Making of a dictator
M. S. PRABHAKARA
DINNER WITH MUGABE — The Untold Story of a Freedom Fighter Who Became a Tyrant: Heidi Holland; Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11, Community Centre, Panchsheel Enclave, New Delhi-110017. Rs. 1395.
The subtitle of the book is “The untold story of a freedom fighter who became a tyrant.” However, the portrait is of a person who was inherently tyrannical, not of one, who “became a tyrant” through chance and circumstance.
Circumstances
Described as a “psycho-biography”, this book is based on over a dozen interviews with family members, friends and comrades, and enemies of Robert Mugabe. One is instinctively suspicious of this kind of psychoanalytical approach to the writing of a political biography. One recalls another book of this kind, Mao’s Revolution and the Chinese Political Culture by Richard N. Solomon, a fat tome which traced Mao’s leadership of the Chinese revolution to unlikely factors.
This book too situates the “making of Mugabe” in the insecurities and resentments of childhood. Few of these are novel, barring the trauma of not being allowed while in prison to attend his son’s funeral in Ghana. The author’s dependence on the astonishing variety of psychoanalytical mumbo jumbo (PMJ) supplied by her interlocutors makes diverting reading, but adds little to our understanding. While the author does provide some interesting, even if ambivalent, insights into the circumstances that shaped Mugabe’s personality, she ignores or underplays the central issue — the material circumstances of the physical and moral degradation of the mass of the people of Zimbabwe under colonial rule, the crucial factor that provided impetus to a long history of resistance of which the eight-year-long liberation war, the Chimurenga, was one phase, and whose primary objectives, true liberation and the restoration of land to those from whom it was stolen, are yet to be achieved.
The ambivalence is surprising, for at various points she admits the injustices and cruelties inflicted on the people by colonialism, but again and again she turns her back on the facts adduced by her to seek explanation to the events that shaped her protagonist and his “state of mind.”
Interviews
Among the dozen or so persons interviewed, three or four stand out: Lord Carrington, the British foreign secretary who led the British team at the Lancaster House negotiations and sold a pup to the liberation leaders, this clever transaction totally obscured by the formal annulling of the illegal “independence” unilaterally declared by Ian Smith on November, 11 1965, the starting point of the country’s problems; Ian Smith himself with whom the author never raises the Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) issue; Clare Short, Britain’s secretary for international development, absolving Britain of any responsibility for even the ambivalent commitments it had made in respect of land stolen during and under British colonial occupation and rule; and two priests, both Jesuits, one African and the other German, holding quite contrary perspectives about Mugabe. Remarkably, though the author does raise the land issues in the interview with Carrington, the subject is not even scratched, for to do so would make one wonder if there is something to be said for the apparent paranoia and contrariness of Mugabe, his conviction that the West and, increasingly, even his African neighbours like Botswana, were bent upon overthrowing him. Neither does the author deal with the role of British and South African media in demonising Mugabe, especially the playing up of his alleged aversion to gays following an obstreperous attempt by a self-confessed gay male to execute a “citizen’s arrest warrant” on Mugabe while on a visit to London in 1999.
Psychological factors
Instead, the emphasis is throughout on the “psychological” factors, with every one of these interviews having at least one passage of PMJ, supposedly throwing light on his character and “motivations”. One of the most amazing of such PJMs is the discovery that Mugabe “grasped Englishness as an antidote to his self-loathing,” traced to the meeting with Ian Smith following the victory in the 1980 elections. Smith’s aversion to physical contact with Mugabe while the latter wanted to hold hands with him while speaking is supposed to reflect a situation where he had steeled himself to extend a hand of friendship which was spurned—“a toxic turning point.” The interview with Mugabe that follows all the build up of the 15 preceding chapters however falls flat, for it does little to help one understand the “mindset” that she has been so relentlessly exploring.
Finally, a word on the title, derived from the dinner that Mugabe pecked at in her house sometime in 1975. Released after 11 years of imprisonment and fearing re-arrest, Mugabe wanted to use her home for a tryst with Allan Palley, a constitutional expert not unsympathetic of African aspirations for self-rule, before crossing over to Mozambique to join the insurgency that was already on. We never return to the theme of the dinner. However, there is a clue on page 173 where the author refers to the play, Breakfast with Mugabe (2005), by a young British playwright who had never been to Zimbabwe. The play, the author says, explored the relationship between Mugabe, Grace, his second wife and “a Western-trained psychiatrist summoned to the State house to treat Mugabe’s delusions.” May one expect another theatrical production in Britain, psychoanalytically dealing with the impact of that ancient dinner over 30 years ago to explain the present travails of Zimbabwe and Robert Mugabe?
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