1Zimbabwe became independent in 1980, after more than fifteen years of communal struggle in Rhodesia. This territory came to symbolise the involvement of the Commonwealth of Nations against racism and all forms of discrimination. It was also considered as a model of reconciliation between the past and the present, between the colonial and the post-colonial times. But more than twenty-five years after its independence, Zimbabwe seems to be in a stalemate. The reconciliation that had been expected for so many years never happened.

2The political evolution of this country for the last seven years has been marked by electoral fraud, the sending into prison of political opponents after mock trials, censorship of the press, racial and ethnic oppressions, etc. This evolution of the regime is not new. Since the coming into being of the new state in 1980, there have always been communal struggles even if the most visible minority, viz. the white community, was not bothered at that time. They have to be considered beyond the simple statement according to which Mugabe may be growing racist as he is getting older.

3This paper will question the meaning of Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980. If we take a look at the way Mugabe asserted his power and at the way he’s now ruling the country, we may wonder whether the mere granting of political independence was sufficient for the new nation to exorcise Rhodesia’s colonial ghost. The exorcism should have been processed through a real postcolonial transition, which obviously, and against appearances, never took place.

4When Robert Mugabe came to power in 1980, his inaugural speech was rather encouraging for the future society to be built as he really seemed to make a clean sweep of what Rhodesia symbolised to open Zimbabwe’s future.

Our new nation requires every one of us to be a new man. If yesterday I fought you as an enemy, today you will become a friend and ally with the same national interest, loyalty rights and duties as myself. If yesterday you hated me, today you cannot avoid the love that binds you to me and me to you.... The wrongs of the past now stand forgiven and forgotten. If ever we look to the past, let us do so for the lesson the past has taught us—namely that oppression and racism are inequalities that must never find scope in our political and social system. It could never be a correct justification that because the whites oppressed us yesterday when they had power, the blacks must oppress them today because they have power. An evil remains an evil whether practised by white against black or black against white.1

5But this reconciliation which was announced by President Mugabe on Independence Eve never took place. In fact, the colonial division of the Zimbabwean society, a division which was inherited from colonial Rhodesia, was never questioned. The object of this paper will be to trace the failure of the state and government of Zimbabwe back to the country’s colonial past. To understand how Rhodesia’s colonial ghost has been able to haunt Zimbabwe’s present, two main aspects will be focused on. First the general context of the interracial struggle in Zimbabwe has to be outlined, beginning with the status of Rhodesia’s white minority in the organisation of the colony and of the empire, which may explain the social construction of the racial communities in Zimbabwean minds. Then the meaning of the concept of ‘the majority of the people’ will be questioned, as it presided over Zimbabwe’s independence process, and tended to crystallise communal differences along colonial lines instead of synthesising a truly post-colonial democratic project.

6Rhodesia was never a dominion, contrary to South Africa. She remained a colony, and as such, under Britain’s direct responsibility. But Britain never really ruled this territory from London as she had transferred political power to a colonial government in 1923. Southern Rhodesia was the only colony—viz. a territory having the status of a colony—with a self-governing white minority. The political autonomy the Rhodesian White settlers enjoyed within the empire had left them free to establish themselves as a colonial nation whose aspirations were getting more and more remote from that of the mother country. In Rhodesia the colonial and the imperial had been distinguished since the birth of the colony, and in fact, in Rhodesia’s particular situation, they never coincided.

