Feature
O, Zimbabwe
by Matt Nippert
The end is coming for Robert Mugabe.
The 27-year reign of Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe has seemed a nightmare without end. But Stephen Chan, a professor of international relations at the University of London, is prepared to name a date when the freedom fighter-turned-autocrat will go.
“In March next year, Mugabe will win the presidential election,” says Chan, speaking by phone from London. “But afterwards he will retire in a blaze of glory, having been validated one last time by his voters. He will then arrange for a sympathetic successor who will forgive him all his crimes and the South Africans will provide him with a very luxurious, safe, and out-of-the-way retirement home.”
Predicting the end of one of the most stubborn strongmen of Africa is a big call, but Chan has his reasons. The academic, who regularly visits the country and has penned a well-received and highly critical biography, Robert Mugabe: A Life of Power and Violence, is just back from Johannesburg, where he talked with Zimbabwean and South African officials.
The principal opposition in Zimbabwe, the Movement for Democratic Change, has now splintered, and so a new president will likely be a “technocrat” from within the ruling ZANU-PF party, says Chan. (The requirements of diplomacy will mean South Africa will take no credit.)
“The new government will ‘spontaneously’, without any kind of South African urging at all, invite the two leaders of the opposition to assume portfolios into a unity government,” Chan says drily. This “spontaneous” gesture of magnanimity is sure to be accepted.
Predictions of Mugabe’s imminent retirement from office are unlikely to receive universal applause.
“There will be a lot of people very unhappy that Mugabe will not get his just deserts. He’ll have gold taps and a good life – for as long as he lives.”
Which may not be long. The 84-year-old president is facing a life-threatening illness and trying to treat it on the sly. “It’s a low-lying cancer; it’s meant to be a big, deadly secret – he’s receiving all kinds of therapies for it. He’s very, very vigorous and belies his age well, but there’s only so much you can do to hold things like that at bay.”
Chan, who has become a globe-trotting Africa expert over three decades, started out here, born in 1949 to parents who had fled the chaos of World War II and ended up in the South Pacific.
“My dad got the second-to-last boat out before Hong Kong fell to the Japanese. It just happened to be a ship evacuating New Zealand soldiers.”
In his Auckland days, the young Chan was known as part of Tim Shadbolt’s hell-raising activist band (Shadbolt, recently re-elected Mayor of Invercargill, gleefully tells the story of how, after 1976, Chan “went from being a peace activist to studying war at the university!”). And when he left to take up a scholarship to the Department of War Studies at King’s College at the University of London, Chan told the New Zealand Herald that his basic beliefs were in “dignity, justice and art” – which, he says, is not an inaccurate description of his philosophy today.
During his activist period, Chan published poetry (including Ian Wedde’s first hardcover collection), edited publications, including Craccum, stood for Parliament as an independent (campaigning on the back of a truck with a rock band), and threw himself into the causes of the time. “I was very much involved in ... Maori liberation – as it was called in those days – women’s liberation and gay liberation, despite not being female, gay or Maori. These were all activities in which I was deeply implicated.”
It was at the 1969 occupation of the US Consulate in protest at the war in Vietnam that Chan’s interest in Zimbabwe was sparked. At the demonstration, which made international headlines, he was one of 17 arrested (others included Sue Bradford and Shadbolt). Chan was held at Auckland Central police station in a cell directly opposite an African student by the name of Henderson Tapela.
“We could speak to each other through the grille on the cell doors. We were banged up for quite a number of hours – six if I remember correctly – and we got talking.”
The Vietnam war was not the only international issue occupying the minds of young people in that colourful era.
“Henderson had a great number of other issues on his mind – particularly what was happening in his own country – then called Rhodesia. And that was the beginning of it, of a major interest in what is now Zimbabwe, that never really left me.”
The peace activist studied with American admirals and British colonels at King’s. Chan, who has slowly grown to appreciate the virtues of a responsible military, now works as an external examiner for the Royal College of Defence Studies and says “every single person on the course has written cogent and extremely well-researched essays against the Iraq war, against every aspect of current [British] government and American foreign policy.”
But before marking the exams of military men, he worked with the Commonwealth Observer Group that oversaw the transition to independence of Zimbabwe in 1980. It was a wild time, as a country run by a white minority democratically ceded power to guerrilla forces who had been fighting the government for almost 20 years.
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