Barbarians at the gates in Zimbabwe

If Hitler Hunzvi’s land invaders merely ‘resorted to civil disobedience’ as described by US politician Andrew Young Cecil Rhodes’ pioneer column and Mizilikazi’s impis were tourists yearning for the wide open spaces, writes MICHAEL HARTNACK in Harare.

President Robert Mugabe’s claim on Friday, at the state funeral of Chenjerai “Hitler” Hunzvi, that over the past 16 months “the mere law of trespass has been broken” by Hunzvi’s self-styled war veterans, has led to inevitable quips about “forgiving us our trespasses as them that trespass against us”.

If what Hunzvi’s militants were doing was just wandering on to somebody’s property without permission, then Mizilikazi’s impis and Cecil Rhodes’ pioneer column were tourists yearning to experience the wide open spaces.

The massive disruption of farm production, the storming of factories and offices, the 8000 crimes of violence catalogued by the Amani Trust, including 40 murders, have seemed to those on the receiving end like the triumph of barbarism -- licensed criminality on a country-wide scale.

Mugabe asserted that he, like Harold Wilson refusing to overthrow Ian Smith, cannot send his forces to shed the blood of his “kith and kin” by removing Hunzvi’s militants from white-owned farms. This sounds like a puerile show of schoolmasterish sneering when set against the deaths that followed Mugabe’s speedy dispatch of tanks to suppress township food riots.

Mugabe said Hunzvi “deserves the halo of a national hero” but Learnmore Jongwe, spokesman for the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, said the Polish-trained doctor was being “rewarded for extortion, murder, theft, violence and torture”.

Hunzvi’s suburban surgery was used for horrific interrogations of suspected opposition supporters. He was accused of filching up to Z$20-million from former guerillas’ investments. His response to every challenge was violence.

Hunzvi’s Polish former wife, in her book The White Slave described him as a “promiscuously unfaithful, vain and brutal sadist”. She only discovered after she married him that he had another wife back in Zimbabwe’s communal areas, and he subsequently took a third.

Hunzvi described himself as one of history’s great “revolutionaries” and gave Napoleon, Che Guevara and his chosen namesake -- Adolph Hitler -- as examples of those he believed would stand beside him in that hall of fame.

When I visited the tomb of the French emperor in Paris, an official guide claimed Napoleon’s great achievements were to crush disorder and conciliate the Pope. Marxists say he betrayed and negated the 1789 French Revolution.

So was he a “revolutionary”? If not, what was he? On the other hand, the German officers and liberals who tried to assassinate Hitler in July 1944 were denounced by the nazi media as “reactionaries”. The nazis continually sneered at Mussolini’s Italian Fascists for not being, as the Hitlerites claimed themselves to be, “revolutionaries”, bringing in a new age.

Amid deceptive and deceitful terminology, South Africans worried whether your country is going to follow Zimbabwe would be wise not to let themselves be confused by it, but to watch carefully for the first signs of the onset of malaise which must always, unambiguously, be called “barbarism”.

Barbarians do not arise and seize power overnight. Moreover, there is a world of difference between a “barbarian” and a so-called “primitive” person.

“Primitive” peoples have highly fatalistic value-systems -- they believe they are at the mercy of environmental forces largely beyond their control.

But they do not believe, as barbarians do, that other people are there to provide a buffer between themselves and the environment, and owe them a living.

A so-called “primitive” person usually has a highly complex code of conduct, sanctioned by the elders and his ancestral spirits, which is religiously observed whatever environmental hardships come his way.

Today’s barbarians are, by contrast, often highly technically educated men.

In his monumental 12-volume Study of History -- a sadly forgotten work -- Professor Arnold Toynbee said the triumph of barbarians follows a definite pattern of a three-way split in a society which has lost spiritual cohesion.

The arrival here last week of former United States ambassador to the UN Andrew Young, and his pronouncements in the midst of the obsequies for Hunzvi, only served to underline how these conditions came about in Zimbabwe.

Only when the barbarian has broken in and proved his utter incompetence in the business of creating and running civilised institutions, when he has plunged society into a dark age, do the bulk of the population cast this delusion aside, rouse themselves and create a new, unifying social ethic.

Hunzvi and his like could never have come to exercise the influence they did without both the Rhodesian Front’s reckless disregard for African opinion, and the sort of sentimentalist inanities we heard Young trotting out here last week.

After a meeting with Mugabe, Young declared that what Hunzvi’s militants had done was “not lawlessness -- they resorted to civil disobedience”.

If sectors of the economy such as tourism were down, this was “because of the propaganda against Zimbabwe”, said Young.

It is worth contrasting the efforts of Edgar Whitehead’s liberal United Federal Party government in 1961 to talk politely to the innately hostile UN Committee on Decolonisation -- it even expressed thanks for being given a hearing. There was an attempt to observe not just the law but the decencies of conduct, to ride roughshod over no one.

When Garfield Todd and the African nationalist leaders called in 1960 for British troops to be sent to remove Whitehead by force, Whitehead had not put himself in the wrong in constitutional law, and it was Todd who was hopelessly wrong-footed. With barbarians, said Toynbee, law, tradition, custom, go by the board.

The force formerly exercised in the community by the elders or the kindred is of little account.

Power is exercised by the one who commands allegiance over a group of influential strongmen through sheer personal prestige in the business of violence.

Power changes hands when what Toynbee calls this “gang of armed desperadoes” fragments, or someone manages to form a more formidable gang. Watch warily for any signs of this form of constitution, whether those trying to bring it in are black or white, choose to call themselves “right” or “left”, reformers or conservatives, progressives or fundamentalists.

The best way to prevent it is to search constantly for a unified social vision, to keep society’s focus of imitative behaviour on the quiet decencies, and to resist at every step not only departures from the rule of law but attempts to ride roughshod over anybody.

If we had always done that there would have been no scope for the likes of Andrew Young or Hitler Hunzvi.