Abstract


Horace G. Campbell

In September 2000, President Mugabe was feted at a ceremony in Harlem, NewYork as a great anti imperialist leader. The struggles over the land occupations, the violence of the political process and the support for the government of Laurent Kabila in the Democratic Republic of the Congo had been used as examples of the sterling service of Robert Mugabe as a freedom fighter. For many Africans outside of Zimbabwe, and for those who organized this meeting at the same time as a meeting for Fidel Castro in Harlem, there was no contradiction in the reality that the Zimbabwe government was involved in executive lawlessness and seriously undermining the livelihood of millions in the Southern Africa region.

The political leadership in Zimbabwe had come to power in 1980 after a violent period of armed struggle. The brazen racism of the regime of Ian Smith had made the society of Rhodesia internationally known. There had been high expectation that the political process in Zimbabwe after independence would make a break with the ideas, practices and forms of economic organization of the Rhodesian State. The integration into the old structures was most manifest in the integration of the armed forces, especially the air force.

Early in the period of the integration into the old structures, it became clear that the independence was conceived as a victory for African males. African women who walked the street as single persons were arrested as prostitutes. From this episode there were definite signs that the government internalized all of the ideas of militarism and masculinity of the colonial overlords. The flexible gender constructions of the pre-colonial relations were completely shattered by the internalization of the European ideation system by the male elites.

From the period of the 1980's the government unleashed the army against the peoples of the southwestern region, called Matebeland. It was not until the late 1990's that the scale of the killings became known. When the government deployed troops to fight in the Congo beside the Interahamwe (those who had committed genocide in Rwanda), the full implications of patriarchal anxiety, militarism and masculinity became evident in the society. The experience of poor Zimbabwean women under this brand of populist nationalism brought to the forefront the implications of the exhaustion of the patriarchal model of liberation. The conjunctural crisis for the society deepened when faced with the dead end of the Rhodesian form of subsidies for the agricultural sector. Under the thumb of the World Bank and the IMF, the government imposed a structural adjustment package that deepened the poverty of the majority. This economic crisis exploded the
myth of the male breadwinner. In the midst of this crisis of masculinity, the political leadership became internationally known for its opposition to persons of the same sex. The politics of retrogression compounded the politics of homophobia and the politics of repression.

African women and representatives of the poor who were not seduced by the populism of the ruling party have been at the forefront of defending their rights and deepening the struggles for democracy. The AIDS pandemic demonstrated that in the struggles for democracy, a far more rigorous conception of democracy was needed than the simple but necessary voting in elections. Questions of the patenting of seeds and plants in Zimbabwe brought forward the issues of biodemocracy to deepen the concepts of gender democracy as the antidote to militarism, repression and patriarchy. The conclusion seeks to draw lessons from the cultural artists and those spokespersons that are raising the issues of gender democracy and deepening the concepts of liberation and emancipation.

It was the late Bon Marley who in his song wailed, “Soon we will find out who are the real revolutionaries."