Jon Lee Anderson | The New Yorker
NINE hundred years ago, at a site on a high plateau north of the Limpopo River called Great Zimbabwe, Shona kings built stone palaces where they lived in splendid isolation from their subjects, with absolute authority over their means to sustain life—cattle herds, land, and the gold that came out of the earth.
In the nineteen-sixties, members of a liberation movement in what was then Rhodesia, among them Robert Mugabe, adopted Great Zimbabwe’s name to refer to the notional state they were fighting for.
Today, Mugabe can be said to be the owner of the riches that remain in the nation of Zimbabwe. After twenty-eight years, he remains in power––Zimbabwe’s only President since the end of whiteminority rule, in 1980. His nephew Leo, therefore, leads a cushioned life. He is an entrepreneur and has stakes in several companies, among them a mobile-phone network. He is a director of Zimbabwe Defense Industries, which purchases the weaponry for his uncle’s Army—most of it, these days, from China.
He also controls at least one large farm that had been seized from its white owners. In the nineties, Leo earned notoriety for his alleged role in securing kickbacks, on behalf of his uncle and other officials, in the construction of Harare International Airport. In 2005, he was arrested for the contraband export and sale of government-owned food, but the charges were withdrawn for lack of evidence. (Leo said the allegations in both cases were unfounded.) That year, he was a candidate for Parliament for the Zimbabwe African National UnionPatriotic Front, known as ZANU-P.F., the ruling party. He won in a landslide.
Earlier this year, Leo was added to a sanctions list first imposed by the United States in 2003 against Robert Mugabe and members of his government. The sanctions included a travel ban and the freezing of foreign assets, and also prohibit Americans from doing business with those on the list. Leo was also named on a sanctions list maintained by the European Union, for his arms-dealing activities. The new sanctions came in response to a wave of terror that Robert Mugabe had unleashed in the country’s Presidential campaign. More than a hundred and fifty opposition supporters were murdered, many were raped, and thousands of people were beaten or tortured, often after being herded into so-called reëducation camps.
Because of the violence, Mugabe’s rival, Morgan Tsvangirai, whose Movement for Democratic Change, or M.D.C., had won a slender majority in the country’s first round of voting in March, dropped out of the race and went into hiding. In the runoff vote on June 27th, Mugabe was unopposed and was quickly declared the winner.
Leo Mugabe works from an office building he owns in Harare, where I met him this summer. His brand-new silver Toyota Land Cruiser Amazon was parked outside. He is a slim, goateed man of fifty-one, and was dressed in a dark tailored suit. On the wall behind his desk hung a map of Zimbabwe made out of a patchwork of animal skins. His secretary, a young woman wearing a tight skirt and jacket, very high heels, and a great deal of jewelry, sat down with us. Her hair was arranged in red-dyed cornrows, and as Leo spoke she scribbled everything down on a notepad, expressing approval whenever he made a point, like a personal cheerleader. He was in a good mood, emanating confidence and optimism over Zimbabwe’s future.
“Have you seen anyone beaten up since you’ve been here?” he asked. “There was less violence here than in Nigeria! And we all know why Zimbabwe’s violence is being exaggerated—it’s about the fortune in the land. We have certain resources here, such as nickel, gold, and platinum. I think Zimbabweans now understand that they are suffering because of sanctions by the United States, Great Britain, and the Europeans.” Otherwise, Zimbabwe’s prospects were excellent—his uncle had been distributing computers to rural schools, for example. “In a few years, rural Zimbabwe will be computer-literate. We are a nation which is moving, and these children will understand what empowerment really means.”
That week, however, the inflation rate in Zimbabwe had officially reached eleven million per cent, the highest in the world; analysts later reckoned it to have been two hundred and thirty million per cent. Eighty per cent of Zimbabweans were out of work. Chronic malnutrition was prevalent, and starvation was spreading in the countryside. Close to two million Zimbabweans depended for survival on food handouts from international aid agencies. Twenty per cent of the population was infected with H.I.V./AIDS.
Zimbabwe’s life expectancy is forty-four years for men, forty-three for women. But Leo Mugabe scoffed at the idea that the situation was dire. “People are going about their business,” he said. “No one is starving—they are driving nice cars! As a Christian, though, I think it is a challenge by God, and the attention being drawn to Zimbabwe is maybe to highlight that we are the new people of Israel, and that we have our own Moses.” I understood “Moses” to be his uncle. His secretary greeted the analogy with an exclamation of delight.
Under Robert Mugabe’s leadership, in 2000 his most militant supporters—many of them veterans of the seventies civil war—began forcibly occupying the country’s five thousand white-owned commercial farms, with the help of armed gangs and, frequently, ZANU-P.F. officials. By almost all accounts, these actions precipitated the country’s economic decline. Leo disagreed. “We have no regrets—he has none, and I have none,” he said.
“We have taken the land,” Leo went on. “So what is the next move? The next move is the mines, the minerals. We know we are very rich—without the British or the Americans. Yes, they invested, but if we have to we will go and take over the mines, too.” Zimbabwe has the world’s second-largest platinum reserves and is relatively rich in other minerals. The country’s mining industry accounts for some forty per cent of its export income. In 2006, Robert Mugabe threatened to nationalize the mines by assigning Zimbabwe a controlling fifty-one-per-cent stake in them. Negotiations with the mine owners, which include South Africa’s Implats and Anglo Platinum, and the United Kingdom’s Rio Tinto, have dragged on ever since.
“Rio Tinto can stay there in London, but their mines and their equipment will stay here. Is that what they want? Because that’s where they are headed,” Leo said. “We can give the mines to the black Zimbabweans, the people who work them now,” he added. “We are not going to go back on the land issue, and the wealth that lies underneath the land will remain ours, too.”
Jon Lee Anderson works for The New Yorker, where this article was first published.