7This can be observed in the meaning the concept of civilisation took on for those who conquered the territory. At one stage of the imperial conquest, civilisation was understood as the White man’s prerogative. Indeed, it was the supposed superiority of the White man’s civilisation which justified and legitimised the imperial conquests. It cannot be denied that there was a racial dimension in the concept of civilisation which motivated Britain’s imperial conquest, but this dimension remained implicit. The concept of civilisation was rather understood as a social and political concept, a set of moral, social and political values upon which a society was to be organised and run. Civilisation was therefore linked with politics and the ability of exerting political power. It definitely had an imperial dimension, because the object was to bring civilisation to people who were considered inferior, but in the imperial idea, it was never said that the colonised peoples could never be ‘civilised’ as White people were. Cecil Rhodes’s famous phrase ‘Equal Rights for All Civilised Men’ did not explicitly have a racial dimension. This ambiguity in the concept of civilisation later allowed the imperial power to adapt it to a non colonial context and made possible its opening to the native people2: race did not determine the access to civilisation. As Southern Rhodesia was a settlement colony in which the White population was granted self-government, for the White Rhodesians to admit that civilisation was not a White man’s prerogative would have jeopardised the legitimacy of their position as the sole rulers of the territory, as it could only be justified in a colonial context and from a colonial perspective. The evolution of the imperial policy then proved difficult to implement in Southern Rhodesia because of the absence of separation between the colonial dimension and the imperial one.

8Indeed, the white Rhodesians were in a rather ambiguous position. They saw themselves as agents working for the imperial grandeur and the promotion of the white man’s civilisation, in the name of the imperial power. But they had their own methods to fulfil their imperial ambition which differed from those of the imperial government. In its relations with Southern Rhodesia, the British government considered the Rhodesian settlers as the actual managers of the territory, not to say the administrators, who made up for the absence of a proper imperial administration of the colony. In doing so, the British government fostered a de facto racial separation among the population of the colony. The consequences of this attitude went against the general inclination of the imperial policy at the end of the 1930s3. The European settlers came to consider themselves as those who represented civilisation and as such as the only people who could exercise political power. Racial distinction was therefore first socially constructed, before being entrenched by those who benefited from it into measures which tended to establish the social and political system on racial discrimination4. Moreover, in spite of the transfer of power to the settler government, Rhodesia was never granted dominion status. Even if the Rhodesian whites administered the territory instead of Britain, from a strictly legal point of view they were only one part of the colony’s population: they were administered people, not colonial civil servants.

9During the negotiations over the independence of the territory in the 1950s and 1960s, the British governments refused to recognise that they had acquired a de facto particular status compared to the rest of the population. In other words, the British government intended to consider them as being part of the colonised population. Of course it was not the way the Rhodesian whites had constructed their own identity and social status within the colony. And it was not the way the Rhodesian Black population considered this white population either.

The armed confrontation in Zimbabwe is an inevitable development in the African people’s struggle for freedom from colonialist settlement, oppression and exploitation, which began with the arrival of the white settlers and agents of British imperialism.5

10For them, the White Rhodesians were colonisers. They represented a colonial power, and they were also the main obstacle to their accessing to power. Just as the White Rhodesians tended to establish a distinction between themselves and the rest of the population to keep political power in their hands, the Black Rhodesians tended to exclude them from their own conception of the future independent state.

11When the British Government set about granting independence to the territory, they were confronted to an insuperable colonial-inspired division of the society. The two main communities had constructed their identities one against the other and had a very antagonistic and exclusive conception of the nation. Black and White nationalist conceptions became more firmly entrenched: the Rhodesian government unilaterally declared its independence from Britain in 1965 and the Black Nationalist movements, after refusing to negotiate before UDI, launched a guerrilla struggle against the Rhodesian regime.

12 At stake in the decolonisation of Rhodesia seemed to be the question of the status of the white minority who testified to the past colonisation of the territory. Should they be considered as colonisers, or as colonised people? Contemplating one point of view or another changed the meaning of decolonisation. Could a mere transfer of power from a minority to a majority be sufficient to really carry out the decolonisation of the territory, and exorcise Rhodesia’s ghost?

13The British Government promoted a decolonisation of the whole Rhodesian society, viz. a decolonisation of identities which had been socially constructed. From this process was meant to emerge a reconciled nation, viz. a nation that would not have been founded on a communal division inherited from the colonial period.

As they had repeatedly made clear, the British Government would only recommend to Parliament the grant of independence to Rhodesia if they were satisfied that this was on a basis acceptable to the people of the country taken as a whole.6

14The independence had then to result from a decolonisation of the balance of power and of the political power. It was not meant to be a mere transfer of power to the ‘majority’ of the population. Britain’s conception of decolonisation refused the division of the Rhodesian population along racial lines. Put under pressure by the Commonwealth, the British Government progressively abandoned this conception to shape the independence of Zimbabwe. To the British principle of independence ‘acceptable to the people of Rhodesia as a whole’, the Commonwealth and the African nationalists preferred the idea of a transfer of power to the majority. This idea was typified in the phrase: ‘No independence before majority rule’ (NIBMAR).

