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A Marxist's Rise in Southern Africa
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13452 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1987 |
2,978 Words |
| Author
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Christopher Gregory
Christopher Gregory is a lecturer in the Department of
International Relations, University of the Witwatersrand,
Johannesburg, and a frequent commentator on southern African
affairs. In early 1988 he visited Mozambique. |
Developments in Zimbabwe since its independence in 1980 suggest that this nation is poised to become the new leader of the Marxist-Leninist states of southern Africa. Embattled on their domestic fronts, both Angola and Mozambique defer increasingly to Zimbabwe. Of all the states in the region, Zimbabwe is the only one with anything like the political and economic strength to stand up to its overwhelmingly powerful neighbor, South Africa. That this is so is due in no small part to the domestic and foreign policies pursued by Robert Mugabe, prime minister of Zimbabwe, leader of the ruling party, Zimbabwe African National Union (Patriotic Front) (ZANU [PF]), and by his own admission a long-standing Marxist-Leninist.
Born at Kutama mission near the capital, Harare, in 1924, Robert Gabriel Mugabe received a Jesuit upbringing and education for the first twenty years of his life. It is arguable that his ascetic, almost monastic outlook on life was fostered here. While he was first introduced to Marxism at Fort Hare University in South Africa in the early 1950s, it was in the heady atmosphere of Nkrumah's newly independent Ghana that Mugbel was galvanized into action. "You could say it was there I accepted the general principles of Marxism," Mugabe was later to say. On his return to Rhodesia in 1960, Mugabe soon involved himself in black resistance politics. He was in on the birth of ZANU, being one of the small groups that in August 1963 split from Joshua Nkomo's Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU).
Notwithstanding his imprisonment by the Rhodesian authorities from December 1963 to December 1974, Mugabe, as secretary-general of ZANU, continued to play as active a role in the party as his confinement would permt. In 1970, following his rejection of Ndabaningi Sithole, hitherto ZANU's leader, Mugabe assumed that position. It was, however, only in September 1977, at the now historic Chimoio meeting of the party's Central Committee, that Mugabe formally became leader of the party, and of its military wing, ZANLA.
The Chimoio meeting marks a milestone in ZANU historiography for another reason: the acceptance of the ideology of "Marxism-Leninism - Mao Tse Tung thought." While members of the party elite had individually espoused Marxism-Leninism for a number of years previously, Chimoio was to signal ZANU's formal adoption of the doctrine. It was the adoption and utilization of Marxism-Leninism that was to set ZANU apart from its black nationalist rivals, and that would strongly influence the foreign and domestic policies implemented by the new Zimbabwean government after
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