Zimbabwe Again
I'm probably going to need a Zimbabwe tag at some point.
Here are some more random musings about Zimbabwe which I've decided to write down. I don't know what to make of them, nor do I know what others will make of them, but you're free to point and laugh.
As the law of the internet goes, someone, somewhere is laughing at you. It doesn't matter what you do, or where you do it, as long as it's on the internet, somebody is going to laugh at you. The converse of this is rarely cited, but it means that no matter what you think, do, or write down, someone else on the internet is doing the same thing.
This rule applies in the real world as much as it does online, except that instead of laughing at you, they have to settle for laughing at the idea of people like you. The part about people doing the same thing though is pretty constant. Someone, somewhere, is essentially living your life; doing the same things you are, thinking about the same sort of topics, although in a setting so exotically removed from your own that, at first glance, you would deny their being any relationship between the two of you.
In my case, I'm fairly sure I know where that person is. Or people. At least one is now in Gaborone, and another in Lusaka, them probably dealing with an unpleasant chill (July is, on average, the coldest month in Lusaka, June coming in second), and staring at, running their finger across, the same maps that I now shuffle somewhat meaninglessly on my desk. They are wondering the same thing that I am, a what if. What if the African Union decides that the situation in Zimbabwe, their neighboring state, has become so deplorable that Africans must enter to assist Africans? What if the deterioration of the nation on their borders reaches such a point that their own lands drown under a tidal wave of refugees? What if, against all the inertia of fifty years of inaction, against the general consensus of leaders in a continent where far too many chiefs of state owe their origins to distinctly non-democratic roots, Robert Mugabe has to go? For the two nations most likely to be hit by a refugee crisis they cannot deal with, and most likely to have to do something about it, the question must now have risen to a burning level of interest.
A great deal of scrutiny must be going on to route A1, which leads from the border of Zambia to Harare, Zimbabwe. If Harare, Zimbabwe's capital and largest political center, is the beating heart of the Mugabe government, then A1 is the spear that points at it. The road is almost straight, as straight as you can be in the terrain in question, running about 350 kilometers from the Zambezi river to the heart of Harare, rising three thousand feet in the process, and providing a straight, paved way for an invading army to knock on Mr. Mugabe's front door.
Perhaps, for Botswana, who has a long border with Zimbabwe, and is openly antagonistic to Zimbabwe's leader, A5 is another name of note, the road the runs the short hundred kilometers from the border of Botswana to Bulawayo, the second largest city in Zimbabwe, home to opposition against ZANU in general, and the Mugabe government in particular. It looks a nice, pleasant town, very sunny, with photos of an ice cream parlor and a bar that look like they came out of 1950s or 60s America, like you were peering at some midwestern farming town that had survived, unchanged, with forty years of wear and tear since its heyday. Perhaps somewhere, some nameless, faceless planner is measuring the length of the streets, considering their wide girth, and wondering about how to fight up and down it.
Those planners will have plenty of practical considerations. They will wonder, like I do, about numbers and equipment, about whether the forty Chinese-made tanks that sources credit Zimbabwe with still function after so many years of economic privation, and about how their own light tanks would fare against their heavier Chinese counterparts. They will count the number of vehicles and guess at the likely deployments that Mugabe, fearing his own people more than any African invasion, will likely adopt. They will calculate the length of every section of the road, look at all the points at which you could get lost, and wonder where others might lie in ambush.
But, in the midst of all the planning, I wonder if they will do what I do, sit back and wonder about the man at the other end, the opposition, the player of the other side who resides at the farthest reaches of the yellow brick road.
Robert Mugabe is a strange man, an interesting man, an odd, almost schizophrenic combination of the polite and the ruthless, the caring and the careless. He is perhaps that most dangerous of dangerous men, a ruthless dictator, who is ruthless because he believes himself to be right. Or perhaps he is just a consummate actor, pulling the wool over our eyes while fooling out senses. He is a man who, by all reports, lives in a shadowy world of conspiracies and half-truths, where decades after the end of the British Empire, Britain itself still weaves a malevolent edge around Africa. It is a man who may have believed, in truth, that Britain's economy was almost totally dependent on Africa, and hence would try forever to keep Africa under their thumb. He has accused the MDC opposition of being illegitimate, tools of the white man, of a resurgent British Empire, and thus inadmissible to Zimbabwean politics, but it is hard to tell if he believes this. If he does, if he truly sees the shadow of the white man in everyone and everything that stands against him, then perhaps he is to be pitied more than he is to be hated, a sad artifact of a revolution when things were split cleanly into good and evil.
