concernedafricascholars.org » Zimbabwe Ten Years On: Results and Prospects - 0 views
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Western governments and associated think-tanks began to test publicly the idea of intervening militarily in a small peripheral country and ex-colony, this time under the pretext of the “right to protect” Zimbabweans from a crazed tyrant.
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Mamdani’s article set out from a simple premise: that Zimbabwe’s deeply unequal and racialized agrarian relations were historically unjust and unsustainable. Restating this premise was significant, because during the course of the crisis the foundation of the debate kept shifting to other issues, such as good governance, productivity, or even historiography. Mamdani went on to argue that the radical land reform of recent years has had various casualties, including the rule of law, farmworkers, urban land occupiers, and agricultural production. But even so, he argued, the land reform has been historically progressive and is likely to be remembered as the culmination of the anti-colonial struggle in Zimbabwe.
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Even scholars on the Left, such as Patrick Bond and Horace Campbell, joined in to dismiss the threat of external intervention as mere Mugabe rhetoric and to dispute really existing imperialism in the country. Despite their evident ideological heterogeneity, they converged instantly around a shared focus on personalities rather than the issues and resorted also to underhanded methods of argumentation (as noted by David Johnson).
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