One works in the business end of biotech and we were both graduate students together at Rhodes University back in 1997, albeit in very different disciplines. The other is a historian whom I met at a conference in Pretoria a couple of years back. He’s hit hard times after funding disappeared for his position at an important online history site and he is holding on to hope that something will come through soon, before he has to go back into the maw of Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe.
Neither of my friends is optimistic about Zimbabwe, and, after all, why would they be? Even forgetting the rapaciousness of Robert Mugabe’s regime and the politics he has created, the immediate concerns that my friends have for their families and friends do not involve roaming bands of ZANU-PF thugs. Instead their fears are of famine, the mind-boggling inflation that continues to skyrocket – it is more than 2.2million% with no signs of abating – despite (because of?) the introduction of laughable bank notes, such as the new Z$100 billion bill that is worth about $1 US and can buy approximately four oranges, or could as of last week, if one could find oranges to buy, and the fact that a loaf of bread now costs approximately a third of a teacher’s monthly salary. These economic conditions are all the direct result of Mugabe’s politics and failed policies, of course, but for the average Zimbabwean these are not matters of politics qua politics but rather of how to eke out a life.
So what to make of the apparent success of the “talks about talks” that led to the signing of a memorandum of understanding about the current meetings between Robert Mugabe and his beleaguered challenger (and presumptive true choice of the voters) Morgan Tsvangirai of the Movement for Democratic Change? And what to make of the meetings? Certainly Mugabe’s willingness to sit down with his rival, the handshakes and photo-ops, the signs of movement after so much stasis, and an interregnum in the bloodshed are all worth something. But what? After all, “talks about talks” has a rather Orwellian ring to it, even if the idea of “talks about talks” was a vital moment in leading to the CODESA negotiations that led to the end of Apartheid in South Africa.
One cannot really blame observers in southern Africa or elsewhere for holding on to hope. The tendency is to hold on to hope when hope is all one has on which to hold. And perhaps the new agreement finally to meet, to hash out these difficulties, really does represent a breakthrough, a new dawn, however tentative. But I cannot shake the images of the last few months (indeed the last few years) and the lengths to which Robert Mugabe has gone to hold on to power. And I cannot shake the thousands and thousands of words I read about the Zimbabwe crisis while I was in South Africa, more even than I read on a daily basis here in the US, from sources even more wary than I, such as The Zimbabwean, which has chronicled in grim and unremitting detail the situation in that country. And I think of the day-to-day fears of my friends for their families. And I think again of what I think the odds are that after all that has transpired Mugabe will suddenly yield even a modicum of control to a man and a party he has terrorized and abused and harassed.
By all means, then, let us believe that the process, however slow and tortured, is going to result in some sort of compromise. Let us believe that after all of the silent diplomacy and seeming aloofness Thabo Mbeki’s gambit has worked, however belatedly. Let us imagine that a new day is dawning and that the talks about talks have yielded talks that will lead to concrete change. By all means hope that finally we have more than hope before us. But forgive me if I am skeptical. Skepticism seems to be the one currency that still spends at its full value in Zimbabwe.
Post published in: Opinions