He rarely appears in print as anything but the fool. One gets the impression, looking at him, that his face could look wise if used properly, but all too often he is caught by the camera looking angry, and angry on his face has a clownish bent, a strange and inhuman quality, as if he were a puppet on a children's show. And, accordingly, we look for the strings. The whispers already dominate discussion, rumors that Mugabe is nothing more than a puppet to his own generals, or that he has become a prisoner of his own insanity, cackling madly in office while his government churns on without him. He is, perhaps, a parody of Adolf Hitler in his last days, when he hid beneath a bunker in Berlin and slowly succumbed to insanity, except without the immediate threat of the Red Army to illuminate his failing capacities.
Who is he? What happens in that world of his? Is he really pulling the strings? Will he fight? Will anyone fight?
The shadow of Robert Mugabe lies long over the situation in Zimbabwe. It is difficult to tell how many of the failing policies of his own regime are his fault, and how often the party would have carried on without him. Is he to blame for the disastrous land reform he tried to do? Or was that the consequence of a nation full of angry people who were willing to take what they want, but did not need what they took. Did he execute the policies that left him isolated from the world, forgotten and dangerous, or was that just another accident, another idea from those who pull his strings that he took the fall for?
Of course, it doesn't matter in the end. We will assume that he will act rationally, and that we will meet him wherever we may choose to enter his country, whether defeating him in detail, first at Bulawayo and then at Harare, or simply stabbing for the throat. We will plan as best we can for the contingencies we can anticipate, and hope that chance will allow us the opportunity to compensate for those we cannot. And then we will take those finished plans, such as they are, and fold them up and put them in the filing cabinet where all the other plans of fanciful invasions and imaginary defenses go. Because Africa is not yet ready to evict a man by force, even if he does commit crimes on his own soil, given the nature of the leaders who would have to condemn him. There is still too much life in the anti-colonial speech that emerges from his lips to discount him totally, and nobody is yet so inundated with the costs to be willing to pay to remove him.
And yet, one day that may change, so the plans stay under lock and key, and we wonder what kind of man the one on the other end of the long, dusty route A1 is.
Here are some more random musings about Zimbabwe which I've decided to write down. I don't know what to make of them, nor do I know what others will make of them, but you're free to point and laugh.
As the law of the internet goes, someone, somewhere is laughing at you. It doesn't matter what you do, or where you do it, as long as it's on the internet, somebody is going to laugh at you. The converse of this is rarely cited, but it means that no matter what you think, do, or write down, someone else on the internet is doing the same thing.
This rule applies in the real world as much as it does online, except that instead of laughing at you, they have to settle for laughing at the idea of people like you. The part about people doing the same thing though is pretty constant. Someone, somewhere, is essentially living your life; doing the same things you are, thinking about the same sort of topics, although in a setting so exotically removed from your own that, at first glance, you would deny their being any relationship between the two of you.
In my case, I'm fairly sure I know where that person is. Or people. At least one is now in Gaborone, and another in Lusaka, them probably dealing with an unpleasant chill (July is, on average, the coldest month in Lusaka, June coming in second), and staring at, running their finger across, the same maps that I now shuffle somewhat meaninglessly on my desk. They are wondering the same thing that I am, a what if. What if the African Union decides that the situation in Zimbabwe, their neighboring state, has become so deplorable that Africans must enter to assist Africans? What if the deterioration of the nation on their borders reaches such a point that their own lands drown under a tidal wave of refugees? What if, against all the inertia of fifty years of inaction, against the general consensus of leaders in a continent where far too many chiefs of state owe their origins to distinctly non-democratic roots, Robert Mugabe has to go? For the two nations most likely to be hit by a refugee crisis they cannot deal with, and most likely to have to do something about it, the question must now have risen to a burning level of interest.
A great deal of scrutiny must be going on to route A1, which leads from the border of Zambia to Harare, Zimbabwe. If Harare, Zimbabwe's capital and largest political center, is the beating heart of the Mugabe government, then A1 is the spear that points at it. The road is almost straight, as straight as you can be in the terrain in question, running about 350 kilometers from the Zambezi river to the heart of Harare, rising three thousand feet in the process, and providing a straight, paved way for an invading army to knock on Mr. Mugabe's front door.
