Can a Team of (Bitter) Rivals Heal Zimbabwe?

Tsvangirai's focus on a bright, distant future also takes little account of how firmly Zimbabwe — a place of first-generation Toyota Corollas and jukeboxes playing Sade and early Madonna — is stuck in the past. To this day, state newspapers and radio stations lead the news with profiles of ZANU heroes who have been dead for 30 years. Mugabe's men obsessively blame Britain, the old colonial power, for all Zimbabwe's problems today. Mugabe — a man who wears impeccable suits and drinks afternoon tea — is "half African and half British," says his biographer Heidi Holland, "and the two halves hate each other." In a Harare hotel, I meet Christopher Mutsvangwa, a ZANU supporter, businessman and former ambassador to China, whose clock seems to have stopped at independence in 1980. "Losing [Zimbabwe] was a very traumatic experience for British imperial pride," he says, "and they feel it needs to be reversed." Hyperinflation, he insists, was a British fabrication. "It wasn't generated by anything the government did. It was generated by a British computer."

Many of Zimbabwe's old white Rhodesian settlers are just as riveted by the past. They argue that until Mugabe and his supporters give back farms that were appropriated from whites — something no Zimbabwean leader endorses as either practical or just — there is no hope for economic recovery. When that argument is put directly to Mugabe at an investors' conference, the President, 85, answers with a fluent 14-minute history lesson on how Zimbabwe won its independence. The point of this polemic? The responsibility for any problems with land reform, concludes Mugabe, "is a British one."

Change Is Coming
A country so fixated on the past and so unwilling to take responsibility for its own condition will have difficulty perceiving its future. A people desperate for change might not recognize gradual adjustment as the real thing.

Yet change is indeed coming. Even the glummest Zimbabwean will acknowledge the reopening of schools, hospitals, shops and factories. And Tsvangirai is adjusting well to his new role, successfully seizing the political initiative from the man who has held it for more than a generation. The contrast between the two leaders was never greater than on Tsvangirai's recent foreign tour, during which he was feted by President Barack Obama, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. At an African Union summit in Libya, meanwhile, Mugabe stormed out of a meeting with U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Johnnie Carson, calling him an "idiot" for trying to "dictate to us."

And 30 years after the party's glory days, ZANU's power is finally waning. Partly this is economic; there are fewer spoils to go around. Tsvangirai told me that when he took office in February, the state's entire resources ran to just $4 million. Last November, several hundred soldiers rioted in Harare over poor pay and conditions. Even if Mugabe called on troops to stage a coup and suppress dissent, it's no longer clear they would obey him. "The emperor is wearing no clothes," says Leonard Makombe, a politics lecturer at the mothballed University of Zimbabwe.

Even now, most Zimbabweans seem to find it hard to admit that their emperor — the man who Tsvangirai acknowledges was a "national hero" once — might be naked. But for how long? As I drive back to the airport, Mugabe's voice comes on the radio. He is speaking at the funeral of yet another hero of the fight for independence. "I have delivered to my nation, my people, a Zimbabwe that is free," he says. "We call ourselves Zimbabweans now, and we never called ourselves Zimbabweans before. We never had a flag before, did we? No. We never had a national anthem before, did we? No." A name, a banner and a song — the proud appurtenances of Africa's heroic struggle against its colonial oppressors. Mugabe may be the last man in Zimbabwe who thinks they are now enough.

— With reporting by Columbus Mavhunga / Harare

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