Africa Is a Country

"You no longer need your calculators to go for lunch in Harare"

Africa Is a Country Podcast
African Five-a-Side Podcast

"You no longer need your calculators to go for lunch in Harare"

By
Sean Jacobs

As 42 opposition activists were facing treason charges in Zimbabwe for watching video footage of the Egyptian democracy protests, the Financial Times sent Alec Russell, its comment and analysis editor, down to Harare to interview Morgan Tsvangirai, Zimbabwe’s Prime Minister. Tsvangirai’s opposition Movement for Democratic Change is serving together in a Government of National Unity with Life President Robert Mugabe’s ZANU-PF since 2009. This arrangement is all tenuous of course. ZANU-PF thugs and the police continue to harass opposition supporters and some Tsvangirai’s supporters want him to leave the government since ZANU-PF ministers occupy key all Cabinet key portfolios at the expense of the MDC. The piece was for the FT Weekend’s feature “Lunch with the FT.” Until recently Russell was as the FT’s correspondent in Johannesburg. The piece is vintage Russell: He uses the term he invented for African leaders:”Big Man;” gets his facts from the Cato Institute, and sundowners is “that ritual of the African safari: the serving of drinks at the close of the day.”

But we do learn a few things:

“You no longer need your calculators to go for lunch in Harare.”

If you were to enter [Cabinet meetings] you would not know who was who, MDC or Zanu-PF. The seating is Zanu-PF, MDC, Zanu-PF, MDC … and he [Mugabe] and I direct. We really do consult when things get out of hand.”

“I used to think [Mugabe] is callous and all that,” he says. “But you know what? He’s human after all. He’s very humane. There is a split personality between Mugabe the [revolutionary] hero and Mugabe the villain …  If you confront him, he tends to close his mind and to say ‘I’m not guilty of violence. I’m not guilty of this. I’m not guilty … ”

Source.

Further Reading

The battle over the frame

As Hollywood recycles pro-war propaganda for Gen Z, Youssef Chahine’s ‘Djamila, the Algerian’ reminds us that anti-colonial cinema once turned imperial film language against its makers—and still can.

Fictions of freedom

K. Sello Duiker’s ‘The Quiet Violence of Dreams’ still haunts Cape Town, a city whose beauty masks its brutal exclusions. Two decades later, in the shadow of Amazon’s new development, its truths are more urgent than ever.

When things fall apart

Against a backdrop of global collapse, one exhibition used Chinua Achebe’s classic to hold space for voices from the Global South—and asked who gets to imagine the future.

The General sleeps

As former Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari’s death is mourned with official reverence, a generation remembers the eight years that drove them out.

The grift tank

In Washington’s think tank ecosystem, Africa is treated as a low-stakes arena where performance substitutes for knowledge. The result: unqualified actors shaping policy on behalf of militarists, lobbyists, and frauds.

Kagame’s hidden war

Rwanda’s military deployments in Mozambique and its shadowy ties to M23 rebels in eastern Congo are not isolated interventions, rather part of a broader geopolitical strategy to expand its regional influence.

After the coups

Without institutional foundations or credible partners, the Alliance of Sahel States risks becoming the latest failed experiment in regional integration.