Chapter 1: Charlie Foxtrot Fancourt
“Well I tell you what, if you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.”
Joe Biden to (black) radio host Charlamagne Tha God, 2020
IF YOU GET upset or confused every time another travesty of common sense detonates, be it a charity stripping its board for being too white or cricket in South Africa confirming that George Floyd will coach and manage the team from his grave in perpetuity, it might be helpful to understand of the theory of intersectionality. Doing so could establish accountability, open your eyes, and ultimately set you free.
It is the idea that all grievance is interconnected and more, it is the soldering of victims together - so that suddenly black Swazis are allied with Pakistani queer studies graduates, and must therefore together resist the white patriarchy.
But insectionality’s main problem is that the groups lumped together in its matrix often loathe each other. In May 2019, Muslim parents of children attending Anderson Park primary in Birmingham caused a stink when they were told that their young were learning about same-sex marriages. Muslims get very jumpy about this kind of thing, so Labour dispatched Jess Phillips MP to calm things down. Jess, a self-confessed feminist (also in the matrix) who has boasted about walking around her house naked in front of the friends of her children, was unable to disguise her disappointment in the protesting Muslims. She tried to speak to the group’s leader outside the school, reverting to the idea of human rights in the United Kingdom, fermented in the 1990s and early 2000s, and stating that “you can’t pick and choose which equality you want or don’t.” The Muslim chap leading the protests wasn’t buying it: “Actually, Allah created woman for man’s pleasure,” he replied. Before climbing back into her car, she shot him a look that said: “How could you?” In Phillips’ eyes, that Muslim leader was part of something much bigger than religion, or so she thought. She had stuck up for them in the past, marched with them and frequently screeched “Islamophobia!” across the aisle in the Houses of Parliament. And this is how she gets repaid?
The story of how intersectionality first made landfall in Southern Africa involves 3 men. The first man used race to disguise his corruption, the second attempted to exploit human rights to extend his popularity across the west and the third, poor bastard, was torn between the two until he became so confused that he disappeared into judgement rehab and has appeared only sporadically since.
The first man was Robert Gabriel Mugabe.
*
By 1999, it was easy to see that most of Robert’s life had been spent in reverence of the English gentleman. He dressed, spoke, walked, and even collected some of the trappings of the landed aristocrat - portraits of mounted Dukes on the English hunt, hand-stitched pocket squares from Henry Poole & Co, Sheffield silver salt and pepper shakers. Then an ultimatum exploded from within: the pesky war veterans, with whom he simply could not identify - because he himself was never a guerrilla and reportedly found them dirty and unsophisticated - warned him that unless land was redistributed from white farmers, mayhem would prevail. This panicked him enough to surrender the very thing he craved the most.
The circumstances prompted fury he’d never felt before. Photographs taken that year of the man raised by white Jesuit missionaries having to address peasants crammed into a stadium capture his mood: he’s been told to ditch the tailored suits for oversized shirts with his face and the Zimbabwean flag emblazoned on them, leaving him sitting uncomfortably with a menacing scowl as a soldier holds an umbrella shading him against the merciless sun. He is pissed. Pissed with his wife, his ex-wife, his advisors, the people he looked up to (including the late Lord Peter Carrington - at whose funeral he cried), white farmers, Hitler Hunsvi - the maniac leading the war veterans who would die of HIV/Aids in a Harare Hospital in 2001 - and probably most of all, he’s pissed with a way of seeing the world just as menacing and destructive as his own corruption and brutality. But on that day, under that umbrella, if you had to predict exactly who it was making him especially pissed, you could do a whole lot worse than arrive at the name Claire Short, the United Kingdom’s Secretary of State for International Development.
