Zimbabwe Election: Tragedy of a Country Torn Apart

A Luta ContinuaThe Safundi Member Research Newsletter

— A RESOURCE FOR SOUTH AFRICAN & AMERICAN SCHOLARS AROUND THE WORLD —

MARCH 2005

For this issue of the Safundi Member Research Newsletter, the recent parliamentary elections in Zimbabwe this

past March are the focus of discussion. There are two fundamental reasons for this. First, Zimbabwe has become a widely observed test-case for democracy in southern Africa since the late 1990s, with its political situation attracting not only the attention of regional neighbors such as South Africa, but also the international community as a whole, in particular the British Commonwealth and the European Union, though increasingly the United States as well. Zimbabwe has therefore provided a watershed moment at the start of the twenty-first century, forcing regional and international political leaders alike to decide how and to what extent principles of good governance should be made compulsory in Africa. The second reason is that the past and present of Zimbabwe have paralleled and intersected with South Africa at a number of levels, from mutual experiences of settler colonialism, to the development of mineral-based economies, to patterns of harsh racial segregation, to hard-won political struggles that sought to end such systems of oppressive governance. Indeed, the experience of Zimbabwe has provided something of a mirror for South Africa and vice versa, though historically Zimbabwe has to some degree been ahead on the political curve. This perhaps is the heart of the matter: if Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980—overthrowing the final vestiges of white supremacist rule there—inspired a sense of political

possibility for South Africans then, what might Zimbabwe’s current crisis—with its elements of single-party hegemony, contingent racial violence, and economic disaster—suggest about South Africa’s possible future now?

The parliamentary election on March 31 drew less attention than the 2002 presidential election that had Robert Mugabe, leader of the Zimbabwe African National

Union—Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF), defeating Morgan Tsvangirai of the Movement for Democratic

Change (MDC) under conditions of widely reported voter intimidation and cases of outright violence against MDC supporters. That election outcome—which continued Mugabe’s position of presidential power, held since independence in 1980—was at the time variously described as “daylight robbery” by the MDC and, by international observers, a “tragedy” orchestrated by

ZANU-PF under “a climate of fear and suspicion.” Many had seen the

election as a moment of opportunity to escape the government’s mishandling of

a dramatic economic downturn and crisis initiated in the early 1990s by a World Bank

structural adjustment program, summarily highlighted by the seizures of white-owned farms in 2000 by purported “veterans” of the independence struggle, who for the most part were unemployed youth mobilized by ZANU-PF as squatters. In June 2000 the MDC made surprising headway in that year’s parliamentary elections, reflecting a growing sense of popular dissatisfaction with ZANU-PF and consequently posing a threat to its long-held power. Hence, the controversial results in 2002, and hence the renewed possibility of the 2005 parliamentary elections presenting an opportunity for the MDC in the same way they did in 2000. But as we have seen, this was not to be. Though the build-up to the election this time included an unusually outspoken

AND THE ONGOING STRUGGLE FOR DEMOCRACY IN SOUTHERN AFRICA1

Christopher J. LeeStanford University

Christopher J. Lee is Mellon-Sawyer Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History and at the Stanford Humanities Center, Stanford University.

CONTEMPORARY ZIMBABWE

statement issued by the U.S. State Department—that Zimbabwe was an “outpost of tyranny”—such international pressure bore little consequence. Members of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) additionally found the election to be conducted within the guidelines they set forth prior to March 31. Zimbabwe’s future consequently remains in peril, with a weakened opposition and a political regime that looks unlikely to turnover any time soon.

In the roundtable that follows, members of the Safundi community have offered a range of perspectives on this situation, what it means for Zimbabwe, what it means for South Africa, and how it may be interpreted by scholars based in the United States. Combined, these essays pose a number of useful questions to consider for further research: To what extent must the argument that Zimbabwe’s affairs are internal to its borders be rescinded, that “quiet diplomacy” by South Africa must be replaced by a more proactive strategy? How might political organizations within South Africa—such as the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU)—both aid organizations within Zimbabwe as well as place pressure on the South African government to amend the situation peacefully? How have contemporary images of the situation in Zimbabwe—in particular vis-à-vis the seizure of white farms—replayed narrative tropes of racial anxiety and fear for white, middle-class audiences in the U.S.? To what extent is Zimbabwe’s condition the result of recent neo-liberal economic policies of the post-Cold War era versus deeper trends of mis-governance on the continent since the early postcolonial period? How might the contemporary follies of electoral processes be compared between the U.S. and Zimbabwe? Furthermore and at a broader level, to what extent might democracy in South Africa be exceptional, perhaps a newly manifested aspect of South Africa’s long-perceived “exceptionalism”? In contrast—with the ongoing entrenchment of the ANC—how is South Africa alternatively falling into a familiar political trajectory? Does Zimbabwe in whole or in part provide a plausible narrative for South Africa’s political future? In sum, Zimbabwe’s current political crisis opens new avenues for comparative thought and work, pathways that can provide new case studies of comparative history for the region and consequently deserve attention.

NOTES1 “A luta continua” was a well-known slogan of the anti-colonial

struggle against the Portuguese in Mozambique, Angola, and Guinea-Bissau, meaning “the struggle continues.” It is used here to invoke a similar feeling of commitment, if in a different context.

THE ZIMBABWE ELECTIONTRAGEDY OF A COUNTRY TORN APART

BY ITS VIOLENT PAST, ITS OPPRESSED PRESENT,AND ITS UNCERTAIN FUTURE1

by Moeketsi LetsekaHuman Sciences Research Council

The Election and Media Feeding Frenzy

The March 2005 parliamentary election in Zimbabwe provided a media feeding frenzy that even the passing

of Pope John Paul II could not dampen. S’thembiso Msomi and Chaemeela Bhagowat recounted in the Sunday Times (April 3, 2005) how Mugabe was asked if he would accept the election results if his party lost, to which Mugabe replied: “Zanu-PF is never a loser.” Indeed, as it turned out, ZANU-PF won 78 of the 120 contested seats to MDC’s 41, while Jonathan Moyo, the sacked former Minister of Information who campaigned as an independent, won one seat. The MDC shed sixteen seats from the fifty-seven it won in 2000. Its difficulties are made worse by the provision in Zimbabwe’s constitution that affords the victorious party the luxury to appoint a further thirty (or twenty percent) of the total number of MPs. Makumbe (2004:7) argues that this is a major bone of contention, at least from the point of view of opposition political parties, for the simple reason that appointed MPs tend to always vote with the ruling party. Adding these thirty seats to ZANU-PF’s total gives the party 108 seats, which is more than the two-thirds majority Mugabe needs to change the country’s constitution. That the election was “free and fair” is highly debated. Schrire (2005) recently argued that it depends on whether a free and fair election is “possible in an unfree society—period.”

Writing in his regular Wednesday column of The Star, Alister Sparks (2005), South Africa’s acclaimed former editor of the Rand Daily Mail in the late 1970s to early 1980s and author of a trilogy of books “on the thunderous history of South Africa,” was dismissive. He argued that “If one is to accept, as our Southern African observer teams apparently do, that the result of the Zimbabwe election reflected the will of the people of Zimbabwe, then one should accept its corollary, which is that the people of Zimbabwe enjoy economic collapse, unemployment and starvation and so turned out in record numbers to vote for more of the same. Either that or they are crazy and willfully voted against their own interests.” Sparks rejected both propositions and

Moeketsi Letseka is Senior Research Specialist in higher education at the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) in Pretoria, South Africa

THE SAFUNDI MEMBER RESEARCH NEWSLETTER :: MARCH 2005

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contended that the election was rigged.A cartoon that accompanied Rodrigue Ngowi and

Dumisani Muleya’s article “Battered MDC demands new poll as SA, SADC approve Mugabe landslide” in the Business Day of Monday April 4, 2005, showed beleaguered Zimbabwean opposition parties scampering for cover as a massive landslide of rocks labeled “harassment,” “intimidation,” and “violence” come tumbling downhill to crush them. In the same paper Manoah Esipisu lamented that Zimbabwe’s opposition risks slipping into obscurity and oblivion unless it can come up with fresh ways to challenge President Robert Mugabe. In the pre-election cover story for the Financial Mail of March 18, 2005, Trevor Ncube noted that the MDC “suffers an acute leadership crisis and above all is in the grip of paralyzing political squabbling. A faction led by trade unionists is laying claim to the soul of the party and elbowing everybody aside. An onslaught is being waged against party Secretary General Welshman Ncube and those perceived to be his supporters.”

No doubt these are all vexing observations and issues that have the potential to paralyze any serious debate on prospects for the future of southern Africa. And perhaps it’s only prudent then that we pause for a moment and reflect on the implications of the election.

Prospects for Peace and Economic Stability in Southern Africa?An African country holding a general election in which

one party wins handsomely in a free and fairly contested encounter is reason to celebrate political maturity and the burgeoning of democratic values. It can be reasonably inferred that this was the case during South Africa’s April 2004 elections which the African National Congress (ANC) won by a two-thirds majority. ANC’s victory also coincided with the country’s celebration of ten years of democracy. Not so for ZANU-PF twenty-five years after its chimurenga (liberation struggle) victory over Ian Smith’s white minority regime. Mugabe’s landslide victory in 2002 has been described as “a national tragedy,” “a farcical tragedy,” and “a cynical farce.” This is because it came off with “documented reports of violence and intimidation” (Chhiba 2004), claims of manipulation of the constitution and legal structures, patronage appointments of his Zezuru clansmen to strategic decision-making positions, all intended to entrench ZANU-PF’s stranglehold over “the executive, the legislature, the judiciary, the police and the military” (Sparks 2005).

