60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

212 development dialogue december 2008 – revisiting the heart of darkness
against the settlers in 1896-7, and in particular at how the struggle
was waged by ZANLA, the armed wing of ZANU. (Moore 1991; and
Saul 1979). Like other Southern African anti-colonial movements,
ZANU in the 1970s was ‘hierarchical and authoritarian’. More than
this, ‘opposition to established leadership and received theory was
regarded as both illegitimate and reactionary’ (Southall 2003: 259). 5
Nor did anything much change after independence. Still ‘militaristic,
vertical, undemocratic, violent and repressive’ (Freeman 2005:
165), ZANU continued to conduct politics through the barrel of a
gun. It may be, as one historian has argued, that it was ‘the heritage
of guerrillaism [that] produced hierarchical, bureaucratic, and
dictatorial tendencies ‘in post-independence governments (Legassick
2002: 61), or, as another has suggested, that aspects of the colonial
system ‘reproduced themselves in the struggle for its abolition and
subsequently in the concepts of governance applied in post-colonial
conditions’ (Melber 2003: 42), but the conclusion to be drawn from
both accounts is that ‘singularly and collectively, the ruling elites of
southern Africa have demonstrated that they are less interested in democracy
than they are in pursuing their self-interest and retention of
power’ (Southall 2003: 268).
The making and meanings of the massacres in Matabeleland would
appear to be the fi rst but not the last legacy of the form of liberation
struggle conceived and practised by ZANU-PF. Along the way,
the democratic ideals and aspirations of ordinary men and women
were ruthlessly subordinated to the logic of a commandist, intolerant
movement whose post-independence policies readily embraced mass
violence. That this violence was as regionally bounded as it was undiscriminating
arguably brings it within the United Nations defi nition
of genocide, which is the attempt to destroy ‘in whole or in part,
a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group’ (as cited in Chirot and
McCauley 2006: 11). But however the Gukurahundi atrocities are
eventually defi ned, they occurred in a very particular political and
historical context. In April 2005, speaking at a rally to celebrate 25
years of Independence, Mugabe reminded his audience that ‘it was
the bullet that brought the ballot’ (Reuters, 8/4/2005). 6 He might have
added that in Zimbabwe the bullet has always trumped the ballot.
5 For the same point in a wider context see Phimister (2005).
6 For a critical re-evaluation of elections in Zimbabwe since Independence see Kriger
(2005).