The piss had started spraying two years earlier, in 1997, when the second man in the story, Anthony Charles Lynton Blair, was elected Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Tony had succeeded a man who disappointed Robert tremendously. John Major had the appearance Robert aspired to - a love of cricket, a frequent diner at Wilton’s in Jermyn Street and more importantly, memberships of Whites and Brooks gentlemen’s clubs in adjacent St. James - but turned out a weakling, terrified of shaking the liberal equilibrium by doing something actually conservative. When it came to interacting with British politicians, Robert appeared to understand John O’Sullivan’s First Law of Politics - before O’Sullivan officially documented it: “all organizations that are not explicitly right-wing will over time become left-wing." This summed up John Major to Robert, and he knew he had to be agile and crafty. No better would his approach be illustrated than his snookering of (then Prince) Charles into a handshake at the funeral of Pope John II at the Vatican 2005. British subjects were horrified by images of the wily operator shaking the hand of the son of the sovereign, but even more so with what happened afterward: as Charles was being escorted away, the cameras captured Robert cackling with an aide, slapping his own leg. On that basis, it is reasonable to suggest that Robert was already skeptical about Tony.
But then the ceremonial piss ran out and there was no longer anything to prevent the dropping of the contents of the stomach. Land, peasants, landless war peasants and the United Kingdom projected as a feature of evil appeared in a steaming coil; split between his deep, personal bond with English sophistication and the fact that the peasants were revolting, or beginning to, Robert then realised that he had to - at the very least - feign concern, so he got his Minister of Land and Agriculture, Kumbirai Kangai, to hop across the continent an undoubtedly delightful Air Zimbabwe flight to London to meet aides belonging to Claire Short - if only to appear not to be deferring difficult decisions. What he would have been hoping for, as a guess, would have been a “thank-you-for-our-meeting-of-course-we-will-give-you-cash-just-give-us-a-few-moments” response. He did not get it.
Instead Claire Short took a new way of seeing the world into an old problem, one where the wardens are themselves the tortured. In a letter composed to Kumbirai on the 5th November 1997, she wrote:
Dear Minister, George Foulkes has reported to me on the meeting which you and Hon John Nkomo had with Tony Lloyd and him[self] during your recent visit. I know that President Mugabe also discussed the land issue with the prime minister briefly during their meeting. It may be helpful if I record where matters now rest on the issue. At the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting [in Edinburgh], Tony Blair said that he looked forward to developing a new basis for relations with Commonwealth countries founded upon our new government’s policies, not on the past.We will set out our agenda for international development in a White Paper to be published this week. The central thrust of this will be the development of partnerships with developing countries which are committed to eradicate poverty, and have their own proposals for achieving that, which we and other donors can support. I very much hope that we will be able to develop such a relationship with Zimbabwe. I understand that you aim shortly to publish your own policies on economic management and poverty reduction. I hope that we can discuss them with you and identify areas where we are best able to help. I mentioned this in my letter of 31 August to Hon Herbert Murarwa. I should make it clear that we do not accept that Britain has a special responsibility to meet the costs of land purchase in Zimbabwe. We are a new government from diverse backgrounds without links to former colonial interests. My own origins are Irish, and as you know, we were colonised, not colonisers. We do, however, recognise the very real issues you face over land reform. We believe that land reform could be an important component of a Zimbabwean programme designed to eliminate poverty. We would be prepared to support a programme of land reform that was part of a poverty eradication strategy but not on any other basis. I am told Britain provided a package of assistance for resettlement in the period immediately following independence. This was, I gather, carefully planned and implemented, and met most of its targets. Again, I am told there were discussions in 1989 and 1996 to explore the possibility of further assistance. However, that is all in the past. If we look to the present, a number of specific issues are unresolved, including the way in which land would be acquired and compensation paid. Clearly it would not help the poor of