IN 1991, Queen Elizabeth II visited Zimbabwe for the meeting of the heads of government in the Commonwealth, a community of former British colonies.
A photograph taken during the trip shows the host leader, Robert Mugabe, then-president of Zimbabwe, a poster child of post-colonial leadership in Africa at the time, smiling with the queen. In a way, Mugabe’s excitement represented the national mood — the fervent interest, obsession, and fascination that Zimbabweans had with British royalty.
For many Zimbabweans, then, the United Kingdom’s longest-serving monarch who died aged 96 recently, was a celebrity as much as she was a diplomat. In a country where Queen Elizabeth’s name had long been immortalised, it was not difficult to imagine why.
In the heart of the capital, Harare, the prestigious Queen Elizabeth High School is a constant reminder of the sway the monarch had in the southern African country. A kilometre away from the school, a big hotel is named after her. To the west, another is aptly called the Queen’s Courtyard. Beyond just buildings and schools, countless girls have been christened after her in the country, undoubtedly a show of admiration and respect.
Her visit, the first since Zimbabwe’s independence from Britain in 1980, epitomised the cordial diplomatic relations between the Crown and its former colony. That relations between Mugabe and the British government would sour so dramatically was not seen coming and anyone suggesting it would have been dismissed contemptuously.
And rightly so. At the turn of the millennium, Mugabe wanted the constitution amended to allow, among other things, the seizure of white farms without compensation and redistribution to landless Black people.
That, however, was rejected in a referendum. Mugabe felt the British had reneged on their pledge to finance the country’s land purchase deal under the Lancaster House Agreement, a ceasefire settlement between nationalist rebel leaders who fought in the war of independence of the 1970s and Ian Smith, the thenprime minister of Rhodesia, who declared independence from Britain.
“We do not accept that Britain has a special responsibility to meet the cost of land purchase in Zimbabwe,” Clare Short, the UK’s then international development secretary, wrote in a letter to Mugabe’s government. Under the Lancaster House Agreement, land redistribution would be on a “willing buyer and willing seller” basis and would be financed by the British government.
Attempts to engage further with the UK government on the land issue came to a head when gay rights activist Peter Tatchell ambushed Mugabe’s limousine in 1999 and tried to perform a citizen’s arrest when he visited London for talks with then-Foreign Office minister Peter Hain.
The following year, Mugabe broke ranks with the British and sanctioned the invasion of white commercial farmers by veterans of the liberation struggle, who often killed and wounded farmers in the process and replaced them with landless Black people.
Banks holding billions of dollars’ worth of bonds as security for loans to commercial white farmers were liquidated after the attacks. Because Zimbabwe’s economy was agriculture based, it was severely affected. For the first time, manufacturing industries had no raw materials as newly resettled farmers struggled to produce without funding. Production fell, triggering layoffs.
With no security of tenure for newly acquired land, Black Zimbabwean farmers struggled to raise funding for production. It also did not help that the Mugabe administration, which had become increasingly dictatorial, failed to plan properly for the transition.
Politically, the appearance of opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) on the political scene in 1999 was a source of discomfort for Mugabe. He believed the opposition was being funded by the UK government and commercial farmers — keen to keep their land — an accusation The Crown kept quiet: UK’s broken land promises Mubabe’s Zanu PF administration maintains to this date. In the run-up to the 2002 elections, Zanu PF unleashed violence on the opposition MDC, a development observers said helped skew the vote in its favour.
The Commonwealth suspended Zimbabwe from the group for the deadly electoral violence. That culminated in the total breakdown of relations between the two countries. “We are not Europeans,” Mugabe told delegates at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in September 2002, six months after Zimbabwe was suspended from the Commonwealth. “We have not asked for any inch of Europe, or any square inch of that territory.
So (PM Tony) Blair, keep your England and let me keep my Zimbabwe.” Emmerson Mnangagwa, who took over from Mugabe in a November 2017 military coup, has largely followed in his predecessor’s footsteps, accusing Britain in December 2021 of a “brazen, self-confessed” violation of Zimbabwe’s “sovereignty”, adding this was a threat to “our national security and stability by the British government”. — Aljazeera
