Things Fall Apart

Chinja Maitiro! ("Change the way you are doing things!") is the battle cry of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), the Zimbabwean opposition party led by Morgan Tsvangirai. The case of the recent presidential elections in Zimbabwe--which Tsvangirai was at press time still contesting--leaves no doubt that its slogan is apt.

Hopes were cautiously high until the end. In 2000, the MDC had two important victories: defeating incumbent Robert Mugabe's proposed changes to the Constitution in February and making significant gains in June's parliamentary elections. But this time, democracy didn't prevail. The run-up to the presidential election was marred by extensive violence (including the murders of at least thirty opposition supporters), threats of a coup by the armed forces if Mugabe were to lose and intimidation of the press and civic organizations. In the end, official results--which many nations, including the United States, have refused to recognize--showed 1.69 million votes for Mugabe, 1.26 million for Tsvangirai. Official results also showed Mugabe carrying areas of heavy opposition support by suspicious margins--recalling our own "Jews for Buchanan" phenomenon--and in some districts, more final votes than had been recorded as cast in the balloting process.

This is appalling stuff, but Martin Meredith's Our Votes, Our Guns: Robert Mugabe and the Tragedy of Zimbabwe makes it clear that stealing this election is but the most recent of Mugabe's sins. Not quite a biography, not quite a history of the young nation of Zimbabwe, Our Votes, Our Guns is best described as a catalogue of outrages. (The title refers to a remark by Mugabe in 1976, to the effect that the people's votes must always be safeguarded by their guns.) The book begins on a hopeful note, with the young Mugabe as a brilliant and disciplined leader in the revolutionary struggle against an Ian Smith determined to preserve the country, then Rhodesia, as the last bastion of white rule in Africa.

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