The New York Review of Books - 07.11.2019

24 The New York Review

the “Lacoste” group, after the French

fashion line with the crocodile logo. He

also could count on the support of the

National Liberation War Veterans As-

sociation, the shock troops of Mugabe’s

violent land seizures, and elements of

Zimbabwe’s armed forces, including

the commander in chief, Constantino

Chiwenga, with whom he had over-

seen Operation Gukurahundi. Grace

Mugabe’s party support rested on a

circle of young, social media–savvy

politicians known as Generation 40, or

G40, a “new guard” that believed the

revered war veterans had accumulated

too much power. G40, named by Jona-

than Moyo, a Svengali- like figure who

served as Grace Mugabe’s closest aide

and stirred her presidential ambitions,

“wanted to create a new narrative that

you didn’t have to fight in the war to

lead the country,” one party insider told

me in December 2017. “Anyone linked

to the war had to be eliminated.” The

split between the two factions had little

to do with ideology or a vision for the

country. “Both factions were corrupt,”

writes Rogers. “They had all been part

of a government and party that had pil-

laged the nation for decades.”

As Rogers tells the story, the battle

over succession intensified toward

the end of 2017. That winter, Mugabe

embarked on a series of Presidential

Youth Interface Rallies designed to

stoke enthusiasm for ZANU-PF before

the next presidential election in 2018.

Grace traveled with him and, with

Mugabe often too enfeebled to address

the crowds, filled in with gusto. She

used the opportunity to make a move

against Mnangagwa. Rogers writes:

At rally after rally the First Lady,

51, long- limbed as an antelope,

glamorous in designer glasses and

chic beret... prowled the stages,

mic in hand, verbally assaulting

her elder rival as he sat numb and

emotionless just a few yards away

from her. He was a “usurper,” she

said, a “traitor”; he was plotting a

military coup against her husband.

Mnangagwa brought matters to a

head at a rally in Bulawayo in early

November. He and his aides bussed

in hundreds of war veterans and other

supporters to a soccer stadium and, as

Grace Mugabe began another diatribe

from the stage, the crowd started boo-

ing her. “It was unheard of,” Rogers

writes. At that point, the nonagenarian

president “stumbled to the microphone

and waved a bony finger in the air.

‘We are denigrated and insulted in the

name of Mnangagwa?...I will remove

him!’” Mnangagwa was out of power—

and on the run—within days.

Mnangagwa’s flight to Mozambique

and then refuge in South Africa

prompted an outpouring of jubila-

tion among members of the G40 fac-

tion. Grace Mugabe, it seemed, was on

her way to coronation as Zimbabwe’s

vice-president, one weakening heart-

beat away from the presidency. The

drama might have ended there were it

not for a coalition of disaffected spies,

ZANU-PF officials of wavering loyalty,

and longtime Mugabe opponents who

had been meeting across the border in

South Africa for two years, reaching

out to potential allies there in the rul-

ing party and the military, quietly erod-

ing Mugabe’s support.

Rogers devotes half his book to this

previously unknown campaign, focus-

ing on several of the participants. Tom

Ellis, a white Zimbabwean who had

fled the country as a teenager in 1980,

owned a small home maintenance

business in Randburg, a neighbor-

hood in northwest Johannesburg, but

he devoted most of his time to provid-

ing moral support to the opposition in

exile. Ellis had helped smuggle Move-

ment for Democratic Change activists

out of Zimbabwe during the crackdown

that followed Tsvangirai’s victory in

2008; met regularly in a smoke-filled

sports bar called the Sundowner with

a procession of opposition activists,

human rights lawyers, and dispos-

sessed farmers; and organized visits

to the International Criminal Court

at The Hague to draw attention to

Mugabe’s abuses. “His thing—his love,

his passion, his all- consuming obses-

sion—was the politics and business of

Zimbabwe,” Rogers writes.

Charles Wezhira, aka Agent Kasper,

a karate blackbelt, former member of a

paramilitary police unit known as the

Black Boots, and agent with Mugabe’s

Central Intelligence Organization, had

spied for years on Zimbabwe’s diaspora

in Johannesburg. In 2015 he received

an assignment from his spymasters to

assassinate Ellis by shooting him at an

ATM to make it look like a robbery.

Ellis noticed he was being followed

and turned the tables on his would-be

killer, blocking his car at a traffic light

and inviting him for a drink at the Sun-

downer. Wezhira, as it turned out, had

grown disenchanted with the regime

and his job, and the encounter led to a

strategic partnership.

The most prominent figure in the

nascent coalition was Christopher

Mutsvangwa, a war veteran and long-

time ZANU-PF stalwart. Described

by Rogers as “a broad- shouldered

middleweight with a perfectly round

shaved head and a penchant for sharp

suits and colourful silk ties,” he had

run the state- owned TV network; over-

seen the Mineral Marketing Corpora-

tion, which is responsible for selling

Zimbabwe’s diamonds; and served as

ambassador to China during the Look

East policy of the 2000s, when US and

European economic sanctions obliged

Mugabe to seek other support for his

regime. Mutsvangwa also served as the

head of a war veterans group, which

by 2016 was under near daily attack

by Grace Mugabe and her G40 allies,

who accused them of being “drunks”

and “lunatics.” Robert Mugabe fired

Mutsvangwa following a protest march

organized by the veterans in Harare.

After publicly denouncing the First

Lady as “a mad woman latched onto

the tenuous blessings of a marriage cer-

tificate,” Mutsvangwa began contact-

ing senior military officers, warning

them that the Mugabes were destroy-

ing the country. He also flew to South

Africa, where he met Ellis. As Rogers

writes, the two men formed an unlikely

alliance:

By rights they should have been

enemies: Mutsvangwa was a fa-

mous member of the political party

that had laid waste to Zimbabwe.

He was the Chairman of an or-

ganisation that had taken [Ellis’s]

sister’s farm and those of dozens

of his friends; it was war veterans

who had assaulted white farm-

ers, beaten and killed their work-

ers. War veterans were the shock

troops Mugabe could always call

on for violence.

A series of meetings between the

anti- Mugabe diaspora community and

disillusioned Mugabe loyalists led,

in the summer of 2016, to the North-

gate Declaration, a verbal pact that

committed the participants to oppose

G40 and support Mnangagwa for the

presidency. Ellis and his cohorts had

little affection for the Crocodile. Even

so, they regarded the fragmented and

weakened MDC as ineffective, viewed

Grace as a meddlesome amateur who

was unlikely to break from the ruinous

policies of her husband, and were reas-

sured by the pro- Western, pro- business

messages carried by Mnangagwa’s

emissaries to South Africa. Over the

next months, Wezhira moved between

Johannesburg and Harare, trying to

turn his contacts in the security agen-

cies against Mugabe. Mutsvangwa con-

tinued his efforts to line up support

among senior military officers, while

Ellis sought to overcome the suspicions

of the MDC leadership and bring all the

parties together.

How important was this group in ex-

pediting the Mugabes’ downfall? The

president’s strategic blunders prob-

ably contributed the most to it. After

Mnangagwa’s escape from Zimbabwe,

Mugabe, fearing betrayal, ordered

Supporters of Emmerson Mnangagwa waiting for his return to Zimbabwe on the day after

Robert Mugabe resigned as president, Harare, November 2017

K

im Ludbrook /

EPA

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