Zimbabwe Vote Held Amid Liberation’s Tangled Legacy

As doves cooed overhead in a giant jacaranda tree, Mickey Townsend sipped his morning tea and peered out at a stunning vista of rolling hills and lush fields on his family’s almost century-old farm.

Like most whites, Townsend fought in the bitter eight-year war to stop the black majority from taking over white-ruled Rhodesia. He planted land mines on his farm, put bulletproof shields over windows and doors, and felt “enormous despair” when the blacks won in 1980 and most whites fled.

But Townsend has this assessment of life today for the 75,000 or so whites still here: “We are decidedly better off.”

Back in Harare, in a slum on the capital’s southern edge, Janet Makumba has another view. She fought on the winning side. But the 35-year-old black secretary said liberation has meant rising unemployment, crippling inflation and a falling standard of living for Zimbabwe’s 10.5 million blacks.

“It’s our own black leaders who are making us suffer,” she complained. “It’s worse now than the old regime. Worse!”

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As Zimbabwe’s voters conclude two days of balloting today in the third parliamentary election since independence 15 years ago this month, their country is riddled with such contradictions.

Zimbabwe boasts a booming free-market economy despite repeated commitments to Marxist policies. Race relations are harmonious despite a blood-soaked past. And a multi-party democracy has produced a one-party regime with little accountability under a government-controlled press and a pliant Parliament.

Still revered for his role in the revolution, President Robert Mugabe has no real political opposition, and his Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front, or ZANU-PF, is assured of winning all but a handful of the 150 seats in Parliament. He is equally certain of winning a fourth five-year term in presidential elections next year.

“Don’t forget, the people know us for the revolution we waged,” Mugabe explained in a brief interview. “They became part of that struggle, and they cannot entertain another party without an equal record. That is the difficulty the other parties are finding.”

In a continent rife with chaos and collapse, even Mugabe’s harshest critics concede that he has brought peace and stability in his 15-year rule. John Makumbe, a political scientist at the University of Zimbabwe, called Mugabe “a frustrated dictator.”

But he added: “It has worked up to now.”

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Stern and autocratic, the 71-year-old president still professes to be a hard-line socialist, and he considered the late Communist dictators of North Korea and Romania among his closest allies. Like them, Mugabe’s critics fear, he intends to cling to power until he is forced out or dies.

But Mugabe is also a pragmatist who has literally shed his Mao suits for others from Savile Row. In 1990, he dumped the calamitous socialist policies that were bankrupting the country and began implementing one of the International Monetary Fund’s strictest structural adjustment programs to open the closed economy.

The results have been mixed. Unemployment has grown to 46%, inflation rages at 22%, and interest rates have soared above 30%. Real wages have fallen to pre-independence levels as costs for basic commodities have skyrocketed. Bread alone has tripled in price.

But shops are stocked with imported goods; new cars clog a modern network of tarred roads, and foreign businesses and investors freely move dollars, yen and marks into and out of what is probably Africa’s most liberalized economy.

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“Corporate Zimbabwe is more than satisfied,” said Mark Tunmer, chairman of the Zimbabwe Stock Exchange, the continent’s third largest after South Africa and Morocco. The agriculture-based economy grew about 6% last year, although growth is expected to cool to 4% this year because of a severe drought.

Western governments and human rights groups are also satisfied. Under international pressure, Mugabe has reined in the sinister security forces that once tortured and killed government critics and that slaughtered an estimated 10,000 members of the minority Ndebele tribe in the mid-1980s. Most of the victims supported the rival Zimbabwe African People’s Union, or ZAPU.

The wounds remain raw today, but there is little ethnic tension or threat.

ZAPU leader Joshua Nkomo serves as one of Mugabe’s vice presidents. There are no known political prisoners, disappearances or other gross human rights abuses. Recent rulings by an independent judiciary have strengthened women’s rights and the freedoms of association and due process.

The government owns all radio and TV and controls every major newspaper. But Brian Latham, former editor of the independent Daily Gazette, admitted that his paper was closed last December because of poor advertising, not government edicts to stop its exposes of official corruption and cronyism.

“You can say what you like in this country,” Latham said. “You’re not going to get locked up or hauled away in the middle of the night.”

Although a growing AIDS epidemic--an estimated one in 10 people carries the deadly human immunodeficiency virus--has badly strained the social fabric, Mugabe’s government is widely credited with expanding services for the poor.

“The education system has improved greatly, beyond expectations,” said Gordon Lloyd Chavunduka, vice chancellor of the University of Zimbabwe. “Medical care has improved. So has housing and transport.”

And Chavunduka is living proof of how tradition and modernity survive side by side. He is a respected academic, a graduate of the University of London. But he is also the country’s top nyanga , a traditional medicine man, and he freely observes that local witches “cause illness and death.”

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Race relations are perhaps the greatest surprise in Zimbabwe. Although the tiny white minority still dominates the economy, there is little overt resentment. Blacks and whites mix with amity and ease in shops and streets.

To be sure, the government incited a flurry of pre-election racial rhetoric last year and announced plans to seize dozens of white-owned plantations--as well as farms of several prominent black opponents--under a 1992 law that offered no legal recourse.

Mugabe quickly stopped the racial threats when foreign investors grew nervous. And no commercial farms were confiscated after the owners argued that they control 80% of agricultural output.

“Now they are reviewing the law,” said Peter MacSporran, president of the mostly white Commercial Farmers’ Union. “The government is working in good faith with us, and we have turned down the fire.”

MacSporran said race relations have prospered partly because most of the worst white supremacists fled at independence, many for the apartheid regime in neighboring South Africa. Most who remained are more interested in making money than in causing trouble.

Not all the Old Guard left, however. At 76, former Prime Minister Ian D. Smith remains unrepentant about the unilateral declaration of independence he put forth in 1965 and about his bitter battle to maintain a renegade white minority state in the face of international sanctions and condemnation. “Never in a thousand years” would blacks rule, he vowed at the time.

“I think it can be proven that most of the discrimination was in favor of the black man,” Smith claims now, defying logic and history. And intimidation under Mugabe’s government, he insisted, “is the same as in Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union.”