• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

ZIMBABWE, NOT LONG AGO

See? It’s Not Just Mugabe

It’s generally considered that, after two decades in office, President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe has lost his sanity. It took him less than three years to bankrupt the country, turn a healthy populace into an army of starving beggars, and generally make himself a pariah among civilized leaders.

So why didn’t the people rise up and throw him out of office?

Well, there are many reasons, including his death squads, but one reason no one has suggested to date is that it’s harder to tell a Zimbabwe madman than you think.

Consider this item from a Bulawayo newspaper:

“While transporting mental patients from Harare to Bulawayo, the bus driver stopped at a roadside shebeen (beer hall) for a few beers. When he got back to his vehicle, he found it empty, with the twenty patients nowhere to be seen. Realizing the trouble he was in if the truth were uncovered, he halted his vehicle at the next bus stop and offered lifts to those in the queue. Letting twenty people board the bus, he then shut the doors and drove straight to the Bulawayo Mental Hospital, where he hastily handed over his ‘charges,’ warning the nurses that they were particularly excitable.

“Excitable was an understatement. Staff removed the furious passengers; it was three days later that suspicions were roused by the consistency of stories from the twenty. As for the real patients: nothing more has been heard of them and they have apparently blended comfortably back into Zimbabwean society….”

You Are the Hope of the Future?

AFRICA, TOMORROW

What’s Next?

It’s hard to say. But for every Shaka Zulu, who began with a village the size of a football field and wound up with an empire three times the size of France, there’s an Idi Amin, who began with a country like Uganda and is now confined to a small house thousands of miles away. For every Albert Schweitzer who devotes his life to truth, there’s a South African president who tells the press that AIDS is a capitalist myth. For every Jomo Kenyatta who outlaws hunting, there’s likely to be a game department officer with a unique way of eradicating tsetse flies.

But they do keep things interesting, don’t they?

You Appointed Whom?

Even the most competent modern leader can’t do everything. He has to appoint and trust capable and loyal subordinates. The problem comes when you put the wrong man in an important position. Nothing demonstrates this better than the tale told below.

WINSTON CHURCHILL, FIRST LORD OF THE ADMIRALTY

ENGLAND, 1914

Elizabeth Moon

In 1912, the relatively new First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Spencer Churchill, appointed Berkeley Milne to the command of the Mediterranean Fleet. This plum of an appointment, going to a royal favorite, would have excited little comment if it had been made by a more traditional, less visionary First Lord. But Churchill? Why would an intelligent, energetic, capable young man, a man who was perfectly willing to annoy, exasperate, even infuriate traditionalists in the Royal Navy, who clearly foresaw the possibility of war with Germany, who had shown considerable strategic sense, pick Berkeley Milne for this critical post?

Admiral Milne had already impressed his fellow officers and others as the kind of blockhead who had risen to rank only by favors. He didn’t want his subordinates to think or show initiative; it is not certain that he himself could do either. Certainly he could not imagine himself into the mind of the enemy, a critical ability for a senior commander in time of war. He didn’t like to be interrupted at dinner by any inconvenient emergency. Affable, charming to the ladies, he had reached his highest level of competence well before this.

Jacky Fisher, heretofore enthusiastic about the young First Lord, blamed Churchill’s wife, Clementine, for the appointment; he thought she had caved in to royal pressure and that Winston had caved in to Clementine. Given the character of both Winston and Clementine, and the nature of their relationship, this seems unlikely. She was not socially ambitious,