Heidi Holland’s presentation at the Difficult Dialogues panel discussion at the University of Cape Town, 1 July 2008 …
Read the other panelists’ presentations: Emeritus Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Dr. Wilmot James, Dr Mamphela Ramphele
TOWARDS A DIALOGUE BASED ON PSYCHO-DIPLOMACY:
INSIDE THE MIND OF MUGABE
by Heidi Holland
We have been told for years now that only Africa can solve the Zimbabwe crisis. Despite the continent’s manifest failure to bring democratic change to our embattled neighbour, there is still a widespread assumption that nobody else can resolve Zimbabwe’s tragic problems. But is this true?
What if we finally realise that – as desirable as it is in an ideal world for Africa to solve its own problems, and as sensitive as the continent is to the dictates and intervention of foreign powers – Africa cannot resolve Zimbabwe’s leadership deadlock or the country’s failed democratic process for the simple reason that Robert Mugabe does not listen to Africa?
It is an open secret that the Southern African Development Community’s mediator has his own agenda in Zimbabwe. Leaving aside Thabo Mbeki’s motives and mindset, however, the sort of settlement the SADC is likely to broker is not going to kick-start Zimbabwe’s economy – never mind the fact that such a deal will almost certainly leave Zanu-PF, a vile organisation, in charge…with all that that implies. What is desperately needed in Zimbabwe is massive funding such as has been promised by the international community if and when a credible government is put in place.
Assuming it becomes clear that Zimbabweans are going to continue to die in ongoing state sponsored violence as well as mass starvation unless someone other than an African leader stops Mugabe, then, I suggest, the international community might be obliged to rethink its hitherto punitive diplomacy, based on the largely futile sanctions that have done little more than fuel Mugabe’s propaganda machine.
As a precursor to changing tack with Mugabe and talking to him rather than further isolating and humiliating him when his anger clearly knows no bounds, we might want to figure out just who this reckless man called Robert Mugabe is – in order to work out how to deal with him.
As some of you may know, I worked professionally with three psychologists to try to fathom how the external events in Mugabe’s life impacted on him internally, and this is what we discovered.
The reviled Zimbabwe dictator’s character weaknesses date back to his troubled childhood. 10-year-old Robert became isolated and prone to fantasy after his father abandoned the family following the sudden death of the favoured older son, Michael. Mugabe’s adored, pious mother became depressed and dependant on shy, sensitive Robert, who buried himself in his books while his siblings and classmates teased him as a mummy’s boy and a coward who would not play and fight with the other boys.
Mugabe’s father substitute in the remote Catholic mission where he grew up was the headmaster, Father O’Hea, who spent a lot of time with Robert and predicted that the clever, diligent boy would become a leader one day – a prophesy his mother believed came from God. Thereafter, he was treated at home as a holy child who was expected to rise above everyone else.
That was the start of Mugabe’s grandiosity, one of his defining characteristics. In addition, because of the difficulties in his family life, especially his mother’s inability to cope with her situation, he lacked the capacity to build inner strength – which was to have disastrous consequences for his country later on.
Thirdly, his closeness to the European priest FatherO’Hea in an imperialist institution, the Catholic Church, marked the beginning of a confused identity which resulted in the superior but emotionally stunted man who is today at war with his own African people. When I interviewed Mugabe a few months ago, he described how he grew up in a Christian village, separated from ordinary Africans. He told me, “My granny was a heathen”, whom he could only visit with the permission of the white priests.
With a rare degree from the University of Fort Hare in South Africa, Mugabe became a school teacher in Ghana with a salary to boot – unusual credentials among ill-educated and largely unemployed Rhodesian nationalists. Wearing a suit and speaking eloquent English, he cut an exceptional figure. But he was still a modest man who enjoyed debate in those days. He married Sally, his intellectual equal and an aspiring politician herself. She idealised him and his role in Rhodesia’s liberation struggle. But she shared his grandiosity. She made him feel less alone and brought out the loving side of Robert, putting him in touch with his long-buried emotions. She was one of the few people who could challenge his ideas without offending him once he became president, but she also fed into the sense of omnipotence his mother continued to fuel.