Zimbabwe if it was done in a way which undermined investor confidence. Other questions that would need to be settled would be to ensure that the process was completely open and transparent, including the establishment of a proper land register. Individual schemes would have to be economically justified to ensure that the process helped the poor and for me the most important issue is that any programme must be planned as part of a programme to contribute to the goal of eliminating poverty. I would need to consider detailed proposals on these issues before confirming further British support for resettlement. I am sure that a carefully worked out programme of land reform that was part of a programme of poverty eradication which we could support would also bring in other donors whose support would help ensure that a substantial land resettlement programme such as you clearly desire could be undertaken successfully. If is [sic] to do so, they too will need to be involved from the start. It follows from this that a programme of rapid land acquisition as you now seem to envisage would be impossible for us to support. I know that many of Zimbabwe’s friends share our concern about the damage which this might do to Zimbabwe’s agricultural output and its prospects of attracting investment. Yours sincerely, Claire
This prompted a sequence of events that involved Kumbirai reportedly squealing “fuck me” and suffering a fit akin to the theatrics of a beggar in a Johannesburg traffic queue. He is said to have grabbed the letter and sprinted to Robert’s office, waving it in the air as he hopped. In Robert’s office the pandemonium continued, with a typewriter being thrown through the glass window. But not even the sound of a woman’s howl of - I don’t know, I’m guessing here - “H-U-R-O-D-Z!” or “H-U-V-E-N-E-E-C-O-L” (Harvey Nichols) could drown out the sound of one particular growl.
Two years later, this desperate situation spiraled out of control.
*
The manicured golf courses of Fancourt are a jewel of South Africa’s treasured Garden Route. Situated in George, Fancourt is equally popular with both golfers and non-golfers, and for a while home to two of South Africa’s sporting greats - the South African golfer Ernie Els, who could with ease demolish multiple brandy and cokes at the clubhouse bar before promptly turning up the following morning to his first round of the day, and Hansie Cronje, the disgraced former South African cricket captain. Cronje who sought refuge there after admitting to cheating, fell into a boozy depression, but found his redemption via baptism, and was turning his life around before an untimely death in an airplane crash in a neighbouring mountain range (an unpleasant, 9/11-esque joke doing the rounds at the time involved a meeting between Osama bin Laden and Hansie, in which the former chastised the cricketing legend: “Fuck sakes Cronje, George Bush - I SAID GEORGE BUSH - not the fucking bush in George”)
It was at Fancourt in 1999, two years after Claire’s letter and shortly after Robert’s appearance in the stadium, that the leaders of the 47 Commonwealth Member States gathered following a conference in Durban on South Africa’s east coast - among them Tony and Robert. It has long been suspected that the animosity between these two men poisoned the well for Durban as the destination of international conferencing: two years later, in 2001, a ridiculous conference entitled, “World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance”, organised by the United Nations, turned out to be just another blood libel - the Israelis and some of their allies were so disgusted they walked out (Robert put in one of his vintage performances there too, getting so worked up he nearly goose-stepped his way off the stage).
From Durban there was concern that Commonwealth event organisers were not au fait with the handbags of the once-conquerers and the once-conquered, so the two countries dispatched respective emissaries to Fancourt to ensure that Robert and Tony were placed in chalets as far away from each other as possible. Robert was the first to announce he would refuse to attend any event that included Tony. A few hours before one of the set dinners, Tony became otherwise preoccupied and canceled his appearance, so Robert decided he would go.
From this night onward, Robert Mugabe started openly jeering Tony Blair as gay, “a gay homo”, “a gay gangster” and even just plain old “poofter”(“poof-tahh”, Robert would express in his rich elocution). On the 5th of March 2001, Robert was exiting the Hilton in Brussels when the homosexual campaigner Peter Tatchell attempted to make a citizen’s arrest. Peter was easily swatted by Robert’s heavies but to this day maintains that Robert said, “bluddy stew-pit poof-tahh” to him as he got close. But on this night in question, in between Robert’s arrival and his going to bed, something had happened.