Phimister and Raftopoulos (2004:388) refer to Colin Powell’s description of “Mugabe and the Zanu-PF politburo as tyrants without legitimacy of moral authority.” While British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw has vowed to intensify diplomatic pressure through the European Union and the Commonwealth to see an end to bad government and bad

policies, and a return to accountable government which respects the rule of law and human rights of citizens. British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s Report on the Commission for Africa (2005:134) picks out Zimbabwe as one of the African countries (others are Liberia and Côte d’Ivoire) where there is economic decline as a result of weak governance and conflict. The report applauds Mali, Mozambique, and Uganda where improvement of governance and resolution of conflict have resulted in a strong turn about. The message here is that ZANU-PF’s landslide victory will not translate into international recognition or accolades for Robert Mugabe. As Sparks (2005) points out, what Mugabe doesn’t have is “a solution to Zimbabwe’s deepening economic crisis. That cannot be resolved without international aid, and Mugabe is not going to get that as long as the Western powers perceive him to be stealing elections and violating human rights.”

But how deep is Zimbabwe’s “deepening economic crisis”? The answer is, very deep. The country has been described as “one of the world’s worst economies” (Timberg 2005). And here’s why. Since 2000, inflation has averaged 195% per year. An estimated 400,000 jobs, mostly in large-scale commercial agriculture and tourism, have been lost. The growing shortage of skills, due to the post-2000 exodus of professional and the savage impact of an adult HIV/AIDS prevalence rate of around twenty-five percent, will surely impede recovery. Hill (2003:4) estimates that as many as 3,000 Zimbabweans crossed the border into South Africa every day by the middle of 2004. The country’s currency has collapsed, public services have deteriorated, and there is fifty percent unemployment (Hawkins 2005). Games (2005:11) argues that Zimbabwe’s domestic debt ballooned to Z$1.7 trillion by October 2004, and was expected to rise above Z$3 trillion by the end of the year.

Herein lies the problem for South Africa and her southern African neighbors, the United States of America, and Britain. It is a problem of such a huge proportion that the policy of “quiet diplomacy” will not resolve. Writing in the “Opinion and Analysis” section of the Business Day of Monday, April 4, 2005, political editor Jacob Dlamini recounts a story by Moeletsi Mbeki, brother to South Africa’s state president Thabo Mbeki. It is the story about a University of the Witwatersrand student who is standing on the ledge of a tall building in Braamfontein, Johannesburg, threatening to kill himself. A crowd forms on the street below and cheers him on, urging him to jump. The analogy here is that “Mugabe is committing suicide and South Africans are cheering him on.” Dlamini’s contention is that the South African government seemed to cheer the Zimbabwean regime and Mugabe further down the road to suicide when it declared that Thursday’s parliamentary



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election reflected “the will of the people” of Zimbabwe. The downside of suicide is after its conclusion someone always has the unpleasant task of taking care of the dependents, who would otherwise be destitute if not taken care of. Already South Africa is absorbing hundreds of thousands of Zimbabwean political and economic immigrants, the majority whom enter the country illegally at the risk of arrest and deportation.

NOTES1 This is taken from the cover blurb of Geoff Hill’s The Battle for

Zimbabwe: The Final Countdown Zebra Press: Cape Town, 2003.

REFERENCESChhiba, N. “The Southern Africa Development Community:

An Overview,” South African Yearbook of International Affairs 2002/03, The South African Institute of International Affaires: Johannesburg, 2002.

Esipisu, M. “MDC risks obscurity now—oblivion later,” Business Day, April 4, 2005.

Games, D. “Zimbabwe: A pre-election overview and recovery scenarios,” a report prepared for the South African Institute of International Affaires, Johannesburg, March 2005.

Hill, G. The Battle for Zimbabwe: The Final Countdown Zebra Press: Cape Town, 2003.

Hawkins, T. “Yet another u-turn needed to stop Zim’s downhill slide,” cover story, Financial Mail, March 18, 2005.

Makumbe, J. “Strengthening parliamentary democracy in SADC countries: Zimbabwe country report,” prepared for The South African Institute of International Affaires, Johannesburg, 2004.

Msomi, S., and Bhagowat, C. “How Mugabe stole the election,” Sunday Times, April 3, 2005.

Ncube, T. “Zimbabwe: If not Bob, Who?,” cover story, Financial Mail, March 18, 2005.

Ngowi, R., and Muleya, D. “Battered MDC demands new poll as SA, SADC approve Mugabe landslide,” Business Day, April 4, 2005.

Phimister, I and Raftopoulos, B. “Mugabe, Mbeki & the politics of Anti-imperialism,” Review of African Political Economy (2004), 101, 385-400.

Schrire, R. “Why SA supports Mugabe.” Financial Mail, April 1, 2005.

Sparks, A. “At home and abroad, inky fingers point back at Mugabe,” The Star, April 6, 2005.

Timberg, C. “Frustration as Mugabe strengthens grip,” The Sunday Independent, April 10, 2005.

Tony Blair et al. “Our Common Interest: Report of the Commission for Africa,” March 2005.

MORE OF THE SAMEZIMBABWE’S PARLIAMENTARY

ELECTIONS IN REGIONAL PERSPECTIVE

by Sean JacobsNew York University

The March 2005 parliamentary elections in Zimbabwe were important for a number of specific reasons beyond

the obvious need to bring some conclusion to the ongoing political and economic crises in Zimbabwe, including effecting a transition from President Robert Mugabe and ZANU-PF’s more than twenty-year rule.

Specifically, the election was a test for new electoral rules set out by the regional Southern African Development Community (SADC) to respond to well-proven claims of fraud advanced by ZANU-PF’s main opposition, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). There were signs that the election would not be accompanied by the extreme levels of state-sponsored violence and harassment, common since the constitutional referendum of 2000, against the MDC. Mugabe and ZANU-PF wanted to use the elections to show that they had popular support for their “reforms.” The MDC, in turn, had to prove to its supporters and boosters that elections were still worth the fight despite continued repression by the state that made such a victory practically impossible. Finally, the elections were important since a two-thirds majority by ZANU-PF would enable it to change the constitution, thus giving it the power to orchestrate the ascendance of Mugabe’s chosen successor, whoever he might be, among other things.

From a post-election perspective, things worked out very well for Mugabe and ZANU-PF. A much reduced level of open political violence against opposition supporters as well as restraint on the part of security forces was seen by election observers. And the government made sure of it. The government half-heartedly introduced electoral reforms (including the establishment of an electoral commission; previously, the government ran the elections exclusively), but kept intact much of the legal framework that favored it, for example the voters’ roll, media regulations that barred the most important opposition media, “public order” laws that gave the police and army power to ban any opposition rallies, and allowing only official election observers from friendly nations, among other measures. True, the election

Sean Jacobs teaches African History at New York University. He will be Assistant Professor in the Center for AfroAmerican and African Studies and communication studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, starting this fall.


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was characterized by little violence, but the legal system made that unnecessary.

The MDC lost more and may not recover. In the early 1990s, a mixture of autocratic, unresponsive and Cold War-client regimes were largely dislodged through a singular focus on constitutional reforms (mainly elections) or by popular uprisings. The MDC’s success in the 2000 referendum has not been followed up by victories in either parliamentary or presidential elections—and thus calls into question the efficacy of a narrow focus on using the ballot box to dislodge African polities of totalitarian leaderships. And even where the opposition made significant gains—such in controlling most of the municipal governments—ZANU-PF continues to frustrate it from the center.

There may be some fatigue with the election strategy. Before the recent elections, there was much confusion between MDC and its civil society partners as to whether boycotting the elections or participating in them would be the better option. We have also learned in hindsight that regimes such as ZANU-PF’s can adjust their tactics: Mugabe and ZANU-PF eschewed violence in these elections, shifting their dirty tricks to the electoral process. The MDC and its backers will also have to rethink their strategy around the fact that ZANU-PF retains some legitimacy, particularly in rural areas inside Zimbabwe and also among African elites inside and outside the country who are suspicious of the motives of some Western observers. Zimbabwe’s politics are now split between basically a rural, ethnic Tshona ZANU-PF (whose political representatives are based in the capital) and an urban MDC, both Tshona and Ndebele. How the growing importance of ethnic politics will play out between Tshona elites and those groups who had suffered under a Tshona hegemony, both outside and inside ZANU-PF, vis-à-vis the politics of control over state resources is also something to watch.

The events of the last three years expose the hypocrisy of the new African Union and its predecessor the OAU, and particularly its main booster and “Africa’s America,” South Africa. That country’s president, Thabo Mbeki and his Cabinet (as well as the ruling ANC) have been consistently proven wrong on their policy of quiet diplomacy, which all indicators suggest they’ll stick to for now. It also did not help that the South African government declared the elections “free and fair” even before polling started. Politically, South Africa’s reputation as a continental leader on democracy will continue to suffer.

More significantly, the events in Zimbabwe expose schisms in South Africa’s ruling alliance. Up to now the South African government has been able to dismiss criticism of its policy as racism from the “official” parliamentary opposition, the Democratic Alliance, and whites in general,

but it may not be able to get away with such a position so easily anymore, now that the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), whose majority are black industrial workers, openly opposes Mugabe. COSATU may also have learned from the Zimbabwe Trade Union Congress’ experience changing from a trade union into a political party—the nucleus of the MDC comes from the ZCTU.

