There were probably many occasions this past year, but nothing quite like ex-trade unionist, now ANC secretary-general, Gwede Mantashe's speech last week at Zanu-PF's congress, to move one to repeat E.E. Cummings' laconic observation: "A politician is an arse upon which everyone has sat except a man".
Mantashe pledged the ANC's outright support for an election victory for Robert Mugabe's ZANU-PF, offering to assist the party with strategy, messaging, and electioneering. It sounds all too proper for a ZANU-PF campaign. Though glad of the support (since ZANU has on votes lost the last couple of elections), I'm sure Minister of Defence Emmerson Mnangagwa was scratching his head wondering what use he could make of the ANC's bourgeois election campaign techniques of polling and focus groups. Mnangagwa simply unleashes State terror squads and sets up torture camps. A "killer campaign" in the USA does not mean the same thing as it does in Zimbabwe. GOTV (Get Out the Vote) is done with a truncheon not a phone call.
Or perhaps it is the ANC, looking ahead that hopes to learn more from ZANU-PF about stuffing ballot boxes, starving the electorate into submission, suppressing the media, and beating up opposition leaders. One recalls Mantashe lashing out at COSATU for holding a civil society conference last year. Spooked by shades of the Movement for Democratic Change in Zimbabwe, he accused the unions of plotting "regime change". Like ZANU-PF the ANC has more than once said it will not accept an electoral defeat.
So the ordinary people of Zimbabwe struggle on, desperate and invisible, while the moribund African nationalist liberation parties steal the food and the money, and grow all dewy eyed for past glories as they assemble at ZANU-PF's congress (their Manguang, riven as it is with factionalism, corruption and a succession debate looming ever bigger as Mugabe's political general paresis loosens his grip on power).
Forgotten too was history. The ANC, with the notable exception of Thabo Mbeki, had always sided with ZAPU (Soviet backed) and not ZANU (China supported). In fact MK veterans have testified to exchanging fire in the bush war with ZANU cadres. Post-liberation, Mnangagwa, leader of the notorious Fifth Brigade and perpetrator of the Gukurahundi (the ethnic massacre of more than 20 000 Zulu descendants in Matabeleland), presided over the torture and detention of the ANC's entire military command in southern Zimbabwe.
South Africa has never played a straight brokerage in Zimbabwe. The continued suppression of the presidential report on the 2002 election is telling enough. Mbeki's controversial "quiet diplomacy", which a famous satirist observed was so effective you couldn't hear the people scream, was de facto surreptitious appeasement.