Robert Mugabe…What Happened? by Simon Bright (review)

Robert Mugabe … What Happened?, directed by the U.K.-based Zimbabwean filmmaker Simon Bright, is a documentary chronicling Robert Mugabe’s evolution from his peasant Catholic boyhood, through his days as a teacher in Ghana during the country’s transition to independence, to the time when he, alongside the trade unionist Joshua Nkomo, became an advocate for the principle of “one-man-one-vote.” The film follows Mugabe from the bush, during his freedom-fighting days, to his emergence as Zimbabwe’s first president.

The film opens with a quotation from Friedrich Nietzsche cautioning that “he who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster.” It moves to the ruins of Great Zimbabwe, whose defaced majesty seems to provide the appropriate metaphor for the narrative: the narrator reflects that “Monomotapa has long passed into history. And the ancestors who haunt these stone dwellings may contemplate in horror the fear unleashed on the land.” Indeed, fear has been omnipresent in the long complicated history of Zimbabwe, but our narrator does not dwell on the nature, origin, and aspects of that fear. On the surface, Bright’s film seems like a linear chronology of significant events (pleasant and unpleasant) that have marked Zimbabwe’s existence, beginning with the bitterly fought struggle between white Rhodesians and black Africans which transformed the former British colony to an independent state under the stewardship of the film’s protagonist and villain. But as the film unfolds one begins to detect, somewhere between the lines, its trove of archival material notwithstanding, some answers to the question the filmmaker poses in his title, as well as the direction of his sensibilities and sympathies.

According to Bright’s depiction, Robert Mugabe is a monster beyond redemption, and he sets about to illustrate how this former teacher-turned-liberation hero, and subsequently Zimbabwe’s first leader, squandered an opportunity to transform this former gem of the British crown from regional breadbasket to a place of despair. But Bright doesn’t stop there; he charts Mugabe’s trajectory from his early days as the young dapper Afro-Anglophile, flip-flopping between democratic ideals and socialist values, to his current status as head of the pariah of the “international community.” Bright uses narration, interviews, and archival footage to bolster his argument that Mugabe is responsible for Zimbabwe’s current malaise, deliberately juxtaposing the highs and lows in the erstwhile freedom fighter’s eventful life. The filmmaker is aided in this task by a cast of personalities from Zimbabwe’s activist, media, and political scene—past and present—whose commonality lies in their shared opposition to Mugabe as leader and person. At one point in the film Trevor Ncube, a South Africa–based publisher and Mugabe opponent, wonders, “can you discipline your hero? Can you discipline your father?”

Art, at least art that is thoughtful, often broadens the parameters of a given conversation, creating tensions while contesting power; it has a way of retaining a slither of ambiguity even when passions run high. Bright, for his part, does none of that. From the very beginning it is obvious that Robert Mugabe … What Happened? is nothing more than the indictment of its protagonist and not a creative endeavor. Art has a way of posing the kinds of questions that Bright eschews: where art engages, Bright judges; where art probes, Bright glosses over aspects of the Zimbabwean/Mugabe saga that do not advance the goal of his narrative. For instance, an in-depth analysis of Britain’s nonimplementation of the Lancaster House Accords is not explored; neither is the impact of southern Africa’s low-intensity wars of the 1980s on the Zimbabwean psyche. “I will be Hitler of the times; I am still the Hitler of the times,” Mugabe declares in one of many unflattering moments captured in Bright’s work.

Ultimately, Bright’s film is about power, or at least the abuse of power—a theme that has...