Zimbabwe Revolution Holds Strong

5-2-25

On November 14, 2017 the corporate media reported an imminent military coup against 93-year-old Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe. The US Embassy in Harare had closed. It looked the the City of London bankers had finally gotten their wish.

But at 1:26 AM local time, the Zimbabwe Defence Forces Major General SB Moyo issued the following statement:

“Firstly, we wish to assure the nation that His Excellency, The President, of the Republic of Zimbabwe, Head of State and Government and Commander in Chief of the Zimbabwe Defence Forces, Cde R.G Mugabe and his family are safe and sound and their security is guaranteed. We are only targeting criminals around him who are committing crimes that are causing social and economic suffering in the country in order to bring them to justice.”

The statement went on to say:

“As you are aware, there is a plan by the same individuals to influence the current purging taking place in ZANU-PF to the civil service. We are against that act of injustice and we intend to protect everyone of you against it.”

Mugabe’s wife Grace was reported to have fled to Namibia, while Mugabe remained in his home. In August she was accused of assaulting a woman in her native South Africa. The 52-year-old married her husband in 1996.

A month earlier she had pushed for her husband to sack Zimbabwe’s Vice President Emmerson Mnangagwa. Grace Mugabe represented the youthful G-40 faction within ZANU-PF, while Mnangagwa represented the old-guard Lacoste faction.

Apparently Grace got her way. Mnangagwa was sacked. But later Zimbabwe’s Army Chief Constantino Chiwenga warned, “The current purging which is clearly targeting members of the party with a liberation background must stop forthwith.”

It was clear that many in the Zimbabwe military felt that ZANU-PF has been infiltrated by foreign agents who were pushing a counter-revolutionary agenda through these purges. Mnangagwa was soon reinstated and became President of ZANU-PF.

Mnangagwa, like Robert Mugabe, is a veteran of the liberation struggle during which the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) and the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU) fought to oust the white minority apartheid government of Rhodesia and its Prime Minister Ian Smith in 1979, giving birth to the nation of Zimbabwe the following year.

In 1988 ZANU and ZAPU merged into a Patriotic Front (PF) to form ZANU-PF, a self-proclaimed “conservative socialist” party with an emphasis on pan-Africanism and anti-imperialism. Land reform has been a priority.

Violence by white farmers whose land is being redistributed to poor blacks during this process has been common, despite the fair compensation offered by ZANU-PF. The corporate media time and again attempted to blame the violence on Mugabe instead.

A currency crisis followed that round of propaganda, created as always by the international bankers. This left the country unable to import food in the early 2000’s when store shelves went bare for a few years. When I visited the nation in 2009, things were just beginning to normalize.

Despite numerous attempts to destabilize the revolutionary government in Zimbabwe, the country’s July 30, 2018 elections saw Mnangagwa declare victory when he took the reins from Mugabe, who stepped down on November 2017 at the age of 93.

Mugabe had spent the better part of a dozen years in prison under the white-minority regime of Ian Smith in what was then called Rhodesia in honor of its namesake Cecil Rhodes - the Crown Roundtable member who was a cohort of Sir Walter Rothschild. Mugabe’s wife Hayfron had also been sentenced to two years in prison because of a speech she gave in which she said that Queen Elizabeth II, “can go to hell”.

When he got out in 1974, Mugabe joined forces with Herbert Chitepo and the remnants of Joshua Nkomo’s Southern Rhodesian African National Congress to carry out of guerrilla war against Rhodesia’s apartheid regime. With assistance from revolutionary governments in Tanzania under President Julius Nyerere and Mozambique under President Samora Machel, Mugabe launched ZAPU (Zimbabwe African People’s Union), then the more radical ZANU-PF (Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front).

From 1975-1979 ZANU-PF waged a guerilla war which resulted in the independence from Britain in. Mugabe became the most prominent guerrilla leader fighting the Smith colonial regime during the Rhodesian Bush War. He became President of the new nation of Zimbabwe in April 1980.

Mugabe died on September 6, 2019. Forty-six years after the revolution his successor Emmerson Mnangagwa still carries forward the example of a liberated Zimbabwe.