Writings

Book Review – The Graceless Fall of Robert Mugabe.

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Published by Penguin

On the evening of 14th November, 2017, a phalanx of tanks rumbled into Harare, Zimbabwe and sealed off Munuhumatapa Building and the Parliament of Zimbabwe. Although the instigators would do there best not to portray it as such, a military coup was under way that would spell end of President Robert Mugabe’s long and ruinous grip on the country.

His sudden demise caught most of the world by surprise, especially as Mugabe had previously proved so adept at dealing with any challenges to his authority.

For any biographer there is plenty of meat here but Geoffrey Nyarota, a veteran of journalism in Zimbabwe, is exceptional in not only bringing his vast experience and insider knowledge but also an elegant style and a gift for narrative. Much of his story, especially the early parts, is inevitably familiar territory, but necessary to the completeness of the story.

Nyarota describes Mugabe’s upbringing in Kutama, his academic and political education, his rapid rise through the ranks which culminated in him becoming the first Prime Minister of an independent Zimbabwe. Initially, Mugabe preached a message of reconciliation but the hope his election engendered would gradually give way to disillusion as he turned from a Hero of the Struggle in to a vindictive bully with a taste for tyranny.

One of the defining moments in this transformation came with his marriage to the much younger Grace Marufu, his former typist. From here on it becomes the stuff of opera. Although Nyarota strives hard to be fair and even-handed, the picture that emerges is of a vain old man and a scheming diva whose political and social ambition, once ignited, burned furiously. In her quest for power the First Lady became every bit as ruthless as her husband, plotting against her rivals while grabbing vast tracts of land and amassing great wealth for herself and her children.

Emboldened by her success in helping to get rid of one of Mugabe’s two Vice Presidents, Joice Mujuru, Grace next set her sights on ousting Emmerson Mnangawa, her remaining rival for the presidency. It would prove to be a bridge too far and lead to her undoing.

Not for nothing was Mnangawa nick-named “The Crocodile”. It what effectively amounted to a Night of the Long Knives, the military, worried that their own interests were being threatened, moved in, on his behalf, and seized control of the country.

Nyarota’s account of how this all happened is first rate. In describing the machinations that went on behind the scenes and inside ZANU-PF itself, he shows a party riven with intrigue and internal conflict, much of it engineered and exploited by the former President himself. Despite having trashed the economy, undermined the rule of law and inflicted enormous damage and hardship on the country and its long-suffering populace, though, Mugabe’s self-belief remained undented to the end.

Now his successor is faced with the difficulty of how to undo the consequences of all these years years of violence, misrule and policy blunders. How committed he is to achieving this is, of course, another question…

REVIEWER’S NOTE – This review was written several months ago – before the current troubles in Zimababwe

Book Review: wtf-Capturing Zuma- A Cartoonist’s Tale

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I think most editorial cartoonists will readily admit that they often find it difficult to send up politicians when they are making a so much better job of it themselves. This is, however, a problem that does not appear to faze South Africa’s best known caricaturist, Jonathan Shapiro (aka Zapiro), whose razor-sharp wit is on clear display in WTF: Capturing Zuma – A Cartoonist’s Tale, a book which demonstrates both his unerring eye for political failing and his powers of invention.

As its title implies, the anthology provides a front row seat in to the fractious – if at times almost symbiotic – relationship that developed between the artist and his ever dodging target, our erstwhile former Number One. The years of Zuma’s presidency certainly proved to be fertile ground for Zapiro which is perhaps hardly surprising, since, leaving aside the question of his private morality, it is difficult to argue that his effect on the country and its economy was anything other than disastrous.

From the outset Zapiro had the measure of his man. Five years before Zuma took over the ANC leadership he was already portraying him as damaged goods.

He also realised that for such a compromised and controversial figure he needed a far more hard-hitting, confrontational style of drawing than he had employed with, for example, Nelson Mandela. Refusing to recognise the limits imposed by decorum or good taste Zapiro hammered away at him again and again.

His Rape of Justice cartoon, in particular, provoked a storm of outrage and moral indignation especially within the ranks of the ruling ANC. Undeterred, Zapiro continued to rip apart his prey.

In the end his systematic and relentless caricature of Zuma probably did as much to destroy the President’s credibility than any number of columns, editorials or speeches from the opposition benches.

