By PAUL SALOPEK [American Scholar] – A musty anti-colonialist in Saville Row suits, Mugabe likes to wrap his cudgel in a veneer of bureaucratic normality. Lawyers defend torture victims in the courts, but judges are arrested when they rule against the government. A policeman berates Godwin for blocking traffic, then goes back to cracking women’s and children’s skulls with his stave. And two Anglican bishops—one legitimate, the other a pro-Mugabe usurper—duel, prissily, with their ceremonial crosiers inside a sedate Harare cathedral.
It’s government as cargo cult. Behind the cellophane-thin trappings of state lies the rot of infantilizing patronage—from luxury Mercedes Benzes for bigwigs to crisp $100 bills for loyal soldiers.
Godwin’s documentary approach sometimes overwhelms his storytelling; numbingly detailed casualty reports and a thicket of place names at times slow the narrative down. But his outrage mostly serves him well. He notes that as Mugabe dodders on, it is his coterie of murderous enforcers who have the most to lose. The ruling party hardliners who coordinated the latest crackdowns, like Air Marshal Perence Shiri (“The Butcher of Matabeleland”), are also guilty of carrying out Mugabe’s massacres against minority amaNdebele people in the 1980s. They rightly fear prosecution as war criminals.
Continued at American Scholar | More Chronicle & Notices.