Although intent on becoming a school teacher, Mugabe was persuaded to return to Rhodesia and join what was soon to become a ruthless political movement with a violent tendency. He became revered among ordinary people not only because he dressed and spoke English so well, but because he went to prison for 11 years in defence of his beliefs. There, he buried his emotions in study once more, acquiring six more degrees and becoming known among the other detainees as their headmaster, who helped his fellow prisoners to further their sparse educations.
His only child, whom he barely knew, died suddenly but he was not allowed out of prison to attend the burial in Ghana. His mentor Leopold Takawira also died while they were in prison together. Mugabe buried his pain in books. He came out of prison and went to war, taking with him not a gun or a hand grenade but a pile of books which he was scornfully told by the politicians arranging his escape from Rhodesia to leave behind as he would not need them on the battlefield. Once in Mozambique, he was held under house arrest in the wake of the assassination of Zanu’s leader in exile, Herbert Chitepo.
The stakes were rising. People were being tortured and killed within their own ranks, let alone in the guerrilla war against white oppression. Emotionally fragile since childhood, cut off from his feelings during the years in prison as well as in the harsh conditions prevailing in Mozambique, Mugabe was ill-equipped to emerge as a balanced, caring person. But he became Zanu’s leader over the next five years in circumstances yet to be fully explained.
Enormously popular for his first 10 years as premier of Zimbabwe, Mugabe continued to rule in the colonial paradigm, adopting much of Ian Smith’s repressive legislation. He succumbed early on to paranoia – albeit in response to dissident activity deliberately fuelled by apartheid South Africa – when he committed the atrocities known as Gukurahundi which have haunted him ever since. But he simultaneously went to great lengths to reassure former white Rhodesians in the hope of retaining their skills and economic power. When they foolishly voted against him and in favour of his old adversary Ian Smith in 1985, Mugabe was deeply hurt – and furious. He embarked on what was to become his typical response to humiliation and rejection: revenge.
He did not have the good sense to quit while he was ahead so, inevitably, he had to confront the mounting consequences of his declining popularity. Having to strategise increasingly cunningly to stay in office, his ever-narrowing world was eventually constructed around his delusions of omnipotence. But with a loyal army and an increasingly brutalised police force at his disposal, he continued to do as he pleased.
It was a letter written to him by British minister Clare Short in 1997 that forced the unrealistic Mugabe to confront a shocking fact: that he was not, after all, omnipotent. He lashed out at Britain for its refusal to provide further funding for land redistribution in its former colony, and at the ingratitude of former white Rhodesians. Then he set about silencing the country’s independent media and its judiciary, as well as defeating by mainly foul means the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) – which was backed by both the British and by former white Rhodesians – all the while withdrawing into a world in which he was always right and could not be wrong.
So much of Mugabe’s life was emotionally unacknowledged by him – the 11 years spent in prison, the dead child, his fear in the double-dealing, two-faced world of Zimbabwean politics. Had he acknowledged his pain and loss, he would have railed against his opponents and cheated at the polls but the monster Mugabe might never have emerged. Instead, his boyhood pattern of burying and denying continued so that his experiences of trauma, hurt, humiliation and betrayal accumulated like a festering sore. The tyrant who emerged in 2000 was attempting to silence the pain.
Mugabe was unrealistic in believing that Smith and the whites would work with him and he became unreasonably disillusioned when they didn’t measure up to his expectations. He had an inaccurate view of how people behave because, with no friends life-long, a cold nun of a mother and an absent father, he had little experience of human relationships of any kind. The one person who relieved the isolation of his youth and whom he trusted completely, his first wife Sally, died prematurely in 1992 at a time when his problems in office were beginning to pile up. Having earlier in his life created his own internal realm where everything was idealised – as deprived children tend to do – he went on to believe as a freedom fighter and then as the leader of an African nation that he could achieve absolutely anything, which he still believes. At no stage has Mugabe recognised any limitations.
Throughout his life, he lacked the emotional development to overcome his own disappointments and his rejection by others. Deeply hurt by the racial rejection of the whites and what he saw as the betrayal of the British, Mugabe’s response was revenge. Later on, he was intensely disillusioned when urban Zimbabweans turned against him in favour of the MDC. The combination of evidence of his failure in the squalor of their informal settlements on the streets of Harare, and their demonstrated rejection of his leadership at the polls, led to Murambatsvina – Mugabe’s cruel campaign to sweep his opponents from the streets and out of sight.
