Mugabe and my South African past

As brief personal background, I was born in South Africa in 1948. My father, Robin Collins, wrote a series of novels under his own name and the nom-de-plume of Robin Cranford. One of these novels, My City Fears Tomorrow, set in Johannesburg, was banned by the apartheid regime because it described, with considerable precision, how black Africans had no civil rights and could be arrested and tortured by the police effectively without redress. Not long afterwards my father, who was a liberal, decided he would prefer to take advantage of his dual British citizenship, and the family settled in England in 1960. We greatly preferred Britain's settled tolerance to South Africa's institutionalised racism.

I retain vivid memories of South Africa, and have been haunted by her history and that of her neighbours. I remember as a child that parks had chairs which had blankes (whites in Afrikaans) and nie-blankes (non-whites) written on them. As part of my South African childhood, it was an extraordinary experience to travel north in the late 1950s on holiday to Rhodesia (as Zimbabwe then was ) and go into hotel bars where white barmen were serving prosperous black businessmen. Compared with South Africa, Rhodesia was then a model of racial toleration. To my eyes, it is a special tragedy that subsequently, under the Smith regime, Rhodesia was forced to undergo a brutal civil war between white settlers and African freedom fighters, a war which has had profound consequences in shaping Zimbabwe's subsequent history. Perhaps the most tragic of these is that nearly three decades after achieving independence, Mugabe's administration continues to live in the past, invoking an imaginary threat from Britain to justify its right to rig elections and use violent repression against the democratic majority.

Considering the moral and political support which is currently being given to Robert Mugabe by the South African president Thabo Mbeki, I have written a commentary on the most recent events in Zimbabwe on my Warwick Collins blog.