15But there remained an ambiguity as to the meaning of the concept ‘the majority of the population’: did it refer to racial majority or to democratic majority? A non-official interpretation of the NIBMAR commitment by some African members of the Commonwealth, deplored by the British Government7, was ‘No independence before majority African rule’. Indeed, the letter ‘A’ in the acronym NIBMAR originally stood for the second letter of the word ‘majority’ and had been added for euphonic reasons. This unofficial interpretation of the addition of the letter ‘A’ tended to confirm that the concept of ‘majority rule’ was to be understood in a racial and colonial sense. The idea of a ‘majority’ as opposed to the idea of ‘the people of Rhodesia as a whole’ tended to exclude a part of the population from political power, in just the same way the colonial conception of the Rhodesian nation under the white minority regime tended to exclude a part of the population. As seen by the African nationalist groups, Rhodesia’s decolonisation meant a transfer of power from one group to another, without questioning the very existence of these groups and their postcolonial legitimacy. Their conception of decolonisation remained influenced by a colonial vision of society and echoed the very way the Rhodesian government itself conceived political power.

16But this view was entrenched by the members of the Commonwealth of Nations at the Lusaka conference in 1979 which set out the principles of Zimbabwe’s independence.

Heads of Government therefore:
a) Confirmed that they were wholly committed to genuine black majority rule for the people of Zimbabwe
b) Recognised, in this context, that the internal settlement constitution is defective in certain important respects...
f) Accepted that independence on the basis of majority rule required the adoption of a democratic constitution including appropriate safeguards for minorities.8

17The Final Communiqué of the 1979 Commonwealth Meeting lifted all ambiguity as to the meaning of ‘majority rule’, as it clearly stated that Zimbabwe’s independence was to result from the transfer of political power to the ‘Black majority’ of the population. The social construction of the communities into a majority and a minority remained and permeated the social and political structure of the new independent state with colonial references. In 1980, at a time when the international community as a whole thought the ghost of colonial Rhodesia had definitely been banished, it was in fact still leaning over the cradle of young Zimbabwe. Some British observers of the 1980 elections denounced attempts by the ZANU-PF, Robert Mugabe’s party, at intimidating electors by threatening to pursue an armed struggle9 which had been lasting for fifteen years.

18Zimbabwe seemed to be bound to be nothing more than the postcolonial expression of colonial Rhodesia, as the values at the core of its very constitution and state system remained the same. Zimbabwe’s political system proceeded from racial confrontation, not from a questioning of this racial confrontation. The NIBMAR commitment which was supposed to pave the way to the construction of a postcolonial nation only reversed a dichotomy inherited from the past. There was no decolonisation of the minds which were left open to the disastrous influence of their own colonial ghosts.

19Decolonisation seen as a transfer of political power in the hands of the majority of the people did not question the structures in which the political struggle took place. It only carried out a shift from a dictatorship of the minority to a dictatorship of the majority. This dictatorship of the majority was not at first directed against the most visible minority, but against another one, an ethnic minority, more likely at that time to challenge the institutionalised idea of the ‘majority’ at the root of the new political power. The attitude of Robert Mugabe’s new Zimbabwean regime towards the Ndebeles, the second main ethnic group, appears as an illustration of the influence of the Rhodesian colonial ghost. The ZAPU (Zimbabwe African Popular Union) was a rival nationalist group during the struggle against the white minority regime in the 1960s and 1970s. Contrary to Robert Mugabe’s movement, the ZANU (Zimbabwe African National Union) which represented Zimbabwe’s ethnic majority, the Shonas, the ZAPU was mainly composed of Ndebeles10. In a post-colonial democratic system, the existence of the ZAPU as a political party after independence could represent a challenge to the power of the ZANU11. Indeed, the people of Zimbabwe still retained the possibility of voting for a party which would not necessarily have come from the ethnic or racial majority of the population. The only way to avoid being challenged was to accept the legacy of the ‘majority’ institutionalised as a racial and ethnic concept, in other words, to entrench the influence of old Rhodesia over new Zimbabwe. The Ndebeles were denounced as traitors12 and obstacles to the project of national construction. They were stigmatised as a minority group, and as such, as an enemy of the majority. More than 20,000 people were killed in Matabeleland between 1982 and 198513. Democracy then seemed to be conceived as the allegiance to the man who embodied the majority, and not as a majority allegiance to one man. As it was an emanation of the ethnic majority of the population, the ZANU-PF became the only party which could represent the majority. As such, Robert Mugabe’s project revealed a vision of the nation seen as a submission to a rigid majority, the definition of which was based on objective criteria, and not as a voluntary subjective allegiance to a project.