I don’t know if you’ll agree with my theory, but I do know that high-ranking Zimbabwean intelligence officials were seen consulting Robert during the dinner. It goes like this:
Robert is busy dining alone. Two fellow leaders of African states he can’t remember the names of are conversing in muted tones at a table nearby in a language he doesn’t understand. The chef has prepared Karoo lamb cutlets and a bottle of Meerlust 1989 Cabernet Sauvignon sits on the table. A Zimbabwean spook walks into the banquet hall and heads straight to Robert’s table, leans down, then whispers in his ear: “Sir, I think we have found something.” Robert folds his napkin gingerly and brings it to his mouth, chewing slowly, not looking at the spook. “We have located a file in the British courts from 1983. It appears one ‘Charles Lynton’ was arrested for public importunity, for attempting to solicit sex from other men in a public toilet.” Robert, now finished chewing delicately puts his hands together, crosses his fingers and pursues his lips, so that his top lip squeezes his little moustache right up against his nostrils and his spectacles lift off his cheeks. “Thing is, Sir, at the trial at Bow Street Magistrates Court, police testimony included a statement of previous warnings. When he was at university, this ‘Charles Lyton’ was also known as a promiscuous cross-dresser called ‘Miranda’”. Robert rubs his fingers against his palms as the intelligence official reaches into his breast pocket. “Here is the picture.” Mugabe stares at a mugshot of a young Tony Blair, his bottom row of crooked teeth aiming in all directions, every man for himself. Then he nods and the intelligence official departs.
I anticipate accusations of fake news and yes, this is what you find when type “Charles Lynton” into X (formerly Twitter) - so here’s another theory that warrants exploration.
At the time Robert wasn’t exactly enjoying the mental health shape of his life. Many thought he’d caught the clap (syphilis) too many times or been listening to too much BBC World Service - but the real issue looked rooted in his personal life. His first wife, Sally, was Ghanian and during that marriage, he thought it would be wise to stash all the cash he had stolen there, in Accra. By the time she died of cancer he was already seeing his sociopathic typist Grace; after Sally’s funeral he called his late ex-wife’s brothers: “yes, yes, awful news, sorry and so on and so forth…but now I politely request that those hundreds of millions of dollars be made available to me at the earliest convenience.” I suspect there may have been a pause on the other end of the line before": “yeah…erm….about that one Robert…um, no, I think no, no, actually, we’re going to…just like…keep this one for ourselves.” Whatever happened, Robert was unable to retrieve his ill-gotten gains sending Grace into a rage from which not even horse tranquillisers could extract her. Not only had that happened, but Tony ruined had Robert’s obsession with Empire, and formed a government that featured homosexuals, a man who looked suspiciously like an albino (Alistair Darling), another man who used to work on a boat (John Prescott) and of course, Claire Short, who had appointed herself a member of an oppressed minority - then shoved her fat foot up the bottom of the things oppressed minorities were supposed to do. Isolated, he couldn’t make up his losses to Ghana without power, and for that he needed a little fellow from the south - the third and final man in the story: Thabo Mvuyelwa Mbeki.
If Zimbabwe’s relationship with Britain had all but collapsed at Fancourt, South Africa was enjoying a certain intrigue. What began to filter down from Tony’s “Cool Britannia” and “New Labour” reestablished influence that had diminished at birth of the Republic in 1961. This influence affected moderate ANC profiles, many of whom were closest Marxism or South African Communist Party admirers, NGOs and charities, South African corporations, universities and large sections of young, white urban voters. Tony had dispensed with the gentlemen’s club premiership and ushered in what he described as a “third way”, which has, predictably and with good reason, never been understood. Because the “third way” is just Sutenbastud - talking peace but throwing Molotovs - a way of doing politics that steals ideas from the worst of both camps, amplifies expedience then white-labels the resultant as something groundbreaking.
Back to Tony. Unlike nepo-babies like Justin Trudeau, or leaders groomed from a young age, like New Zealand’s former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Ireland’s polyamorous Leo Varadkar, he had to learn on the fly, which led him to establish an interesting relationship with one William Jefferson Clinton. But unlike Justin, Jacinda and Leo, Tony was smart. He performed magnificently.