Finally, what the events in Zimbabwe also teach us is that double-standards and inconsistency on the part of the leading superpowers on questions of democracy—take Pakistan, for example—weakens arguments for convincing suspicious African and other third world countries and organizations, concerned about democracy in Zimbabwe, to openly criticize Mugabe. Here the US and the UK have to share the bulk of the blame. As for the road ahead, it looks like more of the same for the Zimbabwean people. ZANU-PF and Mugabe will not get the legitimacy they crave and will likely kick in their heels. Immediately following the election, Mugabe told reporters he would stay in power till his one-hundredth birthday—he is eighty-one years old.

For me, one of the better analyses as to what is at the center of resolving the crisis in Zimbabwe comes from the South African Communist Party (SACP). In an SACP discussion document posted in its online publication “Umsebenzi,” the party advises (if you can read past some of the jargon) that:

the crisis in Zimbabwe is considerably rooted in the social reality of the class force dominant in the leadership echelons of the ruling party. This class force is a bureaucratic capitalist class reliant on its monopoly of the state machinery for its own social reproduction. This class force, dominant in ZANU PF ruling circles, is unable to provide a coherent and hegemonic strategic leadership capable of beginning to address Zimbabwe’s political, moral, economic and social crisis. Indeed, in many respects, it thrives (at least over the short-term) in conditions of crisis, using its access to state power for land grabs, and currency and other speculative activities. It is also able to use state power as an insulation against the terrible impact the crisis is having on most other strata. But, unlike other fractions of the bourgeoisie, it is also incapable of surrendering direct control over state power. This double-bind, an inability to constructively and strategically use political leadership on the one hand, and an inability to cede some bureaucratic dominance, on the other, lies at the heart of the present blockage. (See the full SACP response at: http://www.sacp.org.za/umsebenzi/online/2004/uol051.htm#one)


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THE REPUBLICANIZATION

OF AMERICAAN AFRICAN’S OBSERVATION

OF THE 2004 U.S. ELECTIONS

by Paul Tiyambe ZelezaPenn State University

The U.S. elections are now over and President Bush has been re-elected with a decisive electoral majority, and

the Republican Party has increased its seats both in the Senate and the House of Representatives. Democrats are in a state of shock and much of the outside world is also surprised by the results. Many had thought that the Bush administration would sink under the weight of disastrous policies abroad and at home, especially a foreign policy mired in the quagmire of Iraq, misguided unilateralism, and an economy skidding from anaemic job growth and exploding budget deficits and national debt. Instead, President Bush sailed to what by American standards was an impressive victory (fifty-one percent of the popular vote). How does one explain this?

As an African watching the elections, with its intransigent electoral patterns among the “red” and “blue” states, voting irregularities, and gerrymandering (the drawing of voting districts by the majority political party rather than by a non-partisan body) I could not but be amused wondering what American commentators would say if this were an African election: I bet they would bemoan the regionalization of voting as a reflection of Africans’ incapacity to transcend primordial loyalties based on “tribalism” and “regionalism”; voting misdeeds would be ascribed to the propensity of African governments for vote rigging and the ignorance of “illiterate” voters unaccustomed to democracy. The U.S. elections clearly show that the notion of “mature” democracies is a myth—democracy is still a work in progress around the world.

The popular mandate of the Bush administration is often attributed to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, which galvanized the nation behind its lackluster president, and many have argued that in this election, the nation was simply unwilling to change leaders in the midst of a war. The impact of September 11 on the American

national psyche is indeed critical to understanding current American politics, but it does not adequately explain the right-wing drift in American political culture, which has scaled to new heights and dates back, in its current phase, at least three decades.

It seems to me that this drift, what I would call the Republicanization of America, can be attributed to the complex and combustible politics of race, empire, and globalization. The triumph of the Republicans rests on their ability to manipulate the strains and stresses of civil rights struggles and the uncertainties about America’s place in a rapidly changing world. In short, the Republicanization of America is rooted in efforts by conservative forces to roll back civil rights at home and project untrammelled imperial power abroad.

Many commentators note that the Republicans have succeeded in monopolizing and manipulating the discourse on cultural and moral “values.” The issues concerning Iraq and the economy featured high in the election, indeed energizing supporters of Senator John Kerry, the Democratic challenger, but they were trumped by the question of “values,” which mobilized an even larger number of supporters of the Republican Party. An administration that had started as a fluke in 2000, from the hanging chads of Florida, and was propelled into office thanks to a controversial Supreme Court decision, received an extraordinary mandate in 2004.

However, the racial dynamics of the discourse on “values” are often left unstated. Race is the bedrock of American society, which frames and explains a lot of the country’s political, cultural, social, class, ideological, and intellectual dynamics. The cultural values trumpeted by the Republicans, and which find so much resonance among millions of Americans, primarily tap into the racial codes of American life. These values are driven by the desire to unravel the civil rights settlement of the 1960s, which sought to enfranchise and empower African Americans and other racial minorities.

The enactment of civil rights laws by President Johnson’s Democratic administration led to a crucial realignment in American politics, as Republicans adopted a strategy to capture supporters and states, especially in the South of the country, alarmed by the dismantling of legal segregation. Many whites in the Southern states bolted from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party, which articulated its racist politics and policies in a variety of coded messages against “quotas,” “reverse discrimination,” and “welfare” for “law and order” and “traditional American values.”

The Civil Rights Movement, led by African Americans, spawned other movements, including the feminist grouping and, more recently, the gay rights movement. These

Paul Tiyambe Zeleza is Professor of African Studies and History in the Departments of History and African-American Studies at Pennsylvania State University. This article originally appeared as an electronic monograph available at the Africa Institute of South Africa’s website: http://www.ai.org.za. It is reprinted here with the author’s permission.


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movements not only drew on the struggles and symbols of the Civil Rights Movement, they also inherited and incurred the opprobrium and opposition of conservative forces and their respective signature issues—abortion and gay marriage—joined the litany of infamy allegedly undermining American values.

Collectively, these movements reinforced each other and became central to the progressive agenda in American politics, and as such, the target of radical conservatives who used every arsenal at their disposal, from radio to religion, from broadcasting studio to pulpit, to wage a “cultural war.” The politics of race ensured unity on the Republican side in this “war” (the party remains predominantly white and in the recent election, attracted no more than ten percent of the black vote), and dissension on the Democratic side, as different identity and social projects competed for primacy (as can be seen in the heated debates about gay rights in the African-American civil rights community).

Ethno-racial polarizations have bedevilled progressive politics in the United States for a long time and partly explain why leftist parties, on the European model, have never had much traction. Race and racism tend to override class interests and solidarity and facilitate the framing of the national dialogue in cultural terms, especially as “culture talk” increasingly became a substitute for “race talk.” This might illuminate the strange spectacle of poor and working class whites (many prefer to call themselves middle class—a much beloved term in American popular discourse that serves to mystify class identities) in the so-called American heartland of small towns and rural areas, voting with their cultural hearts for the Republican capitalists, rather than with their economic heads against them.

The politics of race is further fuelled by the country’s changing demographic composition, as the share of the white population decreases and that of minorities increases. Some welcome the prospect of a more multicultural and multiracial America, while others fear this will lead to

“national degeneration.” In a recent book, the influential policy advisor, Samuel Phillips Huntington (he of the Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order notoriety1) is contemptuous of multiculturalism and alarmed about the recent waves of immigration and the failure of Hispanics (a rather amorphous minority) to integrate into America’s supposedly Anglo-Protestant culture (where are the African Americans?) and forecasts the emergence of a movement of white nativism.

Such a movement already exists—it is called racism and white supremacy—and it has many institutional and political homes. In fact, race has been appropriated by the different political parties at different times. African Americans identified with the Republicans (the party of Abraham Lincoln) even if most of them could not vote until the era of President Roosevelt’s New Deal, during which time they began to gravitate to the Democrats—an affiliation consolidated during the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. Since then, the Republican Party has been concentrating its appeal on whites, notwithstanding periodic gestures to minorities in hotly contested districts. For its part, the Democratic Party is increasingly becoming the party of minorities.

The Republicans are better placed than the Democrats to promote both the project of white supremacy at home and imperial supremacy abroad. During the Cold War, the Republicans portrayed themselves as the robust guardians of national security, and the fact that the former Soviet Union collapsed when the United States was under a Republican administration could not but bolster this image. Furthermore, some ideologues even credit President Ronald Reagan’s resolute anti-communism and increased military expenditures for the fall of the Soviet Union.

The extinction of socialism and communism in Central and Eastern Europe, and in parts of Africa and Asia in the 1990s, was accompanied by two contradictory tendencies. On the one hand, the world witnessed a new

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wave of democratization, and on the other, systemic options narrowed as political parties rushed to a center that was drifting rightwards. Some even proclaimed the emergence of “third way” politics. In effect, this represented the retreat of leftwing and social democratic parties to the right.

In the United States, where ideological space has historically tended to be narrower than in Western Europe, the ideological gap between the two major parties virtually disappeared, except for the question of “values,” as increasingly defined by the rightwing. The administration of President Bill Clinton did not fundamentally challenge the rightward drift of American politics; instead it appropriated Republican economic and social policies, notwithstanding populist rhetoric to the contrary, and Clinton’s own personal popularity among various Democratic constituencies, including African Americans. The ideological disarmament of the Democratic Party—its failure to articulate policies fundamentally divergent from those of the Republican Party—left America’s politics open to appropriation by the true proprietors of the conservative agenda, the Republicans. Why purchase a copy when you can get the original at the price of the same vote?

From the 1990s onwards, the United States became the lone and increasingly lonely superpower. The restructuring of the world system was captured in the rather fuzzy concept of “globalization.” A new era had emerged, characterized by the rapid flows of commodities and capital, ideas and individuals, and values and viruses. Above all, globalization was seen as an economic and technological phenomenon that threatened to erode the sovereignty of the state and the sanctity of local cultures and identities.

Much of what is said about globalization is “globaloney”—more a projection of contemporary anxieties and aspirations than a description of the actual processes of global interconnectedness. But there can be little doubt that a kind of global reflexivity has emerged, fanned by the media, international migrations, and the propensity of politicians to blame national problems on malicious or uncontrollable foreign forces.

The possibilities and perils of globalization have engendered transnationalism and nationalism everywhere. For the United States, globalization gave cause for celebration and concern—celebration in so far as its industries and institutions were among the major benefactors and beneficiaries of globalization, and concern in that it promised to shift the measure of global power from

military prowess to economic competitiveness. The burst of the dot-com bubble and onset of recession at the turn of the new century reinforced these fears, and was articulated in the recent election in terms of “outsourcing our jobs.”

Then there was September 11. Much has been written about how the Bush administration squandered global goodwill expressed in the immediate aftermath of the attacks by embarking on a policy of haughty unilateralism, which alienated many of its Western allies and provoked unprecedented hostility in many parts of the world.

This “imperial hubris,” to use the title of one of the many books authored by thoughtful American commentators, who have attacked the Bush administration’s dangerous and deluded war on terror, served the interests of an administration desperate for legitimacy after the botched election of 2000, as well as of the neo-conservative cabal bent on recapturing the military glory of

U.S. imperialism buried in the killing fields of Vietnam.It could also be said that terrorism became a substitute

for communism—a new enemy essential for a permanent war economy and necessary to produce nationalism and promote patriotism in this new era of globalization. For a country that spends nearly half the world’s military expenditure, enemies are essential and the more ubiquitous they are the better. The association of terrorism with Islam rests on and rekindles deep-seated anti-Islamic memories in Western culture, and the fact that the threat is largely seen as stateless (following the overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan) only reinforces the notion that this is indeed a clash of civilisations that predate modern states.

This serves to particularize and primordialize global terrorism, depicting it as an upsurge of evil that has nothing to do with the policies of successive U.S. governments, including those of the current Bush administration. It encourages Americans to ask the question: “Why do they hate us?” The obvious self-serving answer: “Because of our way of life, our freedoms, our wealth; in short because of who we are.” And so, the despicable war in Iraq is portrayed as a heroic effort to bestow democracy upon a long-suffering people (forget the previous justification about weapons of mass destruction)—spreading democracy and freedom, as an alibi for a country that has difficulty running its own elections, and one that has historically failed to respect the democratic rights and civil liberties of its own minorities.

It is hard for outsiders to understand how so many people in the world’s most powerful nation, with a massive media industry and intellectual resources, can

Much of what is said about globalization is “globaloney”—more a projection of contemporary anxieties and aspirations than a description of the actual processes of global interconnectedness.

“ “


— 9 —

be so fooled. But perhaps it would be better understood if the astonishing monopolies of power in the U.S. political economy were understood. There is less diversity of opinion in the American media than in many African countries, for example, because of concentrations of media ownership. The sycophancy of the mainstream American media would shock many of the courageous African journalists who mercilessly attack their governments.

Imperial supremacy requires the constant production of the rhetoric of righteousness, and when this power is a settler society with populations from around the world, such cruel fiction also serves to produce and police citizenship. The language of “empire abroad” and “race at home” are interminably linked: having domestic racial others who have been abused for centuries—principally native Americans and African-Americans—has provided the United States with the vocabulary of derision for foreigners, “natives,” and non-whites. It is not a coincidence that the loudest supporters of white supremacy and imperial supremacy are to be found among Christian fundamentalists, a key voting bloc in the Republican Party. They would like to roll back many of the gains of civil rights and any perceived threats to American global power.

President Bush’s second term will attempt to do the first through anticipated conservative judicial appointments to the Supreme Court and other domestic policy initiatives (from tort and tax reforms to immigration and social security reforms—all intended to roll back the welfare state and establish a conservative “New Deal”) and the second, through a savage war in Iraq and renewed threats against the so-called “rogue states,” principally Iran and North Korea. But the aggressive pursuit of these objectives offers the possibilities of reversing the Republicanization of America, as the forces that have arisen in opposition to this lengthy process, are expected to galvanise and strengthen in the coming years.

What does all this mean for Africa? What are the implications of President Bush’s second term for Africa? Predictably, most Africans were disappointed, indeed dismayed by Bush’s re-election, although their leaders sent the customary, polite congratulatory messages. The upshot is that Africa can expect more of the same: minimal attention where Africa’s fundamental interests for development and democratization are concerned, and maximum manipulation in the service of U.S. national interests focused on the misguided war on terror, and the securing of “safe” oil supplies. Security assistance will increase to fight “terrorists,” as will political and economic investments in the oil industry. Several African governments are already cynically using the “anti-terrorism” slogan, as much as “anti-communism” was used during the Cold War, to win favor

with Washington and to erode newly hard worn democratic freedoms. And Africa already supplies about a fifth of U.S. oil imports—a figure that is expected to grow exponentially in the next decade.

Of course, a great deal more diplomatic noise will continue to be made about American “aid,” especially regarding the developmental impact of the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), the $15 billion Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, and the Millennium Challenge Account, that promises up to $5 billion a year to African countries. But to date, the impact of AGOA remains quite limited, the disbursement of funds from the AIDS program is painfully low and slow, and the Millennium account has yet to distribute a single dollar—not surprising for a country that remains the least generous among the industrialized nations in terms of development assistance, and for a global “aid” industry—high on rhetoric and short on substance, which always promises more than it delivers.

President Bush’s second term, then, poses more challenges than opportunities for Africa, centered on the explosive marriage between terrorism and oil. This calls for vigilance by African governments and civil society organizations to guard against their countries becoming pawns in the U.S. “anti-terrorism” crusade and for the oil producers to leverage a new relationship that promotes development and democracy, rather than deepening dependency and authoritarianism. On a global scale, it calls for Africa to cultivate and strengthen relations with regions and countries that are poised to challenge, for all manner of objective and subjective factors and reasons, current U.S. imperial hegemony. This includes “old Europe,” whose linkages and post-World War II subordination to the United States are undergoing historic shifts, and the rising economic and political powers of the global South, led by China, India, and Brazil.

At stake is the need to rid the world of U.S. imperialist unilateralism, regardless of who is president, and the creation of a New World Order guided and governed by the age-old principles of progressive international and national politics: development, democracy, and self-determination. A world, in short, in which every region matters, African matters matter, and collective human material and moral advancement matter.

NOTES1 Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the

Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998); S.P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations,” Foreign Affairs 72, no. 3 (Summer 1993).


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ZIMBABWE IN THE AMERICAN MEDIA AND THE AMERICAN MIND

by Brian HalleyBeacon Press

What would the average American know of corrupt political leaders and elections held with little

regard for the will of the people, where the ruling party plays unfair to get re-elected? How could the average American understand a national leader who has little interest in helping those who need help most in the country? Furthermore, where would the average American experience complicated race relations in this country, where violence breaks out as sometimes unseen lines are crossed, and innocent individuals get caught in the ensuing riots?

* * *Zimbabwe receives little attention in the American

media on the whole. I prefer the printed news, and the articles on Zimbabwe and Robert Mugabe are often buried, far away from the front page stories on national politics. When American newspapers venture internationally, they start with the countries America’s invading, and those countries, along with Israel, dominate the headlines. Since the end of apartheid, South Africa too has fallen to the margins of even reputable American papers. The less Mandela speaks, the less room American papers find for the new South Africa, much less the region of southern Africa.

But the recent elections in Zimbabwe did draw some notice from U.S. newspapers. And while I would not argue necessarily for an out-and-out bias, I would say there is a paradigm set up in which Mugabe, et al., represent the enemy and the white people of old Rhodesia represent the victims. The potential for a deep racism of the old-school, colonial variety is subverted by a few words to recognize the value of the freedom struggle, leaving the journalist with a kind of shrug just beneath the narrative. It starts “Mugabe is a dictator,” then “these white farmers are being killed and brutalized,” then “the British unfairly occupied Rhodesia for many years,” and then a kind of sigh. Gender also plays a part, as the focus is often a white woman—in articles, even just in photographs—as a kind of victim of history, trying to get by on this land she loves. A notable example is bestselling writer Alexandra Fuller, author of the memoir Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, about her early childhood in Southern Rhodesia. In this election, Heather Bennett has played that role.

The Boston Globe published a rather long article about Bennett as a way in to the elections for their American readers, written by a Globe staff writer. Bennett was shown sitting demurely, and is said to be speaking at a political rally attended by more than 2,500 people in eastern Zimbabwe. Later, it is said that Bennett “did not want to run, but reluctantly agreed.” She’s an accidental heroine, a modest woman propelled to international fame by circumstance. In 2000, she and her husband lost everything in the land grabs, wherein one intruder held a machete to her throat, causing her to miscarry.

I would like to stress that my point here is not to in any way deny the struggle and hardships of many people in Zimbabwe, regardless of their race, ethnicity, or class position. Rather than focusing on their lived experience, something as an American I cannot go on at any length about, I’m concerned here with their portrayed experience in the American media. The editorial choices made by writers and editors in U. S. newspapers shape the way many Americans imagine this country, a country most will never visit.

As a member of Parliament representing Chimanimani, Roy Bennett got in a fight with Justice Minister Patrick Chinamasa, eventually shoving him after he reportedly referred to Bennett’s ancestors as “thieves and murderers.” This fact seems glossed over in the Globe piece, as the writer chooses instead to focus on Bennett’s excessive jail time, and the horrible conditions in that jail. Heather Bennett describes the jail as “absolutely awful,” seeing her husband as a martyr who refuses to “eat something nice when no one else has it.”

I find this imbalance telling. As American readers, we are clearly meant to sympathize with this man, as the journalist very cinematically describes his life in jail and his wife’s efforts to follow the will of the people—his supporters, who (we are constantly reminded) are black. The article clearly lines up on one side Mugabe and unintelligent, farm-invading, violent gangs versus the Bennetts, other hard-working white farmers, and the “good” black Africans, the ones smart enough to see “[Roy Bennett’s] sentencing as a new kind of injustice.” Bennett’s credentials? She speaks Shona, that much is said upfront. She’s also nervous, but perseveres. She’s devoted to her imprisoned husband, and gets a “really, really good feeling” when locals are so “delighted” at her campaign rallies. And she’s refusing to leave Zimbabwe, confident that “this whole race thing will be put to bed.”

To elaborate the dichotomy further, we have angry, ignorant blacks obsessed with race and abusing power versus those people big enough to see past race for the good of all people. Specific incidences aside, the overall historical

Brian Halley is an assistant editor at the Beacon Press in Boston, focusing on cultural studies, nature writing, and legal studies.


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ignorance in the article is indicative of an American media tired of writing the same old stories on racism, at home and abroad.

* * *The American media’s portrayal of Africa, especially

southern Africa and the politics there, speaks volumes about the American people’s nervousness about race, abroad and in our own country. The idealized individuals who manage to find something deeper, looking past the color of one’s skin, must be given a bit more scrutiny. The modern day reader must have an historical context. Heather Bennett is not just an innocent victim of circumstance, and Robert Mugabe is not merely a dictator who has seized power and won’t let go. He rose to power as a freedom fighter, as his supporters will readily tell you. The acceptance of his leadership within the country and from other leaders in Africa is much more complicated than some would have it. The fact that the American media takes this complex situation and pulls out strands digestible for a distinctly white, middle-class readership only supports notions of black Africans that are as damaging as reports from Mugabe sanctioned media—for example, reports of no election corruption, reports that Mugabe is improving the country despite immense poverty and frightening death rates, and so forth..

As long as Americans obsess over domestic issues and cast an eye overseas only to make sure our invasions are going well, our national vision of Africa will continue to be outdated and distorted. Unfortunately, this troubled vision consequently hinders our domestic issues with race, and leave us stalled in our own process of reconciliation.

ZIMBABWE (AND THE UNITED STATES) IN FREE-FALL

NOTES FROM EMPIRE’S EDGES

David B. MooreUniversity of KwaZulu-Natal

How can one understand Zimbabwe in the aftermath of its March 2005 parliamentary elections? They were

appropriated by the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) from the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) by means including: overt violence by youth militias called “Green Bombers” and open and covert intimidation by almost every ZANU-PF politician; promises of food for ZANU-PF votes and threats of no food for MDC votes, when nearly half the population is verging on starvation; communal area chiefs telling voters their choice would be known because the three rows into which voters queued, and the ballot boxes, were “transparent” to the local ruling party agents, and there would be trouble if expectations were not met; rural folk being told that the new computers for their decrepit schools could see the ballots; gerrymandering that transformed at least four seats from MDC urban strongholds into countryside constituencies; old voters’ rolls full of ghosts; blatant ballot box-stuffing; and committed support from the regional super-power to the south, for the third time in five years. But none of this is new: all parties to the elections knew they would be fraudulent before they entered that moment when disbelief becomes suspended.1 Aside from repeating scores of analyses focusing on election behavior, the deep economic crisis in which Zimbabwe is mired, and a quarter-century of deepening authoritarianism,2 would drawing comparisons with the contemporary United States of America be instructive?3 Zimbabwe and the United States share more similarities than U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, recently joining the “outpost of tyranny” refrain, seems to think.

Their shared discourse is patriotism, that last resort of all scoundrels approaching the end of their power.4

David B. Moore teaches Economic History and Development Studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa. A lapsing Canadian nationalist familiar with the contradictions at the edge of American empire, he is becoming accustomed to living in the belly of a regional super-power suffering, like Canada, in the shadows of same—but ironically taking on many of its attributes. He has been researching Zimbabwean history and politics since 1984, most recently from July to September 2004, and during the March 2005 elections.

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— 12 —

In both countries, key elections since 2000 between two neck-and-neck contenders have been marked by consistent irregularities (three were stolen from the people in Zimbabwe, with lots more violence) effectively disenfranchising urban black people (in Zimbabwe, too, many of those are diasporic—from Malawi in particular). In the United States and Zimbabwe, people cannot trust their basic political institutions. Their disbelief is suspended only momentarily in hopes of “free and fair” elections triggering real change.5 When elections fail consistently—or are stolen—the resulting vacuum leads to hyper-cynical and post-modern relativism at one extreme. Bizarre religious opiates flourish amidst xenophobic nationalism at the other.

In the midst of this contradictory mélange of nihilism and creationism, the world’s most powerful state has destroyed its economy by going to war. So has one of the world’s weakest. The United States is bringing ruin on itself by exporting its ideology of liberal democracy to Iraq; Zimbabwe has done so in support of its highest truth—sovereignty—by propping up Laurent Kabila’s Democratic Republic of the Congo from 1998 to 2002 with up to thirteen thousand troops. The Zimbabwean state expended up to one-half of all its export income on that war. The rest of the economy has since dwindled away to one in which eighty percent of the population is now unemployed amidst inflation rates that have only recently gone down from levels approaching six hundred percent. Besides the war, this is due to pensions awarded to the “war veterans” after their temporary takeover of State House in late 1997 and the land invasions on approximately fifteen hundred commercial (white) farms led by the same as ZANU-PF lost an early-2000 constitutional referendum (resulting in 130,000 or so infra-structureless subsistence plots in place of the big farms). These factors rode the surface of devastating neo-liberal structural adjustment policies since the early 1990s.6

Supine media help truth’s hiding away. Journalists in Zimbabwe cannot report on the army’s DRC death-toll, and lie about just about everything else. Journalists for one of its independent weeklies (there is no longer an independent daily) were tortured in 1999 for reporting military discontent. The rest pop in and out of jail. A few local reporters were expelled a couple of months ago: one remains abroad. Foreign journalists are barred, and imprisoned when they enter without accreditation (only a few during this election, though: others were offered free trips to Victoria Falls at Mugabe’s celebratory press conference!). Americans

cannot see body-bags from the scene of war; their media owners cooperate willingly.

The climate of relative truths in both societies stretches back to inconclusiveness about crucial political assassinations. In the United States, nobody really knows who killed the Kennedy brothers, nor Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. Only a very few Zimbabweans know who, almost exactly thirty years before last month’s elections, planted the bomb under ZANU-PF national chairman’s Herbert Chitepo’s Volkswagen in Lusaka, or why, at the end

of 1979, Josiah Tongogara’s Land Rover, en route to Mozambique’s camps to tell the soldiers of their victory, careened to his death.7 Both men rivaled current President Robert Mugabe’s claim to power at crucial turning points in ZANU-PF struggles. Political discussions in Zimbabwe almost inevitably turn to these murders, inspiring fear and doubt.

The tendency for dynastic rule in the Bush family, and their links to state patronage is a hot topic for the United States’ political punditry. In Zimbabwe, the president’s nephew, Leo Mugabe, who a few years ago won a shady tender to build Harare’s new airport, won his Makonde constituency by a margin of nearly fifteen thousand votes. Patrick Zhuwawo, another nephew, won Manyame with a very suspicious count. State media constructs of a royal family in the making abound.8

Gestures to feminism, held high in late 2004 with the appointment as vice-president of liberation war veteran and wife of the very powerful retired General-in-Chief, Joyce Mujuru, do not tally well with a photograph of Mugabe’s partner in a large kitchen captioned “Behind every successful man there is a woman. First Lady Cde Grace Mugabe gets ready to prepare a meal for her beloved husband, Cde R.G. Mugabe.”9 Similarly, the Bush régime’s “progressive” appointments of African-American women such as Condoleezza Rice sit uncomfortably with reaction at every other level of policy. Both countries play with race and gender discourse, tying it up with xenophobia. For Mugabe, all opponents are tarred with being in the pay of whites or as puppets of the Blair-Bush global conspiracy. Bush is a little more subtle: extreme opponents are allied with the likes of Osama Bin-Laden by commission (this ties up with gender discourse because all Islamic people are seen to oppress women); lesser ones such as the Democrats are enemies of freedom by omission or falsified war histories. Zimbabwe’s war of liberation is held up within its history much as the United States’ misadventures in Vietnam have constructed

In the midst of this contradictory mélange of nihilism and creationism, the world’s most powerful state has destroyed its economy by going to war. So has one of the world’s weakest.

