Will The Old Mutasa Come Back Please


Didymus Mutasa has become the most feared man in the close circles that surround Mugabe.
• Minister of State for National Security Apr 2005 - Present
• Anti-Corruption and Anti-Monopolies Programme Minister 2003 - 2005
• Speaker - Parliament of Zimbabwe 1980 - 1990

Report By Zimbabwe Independent
By Trevor Grundy

FIFTY years ago he was a deeply Christian young man and black
nationalist working round-the-clock on a multi-racial farm that was famous
in liberation circles, and beyond, and hated by Rhodesia's white minority
government.

He became a living legend among liberal Christians by helping to
make Cold Comfort Farm into a first class agricultural training ground and a
psychological liberation centre that was an early staging post on the long
march from colonial oppression in Rhodesia to majority rule in Zimbabwe.

"A man of high integrity and Christian character," said Guy
Clutton-Brock, the Welsh-born champion of black freedom who became Zimbabwe's
first and only official white hero when President Robert Mugabe buried his
ashes at Harare's Heroes Acre in 1996.

"He never feared to speak his mind and he was always a sensitive
leader, a man of vision, an optimist with a profound belief in his fellow
man regardless of race, colour, creed."

The man of whom Clutton-Brock spoke so highly now holds high
rank in the government of President Mugabe. As minister of national security
and head of the secret police, Didymus Mutasa is one of the most feared and
ruthless men in Zimbabwe, second in power only to Mugabe.

Mutasa, praised by the devout Clutton-Brock as a Christian of
integrity, sensitivity, vision and love for all his fellow men, achieved
international notoriety in 2002 when he was asked how he felt about three
serious problems confronting Zimbabwe.

The first question concerned the fear in that year that severe
drought might result in the death of half of Zimbabwe's 12 million
population, many of them supporters of the then confident opposition
Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). The second concerned the thousands of
Zimbabweans who die each week from Aids. And the third related to the mass
exodus from the country of skilled blacks and whites.

Mutasa replied: "We would be better off with only six million
people, with our own (ruling party) people who supported the liberation
struggle. We don't want all these extra people."

Thus spoke the man who had once been a byword as the kind face
of the new society to come and who was described by Diana Mitchell in her
book Nationalist Leaders in Zimbabwe as "an essentially gentle and
infinitely reasonable man".

British overseas development minister at the time, Clare Short,
said: "To welcome the death of nearly half the people in a country is
unforgivable. No one should forgive him (Mutasa)."

And leading Danish academic development expert Amanda Hammar
commented: "Mutasa's infamously stated desire to discard surplus populations
has resonance with historic precedents such as National Socialism in Germany
and its translation into routinised governmental annihilation."

It is little wonder that many Zimbabweans ask how the man their
history presented as a near-saint is now at the centre of a web of state
violence and alleged corruption. Who, they wonder, is the real Didymus Noel
Edwin Mutasa?

Back in the 1960s and 1970s, Mutasa was the close friend of the
Anglican lay missionary Clutton-Brock, hated with his wife Molly by the
white farming community as "communist troublemakers". They worked together
at Cold Comfort Farm, a multi-racial cooperative where farming skills were
learned and political ideas discussed endlessly.

A young black intellectual, Robert Mugabe, also became a close
friend of Clutton-Brock, who was expelled from Rhodesia in 1971 for his
criticism of the country's de facto racial apartheid. Hundreds of Africans,
including Mutasa, wept at the airport as he left.

Supporters said of Clutton-Brock that his only offence was to
turn "yes men slaves" into independent human beings. When he died, Mugabe
attended the memorial service at the Church of St Martin's in the Field in
London and was given Clutton-Brock's ashes to be taken to Harare. With
Mutasa by his side, Mugabe supervised the burial of the ashes at the North
Korean-built Heroes Acre. Clutton-Brock is the only white person to have
been buried there.

Mutasa was born in the eastern Zimbabwe town of Rusape in July
1935, the sixth child of a devout Christian couple.

In her 1982 book, Diana Mitchell, now living in Britain, said
Mutasa suffered as a young man because he was appalled by the unfairness of
Rhodesia's land ownership system. "He attempted to evade the worst effects
of the Land Apportionment Act and African landlessness by starting up the
Cold Comfort Farm Society with the patronage of white landowners," she
wrote.

Mitchell, a campaigner for Rhodesia's short-lived multiracial
Centre Party, said Mutasa was a beacon of hope half a century ago when he,
Clutton-Brock, Michael and Eileen Haddon, white liberals who donated their
land for the creation of Cold Comfort Farm, and two renowned blacks
nationalists, James Chikerema and George Nyandoro, worked together to
improve African farming methods and then form the African National Congress.
The ANC campaigned for an extension of the franchise, but was banned within
two years of its birth.

Tomorrow ZimJournalists Arise Will Publish Part 11 This Interesting Article By Zimbabwe Independent’s Trevor Grundy on Didymus Mutasa.