Margaret Thatcher’s vision had established a generation of entrepreneurs, from plumbers to double glazing salesmen to city boy traders, whose upward mobility during those years was firstly, too compelling for political consideration elsewhere and secondly, laid the platform for the prosperity enjoyed - until recently - by middle England. The Conservatives, thanks to Thatcher, had won the economy, but Tony noted that Clinton was a new breed of political animal, someone who combined charm with apparent sensibility and had mastered all manner of political scheming, including polling and lobbying. Insofar as traditional divides were concerned, Clinton introduced new, dark arts messaging and presentation methodology developed by highly-paid coastal strategists - energetic, platitudinal and at the same time, accessible. To the Chardonnay and SSRI housewives of suburban Charlotte, North Carolina and Atherton, California, Clinton was irresistible - ferociously bright, young, confident and good-looking, so Tony booked a meeting with Clinton’s campaign squad, jumped on a plane, and watched in amazement as the team revealed just how they built (what they described as) a political “superstar”. Sold. With this kind of plastery, Tony’s team calculated, you could make cool (or just acceptable) the privilege of being educated at Scotland’s most expensive private school, Fettes, as Tony was, then the privilege of qualifying as a lawyer. You could play man-of-the-people against political opposites drowning with outdated vision, as the Conservatives were, and preach newness and unity against a party whose members were steadily losing voters because they couldn’t forgive each other for either supporting Margaret Thatcher or forcing her resignation.
So this obscure “third way” slimed its way into Downing Street - and many South Africans both in the UK and SA were enamoured. It’s a question I sometimes ask Sutenbastud here when I encounter it in a familiar accent: “what drove you expats to vote for him in 1997?” The usual answer is “he wasn’t a Conservative” - but those predisposed to “social justice” and other scams genuinely believed that Tony represented progress for Britain’s human rights, insofar as minorities were concerned, and the strengthening of allied relationships - useful to threaten to people like Slobodan Milosevic. It escapes these people that the United Kingdom was progressive enough to abolish the slave trade; clearly they were convinced that something had gone off course, and needed correcting.
Yet whilst luvvies (North London) and pop stars and writers couldn’t stay away from Tony, and Rupert Murdoch was pleased (at the time that is - Murdoch would later dispense with the services of his in-house tiger mom whose diaries revealed something of an obsession with Blair), there were other problems for Tony.
The most obvious one was that the people who accompanied him to power - Alistair Campbell, Peter Mandelson and Philip Gould to name a few - were completely unacceptable to the traditional voters belonging to both Labour and the Conservatives. Here is Rod Liddle (a man of the “left”), explaining this in The Spectator, on the 28th September 2013:
“There is a little vignette in the first volume of Alastair Campbell’s diaries that makes it abundantly clear that, at the time, we were being governed by people who were mentally ill. It is yet another furious, bitter, gut-churning row involving Campbell, Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson and concludes with Mandelson stamping his little feet and screaming: ‘I am sick of being rubbished and undermined! I hate it! And I want out.’ The cause of this dispute was not whether or not Labour should nationalise the top 200 companies and secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry. Don’t be silly. It was about whether Blair should wear a suit and tie to deliver a speech or if, instead, he should put on a nice pair of cords. Mandelson was in favour of the cords, by the way…..
…it is impossible to read this sort of thing without coming to the conclusion that the most senior elements of New Labour were mad as hatters.”
On the subject of Peter Mandelson, Blair’s closest confidant, here’s Jeremy Clarkson (a man of the “right”) in The Times on the 8th of November 2009:
“I’ve given the matter a great deal of thought all week, and I’m afraid I’ve decided that it’s no good putting Peter Mandelson in a prison. I’m afraid he will have to be tied to the front of a van and driven round the country until he isn’t alive any more. I hate Peter Mandelson. I hate his fondness for extremely pale blue jeans and I hate that preposterous moustache he used to sport in the days when he didn’t bother trying to cover up his left-wing fanaticism. I hate the way he quite literally lords it over us even though he’s resigned in disgrace twice, and now holds an important decision-making job for which he was not elected. Mostly, though, I hate him because his one-man war on the bright and the witty and the successful means that half my friends now seem to be taking leave of their senses.”
