Mugabe’s fall an ‘unAfrican’ political drama in Zimbabwe

This file photo taken on January 18, 2010 shows Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe giving a speech during the burial of Sunny Ntombiyelanga Takawira, wife of the late vice president of the Zimbabwe African National Union, Leopold Takawira, in Harare at the National Heroes Acre. AFP PHOTO | DESMOND KWANDE

What you need to know:

  • Elsewhere, Mugabe would possibly have ended strung up on an electricity pole in central Harare within hours.
  • It was intriguing seeing Mugabe throw away a kingdom for his wife.

On Tuesday, Robert Mugabe’s long and disastrous 37-year rule over Zimbabwe ended.

He resigned. Extraordinary as Mugabe’s end was, it probably will not be the most enduring story about this episode.

Rather it will be about how Zimbabweans carried themselves. We’ve rarely seen anything like it.

On the day tanks and armoured cars rolled into the capital Harare and placed Mugabe under house arrest last week, a Zimbabwean friend sent me a message I simply had no means of understanding — especially given that I come from “guerilla country”.
COUP

Despite the “coup”, what Zimbabweans do well is “rule by law”, he said. He said Emmerson Mnangagwa, whom Mugabe had sacked barely a week back to make way for his obnoxious and deeply unpopular wife Grace, as his successor, and who enjoyed the loyalty of the army generals, would not replace Mugabe through raw military fiat.

At a minimum, the ruling Zanu-PF central committee would first meet, vote to reinstate him, given that Mugabe had also engineered his expulsion from the party, then Parliament would take a vote of some sort on the matter. I didn’t believe him.

The next few days, the world was transfixed, as the army feared to be seen to have carried out a coup. There were negotiations and pleadings with Mugabe to resign.

Then the Zanu-PF central committee, indeed, did meet as he had said they would, at the weekend, and with thousands of Zimbabweans on the streets demanding Mugabe must go, they stripped him — and Grace — of their party positions, and voted in Mnangagwa.

But that was still not enough. The military and party continued to pile pressure on Mugabe to resign, and in a highly billed address on national TV on Sunday, the President seemed to have “forgotten” to do so.

REVOLUTIONS

More pleas, then on Tuesday a motion to impeach him made its way into the Parliament, and only then did the Speaker reveal that the old chap had just sent a resignation letter.

That is not the way revolutions are made. No. Elsewhere, Mugabe would possibly have ended strung up on an electricity pole in central Harare within hours.

But even more remarkable, there was no violence. And, surprise, surprise, no looting (or “revolutionary charge” as some call it).

Then I remembered that six years earlier, a remarkable story told to me by an international banker, whose visit to rural Zimbabwe had revealed a special side of the country that the many years of repression and deprivations of Mugabe never killed.

I wrote about it in early February 2012, and here is the excerpt five years later: “He told … a powerful story that … demonstrated that there are simple relationships between people and State, and the humaneness of the Zimbabweans, that have not been destroyed by repression and long years of suffering. To him, it demonstrated that ‘deep down, Zimbabweans are still there’.

“He was being driven outside the city of Mutare. His driver, as it happened, had a relative deep in one of the villages near Mutare. He decided to stop and greet the elders.

“When they got to the village yard, they found a massive crowd had gathered and there was a lot of excitement. There was no political rally, nor had some quack pastor from the city showed up to rip off the people with dubious miracles.

HUMANITY

“The village, it turned out, was being terrorised by an elephant nearby. The people had reported the matter to the government. The government was shortly sending a ranger to shoot the rogue pachyderm.

“That meant that there would be lots of meat to share. The villagers had gathered at the headman’s house and were haggling over how the carcass would be divided.

“By the time the game ranger arrived, the list would have been done, and the cut for every household in the village agreed…

“Here was a system that worked. There was a humanity that recognised that everyone needed to be taken care of. Also that the government, discredited as it is, still took the task of sending a ranger to kill an elephant that was trampling the villagers’ crops, seriously.”

The events of last week probably shouldn’t have come as a surprise, then. It was intriguing seeing Mugabe throw away a kingdom for his wife. But it was particularly heartwarming to see, as my banker friend said years ago, that “deep down, Zimbabweans are still there”.

The author is publisher of Africapedia.com and explainer site Roguechiefs.com. Twitter@cobbo3