M J Matshazi: Zimbabwe: With Robert Mugabe to the brink of the abyss

(University of Fort Hare Press, 2007)

Reviewed by Dr Dan Wylie (Rhodes)

How deeply ironic that from Robert Mugabe’s own alma mater – Fort Hare University – emerges a crisply written and scathing denouncement of Mugabe’s rule. M J Matshazi was once at the University of Zimbabwe, subsequently at one of Zimbabwe’s many outlying institutions, the Bindura University of Science Education, and at one time was at least amicable with the present government (if you Google him – as one must these days – you will find a photograph of him in the laughing company of a ZANU minister). Professor Matshazi has a distinguished career in research, particularly in the area of distance learning, and it’s part of the general tragedy that Zimbabwe appears to have lost him.

With this book, Matshazi embarks on a tightly written political history of the 20 years of Mugabe’s deteriorating reign in Zimbabwe. There has been a veritable flood of literature of all kinds during the latest ‘land grab’, but relatively little of it from native Zimbabweans of Matshazi’s pedigree (which is to say, other than by displaced white people, who can always be conveniently accused of some form of disgruntled racism). But as Matshazi shows incontrovertibly, Muagbe’s main war has been against ‘dissenting’ black inhabitants of Zimbabwe.

Amongst those are the Ndebele, the Nguni-speaking people of the Bulawayo-centred region who, Matshazi demonstrated, have consistently been marginalised, demeaned and even, in the Gukurahundi period, slaughtered in great numbers. Amongst the innocent victims was one of Matshazi’s own close cousins.

Generally, Matshazi maintains a level tone, laying out the documentary evidence for Mugabe’s abuses – at just a couple of points, however, the anger which has really generated this book overflows, and the language borders on the vitriolic.

Then the calm historian’s tone is reasserted, supported by a number of crucial documents reproduced as appendices.

Though I found little to disagree with in essence, I did find Matshazi’s range of sources somewhat limited, though at times enlightening. His account of Gukurahundi, for example, is filtered almost exclusively through the Catholic Commission of Justice and Peace’s 1987 report Breaking the Silence, which is not widely read; even less widely read is Mugabe’s own ‘Progress Review on the 1979 Grand Plan’, labelled almost self-parodically, ‘For Restricted Circulation, For the Eyes of the Shona Elite Only! Please Pass to Most Trusted Persons’. This, if accurately quoted, must be one of the most damaging of documents to emerge from within ZANU-PF – though it’s only marginally more vituperative than Mugabe and his henchmen’s public pronouncements. Matshazi draws too heavily for my historian’s eye on Martin Meredith’s secondary account, and far too heavily and uncritically on Ian Smith’s horribly self-serving and historically distorted autobiography.

But the general thrust of the book is vigorous and revealing: you could do a lot worse than read its fairly short and incisive account as a primer on modern Zimbabwe and its manic ruler. The way in which the very letters of ‘Abyss’ on the cover topple over into the photograph of Mugabe pretty much sums it up.