So, one more gone...
Nov. 22nd, 2017 07:55 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
danalwynIt's odd to think about but for most of my adult life, Robert Mugabe has been sort of an eternal figure delving deeper and deeper into pariah-hood. He's always been sort of the clowinsh version of the Kim family of North Korea, a would-be totalitarian dictator with an intense personal story hampered by the comic ineffectiveness of his ruling party and his government. Now that power structure has toppled him by themselves.
I don't hold any illusions that this is an unalloyed good; the generals and politicians who abandoned Mugabe in his final days also got rich off of exploiting the people. They were never entirely competent, and certainly they were complicit in his looting of Zimbabwe's economy. We're not getting a democracy there - but maybe we're getting a more traditional authoritarian kleptocracy that will have less effects on its citizens.
And I'm in no way thinking we're seeing part of an African renaissance or whatever we're calling this particular sequence of events. This is not a revolution. It is perhaps just a reminder that people don't like it when dictators try to turn a country into their family's fiefdom, which is about the best new I think I can hope for.
I don't hold any illusions that this is an unalloyed good; the generals and politicians who abandoned Mugabe in his final days also got rich off of exploiting the people. They were never entirely competent, and certainly they were complicit in his looting of Zimbabwe's economy. We're not getting a democracy there - but maybe we're getting a more traditional authoritarian kleptocracy that will have less effects on its citizens.
And I'm in no way thinking we're seeing part of an African renaissance or whatever we're calling this particular sequence of events. This is not a revolution. It is perhaps just a reminder that people don't like it when dictators try to turn a country into their family's fiefdom, which is about the best new I think I can hope for.