Zimbabwe's tribal struggle

Richard West

Harare

The outside world is no doubt sated with shock reports from Zimbabwe: most recently, of Joshua Nkomo's depar- ture to Botswana; of government troops on the rampage in villages of the west; of mass arrests in the western city of Bulawayo; of violence done to the men of Mr Nkomo who, partly because he has been around so long and partly because of his avoirdupois, is much the best known of the black politi- cians.

The government in Harare tends to put the blame for much of this bad publicity on the foreign press. 'It is surprising,' says Comrade Enos Nkala, the Minister of Na- tional Supplies, 'that when it comes to Zim- babwe world attention is focused here but when church organisations and human rights are being violated in Northern Ireland, not much attention is given to it.' Veiled and not so veiled threats have been made of deportation for individual reporters. The British journalists are almost as unpopular with some of the blacks as we were with some of the whites in 1964, when I visited what was then Southern Rhodesia.

This seems unfair, as much of the strongest criticism of independent Zim- babwe has come from papers that violently attacked the previous Smith regime: the Guardian and the New Statesman in Bri- tain, and Newsweek in the United States. Most of the journalists now getting stick from the government also got stick from the Smith Information Department, often for making reports of army brutality against villagers. If some reports are vague, this is because people are now afraid to be quoted for fear of reprisals. Religious organisations such as the World Council of Churches and the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace — so vehement against Smith — are now oddly silent.

It is heartening that a strong though measured condemnation of government

'They're getting the mounted police back on the beat.'

policy towards Matabeleland should have appeared in the very good Zimbabwean Catholic magazine Moto. The latest issue, which has not appeared on the newsstands and may be suppressed, quotes letters from people living in Matabeleland who have suf- fered beating and terrorisation from government soldiers. An editoral says that `Moto has heard from sources too varied and reliable to be discounted — tales of brutality, atrocity and killing which under any circumstances are unjustifiable — and the effect has, by all accounts, been just that (terrorising the people): there is now an air of fear and horror in certain areas of our land — worse, as one witness put it, worse than even during the war.'

The government has a few good argu- ment in its favour. The western part of the country has indeed suffered from armed bandits who shot farmers and kidnapped six unfortunate tourists of whom nothing has been heard. It has also indeed suffered a drought and the death of thousands of livestock which may have contributed to a drift away from the land. The South African government may be assisting anti- government rebels, as it had certainly done in Mozambique and Angola. South Africa's raid on Lesotho showed how brutal and crass it can be in dealing with black-run countries.

Yet even government speakers admit, in- deed boast of, their wish to dissolve the main opposition party, led by Mr Nkomo. It also seems clear that the instrument of this policy, the renowned 5th Brigade (always described as 'North Korean- trained'), has acted at times with more or less the cruelty that you have seen described in the newspapers. To say this is not to lend oneself to right-wing, anti-African pro- paganda. Those people tend not to worry what happens to Mr Nkomo, whom they blame for the shooting down of two Vis- count aeroplanes during the previous guer- rilla war. It is just those whites who really believed in Zimbabwe who are now the most distressed. 'The first year after in- dependence was the happiest of my life,' said one very decent liberal white, 'and the last year has been the worst of my life.'

Like most things in Africa, the present dispute is not easy to judge by outside criteria. Or, to quote last Saturday's leader in the government's Herald: 'With the Zim- babwean system of government, nothing is impossible. The rules are made up as it goes along, and if there seem to be a great many unwanted rules this is because it has been going along for quite some time' .

The only way to understand this conflict is from Zimbabwe's history. The two tribes or nations involved in the current unpleas- antness are the Matabele, who live on the western fringe of Zimbabwe, and the Shona, who form almost 80 per cent of the population. A hundred years ago, the Matabele,a warlike, proud and monarchical people of Zulu origin, lorded it over the Shona. Indeed one of the reasons advanced by Shona (in private) for bashing the Matabeles is simply revenge for the cattle raids, the rape of women and burning alive of children that did go on in the 1880s. One also hears it said that the British who came here, the 1890 settlers, 'did not help us', yet Rhodes and his pioneers used just this ex- cuse, of saving the Shonas, to justify their invasion — the real motive for which was gold.

Rhodesian history books in the Ian Smith period represented the pioneers as a kind of rescue force for the victims of tribal war. The real historian of Rhodesia, Robert Blake, has rubbished this theory for good and all: within a few years of the 1890 intru- sion, both Shona and Matabele rose in desperation against the whites, and were crushed with equal ferocity. Yet even in those days the whites rather preferred the Matabele. You find this preference express- ed in recent lurid novels of turn-of-the- century Rhodesia, with titles like Where No Leopard Dares or Now Thrive the Vultures.

Both Shona and Matabele had equally humble status as labourers in the Southern Rhodesian mines and tobacco farms. And over the years it seemed that the two peoples had lost their mutual enmity. In the turbulent politics of the early Sixties, when white Southern Rhodesians resisted the 'wind of change', there was much agitation and violence among the blacks, between parties even then calling themselves ZANU and ZAPU. But although ZANU was stronger among the Shona, and ZAPU, as now, was led by Joshua Nkomo, the tribal enmity did not come to the surface It was there. So was ideological dif- ference and simple gangsterism, which led to the burning of huts and the beating up of hundreds of people who did not carry the right party card. But even the white Rhode- sians referred to all this as 'faction fighting' rather than tribal warfare. Both the two main parties contained an important membership of the opposite tribal group. After the Unilateral Declaration of In- dependence in 1965, it seemed that Shona and Matabele had dropped their differences in a common enmity against the rule of Ian Smith. Then, in the Seventies, came the long and confusing war of liberation, as we must now call it, when ZAPU and ZANU joined in a Patriotic Front. But both sides needed a friendly neighbouring country where they could train and arm themselves and get supplies.

By the simple logic of geography, Mr Nkomo's men established themselves in Zambia, to the north-west, while ZANU, now commanded by Robert Mugabe, esta- blished itself in Mozambique to the east. Not unnaturally, the two political groups acquired a different perspective and, still more important, the two separate guerrilla armies found recruits from the two different main tribes. Thus, while Mr Nkomo's political party could still boast of a large Shona element, his army was formed almost exclusively from Matebele youths.

As the fighting dragged on to the peace agreement of 1980, further differences arose between the ZANU and ZAPU. (I apologise for having to use these acronyms: an article in the Guardian once grew so bemused by them all that it started to write of Zambia in capital letters.) The Russians, the British and certain commercial groups like Lonrho backed Mr Nkomo, largely because they thought he would come out on top. Indeed at the start of 1980, when all the exiles returned to join an election cam- paign, Mr Nkomo attracted enormous crowds not only in Bulawayo, the Matabele

capital, but in Salisbury (Harare). However, when election day came, the Shona %voted for their man Mugabe, leaving Nkomo only those seats where Matabele predominate.

Therefore, Zimbabwe emerged as a coun- try divided on tribal lines. More ominously, it emerged as a country founded on violence: bombs, political murder, the bur- ning of farms and the shooting down of two Viscount aircraft full of civilians. Whether one calls this 'freedom struggle' or 'ter- rorism' must always depend on which side wins, but it is worth bearing in mind that almost every country born in this fashion has ended in tyranny, partition or a con- tinuation of fighting — or all three things. One only needs to reflect on Ireland, Palestine and Cyprus.