Perhaps, for Botswana, who has a long border with Zimbabwe, and is openly antagonistic to Zimbabwe's leader, A5 is another name of note, the road the runs the short hundred kilometers from the border of Botswana to Bulawayo, the second largest city in Zimbabwe, home to opposition against ZANU in general, and the Mugabe government in particular. It looks a nice, pleasant town, very sunny, with photos of an ice cream parlor and a bar that look like they came out of 1950s or 60s America, like you were peering at some midwestern farming town that had survived, unchanged, with forty years of wear and tear since its heyday. Perhaps somewhere, some nameless, faceless planner is measuring the length of the streets, considering their wide girth, and wondering about how to fight up and down it.
Those planners will have plenty of practical considerations. They will wonder, like I do, about numbers and equipment, about whether the forty Chinese-made tanks that sources credit Zimbabwe with still function after so many years of economic privation, and about how their own light tanks would fare against their heavier Chinese counterparts. They will count the number of vehicles and guess at the likely deployments that Mugabe, fearing his own people more than any African invasion, will likely adopt. They will calculate the length of every section of the road, look at all the points at which you could get lost, and wonder where others might lie in ambush.
But, in the midst of all the planning, I wonder if they will do what I do, sit back and wonder about the man at the other end, the opposition, the player of the other side who resides at the farthest reaches of the yellow brick road.
Robert Mugabe is a strange man, an interesting man, an odd, almost schizophrenic combination of the polite and the ruthless, the caring and the careless. He is perhaps that most dangerous of dangerous men, a ruthless dictator, who is ruthless because he believes himself to be right. Or perhaps he is just a consummate actor, pulling the wool over our eyes while fooling out senses. He is a man who, by all reports, lives in a shadowy world of conspiracies and half-truths, where decades after the end of the British Empire, Britain itself still weaves a malevolent edge around Africa. It is a man who may have believed, in truth, that Britain's economy was almost totally dependent on Africa, and hence would try forever to keep Africa under their thumb. He has accused the MDC opposition of being illegitimate, tools of the white man, of a resurgent British Empire, and thus inadmissible to Zimbabwean politics, but it is hard to tell if he believes this. If he does, if he truly sees the shadow of the white man in everyone and everything that stands against him, then perhaps he is to be pitied more than he is to be hated, a sad artifact of a revolution when things were split cleanly into good and evil.
He rarely appears in print as anything but the fool. One gets the impression, looking at him, that his face could look wise if used properly, but all too often he is caught by the camera looking angry, and angry on his face has a clownish bent, a strange and inhuman quality, as if he were a puppet on a children's show. And, accordingly, we look for the strings. The whispers already dominate discussion, rumors that Mugabe is nothing more than a puppet to his own generals, or that he has become a prisoner of his own insanity, cackling madly in office while his government churns on without him. He is, perhaps, a parody of Adolf Hitler in his last days, when he hid beneath a bunker in Berlin and slowly succumbed to insanity, except without the immediate threat of the Red Army to illuminate his failing capacities.
Who is he? What happens in that world of his? Is he really pulling the strings? Will he fight? Will anyone fight?
The shadow of Robert Mugabe lies long over the situation in Zimbabwe. It is difficult to tell how many of the failing policies of his own regime are his fault, and how often the party would have carried on without him. Is he to blame for the disastrous land reform he tried to do? Or was that the consequence of a nation full of angry people who were willing to take what they want, but did not need what they took. Did he execute the policies that left him isolated from the world, forgotten and dangerous, or was that just another accident, another idea from those who pull his strings that he took the fall for?
Of course, it doesn't matter in the end. We will assume that he will act rationally, and that we will meet him wherever we may choose to enter his country, whether defeating him in detail, first at Bulawayo and then at Harare, or simply stabbing for the throat. We will plan as best we can for the contingencies we can anticipate, and hope that chance will allow us the opportunity to compensate for those we cannot. And then we will take those finished plans, such as they are, and fold them up and put them in the filing cabinet where all the other plans of fanciful invasions and imaginary defenses go. Because Africa is not yet ready to evict a man by force, even if he does commit crimes on his own soil, given the nature of the leaders who would have to condemn him. There is still too much life in the anti-colonial speech that emerges from his lips to discount him totally, and nobody is yet so inundated with the costs to be willing to pay to remove him.
And yet, one day that may change, so the plans stay under lock and key, and we wonder what kind of man the one on the other end of the long, dusty route A1 is.