Notes
N o t e s Introduction 1. The Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) broke away in 1963 from the leading Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU), which formed in 1961 and was led by Joshua Nkomo. The two organizations were rivals during the war of liberation and loosely united in 1979, for the Lancaster House conference, under the umbrella of the Patriotic Front, thus adding PF to the acronyms. However, they ran separately in the 1980 elections, and since then Mugabe’s party, which absorbed ZAPU in 1987, has been known as ZANU-PF. Although Joshua Nkomo’s party’s official name between 1976 and 1987 was PF-ZAPU, it is always referred to as ZAPU in the rest of this book. 2. The Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace (CCJP)/Legal Resources Foundation (LRF) report, the most credible to date, documented 3,750 cases of murder and estimated the actual number as more than 6,000 dead. See Breaking the Silence, Building True Peace: A Report on the Disturbances in Matabeleland and the Midlands, 1980 to 1988 (Harare: CCJP/LRF, 1997), 157. Other sources put it as high as 20,000 people, but without documented evidence. 3. It came as a shock to us to be told in 1995 by a low-ranking government employee in rural Zimbabwe: ‘‘At least in Smith’s time what I earned could feed my family’’ (personal field notes). 4. On Matabeleland, see for example Terence O. Ranger, ‘‘Matabeleland Since the Amnesty,’’ African Affairs 88, 351 (1989): 161–73. Other academics who toed the line were not ZANU-PF fellow travelers like Ranger; see John Hatchard, Individual Freedoms and State Security in the African Context: The Case of Zimbabwe (London: James Currey, 1993), 17–20; and David N. Beach, The Shona and Their Neighbours (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 183. Both underestimated the extent of the repression. 5. Zimbabwe-reared writer Doris Lessing, although once a communist sympathetic to Black nationalism, woke up to these grim realities. See her honest and incisive account of her successive trips to post-independence Zimbabwe in African Laughter: Four Visits to Zimbabwe (New York: HarperCollins, 1992). See also her charge against ‘‘political correctness’’ allowing African dictators such as Mugabe to get away with graft and murder; Doris Lessing, ‘‘The Jewel of Africa,’’ New York Review of Books, 10 April 2003. 278 Notes to Pages 2–5 6. Several analysts pointed at this narrow-minded nationalist agenda; see Norbert Tengende, ‘‘Workers, Students and the Struggles for Democracy: State-Civil Society Relations in Zimbabwe,’’ Ph.D. dissertation, Roskilde University, 1994; Lloyd Sachikonye, ‘‘The National-State Project and Conflict in Zimbabwe,’’ in Adebayo Olukoshi and Liisa Laakso, eds., Challenges to the Nation-State in Africa (Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 1996). 7. A Heroes’ Day was instituted, and the burial or reburial in the national and provincial Heroes’ Acres of deceased ex-combatants followed a ceremonial inspired by Communist countries of the Stalin era. On this cult, see Norma Kriger, ‘‘The Politics of Creating National Heroes: The Search for Political Legitimacy and National Identity,’’ in Ngwabi Bhebe and Terence Ranger, eds., Soldiers in Zimbabwe’s Liberation War, vol. 1 (Harare: University of Zimbabwe Publications, 1995), 139–62. 8. See the figures quoted by Hevina S. Dashwood, Zimbabwe: The Political Economy of Transformation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 41–46. 9. A point acknowledged by Brian Raftopoulos, ‘‘The Zimbabwe Crisis and the Challenges for the Left,’’ Journal of Southern African Studies 32, 2 (June 2006): 203–19. However, no convincing explanation of the ‘‘Left-minded’’ scholarship ’s permanent state of denial on Mugabe’s regime and ZANU-PF is offered. 10. The Unilateral Declaration of Independence in 1965, proclaimed by the Southern Rhodesian government of Ian Smith, was a rebellion against the British Crown that led to increasing international isolation and economic sanctions. It ended with the Lancaster House agreement in December 1979 and a shortterm return of British authority in preparation for full independence. 11. There is a striking analogy with one of Mugabe’s models, Mao Zedong; see Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, Mao: The Unknown Story (New York: Random House 2005). 12. Before that, the workers’ strikes in 1980–81 were described in government propaganda as an unavoidable contradiction between workers’ short-term interests and the country’s long-term socialist project, a rhetoric eagerly swallowed by many academic sympathizers. 13. ESAP was a five-year program to cut down government spending and contain public debt with the financial support...
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