Book Review: “ Mugabe’s Legacy: Coups, Conspiracies and the Conceits of Power in Zimbabwe. David Moore, 2021”

 By Takura Zhangazha*

In the middle of this year I got what I now refer to as a present of privilege.  It was a yet to be fully published book by David Moore titled, “ Mugabe’s Legacy: Coups, Conspiracies and the Conceits of Power in Zimbabwe.”  

I was lucky enough to get the book not only as a personal gift from the author but also before it had been released into bookstores (though the print-run has already been done).  I had hoped that the book would be available in bookstores before the end of 2021 but that is looking least likely at the moment. 

With the permission of the author I still thought it necessary to do a non-academic review of it. Moreso within the context of shifting political allegiances of those who were Mugabe’s Generation 40 (G40) and the mainstream opposition MDC Alliance frontrunners after the end of his long-duree rule.  And also with the not surprisingly awry but politically insignificant silence of his widow, Dr. Grace Mugabe. 

There are many books that have been written about Mugabe.  There are many more that are being worked on and will soon also be published.  Most of them will probably look at Mugabe from a Eurocentric or global north lense, one that is likely to fit specific expectations of narratives around his leadership of Zimbabwe.  These narratives are largely about seeking to not only demonise Mugabe but also seek some sort of historical revisionism on the end effect of African national liberation struggles and Pan Africanism. 

Moore in his book does not take this approach.  Instead he looks at Mugabe not as just an individual leader and as he suggests in the title, the realest meaning of political power in Zimbabwe’s historical context.  Including how it is arrived at, accepted, exercised and in Mugabe’s case, lost within the framework(s) of liberation struggle movements and their attendant historical political culture. 

It is a very Gramscian  take on Mugabe’s legacy, leadership and the political culture that informed Zanu Pf;s rise to power and the contestations around its future.  With key lessons for those that would seek to challenge the ruling establishment.

What Moore does well in analysing Mugabe’s legacy is to link the passage of time, struggle and political cultural practice (exercise of power) of what in academic circles we would refer to as ‘hegemony’.  And he does so with a very personal touch by narrating his interactions with not only the leaders of the Zimbabwean nationalist movement but also those of the then emerging liberal opposition movement(s).   All in which he almost arrives at the conclusion that Mugabe was not just an individual but was more representative of a culmination of deliberate historical events that shaped his approach to leadership.  

Not that Moore reduces Mugabe’s agency in the making of contemporary Zimbabwe.  Instead Moore seeks to explore the connotations of Mugabe’s intellectualism, high sense of personal accomplishment (education) and even Messianic tendencies as being fueled by not only the context of the liberation movements but also by his (Mugabe) own egoistic inclinations. 

And Moore makes this relatively clear in assessing Mugabe’s ideological roots by outlining that the latter was never committed to Marxism or any other left leaning version of it.  Instead, and that’s the impression I get from Moore’s writing, Mugabe largely instrumentalised populist tendencies for his own political interests.  And that these interests resided largely in the retention of power.   But all working within the political culture enabled by the liberation and nationalist movement.  

Moore however also gives an historical outline of Mugabe’s Achilles heel, this being the military and organic ideological side of the liberation movements. In combination.  He walks the reader through the full import of the Vashandi rebellion (his good friend Dzinashe Machingura helped him greatly with understanding this).  And his interviews with various liberation war veterans to understand how the disjuncture between fighters of the liberation war and the nationalists was and still remains relatively palpable.  Hence in the book Moore makes references to stalled and attempted coups before arriving at what he calls the 2017 ‘coup incarnate’. 

And this is where a reader’s curiosity is likely to reside.  The making of the coup, in reading Moore was largely Mugabe’s own fault.  Never mind his wife and G40. And over a course of at least 50 years at which Mugabe was either close to or at the helm of not only his party but eventually the other 37 where he was in charge of the country.  

Moore writes this book with a very anecdotal pen.  It is very easy to relate to because he makes reference to people he met, outlines events as they unfolded and as they were reported in the mainstream media.  But where he uses wit and slight humour, he intends to make a point about the fact that Mugabe’s legacy was never going to be his own. It had and still has far reaching implications on Zimbabwean society.  From the economy and its oligarchs through to the political culture of not only the ruling Zanu Pf party but also as it affects the mainstream Movement for Democratic Change opposition formations. 

Moore does not present Mugabe as a larger than life character.  He presents him as both the product of historical circumstances, ambitions and an ambiguous Zimbabwean hegemony that is yet to be fully explored.  Hence Moore’s consistent reference to the Gramscian ‘interregnum’.  Mugabe’s legacy is that there was never a terrible beauty that was born after his departure. 

*Takura Zhangazha writes here in his personal capacity (takura-zhangazha.blogspot.com)