BLACK AFTERLIVES MATTER
Here in Britain, we’ve witnessed mobs wanting to tear down statues of long-forgotten colonial figures in repeated fits of iconoclasm (see FT398:32-39). In our former African colony of Zimbabwe, the opposite problem has emerged, with outrage being caused by plans to erect a memorial to one of the nation’s black anti-colonial heroes.
Following a successful armed independence struggle from the white-majority rule of PM Ian Smith’s quasi-apartheid government back in 1980, the name of Cecil Rhodes, the imperialist adventurer who’d grabbed the native soil in the first place, was literally wiped from the map as the former nation of ‘Rhodesia’ was renamed with the indigenous term ‘Zimbabwe’. So when in the summer of 2020 the governing ZANU-PF Party, the political heirs to the military rebels who’d fought off Smith’s soldiers in the 1970s, announced plans to erect a 3.5m bronze statue of their revolutionary precursor Mbuya Nehanda, the female spiritual leader of a Victorian-era mutiny against white rule, in the centre of the capital Harare – indeed, on the very same street where a now-exiled figure of Rhodes himself had once stood – they expected to encounter little but pious plaudits. How wrong they were.
As so often, liberators quickly turn tyrants, with ZANU-PF effectively rendering Zimbabwe a one-party state, first under long-term dictator and former resistance icon Robert ‘Comrade Bob’ Mugabe, and then, following a 2017 coup, under Mugabe’s one-time military ally, Emmerson ‘the Crocodile’ Mnangagwa, who continued ZANU-PF’s 40-year governmental record of violence, repression, murder, corruption, electoral fraud, witchcraft, famine and ruinous hyperinflation. As Mbuya Nehanda herself had been executed in 1898 after the failure of her insurgency, her hands had never been sullied by the corruptions of power – so the Crocodile claiming her as his own by raising her statue in 2020 appeared an excellent ploy to brush clean his own bloodstained teeth. ZANU-PF spokesman Patrick Chinamasa used the news as a handy prop to dismiss economic sanctions then being enacted
