I would like to think that I have been as active a voice about the crisis in Zimbabwe and as critical toward Robert Mugabe as anyone writing over the past few years. And yet moral outrage is not a sufficient stance to take to write effectively about Zim, even if a soupcon of outrage may be necessary. Two recent articles in prominent venues brought this point home to me over the course of the last couple of days.
The New York Times’ former Africa correspondent John Darnton had a peculiar op-ed appear in Wednesday's Times in which he tried to draw significant conclusions about Robert Mugabe based on whether or not Mugabe got a reference that Darnton made about TS Eliot in a conversation the two men had three decades ago. I can probably come up with a thinner reed upon which to hang an argument, but I probably could not come up with one so simultaneously solipsistic. Basically, Darnton had heard that Mugabe loved the poetry of Eliot. At the end of a rather uneventful meeting with Mugabe, Darnton asked about Eliot and received no response. Somehow this is supposed to be telling. Apparently once one gets one's foot in the door at the Times they get to publish any dreck on the op-ed page. membership, as the old commercial line went, has its privileges.
Far less obnoxious (and for the most part actually spot-on) is this New Republic editorial. Well argued and with TNR's typically ardent presentation, I nonetheless found this hypothesis to be something of a clunker:
Many African leaders, veterans of anticolonial movements themselves, are terrified at the prospect of seeing Mugabe's ZANU-PF fall, as it could signal the beginning of a post-liberation African politics in which “struggle credentials” don't guarantee a lifetime in power.
Not to put too fine a point on the argument, but this assertion is nonsense. African leaders from the revolutionary era do support one another, sometimes blindly. And one wishes these bonds of loyalty gave way in the face of demonstrable failings among that generation's cohort. But the armchair psychologizing about the revolutionary generation seeing their own mortality is pretty silly in light of a much more logical explanation: They are loyal based on experiencing a common struggle against what was, we too easily are allowed to forget, a noxious evil in the colonial era. This reductionist argument that the liberation leaders support their own because of some sense of concern about their own slippage strikes me as silly and at best limited in its explanatory utility.
