Sharp Focus January 2024

In this issue we will look at Peter Godwin discussing a photograph of Robert Mugabe by Rob Cooper:
(click on the photo to view larger)

The Emperor’s New Clothes

On the face of it there’s nothing that is remarkable about this photograph of Zimbabwe’s president Robert Mugabe. It seems like another stock shot of him at a political rally. The iconography of power is all here. The bulky armchair chair is appropriately throne like, the gold ring and watch peep from beneath the sleeve, indicating that he is a ‘big man’ in the African tradition, a man with resources who can help those who curry his favour. And behind him are arrayed the usual tableaux of enforcers: the senior cop, garnished with braid and medals, and the security agent, complete with aviator shades, goatee and moustache, and double breasted jacket – all the better for concealing the shoulder holster beneath its bulkier cut. And underneath them all, of course, that old cliché of power, the red carpet.

But to my mind, this image is laced with the visual clues to the elderly president’s desperate political calculus.

It is taken in 2000 when, after twenty years of a consolidating his one party state – that party being the ZANU PF on the banner behind him – his formerly quiescent people have suddenly risen to challenge him by voting against a constitutional amendment that would extend his presidential term limits.

Mugabe is furious and in this election campaign he is fighting back by dusting off his old credentials as a guerrilla leader and reheating the congealed remnants of an ancient anti-colonial struggle that most of his young population can barely recall.

So he has changed out of the Saville Row suits and silk polka dot ties of the proto-capitalist, foreign investment friendly leader and donned once more the garb
of the guerrilla: the olive combat gear that he used to wear in the early 1970s, in order to emphasise his man-of-action persona, with its chilling reminder of the ‘power flows from a barrel of gun’ dictum that seems to remain indelibly in his political DNA. (Fidel Castro is the main practitioner of this ageing guerrilla act.) The uniform is part of a greater problem, the near universal inability of former guerrilla groups to transform themselves into truly democratic political parties; their inability to distinguish disagreement from treason. Their assumption that the concept of the ‘loyal opposition’ is an oxymoron.

But his get-up also reveals something else about Mugabe – that he was never actually a soldier in the bush war. The signs are all here: the light blue socks and slip-on, leather soled loafers, the coltish knock-kneed stance, the geeky multiple pens of the school teacher he once was, carefully arrayed in his top pocket, the outsized, almost feminizing spectacles – which themselves provide a mask for his impassive face. All of these help to betray a man who was always more at home behind a desk than in the field.

The president has a lot on his mind. He is busy putting in place a campaign of torture, intimidation, media clampdowns, gerrymandering and vote rigging.

And the slogan partial concealed behind him, actually reads (in Shona, the vernacular) Our Land is Our Power (chk). This was the cornerstone of his furious reaction to the sudden appearance of a credible political challenge: to dismiss the new opposition (Movement for Democratic Change) as lackeys to former white rulers, and to confiscate those farms still owned by whites and redistribute them to political allies. Over the next few years this deliberately anarchic transfer destroys commercial agriculture and with it most of the country’s economy. Zimbabwe now has the fastest shrinking GDP in the world, and the highest inflation rate. Since this photograph was taken, almost half of its adults have fled the country.

What we are seeing here is an old man in his moment of Sampsonian spasm, pulling down the pillars of the temple around him, ruining an entire country in order to cling to power. This is a man who once thought his legacy might rival Nelson Mandela’s. Zimbabwe had the highest literacy rate in Africa, and a flourishing economy, with the continent’s second highest standard of living. But Mugabe is sacrificing all of it to stay on this chair into his dotage. His expression, disdainful, aloof, sees barely to mask his cold rage at his querulous populace and his determination to whip them back into line – whatever the cost.

It is a powerful portrait of political hubris.

EVALUATION OF THEME IMAGES – JANUARY 2024

Salons

Salon dates for the following year are available from the PSSA website under the tab Salon Calendar and Results for the Year Ending June 2024 or from www.photovaultonline.com

All the brochures containing details are available on both the PSSA and Photovault websites.

Please see our record-keeping page for information on how to submit your salon acceptances to our club records.

Themes and Outings

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Formats and sizes of photo submissions, and naming conventions

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Our committee

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