Bobby Mugabe and Auctoritas

"...and where it's going, no one knows..." N. Lowe

I understand that casually stretching and taking that photo on my way into Zimbabwe was not a good idea. My buddy was haggling with the Visa people; I was chatting with the nephew of the Mikune chief, a former game warden. Bobby had declared the second or third salvo about 'humanitarian workers,' in late summer 2004. But I didn't have any identification as a hunger worker, and I seemed to be doing a good job at big, dumb, and affable.

(The border security, 'privately contracted' wear uniforms that read 'Auctoritas.' All the more allegorical path to make our second or third pass through Zimbabwe. No question mark or other query punctuated the name, like "Quid Auctoritas?". Passing outside towns we saw fringe lines of trainees in mufti on the side of the road, being trained in the shade. They stood at attention or sat or slouched against a tree.)

Minor, private statements of rebellion can be wonderfully satisfying. Plus the two Ugliest Americans ever minted were in the van, too. When the Auctoritas official asked me to step back out of the cab, I explained that I had been taking a picture of their wonderful national Crest. "What kind of bird is that? Right, up there." No, I hadn't 'taken a picture through' of the men with the Kalashnikovs. I had to step back to see his sunglasses. From my vantage I saw only 'Auctoritas' and a shiny black brim. Really cheap technology offers great things like panoramic settings that let you get the undercarriage inspection port, too. I have gotten by on height and whimsy with auctoritas most of my life. Quid? Quod? I have those answers, but the world seems much less interested.

In Out of America, Keith Richburg points out that when taking a chance or dodging a bribe, the bigger the lie the better. It wasn't plausibility, but scope. I learned this ex post facto, from the Joburg bookstore, about Auctoritas. The old saying in the church is that 'it is easier to ask forgiveness than permission.' Since the question about the Anglican Communion and Africa has been 'Quid Auctoritas?' I felt on my home pitch.

The story is downhill from here. He wanted my camera. Or money. I had the shotgun seat to ward off the vertigo that has me sidelined entirely now, but which presented another kind of calculated fib and bluff that late summer. The real joy of the trip was being myself, having said good-bye to all that I left behind. A vehement suspension of belief and disbelief, going overboard like poor Pip off the Pequod. Jacob liked the bluff. He liked 50 Cent, too, so we debated the relative merits of Eminem and other world-clashing correlates from Zambia to Botswana.

I presumed Auctoritas was a leftover Rhodesian affectation, but I was wrong. Since then, Bobby Mugabe has been daily in mind and omnipresent in the news. That night, I flexed my Zim dollars on Zimbabwe Cricket jerseys and Castles, water over the falls. But that's for a different time.


Yes, He Has No Bananas
by Joe-Bob Briggs

What possessed Robert Mugabe to start wearing the wispy little Hitlerian mustache? Fortunately, he has the big saucer eyeglasses and the statesmanlike receding hairline to announce his grandfatherly intentions. We could send over the cast of "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" to straighten him out, but unfortunately, the entire cast would be seized and imprisoned for ten years as soon as they set foot in Zimbabwe, under Mugabe's "worse than dogs or pigs" statutes. Mugabe used these laws to throw Zimbabwe's ex-president, Canaan Banana, into prison, claiming all gays contribute to the aids crisis (highest infection rate in the world; 20 percent of the Zimbabwean population; 2,000 dying each week). Besides having a name that sounds like someone who would march in the Gay Pride Parade, Mr. Banana had been caught in flagrante aardvarko, and so the dignity of the state was at risk.

Robert Mugabe must get a lot of email from the Pope. As the last great Roman Catholic dictator, Mugabe can't risk the confessional in a nation full of spies and enemies and vengeance-seeking widows, so I would imagine he improvises. He uses the old "enemies of the state" stratagem. There were those who said that Canaan Banana--sorry, I can't help repeating the name--was simply a political enemy who was conveniently removed when he misused his banana. But normally, Mugabe is not shy about simply saying, "He's a traitor." Virtually none of the traitors are traitors in the Western sense. They are traitors only under the narrow definition of failing to support the Zimbabwe African National Union-Popular Front Party. (And doesn't that just trip nicely off the tongue? It must be hell at outdoor rallies. "All together now: Zimbabwe African National Union-Popular Front Forever! Okay, again! Zimbabwe African...")

At any rate, Mugabe's willingness to designate virtually anyone, including the official weather forecaster, as an enemy of the state, is a fairly common occupational quirk among despots both ancient and modern. In Mugabe's case, it's a self-deception, but I think it's an honest self-deception. He really does think that any enemy of him personally is an enemy of Zimbabwe. After all, he has all those United Nations citations to prove that he's a good guy, doing the best he can.

I think it's important to Mugabe to be remembered as a good guy. He's eighty years old and has so many ailments (cancer of the throat, cancer of the prostate, at least one stroke) that he must know he's dying, and yet he holds onto power like a possessed man. (Somehow you can't imagine Mugabe taking one of those Boston University retired-dictator-in-residence gigs.) He's reached the stage that corresponds to the last three years of Ivan the Terrible's life, when suddenly Ivan decided he needed to find the names of every single person he had ever killed, take them to a church, and have a priest read them out and bless them. This was a considerable undertaking, requiring thousands of bureaucrats inquiring in hundreds of places. Ivan, like Mugabe, was a religious man, and he sensed a reckoning.

What's odd in Mugabe's case is that while he's cracking up, he's also still cracking down