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By Root 1322 0

weaponry, and they had won. Now they had to take power as equals in a modern world. Their chief difficulty was the same as in all new black nations. They did not have enough people trained in administration, though Southern Rhodesia had done better than most, particularly in agriculture, for Zimbabwe began with a good number of already trained black agricultural workers. That is one reason why Zimbabwe, unlike the black nations that surround it, feeds itself, and has healthy surpluses which it is proud to sell to South Africa and to donate to famine areas in the Horn of Africa. Zimbabwe is a success for all its faults, for all its mistakes, and although it has had to sustain Mozambique, which is a disaster. To help police Mozambique, feed its refugees, keep the oil flowing in the pipeline from Beira, costs Zimbabwe, a poor country, a million pounds a day. Mozambique has been kept alive by Zimbabwe, while South Africa has done everything to destroy it. If South Africa has stopped trying to ‘destabilize’ its black neighbours, then the damage that has been done will not heal itself overnight, and the rebel bands it armed and financed have not all become good citizens, they still sabotage and destroy. South Africa dominates Southern Africa, for better for worse, and will continue to do so: already in 1991 the ex-communist government of Mozambique invited in South African capital to heal and develop the shattered country.

Zimbabwe, like other new black countries, has a corrupt ruling élite. This is a far from apologetic class of robbers. On the contrary they are proud of themselves, boast and display their wealth. Joshua Nkomo who, like Robert Mugabe, had tried to check the corruption, finally had to capitulate to fact, and to what he was observing all around him. In a speech in 1989 he said, ‘I suppose we have to learn how to be rich as well as having to learn everything else.’

The first decade of Zimbabwe’s history was a tale of violence and discord; was contradictory, ebullient, and always surprising. The worst chapter was the murders and arson by the ‘dissidents’ of Matabeleland, seen as representing all the Ndebele, the whole province. Mugabe’s armies terrorized the area, decimated villages, were merciless, treated Matabeleland as an enemy province. It turned out that the dissidents, believed to be a guerilla army, were a few desperadoes who, far from representing their people, were refused entrance by their villages when they returned home. It is not–perhaps–without significance for the future, that it is said the Mashona troops, despoiling or killing or raiding through Matabeleland, said, ‘This is in return for…’ some incident of well over a hundred years before, when the Matabele drove off cattle, burned crops and huts, took women.

The best of the Zimbabwe story is the vigour, the optimism, the determination of the people. You may return from a several-weeks’ visit to Zimbabwe and realize, finding yourself again in the enervating airs of Europe, that you have been day and night with people, white and black, who talk of nothing else but how to make Zimbabwe work, of new ideas that may be adopted there, and who have an identification with the processes of government and of administration that means nothing can happen which does not at once attract the most passionate reactions, for or against. People coming to Zimbabwe after Mozambique, or Zambia, where nothing is a success, where cynicism poisons everything, say their faith in Africa is restored, and that Zimbabwe, for whatever reason, is unique in Africa because of the creative energies of its people. They are proud of themselves…thus you may hear a black person remark of Zambia, or of Mozambique: ‘They don’t know how to do anything, we shall have to show them.’ This self-respecting, or perhaps one might say, bumptious, attitude is a continuation of the Southern Rhodesian white love of themselves and ‘their’ country, which goes on though the country is no longer theirs. Talking of a success in South Africa, some new enterprise, or farm, you may hear a white remark: