OBITUARY: TAKING OUT THE "MUGARBAGE" — SHITHOLE FACILITATOR OR NATIONALIST HERO?

Robert Mugabe and his possible legacy

by Colin Liddell 

As a "partial South African"—I spent a number of years there as a child—I couldn't really let the death of Robert Mugabe pass by without a comment.

There are a number of valid and legitimate ways to view the man and his political career, although ultimately the question really boils down to who you are. This is because Mugabe was a deeply divisive figure, and, whoever you are, you stand on either one side or other of that division regardless of whether you want to or not.

The first and most popular view in the Dissident Right is what I will call "The Shithole Thesis," i.e. that Mugabe was part of the process by which the once successful and flourishing White-ruled state of Rhodesia was degraded to become the economic basket case of Mugarbage-led Zimbabwe.

There is a lot of truth to this view, although it is usually greatly overstated, as the living standards of Black Rhodesians were never that great anyway, while things are not as economically dire today as some suppose.

But the problem with this view is that, in essence if not degree, it is identical to the critique used by Remainers in the UK to oppose Brexit, namely that such-and-such a political change causes or will cause an economic downturn.

Black-run Marxism, what
could possibly go wrong?

However, one of the characteristics of the Dissident Right is that we are "Big Picture" and we are not all that concerned about GDP, the rate of growth, and other bourgeois indicators of "success," as that kind of success has clearly been destroying our own civilisation for several decades now.

Another popular and also partially valid view of Mugabe is that he was actually a good guy, a brave nationalist who obtained the independence—if not quite so much the freedom—of his people.

There is a lot in this. But it is also interesting to view this through a tribal perspective, as Mugabe essentially represented the ascendancy of the numerically stronger, but historically weaker Mashona people. In fact, before the British showed up with their Gatling guns and Pax Britannica being a Mashona was one of the worst things to be.

Here is John Selby in his Short History of South Africa (1973), which I highly recommend:

The relationship between the Matabele and the Mashona was a strange one. Mzilikazi [the Matabele King] regarded the Mashona as suitable prey for occasional forays, but like game birds on a well ordered shoot, only in season. They were thus culled at intervals but never completely destroyed. A suitable area was chosen for each raid and, when it had been despoiled, sufficient survivors were left to replant the crops and build up the cattle herds. Then it would be left untouched for a period until it recovered. The forays took place each winter, the area being chosen by the King himself casting a spear in the desired direction. (P.135)

The Matabele, by the way, were an invasive offshoot of the warlike Zulus from far to the South in what is now Kwazulu-Natal Province in South Africa, who invaded and settled in the area around Bulawayo in Western Zimbabwe in the 19th century to escape from the Boers, and whose people now make up around 20% of the population.

The quoted passage is particularly interesting when we consider that Mugabe's most brutal act of tyranny and repression—even worse than driving White farmers off their land, which was mild by comparison—was the Gukurahundi, a Mashona phrase that translates as "the early rain which washes away the chaff before the spring rains."

This ominously if poetically titled operation was aimed at the Matabele, the former oppressors of the Mashona. A special Mashona military unit, trained by North Korean advisers, went into Matabele areas where they executed, tortured, and generally intimidated the Matabeles. The exact numbers killed are unknown, but high estimates range up to 80,000.

White people can be driven away by
tedious rhythm and pointless gyration. 

Mugabe was a lot more timid than this when it came to oppressing the Whites, but then he could afford to be, as merely taking away their farms and threatening their formerly comfortable lifestyles was enough to get rid of nearly all of the them.

So, we now have two theses: "The Shithole Thesis" and "The Nationalist Hero Thesis." The former is often used to critique the latter, along the lines that a true nationalist hero who loved his people would have tried to avoid turning his country into a shithole. In reality this would have meant keeping most of the Whites in the country and using their expertise to maintain Zimbabwe's relatively successful economy.

There is some evidence that Mugabe tried to do this, especially in the early stages, but was eventually overcome by fears that White economic power, combined with the fractious nature of African tribal politics, would be more than a match for him, leading him to choose the economically rocky road he followed as being the best one to protect his own power and that of his tribal group.

The rise of China also facilitated this course. As Whites were pushed out of the economy, the Chinese were brought in to help restore Zimbabwe's faltering economy. Indeed, it was this that eventually led to his downfall when a coup, apparently backed by China, led to him being ousted from power at the grand old age of 93, after 37 years at the top.

This raises another thesis, "The Supremacist Thesis." According to this viewpoint, some nations are "more equal" than others, and the small, insignificant, and backward ones, like Zimbabwe, are always fated to be the pawns of the more powerful ones. Thus the correct way to view Zimbabwean history—and thus the career of Robert Mugabe—is as a search for a colonial master or at least overlord.

"It's all so tiresome"

More than any other group, it was Mugabe's tribe that benefited from the rule of the British. In little over a hundred years their numbers increased more than a hundred-fold and they were brought out of the Stone Age to the point where they could actually oppress their former oppressors the Matabele. But the British had no wish to uphold their benign Supremacism and laid it down in the dust. Now we are seeing how Chinese supremacy in this part of Africa works out. Will it lead to a healthy symbioses with Zimbabwean nationalism or will other Supermacist forces, from the West, intervene to subvert China's hold and create new politico-economic structures?

These are all interesting—and indeed objective—ways in which to view Robert Mugabe's long life and career, but they all pale against the fact that here was a man, who whatever his reasons or the historical forces driving him, made himself an enemy of Whites. This is the only authentic way in which any person of White or European blood can view him, and, what's more, this is how we should have viewed him in the past.

Instead we were tricked by the usual sophistries into viewing him either as an ideological warrior—a "Leftist" or a "Marxist"—or a "freedom fighter," giving little consideration to the fact that the freedom he sought required our acquiescence and involved our subjugation.