Capital of the basket case of Africa.
Capital of the basket case of Africa. Sproetniek/gettyimages.com

Robert Mugabe basically pulled the plug on Zimbabwe’s fragile economy in 2000, when he destroyed the banking sector by destroying the agriculture sector to maintain power in a moment of desperation. As everyone should know, the deepest grievance for many black Africans in Zimbabwe has been the land issue. White Africans had all of the good land, and black Africans had the bad land (called “reservations”). Mugabe, who became president of Zimbabwe in 1980 (yes, 37 years ago) after a long war, failed, for a number reasons (the main of which were rampant corruption in his party ZANU PF, and the disastrous imposition of the IMF’s pro-market policies) to do anything about this deep issue until his back was against the wall.

When democracy threatened to remove him from power in 2000, he turned against the white farmers, seized their land, and permitted poor black Africans to settle on some of them. At the time, professor John Makumbe described the whole bad business to the Guardian as “an election gimmick which will result in environmental damage and will speed up our economic decline….” If you watch Saki Mafundikwa’s 2009 documentary Shungu, which screened at Northwest Film Forum not too long ago (Mafundikwa now lives and teaches in Seattle), you will see that the professor’s predictions were indeed correct.

Everything rapidly collapsed in Zimbabwe after the agricultural sector was demolished for political reasons. Those who could leave the country did. People like my parents, who were educated in the US in the 1970s, and returned to Zimbabwe in the 1980s with the hope of building a new and democratic nation, returned to the West for their old jobs. Young people walked to South Africa and soon found themselves represented as aliens in the movie District 9. Much-need foreign currency exited the country. Even I took advantage of the absence of capital controls (they were removed at the insistence of the IMF in the early 1990s—the real beginning of the end for Mugabe), sold my family’s property, pulled out every dime I could, and deposited the money in Western banks. (All business in Zimbabwe is now conducted in USD.) As Zimbabweans like to say, the breadbasket of Africa became the basket case of Africa.

Removing Mugabe will help? Maybe. I really do not know what the military has in mind. Certainly, removing Mugabe’s thick-as-two-planks wife Grace Mugabe from Zimbabwe’s political future is not a bad thing. (In fact, the coup was probably sparked by a miscalculation on Grace’s part—she wants to run the country after her husband’s death or while he is in a “special wheelchair.”) But even if the military does the country right—restores a democracy that really only lasted for seven years (1980 to 1987), gets rid of the other Mudede who, by manipulating the elections, helped keep Mugabe in power—it will take a generation to repair the economic and demographic damage Mugabe caused over the past 17 years. All I can say is: Good rak, Zimbabwe.

Charles Mudede—who writes about film, books, music, and his life in Rhodesia, Zimbabwe, the USA, and the UK for The Stranger—was born near a steel plant in Kwe Kwe, Zimbabwe. He has no memory...