Political Theater

Robert Mugabe and how how quickly style and showmanship can sweep away an audience, even when the underlying message promotes violence and jingoistic triumphalism.

Still from 'Breakfast with Mugabe.'

In 2001, on the eve of national elections, Zimbabwean newspapers reported that Robert Mugabe had turned to a white Zimbabwean psychiatrist to help him cope with recurrent visitations by the ngozi, or malevolent spirit, of one of his former comrades. This news forms the basis for the play, “Breakfast with Mugabe,” on extended run Off-Broadway in New York City. The play delves into the psychological motivations behind Mugabe’s highly controversial land redistribution policies.

The play may overemphasize the way politicians’ personal lives determine their public acts, thereby divesting the land redistribution policies of their deliberate and quasi-socialist underpinnings. Yet the portrait playwright Fraser Grace paints of Mugabe as a man still striving to shake off the colonial yoke twenty years after independence, refreshingly enlivens public dialogue about Zimbabwe’s most (in)famous political figure who has come to stand in the Western news media as an almost parodic symbol of evil.

Still from ‘Breakfast with Mugabe.’

The actor Michael Rogers gave an astonishingly powerful performance the night I was in the audience, and he was especially convincing as a charismatic, if dangerous head of state in a scene near the end that stages a political rally. As his populist rhetoric soars in the small theater, one sees how quickly style and showmanship can sweep away an audience, even when the underlying message promotes violence and jingoistic triumphalism. It takes a convincing actor to show how powerfully persuasive acts of political theater can be.

One of the more surprising suggestions of the play is that it is through his confrontation with his own traumatic past (via psychoanalysis) that Mugabe is able to shake off his anxiety and recognize that the answer, for him, lies in a “Third Chimurenga,” in the form of a new land reform policy, that effectively renders the psychiatrist himself, bereft and haunted by his own ngozi. While psychoanalysis is not often thought of as the master’s tool used to dismantle the master’s house, the more benevolent spirit of Fanon may well approve of this reversal.

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.