Both views are legitimate: these people were off their rockers, and not in the Joe Biden way of mumbling about how he pinched the thigh of Fletcher Christian the day the mutineers spotted Pitcairn Island in 1790, literally off the reservation - angry, vain and aloof. But as South Africa went, these “third-way” chancers and schemers were that era’s TikTok-ers.
*
In the early 2000s a South African advertising executive called Angel Jones founded an intiative called “The Homecoming Revolution”. The objective was to encourage expats permanently or indecisively habituated in cities like London and New York to return home and help ferment the idea of a truly integrated, diverse, compassionate and free country. Many of these South Africans had gapped it before the 1995 elections, terrified by the events of Boipatong and the St. James Church massacre and the Heidelberg Tavern massacre and the Shell House massacre and the Bisho massacre. Out-massacred, they had decided that the grim climates of Europe, or indeed the agreeable ones of Australia, offered succour to the battle-weariness. So Angel, adorned with a pair of wings and with the support of Primedia radio personalities such as Jeremy Mansfield and John Robbie (at this point, 94.7 Highveld Stereo was the 10th most commercially successful domestic radio station in the world), began calling the country’s departed home - with success. The campaign was beautifully marketed and thus appealing to upwardly mobile entrepreneurs who calculated that they could establish businesses at a fraction of the cost of doing the same in foreign financial capitals. Johannesburg, in particular, was made to look like it was on the turn: glitzy new properties like Melrose Arch in the Northern suburbs began selling, and developers were bullish. Angel’s most telling strength, however, wasn’t portraying commercial opportunities, but tugging at the sensitivities of people who were liberal-inclined but hadn’t given the ANC a chance. 99.9% of these people were white; the country, contrary to their worst fears, hadn’t shat the bed, so to home it was.
Far from entertaining white supremacy, many of these people in the United Kingdom had watched the rise of Tony Blair and listened to the carefully scripted narrative, which incorporated features of race and inheritance in its attempt to distinguish itself from the banality of traditional Labour’s blue-collar proclivities. It also distinguished itself from the Conservative’s economy speak, which rarely addressed race. Labour, Blair argued, was always - but especially then - the home for non-white English citizens, particularly those descended from the Windrush generation of Jamaican expats and Pakistani immigrants. In front of those white South Africans a workable unity - or the appearance of one - was unfolding, and it was all due to the smooth, choreographed articulation of Tony and his friends, allowing them to return home with two features: invaluable corporate experience and the conclusion that co-habitation was possible. What they didn’t know was that exposure to Blair and his chums had inculcated into them a sense of submission - and this was to be a critical feature of their new lives in an old home: the ANC was, politically, the only owner of the country, and everything they had once thought needed to be adjusted. Many would subsequently join the ANC as R10 card-carrying members, then go back to creaming the market.
It was about this time that Sutenbastud businesses began popping up in Johannesburg, courtesy of the home-comers. Many of these were advertising and design agencies. Many were boutique investment managers. Most were successful. But no other business captured the oiliness than a consultancy founded in 2003 by a returned husband and wife, whose business model was incomprehensible. Its logo was contemporary London, akin to that of a Shoreditch production or app development studio, but it might as well have been a high-visibility yellow jacket. It claimed to do exactly the things a company like McKinsey does (“efficiency” - translated, as you know it means “mass redundancy and a pricing model that requests a split of revenue saved from all the sackings”) but it included meditation sessions, “discourses of empowerment”, accompanied by masses of project management spreadsheets and something called “principle-driven” leadership assessment. For the latter it would go into organisations, for example a glass manufacturing business in the Johannesburg suburb of Ruimsig, spend time with bosses, then conclude that all management personalities were down with “principles” - so please settle this 6 figure bill for our expertise, or, actually, no - Marco Vermeulen there in logistics is a bit rough and carries a gun in his car, so we’ll spend a few more weeks ironing him out - before sending a slightly-more-than-6 figure bill for our expertise. The company’s qualifications were not clear but it flourished in a regulatory lax environment, away from the prohibitive, expensive, checks-and-balances overreach of London. Its owners, not even 50, were able to retire to the Eastern Transvaal, to a fly fishing estate five years later. The company was bought by a batch of new homecomers from London.
