Don’t you carry?

R.W. Johnson

In Harare to watch Mugabe steal the election I quickly got some reminders I didn’t really need that I wasn’t too welcome. The state-owned media repeatedly declared that foreign spies posing as journalists were flooding into Zimbabwe and would be harshly dealt with. The Minister of Information, Jonathan Moyo, went on TV to say that such people had better be prepared to spend a very long time in Zimbabwe and we knew what he meant. Mr Moyo had several times made it clear that he regards me with particular loathing so I wasn’t too surprised to find myself watching a ZTV programme about myself as the evil genius of the whole Zimbabwe crisis. When I told the paper I was writing for they got quite excited: ‘We’ll send a photographer around,’ they said.

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Vol. 24 No. 8 · 25 April 2002 » R.W. Johnson » Don’t you carry? (print version)
Pages 24-25 | 3089 words

Letters

From Michael West

R.W. Johnson says he went to Zimbabwe to watch Mugabe steal the election (LRB, 25 April). Mostly, though, readers are treated to tales of psychopathic murder and to a shameless celebration of colonial depredation. The narrative line emerges from the scene in the compound belonging to Johnson's friend, 'Dave the hunter': 'Kalashnikov rounds on the mantelpiece … and pictures of the Pioneer Column, of Selous, the greatest of all hunters … in the hall'. Today, Dave the hunter and his friends Zeno and Jimmy keep up old traditions. Taking full advantage of the shameful shoot-to-kill policy – a policy begun by Ian Smith and continued by Mugabe – Zeno, his 'passion' for elephants and rhinos apparently exceeded only by his contempt for African life, has, by Dave the hunter's count, 'slotted' some thirty poachers. Meanwhile Jimmy, the policeman and ex-Rhodesian soldier, pursues another slotting expedition: by his own count, he has coolly murdered 84 alleged rapists and drug-dealers, not one of whom, it seems, was accorded the benefit of a trial, let alone convicted in a court of law. Perhaps Jimmy's killing spree is justified by Mugabe's executive lawlessness. A century earlier, Johnson assures us, the European takeover of Africa had ended such anarchy, stamped out cannibalism, and imposed the rule of law. With the end of colonialism, however, life expectancy has gone down while lawlessness, disease, even cannibalism (on Dave the hunter's authority), are back. I was ready to cancel my LRB subscription. But then I turned the page. There, Richard Gott lays bare the horrors of colonialism as he brilliantly exposes The Oxford History of the British Empire for the whitewashing that it is. The LRB, after all, is capable of self-correction.

Michael West
Chapel Hill, North Carolina