What Zapiro’s constant undermining of the president also proved is that cartoons still matter – a lot. They certainly mattered to Jacob Zuma who, in a misplaced attempt to silence him, served Zapiro with two lawsuits, totalling R22million, claiming the cartoons invaded his dignity.

Which begged the obvious retort – one that the artist himself was quick to seize on and make the subject of yet another witty, put-down, cartoon – what dignity? Needless to say, the matter never got to court.

Zapiro’s drawings have always tended to dominate the pages on which they appear. Wielding his pen like a scalpel, he manages to be both extremely funny and serious at the same time. As with all good satire, his cartoons are designed to entertain as well as to convince. Behind the often mordant humour one senses the fire of honest indignation that fuels all real political art.

Over the years he has carefully recrafted and subtly changed his depiction of Zuma. In doing so, he has, admittedly, been helped by the man himself, whose physiognomy, facial features and nervous tics and mannerisms have often unwittingly and unerringly betrayed his real character (his habit of shoving his glasses up his nose with his finger, his giveaway: “Heh, heh, heh”).

Probably Zapiro’s most inspired moment came when he decided to place a showerhead on Zuma’s oddly-shaped cranium after the then Deputy-President famously stated that he had taken a shower, following sex, because he believed it would reduce his chances of getting HIV (Zapiro admits he got the idea from the brilliant English cartoonist, Steve Bell, who delighted in drawing Prime Minister John Major all the time with his underpants outside his trousers).

The image was picked up and imitated by many. Even Julius Malema adopted it as a visual gesture of constant mockery.

In that sense, his showerhead became the defining symbol of the Zuma era (or “error” as Zapiro so aptly puts it). Like an ever dripping crown of shame, it perfectly captured the rotten-ness and moral bankruptcy of his chaotic, corrupt and scandal-ridden administration.                                                                                                     

‘Death of Truth’ – Book Review

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Published by William Collins Books

We live in an age of deliberate misinformation and disinformation in which it has become increasingly difficult to tell where the truth lies or, indeed, if there is such a thing as objective truth.

The new technology has only added to the problem. The world wide web, which was originally envisioned as a benign universal information system, has turned in to something of a Frankenstein monster. It has been used, most notoriously by the Russians, to spread propaganda and falsehoods and erode voters faith in the democratic system. Rather than bring people together the use of social media has amplified polarization.

In this relatively short, sharp and utterly persuasive book, Michiko Kakutani – a Pulitzer prize-winning literary critic and former chief book critic of the New York Times – shows how the concept of truth has been corrupted to such an extent that it threatens the very pillars on which democracy has been built.

Drawing on the writings of the great critics of authoritarianism, such as George Orwell and Hannah Arendt, she shows a world in which the wisdom of crowds has usurped research and expertise and where people have been dumbed down and suckered in to accepting the most banal and irrational of beliefs.

Nowhere is the decline of reason better exemplified than in the rise of Donald Trump, a man who has proved an expert at sowing dissent and appealing to peoples base prejudices, rather than their intellects, with his simplistic, and mostly unachievable, utopian promises. Kakutani is clearly no admirer of the President. Self-serving, shallow, boastful, unreflective, sublimely ignorant of the outside world and unwilling to learn, she sees him as a man with few, if any, principles. The irony, as she so clearly shows, is that Trump, a man who is forever accusing the media of promoting “fake stories”, has done the exact same thing himself, on a mind-numbingly regular basis, throughout his career, both as a businessman and a politician. A further irony is that in pushing his populist, right-wing, message Trump has made use of tactics sharpened and perfected by the likes of Vladimir Lenin, who employed similar incendiary language and showed a similar disdain for the truth and reluctance to compromise. Small wonder then, that he is also an admirer of Putin, another master manipulator.

Elsewhere, other alt-right trolls (who share Trumps mania for tweeting) have employed relativistic arguments, once largely the domain of the post-modernists and the Left, to argue there are no objective truths any more – only different perceptions and different story lines. Kakutani makes short shrift of these arguments believing that they lead to the sort of cynicism and resignation that autocrats and power-hungry politicians depend on to subvert resistance.

Without commonly agreed-upon facts, she insists, “there can be no rational debate over policies, no substantive means of evaluating candidates for political office, and no way to hold elected officials accountable to the people.”