“ “


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litmus tests and lies for its political class.To be sure, the parallels can be taken to extremes.

Although both the Republicans and ZANU-PF deprive their countries’ poor youth of a decent education, the former do not continuously arrest and imprison youth leaders and demonstrators, as befalls the MDC youth chairman (and Member of Parliament) Nelson Chamisa regularly.10 One is not likely to receive emails such as the following from inner city Detroit:

It’s funny I got in trouble from the MDC members who were in the streets yesterday singing and chanting slogans but they suddenly started beating people and much worse stealing from people found on ATMs. I really was disappointed especially to be assaulted by my party people. They just said, “Let’s go big man,” and I said, “Where.” Thus they started kicking and clapping me so much that I am finding some difficulties in chewing food. But some are saying they are ZANU-PF youth purporting to be MDC. But I really wonder coz they were also beating up members of the police force, soldiers, prison service, and anyone putting on ZANU-PF T-shirts. I think now there is going to be a lot violence from what has happened. I don’t know what will happen. The prices of all commodities have shot up tremendously [news reports suggest 100% since the election, at time of writing only two weeks ago] with basic things scarce now.

This is from the poorest township in Chitungwiza, a city of a more than a million just south of Harare. St. Mary’s was won by MDC “Young Turk” Job Sikhala, whose even younger and permanently unemployed cadres have been accused of replicating ZANU-PF youth violence. In the United States, what will happen to the poor African-American veterans of the war in Iraq?11

Many MDC and civil society advisors say only action in the streets will dislodge Mugabe, or persuade the Bretton Woods institutions to maintain their sanctions on a ZANU-PF led Zimbabwe until a “government of national unity” is forced down both parties’ throats.12 The MDC is caught between the false petards of social movement activism and “pragmatic” constitutionalism. Its leader is accused of vacillation.13 American journalists at the party’s first post-election press conference queried him ferociously: “Will you tell your people to go out on the streets?” An exhausted Tsvangirai replied ambiguously. He told them Zimbabweans were advised to “defend their vote,” but might have asked if they expected him to be a dictator like Mugabe, giving orders to “his people” to engage in violence. Do Americans enjoy violent “régime change,” led by “big men” in countries other than their own? Most Zimbabweans, more peaceful, fear street action because of evident and well-practiced retribution. A similar post-election moment in October 2000 saw extreme violence, but no political change. It

would be adventurism to incite more violence if there were no plans for crafting a real transformation out of it. Nobody appears to have such a strategy.

Relying on ZANU-PF to take up calls for cooperative change is as futile as revolt. There is no sign of ZANU-PF rationality while it is ripped apart by a succession crisis taking on ever-more ethnic dimensions. Such uncertainty meant Mugabe’s post-election announcement that he will rule until he is one hundred was greeted with some relief in ZANU-PF.

Until a new strategy arises in Zimbabwe, all one can predict is continued stalemate—and vain searches by its ubiquitous “intellectuals” for a “third force” autonomous from the workers they despise (do they bear resemblance to Americans placing hope in Ralph Nader, or even Ross Perot?).

In concluding on conditions inspiring such pessimism, “progressive” academics search for appropriate quotes. It is little solace to pull one from the best analyst history’s conundrums have thrown up, although it is timely to remind readers of the increasing relevance of Antonio Gramsci’s stark observations about such long-term political crises. In both Zimbabwe and the United States, “the crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”14 As always, the consequences of the global calamity in which we are now entrenched are especially gruesome on capitalism’s edges. They are even more depressing when they are perpetuated by a régime that was once almost revered (in spite of good evidence to the contrary15) by many of the ever-diminishing members of the global left. They could assuage their guilt over such past allegiances by assisting alternatives supportive of the optimism of will that should always accompany pessimism of the intellect. Those opposing Mugabe and ZANU-PF in Zimbabwe must be optimists: so, too, must Americans supporting a deepening of democracy that is, in spite of its most recent beneficiaries, much stronger than its images on the globe’s outer edges.

NOTES1 Announced on April 2, the official results for the March

31, 2005, parliamentary election give ZANU-PF 78 seats, MDC 41 (down from 57 seats in 2000 and a near miss in the March 2002 presidential contest), and 1 to an Independent, Professor Jonathan Moyo, former ZANU-PF information minister. (Moyo holds a University of Southern California doctorate. Zimbabwean conspiracy theorists say he was planted by Condoleezza Rice and current American Ambassador to South Africa Jendayi Fraser, with whom he consorted during his California stay, to destroy ZANU-PF; thus, they contend, these women counselled George W. Bush before his African tour in mid-2003 to anoint South


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African President Thabo Mbeki as his “point man” on Zimbabwe). An officer in Zimbabwe’s Central Intelligence Organization apparently told MDC leader and former head of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions Morgan Tsvangirai that his party had really carried 94 seats. For details of the theft, see “What happened on Thursday night: An account of how ZANU-PF rigged the Parliamentary Elections,” Sokwanele Special Report, April 5, 2005, http://www.sokwanele.com, “Zimbabwe opposition releases dossier on ‘stolen’ elections,” AFP, April 13, 2005, and “To hell with the masses—how the results were rigged,” The Zimbabwean, April 15, 2005, p. 5, in which the MDC claim a minimum of 62 seats. Overt violence was undoubtedly eased in the few weeks before the election, but that was engineered for the benefit of the friendly observer teams from allied states, and the many uninvited guests. Only some were fooled—because they wanted to be—including the official observers from South Africa and the Southern African Development Community. On the election observers, see Susan Booysen, “Observing with a blindfold,” The Star (Johannesburg), April 10, 2005, p. 8; for an opposing view, see Omowale Clay of Brooklyn’s December 12 Movement, “The Zimbabwe elections: Opposition accuses Mugabe of rigging the vote,” Democracy Now, April 1, 2005, http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/01/1432225. For an immediate response, see Patrick Bond and David Moore, “Zimbabwe: Elections, despondency and civil society’s responsibility,” Pambazuka News 201, April 7, 2005, http://www.pambazuka.org/index.php?id=27627, and the April 14 edition for a response typical of what Bond has labelled “exhausted nationalism.”

2 See, amidst at least a dozen books since 2000, Amanda Hammar, Brian Raftopoulos, and Stig Jenson, eds., Zimbabwe’s Unfinished Business: Rethinking Land, State and Nation in the Context of Crisis (Harare: Weaver Press, 2004); David Harold-Barry, ed., Zimbabwe: The Past is the Future (Harare: Weaver Press, 2004); and Brian Raftopoulos and Tyrone Savage, eds., Zimbabwe: Injustice and Political Reconciliation (Cape Town: Institute of Justice and Reconciliation, 2005).

3 The inspiration for a seemingly bizarre comparative approach rests in “The Project for the New American Century and the War in Iraq,” a seminar presented to the School of Politics Seminar at the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal by Professor Dan O’Meara, Université du Québec à Montréal, April 8, 2005. He did not discuss Zimbabwe’s culture, but his analysis of the class and cultural roots of American politics and foreign policy resounded with my recent research (July-September 2004, March-April 2005) in Zimbabwe.

4 The Zimbabwean variant is captured admirably in Terry Ranger’s “Nationalist Historiography, Patriotic History and the History of the Nation: The Struggle over the Past in Zimbabwe,” Journal of Southern African Studies 30, no. 2 (June 2004), 215-34.

5 I owe the thought that elections in Zimbabwe—and perhaps bourgeois elections all over—can only proceed amidst a “suspension of disbelief” in their ability to engineer deep political change, to Susan Booysen.

6 It is with the economic free-fall and the land invasions that comparisons with the United States are stretched! For more on the land, and a discussion of human rights vs. “agrarian patriot”

perspectives from the left, see David Moore, “Marxism and Marxist Intellectuals in Schizophrenic Zimbabwe: How Many Rights for Zimbabwe’s Left? A Comment,” Historical Materialism 12, no. 4 (December 2004), 405-25; cf. the editors’ chapter on Zimbabwe in Sam Moyo and Paris Yeros, eds., Reclaiming the Land: The Resurgence of Rural Movements in Africa, Asia and Latin America London: Zed Books, 2005).

7 Luise White, The Assassination of Herbert Chitepo: Text and Politics in Zimbabwe (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2003). Well before John Kennedy reached power, popular Zimbabwean nationalist Dr. Samuel Parirenyatwa died as his car was smashed by a train: his death too is shrouded in controversy.

8 “The Zvimba Dynasty,” The People’s Voice, February 24-March 2, 2002. Zvimba is Robert Mugabe’s home place.

9 Ibid., for more see David Moore, “Zimbabwe’s triple crisis: Primitive accumulation, nation-state formation and democratization in the age of neo-liberal globalization,” African Studies Quarterly, Special Issue: Zimbabwe Looking Ahead, 7, nos. 2 & 3 (December 2003).

10 “MDC youths in hospital,” SW Radio Africa, April 8, 2005, posted on an excellent daily Zimbabwean news digest compiled in Toronto by Bill Sparks at [email protected]. Chamisa was last imprisoned in September 2004, just before an MDC rally in the Harare township of Highfields and a tour of Europe.

