Lionel Cliffe and the generation(s) of Zimbabwean politics

ABSTRACT

Lionel Cliffe’s idea of ‘generations’ was a way of understanding the structure/agency divide and internecine struggles among Zimbabwe’s nascent ruling classes during its liberation struggle. Here, its utility as an analytical tool on factional conflict is assessed. Cliffe’s own involvement in the Zimbabwe African National Union’s history is also examined as a lens on its generational and ideological contradictions. Further, archival evidence of the British state’s observations of Mugabe illustrates how he fused the contradictions of age cohorts, points of entry into the struggle, political philosophy and international dimensions, and suggests, too, the difficulties of outsiders’ understanding of complex struggles.

[Lionel Cliffe et le(s) génération(s) de la politique Zimbabwéenne.] L’idée de Lionel Cliffe des « générations » était une manière de comprendre le fossé de la structure/l’action et les luttes internes parmi les classes dirigeantes au Zimbabwe naissant pendant la lutte pour sa libération. Ici, son utilité comme outil analytique sur le conflit entre factions est évalué. L’implication propre de Cliffe dans l’histoire de la Zimbabwe African National Union est aussi examiné à travers ses contradictions générationnelles et idéologiques. Des preuves provenant des archives des observations de l’État britannique sur Mugabe montrent comment il a fait fondre les contradictions des cohortes d’âge, les points d’entrée vers la lutte, la philosophie politique et les dimensions internationales, et suggèrent, aussi, les difficultés de la compréhension par les outsiders de luttes complexes.

KEYWORDS:

• Zimbabwe
• Zimbabwean liberation war
• political generations
• African decolonisation
• Robert Mugabe

MOTS-CLÉS:

• Zimbabwe
• guerre de libération au Zimbabwe
• générations politiques
• décolonisation africaine
• Robert Mugabe

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to the organisers of the conference in memory of Lionel, at which a preliminary version of this paper was offered; ditto to the editors and reviewers of this Festschrift.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Note on contributor

David Moore is Professor of Development Studies at the University of Johannesburg, and can be contacted at [email protected].

Notes

1. The first part of this essay relies on Moore’s (1990) interpretation of Cliffe's paper, consulted in 1984 in the library – no longer in existence – of the Leeds University Centre for African Studies. Some ideas were discussed with Lionel in Leeds in March 1988 and Cape Town in May 2013, the latter during which he indicated he would try to track down that paper and more. Ranger’s (1985, 15) arguments with John Saul about Zimbabwe's victorious party's radicalism cite a paper Cliffe presented in March–April 1980 at a Political Studies Association of the United Kingdom conference at Exeter University (Cliffe 1980).

2. The last time this author observed Lionel Cliffe’s and John Saul's good-humoured sparring was at a conference on ‘progress in Zimbabwe’ in Bulawayo late in 2010. Debating contemporary Zimbabwe, the former called the latter a ‘moralist’. The riposte? ‘Pedantic’.

3. ‘Freedom fighter’ is taken deliberately from Dzino: memories of a freedom fighter (Mhanda 2011). Cliffe met and interviewed Mhanda in October 1976 (Cliffe 1977) at a conference in Geneva arranged by the British – helped greatly by American Secretary of State Henry Kissinger – to pursue majority rule in Zimbabwe. They met a few times subsequently. Wilfred Mhanda, aka Dzinashe ‘Dzino’ Machingura, the epitome of the clash of generations much of this paper discusses, died about seven months after Cliffe (Moore 2014a, 2015a).

4. Gukurahundi, or ‘the spring storms that wash away the chaff’, was ZANU-PF's military operation carried out from about 1982 to 1986 by the North Korean trained ‘5 Brigade’, killing from five to twenty thousand Ndebele people in response to fears of ‘Super-ZAPU’ dissidents, among others (Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace and Legal Resource Foundation 1997). By late 1982, when ZANU-PF's vicious actions against ZAPU were well known in the British state, an analyst in the foreign service wrote that if military aid were refused Mugabe, he

will turn elsewhere, possibly to the Soviet Union despite his reluctance to do so … he might feel obliged to follow the example of Angola and Mozambique and accept large-scale military help from the Soviet Union and Cuba … The US Government attach particular weight to this danger. The worst case scenario would be a virtual Soviet world monopoly of certain strategic minerals and Soviet domination of the key sea lanes round the Cape. (National Archives 1982)

5. In those days, ideas of the ‘overdeveloped postcolonial state’ moving to socialism were in the air (Saul 1974; cf Leys 1976; Williams 1976).

6. Frank Wisner Jr attended the Geneva Conference as a new member of the State Department's Africa mission. He thought Mugabe was ‘diffident, stand-offish, smart, intellectually acute and by far the most impressive of the four … [with] the coldest, clearest eyed approach’ (Interview, Washington, DC, November 2013, also in Moore 2015b).

7. A few months after writing this article, the author visited the archives of Peter Mackay at the University of Stirling, where it is evident that Mackay, aside from many other contributions to the liberation of Malawi and Zimbabwe, played a key role in releasing the March 11 Movement leaders from Zambia's jails.

8. Cliffe's influence on the students who started the Frantz Fanon Society undoubtedly contributed to the authorities' suspicions. Hamalengwa was a student leader at the time of the marches against Kaunda's policies regarding Angola. He was imprisoned at the same time as Lionel Cliffe and those accused of murdering Herbert Chitepo, sharing a cell with a member of this group (Hamalengwa 2014: Interview with David Moore, Toronto, November 25). Early 1976 cables from the American Embassy in Lusaka to the State Department (US State Department 1976a, b) discussed a January 15 1976 University of Zambia demonstration against Zambian foreign policy regarding Angola, and the February 7 strike protesting Cliffe’s detention relating to the first event. In February, the students claimed that Cliffe’s arrest inhibited ‘free discussion of political issues’ because other staff members refused to teach his classes, fearing arrest. The students also demanded the dismissal of two academics. Eyo Ndem, the dean of humanities and social sciences, was accused of reporting Cliffe and other foreign academics ‘of leftist persuasion’ to the state as subversives, and refusing to call a faculty meeting to discuss their arrest. Kasuka Mutukwa, a Zambian political scientist educated in the USA, was alleged to be working for the CIA and ‘forming axis’ with Ndem and other African lecturers against their white and Marxist-oriented colleagues.

9. Judith Acton, née Todd, daughter of the former Rhodesian Prime Minister Garfield Todd and well-known activist for democracy in Zimbabwe, as was her father, has said that she was asked to join the Zimbabwe Detainees Defence Committee and she did so because she opposed the use of torture, not out of a particular belief in the ZANU prisoners' innocence (Todd 2014).

10. This page of Lewen's note is on green paper, which means that the National Archives replaced the original by a copy with some words removed – perhaps the name of the person who showed Lewen the list of ZIPA's High Command. The blank spaces are underlined in this text.