I can’t imagine what has come over Matthew Parris, a journalist I generally enjoy reading. After a visit to the grave of Cecil John Rhodes (a place I know well, incidentally, its location in the Matopos – as was – being not far from the several sites of picnics taken by my family when I was a boy), Parris indulges the conceit that in due course Robert Mugabe might come to be buried next to Rhodes (£):
When the time comes, even as a sort-of white Rhodesian, I should like to see Mugabe’s memorial alongside Rhodes in that sacred place. I know the President is from the Mashona people, historic foes of the Matabele. I know Rhodes did many cruel things, dispossessed and killed many people and cheated Chief Lobengula unforgivably. But still, for his restless and unbounded energy, for his vast achievements and for his almost limitless vision, I would call Rhodes’s a great life.
Exit half my readers. Now to alienate the other half. I know Robert Mugabe has made some terrible mistakes, brought his country for a while close to ruin and been associated with the murder of many Matabele people. But still, for his tremendous ambition, his long fight against overwhelming odds, and his deliverance of his people from submission to another race, he deserves the name of both warrior and leader, and I would call his a great life.
Great men may do brutal things. History is shaped by complicated people, their greatness seldom uncompromised, their nobility tangled with infamy, their wisdom with folly. For good or ill and usually both, they stamp indelibly their age and their country, and we can respect without always approving. I should one day like to see Cecil John Rhodes and Robert Gabriel Mugabe side by side in that awesome place.
In Rhodes’s case, the man is beyond the reach of justice, and one may, I suppose, form whatever view one wants of his stature and his life. Mugabe, however, is still with us, and some of the things he has presided over were not just ‘mistakes’. In the Gukurahundi in the early 1980s Zimbabwe’s North-Korean-trained Fifth Brigade massacred some 20,000 civilians. That is a plain crime against humanity and even if one does think, as Parris appears to, that Mugabe is a ‘great man’, it is no longer legally permitted to great men to ‘do brutal things’ on such a scale. Then, more recently, there’s the open violence, as well as various other electoral malpractices, used by Mugabe’s supporters to maintain Mugabe and ZANU-PF in power.
I find it one-sided, to put it no more strongly, that Parris should be wondering about how to honour this man on his death, without any complementary reflection on whether he shouldn’t first be made to stand up in some court somewhere for his crimes.