20President Mugabe regularly summons history in his speeches, and he did so even during the massacres in Matabeleland in the 1980s. His regular references to the history of the guerrilla and of the communal struggle in Rhodesia to support his policies appear as a way of legitimising the concept of majority as a pre-constructed data of Zimbabwean political life. In doing so, he also entrenches a colonial reading of Zimbabwe’s political life. Terence Ranger showed how Mugabe tried to establish a monopoly on the legitimate interpretation of history to assert his power14. For Ranger, the reference to nationalist history, as opposed to national history, has become the only way for the Zimbabwean citizens to gain access to the political field. This confusion between nationalist history and the nation’s history corresponds to a confusion operated between the ‘majority’ and the nation. Such confusion was inherited from the Rhodesian colonial system in which the division between the majority and the minority was institutionalised within the political system.

21After his agrarian reform was outvoted in a referendum in 2000, Robert Mugabe called the population of Zimbabwe to organise a third ‘chimurenga’15 against the white farmers and Britain in order to revive the symbols of national liberation and reassert a political legitimacy which could only be founded on the colonial past of the territory. The first two Chimurenga were launched against a situation of colonial domination which no longer exists today. To carry on with his agrarian reform, he challenged the legitimacy of democracy with a legitimacy of the majority.

22 Some observers also noticed that, during the 2000 referendum crisis, Mugabe more often addresses Britain and her Prime Minister (Ranger 2003: 7), than Morgan Tsvangirai, the leader of the Movement for Democratic Change16 (MDC), the major opposition party, as if he denied the latter a legitimacy to contest his power17. Indeed, the MDC’s political backing is not only made up of people belonging to the ethnic majority of the population18, but also of social, ethnic or racial groups defined by the ZANU-PF as enemies of the nation because they challenge its legitimacy. This movement is far more difficult to stigmatise than the ZAPU which could be identified with a ‘visible’ minority. Moreover, in this colonial revival, denouncing the British as enemies makes sense because it further encourages a colonial opposition, as if Mugabe’s political legitimacy could only be founded on the colonial history of the territory.

23The evolution of Zimbabwe’s political power in the last decades has shown the limits of a conception of decolonisation understood as the transfer of power to the majority, and not as a questioning of the colonial divisions of the population. This questioning can only be operated through a true postcolonial transition and a reconciliation of the nation with her own past. A true decolonisation of the values upon which the Zimbabwean state system was built appears as a necessary condition for the emergence of a postcolonial nation.

24 Rhodesia’s colonial ghost does not lie in the visible legacy of the colonial past, viz. the presence of a white population in Zimbabwe, but in a conception of power, a structure of government, but also a set of political values, which tend to exclude some members of the Zimbabwean nation as long as they do not belong to what is considered as the majority, whether they be Whites, Ndebeles, homosexuals, members of the democratic opposition, etc. Rhodesia’s colonial ghost was in fact hidden in the concept of majority as it was inherited from the colonial struggle and entrenched in government institutions promoting a colonial-inspired division of the society. It is only through a catharsis of its own colonial past that Zimbabwe will be able to free itself from the ghost of Rhodesia which still prevents its postcolonial nation from emerging.