Opinion - News Analysis

Different depictions of Robert Mugabe

Victoria Brittain

Zimbabwe's President was not always the figure now depicted on the London stage.

PRESIDENTS, PRIME Ministers — how universally they hate to step down from power. Long after most of their people and colleagues wish they would go, they hang on, convinced that the country still needs them. Fraser Grace's play about Zimbabwe in 2001, currently on stage in London, resonates with Britain in 2006. We all have conversations about what on earth Tony Blair is thinking. What is in his head? And we know we do not have a clue. But when it comes to the same conversation about Mr. Mugabe, the old African stereotypes come up and we say that he is mad.

Grace took a bold leap based on an article by a journalist with a history of unfriendliness to southern African liberation movements. The headline was: "Paranoid Mugabe dines with a ghost." Mr. Mugabe was depressed and being treated by a white psychiatrist, it said. That story became the play Breakfast with Mugabe. This was tempting but perilous territory for an imaginative writer, and only someone who had never been to Zimbabwe would probably have dared to go there.

I had breakfast with Mr. Mugabe myself once, in the late 1980s. He was then, with Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, one of Africa's leading intellectuals to hold power in the post-colonial period. He was courteous and as clever as his academic record of degrees gained in prison suggested. His conversation was about world economic trends and new books, though inevitably mostly about the hidden war that apartheid South Africa was then waging against Angola, Mozambique and other frontline states.

I had often been to Angola, the war's centre, where American funding, logistics and propaganda were critical to South African military offensives. Mr. Mugabe wanted to hear the story from the ground.

The President was on one of his unproductive visits to Margaret Thatcher's Britain to ask for support against the death and devastation from South Africa.

It was not easy for him to ask anything of Britain, so raw was the old wound of the colonialism that had shaped his life. But economic and political destabilisation were crippling the country and its neighbours, and political assassinations of African National Congress members were terrorising the region.

Mr. Mugabe's Zimbabwe took the considerable risk of hosting a conference of South African children tortured by the apartheid regime, and exiled ANC leaders came to Harare to meet lawyers, churchmen and township activists from South Africa. And it was in Harare that Castro declared he would keep Cuban soldiers in Angola until the end of apartheid. These things fired the courage of the South African resistance and explain why today's Mr. Mugabe is still a hero in South Africa despite economic collapse, crude repression and the flight of thousands of Zimbabweans to South Africa.

Grace's Breakfast with Mugabe, like the article, has Mr. Mugabe haunted by the spirit of the charismatic Josiah Tongogara, the military leader of the Zanla guerrilla army in Zimbabwe's struggle. CIA briefings said that Tongogara was killed by his own side because he was a rival to Mr. Mugabe. The memoirs of the former Prime Minister, Ian Smith, told the same tale. To choose to believe the Western version was a political choice in the Cold War climate of 25 years ago. As a device in the play, it allows the bullying white psychiatrist to pronounce that guilt over the death of Tongogara and the idealism he represented are at the root of Mr. Mugabe's anxiety attacks. —

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

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