Then there was Thabo.
Who knows what he was expecting of the United Kingdom before his own Presidency, but he was technically - or should have been - better positioned than most of his contemporaries thanks to his studies at The University of Sussex, where in 1964 he’d led a march from Brighton to London in honour of the Rivonia trialists. He befriended other exiles whilst in the UK, notably the Pahad brothers (Essop, Aziz) and Ronnie Kasrils. He invited the white South African communist, Michael Harmel, to attend his graduation in 1965.
By 1997, Britain had exited its sick-man-of-Europe syndrome. Thabo would have taken profound exception to Margaret Thatcher’s medicine, as it involved privatisation, which is as offensive a word it gets to any sneering economics graduate. In the historian Dominic Sandbrook’s “Who Dares Wins”, the vast majority of beneficiaries of this era are documented as white - even if many did originate on council housing estates. It would have been difficult for Thabo to see the United Kingdom - under anyone - shake off its historical burden whilst maintaining its often annoying claim of exceptionalism. But if Thabo was tempted into Tony’s view of a new elitist world, tweaked to now include colour-blindness, there was the terribly cross fellow to the north waiting with a stick.
In 2002 Robert Mugabe was slapped with a European Union travel ban. In light of the aforementioned, it was the worst punishment conceivable. Eager to avenge those he considered responsible for this outrageous sanction, in 2005 he initiated something called Operation *Murambatsvina* (“clean out the rubbish”) - essentially the second coming of the 1980s *Gukurahundi* (“the rain that washes away the chaff”) massacres. *Murambatsvina* witnessed over 700000 people, mostly all Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) supporters, lose all their earthly possessions courtesy of Robert’s bulldozers, and Fleet Street’s board sheets exploded with news of renewed human rights travesties. But when the UK government criticised the operation, Robert was ready: “Arrggghhh the Englishman! He is the worst! You can never beat the Englishman, no matter how good you are. And you can never be his equal!” As prepared as the response was, Robert appeared genuinely hurt, disappointed. The people he once loved had turned beastly.
Thereafter he watched the South Africans and the British from his increasingly dysfunctional state. Blind racial solidarity ensured that South Africa would remain spiritually loyal to him; in 2003, the then Minister of Foreign Affairs, Dr. Nkozosana Dlamini-Zuma, stood up to a room full of reporters puzzled by South Africa’s odd stance on Zimbabwe: “I know you, you reporters,” she said, “all you want to hear is two words - condemnation of Zimbabwe. That will NEVER happen.” A handful of white Zimbabwean farmers had been killed - this of course thrilled North London. Privately, would Robert have warned Thabo about Tony? Possibly, but even Mbeki, the dynastic scholar of the ANC - the intellectual - was underneath Mugabe. At that point it was all about class, and smoking a pipe was no longer considered fashionable - more the stuff of chattering Marxist types Robert had long since graduated from.
The gay slur foiled Tony. Robert had turned what Tony considered a powerful weapon in his boutique of rights against him. On one hand, he was frequently the recipient of angry letters from UK civil groups condemning Robert for the insult, claiming they too were offended, demanding the Prime Minister do something about it. On the other, Tony knew that any condemnation would result in Mugabe counter-accusing him of being a racist, and considering how hot things were on the ground, it would be unwise to lecture the cranky old bigot on progressive values:" “Now listen here Mr. Mugabe, neither I nor the British people, who adore the gay and lesbian communities (for that is just what it was before the LGBTQIQWERTY stampede) will stand for your abhorrent homophobia!” “See! See! The little gay homo bastard is being racist again!”
