The Poverty of Nationalism and the Zimbabwe Tragedy Posted July 1st, 2008 by PTZeleza in U.S. Affairs

The tragedy of Zimbabwe and the misguided support some African intellectuals and leaders still give the Mugabe dictatorship as we saw today with the tepid resolution passed at the concluded AU summit in Sharm el-Sheikh in Egpyt betrays the current poverty of African nationalism.

I have been intrigued talking to several African professionals including academics in a number of western capitals over the past couple of weeks and reading commentaries on a few online African discussion groups at their refusal to accept that the bankruptcy of the Mugabe dictatorship is not a fiction manufactured by the western press, notwithstanding the obsessive racist denigration of Africa in the western media.

The more removed people seem to be from the situation in Zimbabwe itself, from the country's horrific economic meltdown, not to mention the widespread political violence, the more they sanitize Mugabe cloaking him in gaudy anti-imperialist colors, seeing him as an unfairly maligned nationalist hero. How many of them would like to trade places with the millions of Zimbabweans who have fled for their lives, survival, and dignity? Are all those Zimbabweans so misguided, so blinded by Blair now Brown and Bush that they cannot appreciate their fortunes under the Mugabe dictatorship?

The reality is Mugabe lost his anti-imperialist and progressive nationalist credentials a long time ago. As a frequent visitor to Zimbabwe, a country where I was born and where my family lived for many years, the gap between revolutionary rhetoric and voracious acquisitiveness, national liberation and political intolerance was already evident by the mid-1990s. I used to warn my Zimbabwean friends that they seemed to be headed towards Banda's dictatorship that had terrorized us in Malawi for three decades.

Unfortunately, following the loss of the referendum in 2000, the Mugabe regime exceeded even my worst fears as it turned into a more violent and venal dictatorship that progressively impoverished the beloved masses who had sacrificed so much for their liberation from settler colonialism. Zimbabweans have been voting with their feet, more than four million are now refugees in the neighboring countries and in the very western countries some of Mugabe supporters or sympathizers reside.

The defense of the Mugabe dictatorship takes several forms: that the regime must surely not be so bad if it is opposed by the western powers, and that Africa has far worse regimes than Mugabe's that are ignored or tolerated by the same western powers. Underlying these arguments is an obsession with the West as the arbiter of all our actions, a willful concession to the agency of the West and Africa's incapacity to think and act without the western gaze.

These are the arguments of a knee-jerk nationalism, a desperate nationalism emptied of its historic mission of restoring full humanity to Africans so cruelly denied by Europe through its barbarities of slavery and colonialism and their neo-colonialism aftermaths. An empty nationalism more preoccupied with venting and scoring points against the West than pursuing, promoting and protecting the fundamental interests of African peoples. To the regime's supporters, its virtue primarily lies in its antagonism with the West, not its delivery of development and democracy, those fundamental imperatives of progressive African nationalism or any state worth its legitimacy for that matter.

Subscribing to such an impoverished nationalism demonstrates the depths of the West's damage to the political psyches of contemporary Africa, how some of our best and brightest can excuse a bankrupt, murderous dictatorship because of the hypocrisies of the West, not because of the inestimable value of our own people's lives. To measure the Mugabe regime according to Africa's register of infamy, rather than its viable democracies and democratic aspirations, the Nigerias rather than the Botswanas, is the height of moral decrepitude.

Support for the Mugabe dictatorship is also based on its liberation history. In the highly racialized context of Africa's settler colonies, where protracted and costly liberation wars were waged, this history serves both as an asset and a liability. A liability in so far as the transition from liberation politics to democratic politics tends to be paralyzed by the monopolization of political legitimacy by the national liberation movement, which often paints opposition forces and parties that emerge after independence when the challenges of uhuru rear their inevitable heads as unpatriotic, as the Mugabe regime has done with Tsvangirai's MDC. Clearly, the Mugabe regime hangs on this historical legitimacy, not its record of governance in recent years.

It is in this sense and during these moments that nationalism becomes an albatross, shedding its liberatory promises for an openly predatory dictatorship. As I wrote in a commentary on nationalism on this site, nationalism is a house of many mansions. We need to distinguish between the repressive and progressive nationalisms, between the reactionary, reformist, or revolutionary goals of various nationalisms. Mugabe once represented progressive nationalism, now he embodies an impoverished nationalism that is devouring its own citizens, robbing them of their human rights in all their
indivisibility: political and civil, social and economic, cultural and solidarity rights.

That the West has always sought to exploit, manipulate, and humiliate Africa is not news, nor the fact that it is hypocritical, conniving, unscrupulous and totally lacking in moral authority. But to base our actions and attitudes towards the governance of our own people on what the West thinks or does is to give the West too much power, to shirk our responsibilities. At this historical juncture, five decades after we defeated colonialism, one of the great political victories and events of the twentieth century, this represents political posturing that smacks of historical irresponsibility.