11 See George Gittoes’ film, Soundtrack to War, http://www.soundtracktowar.com.

12 Zimbabwe was cut off from the International Monetary Fund lifeline at the end of 1999 because it was accounting improperly for expenditure on the DRC war. Throughout 2004 its Reserve Bank has been trying valiantly to get back in. In late 2004 Washington and London pundits said the MDC had fallen from western grace, and foreign policy makers were hoping a polished ZANU-PF could gain legitimacy. South Africa’s “plan” for Zimbabwe is a “government of national unity” along the same lines as South Africa c. 1994-1996. Western foreign policy makers, tired of the MDC and wary of a working class party, willing to dispense with their ephemeral support for “democracy,” seem to be inching towards that solution too.

13 David Monyae and Godfrey Chesang, “Mugabe not solely to blame,” The Star (Johannesburg), April 18, 2005; Christopher Thompson, “Call for Tsvangirai to resign after poll,” Independent (London), April 5, 2005. For Tsvangirai in conversation with a London academic, in which he more than holds his own, see Stephen Chan, Citizen of Africa: Conversations with Morgan Tsvangirai (Fingerprint Co-operative Ltd, Cape Town, 2005).

14 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 276.

15 See David Moore “Democracy, violence and identity in the Zimbabwean war of national liberation: Reflections from the realms of dissent,” Canadian Journal of African Studies 29, no. 3 (December 1995), 375-402 for an analysis of Robert Mugabe’s quelling of leftists during the liberation war.


— 15 —

— Calls for Papers“Edinburgh Studies in Transatlantic Literatures” Contact: Susan Manning, [email protected] With the end of the Cold War and the burgeoning of a global culture, the assumptions upon which Area Studies were based have started to be undermined. Edinburgh Studies in Transatlantic Literatures is an exciting new publishing venture that will promote the study of American literatures beyond national perimeters. How are place-based identities transformed by a wider Atlantic world? To what extent has the literature of the American hemisphere always and inevitably been in dialogue with that of Europe? What forms of literary expression do national identity and cultural nationalism take in a transnational environment? The series will explore the theoretical implications of comparing transatlantic literary cultures and publish important studies of transatlantic exchange in practice. It aims to be flexible in approach, incorporating Readers aimed at undergraduate and postgraduate students, monographs, and tightly-conceived edited collections.

“Exploring Global Perspectives” Contact: Karen Advokaat, [email protected] Berkshire Publishing Group is preparing Exploring Global Perspectives for publication by Congressional Quarterly Press in September 2005. This work will feature essays that explore the processes that have shaped and continue to shape perspectives of the United States around the world, and how these perspectives fit into the framework of broad global issues and concerns.

“Comparatively Queer: Crossing Time, Crossing Cultures” Due: 6/15/2005 Contact: Jarrod Hayes, [email protected] This collection seeks to queer the field of comparative studies as well as demonstrate how a comparative component might be considered central to “queering queer studies” itself. Papers are therefore sought that take a comparative approach to queer projects by interrogating the usual national limits of study as well as the nexus of comparison where traditional boundaries break down. Especially welcome will be work that crosses historical periods, cultures, and linguistic contexts.

“Journal of Natal & Zulu History” Due: 6/15/2005 Contact: S. Thomson, [email protected] Special issue on the “Bhambatha Rebellion”. 2006 is the centenary year of the violent events in KwaZulu-Natal which have become knows as the Zulu or the Bhambatha rebellion. James Stuart wrote the standard contemporary account a few years after the event. Shula Marks’ Reluctant Rebellion (1970) was a milestone in the historiography of the region, and Ben Carton in Blood from your Children (2000) examined aspects of the rebellion. Now, for the centenary year, the Journal of Natal and Zulu History is calling for articles which suggest fresh ways of looking at these events, in the context of earlier interpretations.

“Afro-Diasporic Cinema: Callaloo” Due: 8/1/2005 Contact: Fred Moten, [email protected] Callaloo seeks papers for a special issue on “Afro-Diasporic Cinema”

to be published in 2006. In addition to innovative, interdisciplinary, historically informed, aesthetic analyses of film, television, video and digitial art throughout the diaspora, Callaloo welcomes the submission of screenplays, scenarios, interviews and images thatdocument black cinematic practices, broadly conceived.

“Black Enlightenment-Black Atlantic” Due: 12/27/2005 Contact: Jonathan Beecher Field, [email protected] What challenges and opportunities do discourses of the Enlightenment offer to Africans inhabiting a circum-Atlantic world? Considerations of science as a performative activity encouraged. This session is subject to the approval of the Program Committee. One-page abstract, brief CV by 1 March.

— Conferences and Workshops“Citizenship and Race” Start Date: 5/25/2005 End Date: 5/27/2005 Location: Seattle, WA This year marks the 13th annual graduate student conference of the American Studies Colloquium at the University of Washington. This conference will help generate critical work on the developmental regimes of Euro-American hegemony, and discursive practices of political and market liberalism as they work within and against the nation-form. We are interested in soliciting scholarship from graduate students in a variety of disciplines (literature, history, anthropology, geography, women’s studies, globalization studies, etc.) that engages with some of the pressing knowledge projects undertaken by recent critical scholarship done in American Studies. These projects include, for example, tracing the historical articulations between discursive practices of race, nation, and empire; interrogating the production and circumscription of a normative (liberal) citizen-subject and its alternative/excluded embodiments; and conceptualizing critical models that work within as well as against the rubrics of U.S. exceptionalism. Such knowledge projects fall under at least three mutually-constitutive categories: 1) Citizenship: What are the constitutive frameworks for regimes of citizenship? How do subjects work and improvise within (and at the boundaries of) citizenship? How are notions of liberal citizenship articulated under the amorphous conditions of U.S. empire? 2) Race: How do conceptions/formations of race work within and against the nation-form? What critical leverage does thinking race through an international frame put on conceptions of racial nationalism? How do nation-based racial formations circulate (via bodies, discourses, legal regimes, commodities) across national boundaries? 3) Liberalism: How has political liberalism been utilized on a national/global scale? What types of hegemonic forces are buttressed by logics of liberalism? How do Marxist-Feminist theory, critical race theory, and queer theory work within and against the imperial regimes of liberalism? How can we develop ways of productively excavating the relationship between political and market liberalism?

“Digital History Workshop” Start Date: 6/6/2005


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End Date: 6/10/2005 Location: Washington, DC Contact: Joan Fragaszy, [email protected] Link: echo.gmu.edu/resources/workshops.php The Center for History and New Media at George Mason University invites scholars whose work speaks to the history of science, technology and industry to a workshop on the theory and practice of digital history, to be held June 6-10, 2005. Specific topics to be covered include genres of online history, designing a website, creating a site infrastructure, digitizing documents, identifying and building audiences for online history, and issues of copyright and preservation. Participants will leave with a deeper understanding of both the technical and methodological issues raised by the practice of digital history, as well as the ways that digital technologies can facilitate the research, teaching, writing and presentation of history. Co-sponsored by the American Historical Association and the National History Center, the workshop will be held at George Mason University’s Arlington campus, conveniently located in metropolitan Washington, DC. With support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, there will be no registration fee, and a limited number of scholarships are available to defray the costs of travel and lodging for graduate students and young scholars.

“Rethinking America in Global Perspective” Start Date: 6/20/2005 End Date: 7/15/2005 Location: Washington, DC Contact: Debbie Doyle Link: www.historians.org/projects/rethinkingamerica The American Historical Association, the Community College Humanities Association, and the Library of Congress invite you to apply for “Rethinking America in Global Context,” a summer institute funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and designated a “We the People” project. The four-week institute will take place at the Library of Congress from June 20 through July 15, 2005. The George Washington University Department of History will co-sponsor the institute.

“Slavery From Within: Legacies and Comparative Perspectives in the Atlantic World (Middelburg, Netherlands, 22-24 Jun 05)” Start Date: 6/22/2005 End Date: 6/24/2005 Location: Netherlands Contact: Hans Krabbendam, [email protected] This international conference on New World slavery and its contemporary legacies consists of two days. The first day will focus on slavery, the second day on its legacies. Researchers from the different parts of the enslaved New World will address the following questions: What is the general state of the art in slavery research in the different linguistic parts of the Americas? Is it possible and useful to make comparisons between the different areas, or have different research traditions and debates gone their own separate ways? What is the state of the art in micro history from an enslaved perspective? What did slavery do to the enslaved and their descendants and what did the enslaved and their descendants do to the system they lived in? Which traces of slavery can be found today, varying from tangible to intangible, or even mental cultural heritage?

“Slavery from Within: Comparative Perspectives and Legacies in the Atlantic World” Start Date: 6/23/2005 End Date: 6/24/2005 Location: Middleburg, Netherlands Contact: Hans Krabbendam, [email protected] In the discourse of Atlantic Slavery much has changed over the years. Since it became a major field of research in the second half of the twentieth century a shift has taken place from macro-studies “from above” to micro-studies “from below/from within.” This international conference on New World slavery and its contemporary legacies consists of two parts. The first day will focus on slavery in a variety of regions, the second day on its legacies. Researchers from the different parts of the enslaved New World will address the following questions: What is the general state of the art in slavery research in the different linguistic parts of the Americas? Is it possible and useful to make comparisons between the different areas, or have different research traditions and debates gone their own separate ways? What did slavery do to the enslaved and their descendants and what did the enslaved and their descendants do to the system they lived in? Which traces of slavery can be found today, varying from tangible to intangible, or even mental cultural heritage? The presentations will cover slavery in countries such as Angola, Brazil, Cuba, Guyana, Martinique, the Netherlands Antilles, Suriname, the United States, and compare Dutch, French, and Spanish slave colonies. The conference will be preceded by a seminar on slavery and its legacy in the Netherlands.