The key to understanding Mugabe is his urge for revenge, invariably triggered by his experiences of disillusionment, rejection and humiliation. An examination of all his most damaging excesses reveals this destructive pattern. What you don’t see in the film footage of “Mad Bob” Mugabe is the traumatised psyche held together by an elegant veneer and an omnipotent view of himself. He is, to put it bluntly, emotionally incapable of accepting defeat.
Mugabe now knows that his people do not want him anymore. He was forced to confront that fact in March this year when the so called “harmonised” election results left no other conclusion. In my view, the protracted five-week period of apparent vote counting, when the world’s media speculated that Mugabe was trying to rig the result, was nothing of the sort. Mugabe was playing for time. The clever strategist was using that five-week period to organise himself militarily in the rural areas pending not only the violent intimidation he would unleash in order to win the run-off, but revenge against his own people.
I think this is why so many analysts assumed and are still claiming that Mugabe’s generals are now running the country. His generals are indeed more involved on a day-to-day basis – yes – but that’s because Mugabe has gone back to war in the rural areas. He has said as much himself. It is a remarkably similar form of warfare to that waged by Zanu’s army against white oppression during the Seventies. Look at the type of atrocities and torture… We’ve seen it all before…
I hope I’m wrong, but I fear that what is going on in the rural areas of Zimbabwe may yet turn into a replay of Gukurahundi, the massacre in which Mugabe used brutalised North Korean soldiers to kill between 8 000 and 20 000 Ndebele people. They were Mugabe’s opposition when he first came to power…
During the coming weeks, the international community should watch Zimbabwe’s rural areas very carefully to see if state-sponsored violence is continuing there – bearing in mind that Mugabe’s tactics in the run-up to the run-off included preventing the police from reporting acts of violence, as well as banishing NGOs from the countryside. Should the violence continue, urgent dialogue at all sorts of levels needs to shift the primary responsibility for Zimbabwe from Africa to the international community.
In my view – and I have been saying this ever since I met Robert Mugabe and spent two-and-a-half hours talking to him at State House in Harare six months ago – it is the British who need to talk to Mugabe – not the United Nations or the United States, but Britain. Why? Because Mugabe has made it clear over and over again that he does not have a quarrel with the UN or the US: he has a quarrel with the British. He is quite adamant about this – and indeed, utterly obsessed with Britain.
People will argue that what Mugabe wants is irrelevant. They will find the suggestion that the West should talk to him offensive, and I can well see why. Mugabe is a monster, guilty as charged. I am not an apologist for him – on the contrary. But we need to be pragmatic to deal with him. Mugabe will stop at nothing. He is an incredibly dangerous man, never more so than now that he knows irrefutably that his people have turned against him.
I think those of us who fear the worst in Zimbabwe should appeal to the British to face up to their post-colonial history as it is bizzarely embodied in Robert Mugabe. This man spent much of his life under British rule, trying to be a British gentleman. Underneath Mugabe’s public hatred of Britain is his love for Mother England. He nearly cried when he talked to me about the British Royal Family, for example.
If the British, in the interests of suffering Zimbabweans, could see their way clear to approaching Mugabe as a man they once respected – and I know that’s a big ask – I believe they might be able to influence him and perhaps prod him towards a creative interim settlement – not because he remotely deserves to be treated with such respect but because anybody who has any chance of stopping the madness in Zimbabwe must try by all means to do so before more, and possibly many more, Zimbabweans die.
The purpose of such British psycho-diplomacy, hopefully leading to dialogue, would be to find out what is possible by way of a negotiated transitional settlement involving Mugabe and specifically seeking his co-operation. Possible models off the top of my head might include an all-party conference leading to a best-person interim government, both of which Mugabe might favour since they revisit his glory days and an earlier time in his life when he was a much-loved liberation hero and a magnanimous premier.
The rationale for this unusual and some might say morally offensive approach is that Robert Mugabe, like so many of us in southern Africa, has a thoroughly wounded psyche which is part of our collective legacy – and, for that matter, part of Britain’s colonial legacy, too.
July 3, 2008
Zimbabwe