Zimbabwe Reeling

Thabo Mbeki, the South African president, likes to make the point that the world is obsessed with Zimbabwe because white farmers have been victims there. Mbeki's argument is that there are many other African countries where black people are oppressed that are not even a blip on the screen of CNN or the BBC. Mbeki is wrong, of course. The worst victims of Robert Mugabe's kleptocracy have been black folk, the poor people without British or South African passports whose only choice is to live, impossibly, with 165,000 percent inflation or to become illegal migrants in South Africa, and who have now been defrauded of the one thing that gave them dignity: their democratic rights.

Mbeki is wrong, too, about why Zimbabwe attracts the world's attention. Certainly, dispossessed white farmers play well, particularly in the right-wing British media. But global interest spotlights Zimbabwe for reasons not dissimilar to those that drew thousands to the antiapartheid movement in the 1980s: it has become the symbol of a larger struggle, this time between an old African way of doing things and a new one.

Mbeki himself called for an "African Renaissance" early in his tenure. Well, one was happening just across the border, where a vibrant new coalition of civil society, working across old ethnic boundaries, coalesced in 1999 into an opposition that formed the first real challenge to Mugabe's effective one-party state and heralded something of a post-neocolonial era in Africa. It had happened already in other countries--specifically, Kenya and Zambia--but there was a spirit to the Zimbabwean opposition that seemed particularly rejuvenating.

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