“South African Historical Society Biennial Conference” Start Date: 6/26/2005 End Date: 6/29/2005 Location: University of Cape Town Contact: Lance van Sittert, [email protected] Link: http://www.uct.ac.za/depts/history/sahs Southern Africa and the World: the Local, the Regional and the Global in Historical Perspective

“Africa in Literature” Start Date: 7/10/2005 End Date: 7/13/2005 Location: Cape Town Contact: Rosemary Gray, [email protected] Link: www.englishacademy.co.za We aim to bring together people who use English as a primary means of communication, concentrate on theme “Africa in Literature”; we aim to encourage conversation, mutual exchange and hope in a time of global conflict. Organized by: English Academy.

“Diasporas, Migration, and Identities” Start Date: 9/9/2005 End Date: 9/11/2005 Location: Cambridge Contact: Ben Marsh, [email protected] The British Group in Early American History invites participants for its fifth annual conference, on the theme of “Diasporas, Migration, and Identities.” The conference will take place at Clare College, University of Cambridge, between the 9th and 11th of September 2005. The


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conference organizers invite papers or panels on any subject relating to the history of the Early Modern Atlantic World between c.1500 and c.1800, and particularly welcome proposals that engage with the theme of “Diasporas, Migration, and Identities.” The below suggestions are not intended to be prescriptive, but to offer a flavor of the sorts of question we hope to explore.

“Imperial Cultures: Transatlantic Perspectives on Empires” Start Date: 11/17/2005 End Date: 11/18/2005 Location: Paris, France Contact: Pierre Guerlain, [email protected] The new political conjuncture, which for the past two years has been epitomized by the war in Iraq, may indicate certain major shifts now affecting the paradigms which, for the past twenty years, have constituted the dominant horizon of intellectual debate. The various academic disciplines which together make up “English and American studies”—from historiography to literary theory, not forgetting the analysis of political institutions and the current state of international relations—thus offer a series of privileged vantage-points for the observation and examination of these shifts. The recent precipitation of these evolutions in the context of the war in Iraq and, beyond this, the possible future extension of U.S. military intervention, have lent a renewed urgency to the need for an inquiry involving a confrontation of the various disciplinary viewpoints on the current pertinence of the concepts of empire and imperialism. Such an inquiry inevitably has implications for a whole range of presuppositions that are commonly drawn upon for the analysis of globalization and its effects on the societies located at the heart of the new Empire (whose existence and whose manifestations must be examined). The current conjuncture would seem to distort the conceptual and interpretational template which the triumph of “the new world order” (so near to us in time, so strangely distant now) had propagated. The current tuning of critical attentions to the question of empire and imperialism thus amounts to a epochal shift, involving a displacement in concepts, notions, presuppositions. New questions emerge, while other, older questions take on a renewed urgency.

— FYI“Honest Patriots: Loving a Country Enough to Remember Its Misdeeds” Contact: Donald Shriver, [email protected] In a book about to come from Oxford University Press, I have quite a bit to say about the principles that the TRC followed and that are relevant to the United States. Short notice and short spaced do not allow me to say much more right now, but there is one practical suggestion that we ought to consider seriously in this country: the use of media for getting alternate experiences of US citizens to talk to each other and the wider public, especially alternate experiences of history. Honest Patriots includes one chapter is on South Africa, one on Germany, and three on the United States.

“GEFAME: New Online Journal” Contact: Elisha Renne, [email protected]

Link: www.hti.umich.edu/g/gefame We are very pleased to announce the publication of GEFAME, a new web-based journal of African studies. GEFAME is an online journal that promotes scholarly communication. The journal is intended to facilitate the exchange of ideas and work among Africa-based scholars and scholars outside the continent of Africa. To be published approximately twice a year, GEFAME is a peer reviewed journal. GEFAME may be found at http://www.hti.umich.edu/g/gefame/ We are also pleased to announce that the journal Passages: A Chronicle of the African Humanities, originally published by Northwestern University’s Program of African Studies, is reappearing as a web-based publication, passages, in association with GEFAME. passages is not peer-reviewed; rather it provides a site for documentation, commentary, discussion, and experimental and provisional writings. In early 2005, the passages site will include a searchable archive of the eight issues of the original journal. passages may be found at http://www.hti.umich.edu/p/passages/ The first issue of GEFAME is dedicated to the memory of Professor Lemuel A. Johnson, whose wide-ranging genius contributed in extraordinary ways to the shaping of the thought and letters of scholars of Africa. As well, passages in its new series includes an edited collection of Johnson’s “electronic criticism”, ideas and questions he circulated freely via email and list-serves over a number of years almost right up to his death in 2002. GEFAME, with passages, is published by the Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library and is the product of collaboration between the University Library and the Center for Afro-American and African Studies at the University of Michigan. The Editors welcome your submissions and suggestions. To contact the editors of GEFAME and passages, please contact, respectively [email protected] or [email protected]

“Globalization, Empire, and Imperialism in Historical Perspective” Contact: Peter A. Coclanis, [email protected] In recent years globalization has received a huge amount of attention. The media are replete these days with references to empire, imperialism, neo-imperialism, etc. Clearly, the time seems right for systematic scholarly examination and analysis of these concepts and of specific historical episodes/manifestations of globalization, empire, and imperialism across space and time. With the above considerations in mind, the Historical Society is pleased to announce that the organizing theme for its 5th conference, scheduled for early June 2006, will be “Globalization, Empire, and Imperialism in Historical Perspective.” The conference will be held in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and will be hosted by the University of North Carolina. We envision a meeting in which historians across fields come together to deepen and enrich the state of knowledge about these vital concerns. Although we suffer no delusions about the degree of influence scholars typically have on contemporary policy debates, we are hopeful that the addition of historical context may lessen to some small extent the level of ignorance, if not partisanship characteristic of the same.


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— ABOUT SAFUNDI —

Safundi is an online community of scholars, professionals, and others

interested in comparing and contrasting the United States of America with the Republic of South Africa.

The word “Safundi” was created solely for this community of scholars and deconstructs as follows: “S” represents “South Africa,” “a” stands for “America,” and “fundi” comes from the Xhosa verb, “-funda,” or “to learn.”

The journal, Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Comparative Studies, is the centerpiece of the online community. The editors believe that analyzing the two countries in a comparative context enhances the perspective of each, individually. While new comparative research is the focus of the journal, Safundi also publishes articles specifically addressing one country, provided the articles are of interest to the comparative scholar. Furthermore, Safundi’s subject matter is as permeable as any country’s border: the editors will consider research addressing other states in southern Africa and North America.

Articles that Safundi publishes are academic in nature. Research papers are reviewed as they are submitted. Scholarly essays are welcomed. Any topic may be addressed. Safundi aims to provide its readers with a diverse and insightful collection of articles in each issue.

The peer-reviewed journal is published on a quarterly basis by Safundi Publications. Submissions are vetted by the editors-in-chief and the editorial board before they are accepted for publication. Safundi retains the copyrights to all articles unless otherwise noted; however, should authors wish to have their papers published elsewhere after first appearing in Safundi, permission will be granted upon receipt of a written request and so long as credit is given to Safundi as the original publisher.

The views expressed in the articles are those of the authors, and not of the editors or of Safundi itself.

For more information, please visit www.safundi.com.

Rita BarnardUniversity of Pennsylvania

Christopher SaundersUniversity of Cape Town

— EDITORS-IN-CHIEF —

— PATRON OF THE BOARD —George FredricksonStanford University

— FOUNDING EDITOR & PUBLISHER —Andrew OffenburgerSafundi Publications

Susan AndradeUniversity of Pittsburgh

Lynn BeratNew York University

Surendra BhanaUniversity of Kansas

Norman EtheringtonUniversity of Western Australia

Rick HalpernUniversity of Toronto

Peter HilsenrathUniversity of North Texas

Michael LeslieUniversity of Florida

Moeketsi LetsekaHuman Sciences Research Council

Alex LichtensteinRice University

— EDITORIAL BOARD —Peter Limb

Michigan State University

Sabine MarschallUniversity of KwaZulu-Natal

Roy du PréVaal Triangle Technikon

Peter RachleffMacalester College

Scott RosenbergWittenberg University

Grant SaffHofstra University

James StatmanWitwatersrand University

Johann TempelhoffPotschefstroom University

Keyan TomaselliUniversity of KwaZulu-Natal

Mohamed AdhikariUniversity of Cape Town

Geri AugustoIndependent Scholar

Azeem BadroodienHuman Sciences Research Council

David CarterUniversity of Nebraska-Omaha

Derek CatsamUniversity of Texas of the Permian Basin

Eric CédieyInstitute of Political Studies

James CobbeFlorida State University

Allan FarmanUniversity of Louisville

— ASSOCIATE EDITORS —Jamie Gates

Point Loma Nazarene University

Brian HalleyBeacon Press

Peter MidgleyUniversity of Alberta

David Chioni MooreMacalester College

Carol PatituTexas A&M University

Marie Denise PrevostUniversity of Maastricht

Eric SingerGoucher College

Sylvia WashingtonNorthwestern University

— CONTRIBUTING EDITOR —Christopher J. LeeStanford University

Zimbabwe Election: Tragedy of a Country Torn Apart

Documents

Transcript of Zimbabwe Election: Tragedy of a Country Torn Apart