A critical afrocentric analysis of South Africa’s SADC-mandated mediation in Zimbabwe, 2007 – 2014

Abstract

This study seeks to understand how South Africa has pursued the African agenda through its foreign policy and how it applied it during its mediation in the Zimbabwe crisis between 2007 and 2014. South Africa’s approach was criticised both at home and abroad for being “soft” on the governing Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) led government when it seized land from white farmers and dealt violently against political opposition in the early 2000s. Pretoria’s refusal to denounce the Mugabe government publicly, even when internal activists called for condemnation, provoked criticism from the human rights community that the African National Congress (ANC) government ignored human rights violations in Zimbabwe in blind solidarity with a fellow liberation movement. After assuming the mediator role in Zimbabwe on behalf of the Southern African Development Community (SADC), this criticism spread. Pretoria’s approach was then labelled a ‘quiet diplomacy’ to suggest that it was keeping mum about what it needed to openly oppose. Some argued that South Africa chose African solidarity to shield violent and dictatorial African governments from criticism and censure over the need to speak truth to power. Furthermore, studies that have covered South Africa’s foreign policy in Zimbabwe look at it from multiple theoretical perspectives, but none has so far employed an Afrocentric lens. This is despite the fact that a need to understand this, which is called African solidarity in South Africa’s approach. This study responds to this gap in analysis by providing a critical Afrocentric analysis of South Africa’s African agenda and how it shaped South Africa’s approach to the mediation in Zimbabwe. It seeks to understand how the African agenda, as understood by Pretoria, may explain the dynamics of South Africa’s foreign policy posture on Zimbabwe in 2007 and 2014 when it was a SADC mediator. On this basis, the study argues that the South African African agenda is underpinned by ideological frames coming from African ideas like Pan-Africanism, African Unity and African Renaissance that are crucial to fully account for South Africa’s relations with fellow African countries. We argue that the South African approach to Zimbabwe cannot be adequately explained without understanding the core paradigm and principles of the African agenda and how this guided South Africa’s choices concerning the Zimbabwean crisis. Mainstream analysis tends to associate the African agenda with the sustenance of demagogues. The weakness of such analysis is that it focuses on African leaders in which the interest of those leaders defines the good of Africa. Afrocentricity looks beyond just leaders; it focuses on people, culture and identity from a social, economic, political and philosophical term. We also argue that if the African agenda is understood outside Afrocentricity, the focus is on leaders, but if understood within Afrocentricity, the focus is on African people. Consequently, the study found that despite South Africa’s failure to meet international human rights standards by downplaying the ZANU-PF-driven violations on Zimbabweans and failure to uphold democratic processes, Pretoria successfully promoted their African renaissance regional objectives, including regional solidarity, unity, respecting sovereignty of African countries, African- centered conflict resolution in the region and African solutions to African problems. The research is a qualitative analytical study reliant on primary and secondary data in the public domain.