Caught in intersectionality’s intersection was Thabo, who could do nothing but smile nervously as Tony heaped praise on his wisdom. In 2007, Tony’s successor Gordon Brown described the ANC and Labour as “soul mates”; even the more learned of the ANC hierarchy, such as the party’s longtime strategist Joel Netshitenzhe was reportedly stumped by the sheer charm of a group of men who dressed like the old guard but spoke like shop stewards, then disappeared into some sweaty basement club to grind off each other to the beat of 1990s Britpop. In the same way today that only the disobedient survive, only the deeply cynical understood what was really happening: when Tony and Gordon retreated back to their inner circles - those festering huddles of paranoia and self-loathing - they were just as greedy and uncompromising as their predecessors. And more ambitious. At least with the old bunch, I imagine a berserker like the ANC profile like Christine Qunta would say, you knew where you stood.
The Charlie Foxtrot at Fancourt between the United Kingdom and Zimbabwe endured, beyond Tony, to David Cameron, the PR consultant who admitted that he plotted his greasy path to number 10 as “the heir to Blair”. In 2011, one year after his election, London was gripped by anarchy after armed police had shot a suspected drug dealer of mixed race, Mark Duggan. Flames scorched the capital and sneaker stores were looted. As the small businesses burned, Robert couldn’t resist a dig David, reluctantly hauled from his Tuscan holiday to address the chaos, who he thought (quite rightly) was moneyed old guard trying to be right-on - just like Tony. “Mr. Cameron,” Robert said, “your people have spoken, they don’t like you, you must resign.” You can imagine Robert then - the continent’s most pompous Englishman ever - allowing himself the briefest of cackles before rerouting yet another Air Zimbabwe flight to Malaysia, to give his wretched body an oil change.
*
What happened between the three men saw hundreds of thousands of Zimbabweans fleeing into South Africa and initiated the collapse of the agricultural industry in that country. Robert and Tony had fronted new orders to the world - one was strategically absent of whites, the other strategically - supposedly - filled with “rights” (except, of course, when it came to people like the white farmer Martin Olds, butchered by drunken Shona thugs). Way before intersectionality was made fashionable by academics in the late 2010s, and its formulas distributed to HR departments and editorial policy, Robert and Tony had shown the world what a vomit wormhole it really was, something made explicitly clear by Thabo Mbeki, whose participation ridiculed his “African renaissance” bravado. He didn’t do anything, and in not doing anything, he ushered in the worst of Tony, and the worst of Robert. These things stay.
We never cared about Robert Mugabe’s “black” in the same way we never cared about Tony Blair’s “gay”. If Tony Blair really is gay - so? We don’t care. We don’t care if Barack Obama is gay, and one day says, looking at the photo accompanying a flattering interview in one of Sutenbastud’s magazines, possibly Tatler: “Hmm, Tony’s teeth are really getting me all hot here in my tight white jeans.” We wouldn’t care if Barack decided to follow through on the impulse - board the next Virgin Atlantic from New York to London, sext the shit out of Tony using Upper Class’s crappy Wi-Fi, then meet him in an overpriced Covent Garden hotel and roger him so hard that the earth shifted 17cm on its axis.
We know that intersectionality fails - because we saw it fail. We learned then that it is just gaslighting, the pathological desire to ruin society based on self-interest. We know that it is gavage - the continued contamination of our minds with demonstrably useless or dishonest ideas. When we get upset or confused or depressed about it, it’s because it happened right in front of us, and we never possessed the courage to call it out.
*Coming Friday 1st December, Chapter 2: Kakocracy