The curse of Mugabe’s handshake
It pains me to say it, and it makes my skin crawl to think about it, but I have to say that I think that I too would have shaken Mugabe’s hand at the Pope’s funeral; or at least, I hope I would have been able to do so despite everything I think and feel about Mugabe. I like to think that I would have done so out of respect for the Pope, to honour the spirit of the funeral and the Pope himself. After all, the Pope was in the business of forgiveness and reconciliation, a force for good. What would he have thought if I had rebuffed a handshake? The Pope, as a human being, was far greater and more significant than Mugabe could ever be. It’s important to recognise and pay tribute to that.
Having reluctantly said that, I also know that any handshake with Mugabe would be ruthlessly exploited by him and used and manipulated in an attempt to con people in Zimbabwe that all is well and OK with Mugabe and the world. It’s a serious point beca
use we don’t have independent daily news in Zimbabwe so the state controlled media has an almost free reign in controlling information. As expected, the front page of yesterday’s The Chronic revealed the product of Mugabe’s PR efforts in Rome: a front-page picture of him being ‘welcomed’ by Archbishop James Harvey.
However, The Chronic deliberately didn’t tell us that Archbishop James Harvey’s duties on that day, as Prefect of the Papal Household, was to greet every single visiting dignitary, including despots and dictators. Nor did The Chronic describe the revulsion that Mugabe’s obvious attempts at self-promotion invoked in people overseas. One newspaper commented that the “curse of the Robert Mugabe handshake struck again”; another referred to the “handshake from hell”. A third marvelled at Mugabe’s “gall” and “temerity” for showing up in the first place and at his “bald-faced hypocrisy”. Someone within the Vatican was quoted as saying that the Vatican “was hard to put Mugabe anywhere where he would not cause embarrassment”.
What is interesting to me is that The Chronic chose that picture to trumpet out its message to the home audience, and not the one of poor Prince Charles shaking Mugabe’s hand. I think there are two reasons for this.
First, the picture of Charles and Mugabe shows Mugabe clearly leaning over and going to a huge effort to grasp the Prince’s hand - it doesn’t show the Prince warmly receiving it or even leaning forward to make it easier for Mugabe to reach him. The Prince’s household have confirmed that the effort was all Mugabe’s: “From what we understand, Mr Mugabe manoeuvred himself and leant over at a point in the service when people shake hands. The prince was caught by surprise and was not in a position to avoid it.” I was listening to swradio africa the other day and TK was laughing - he thought it was hilarious that Mugabe would go to such extreme lengths to shake the hand of his ‘colonial master’. I have to agree.
And that’s the second point why The Chronic wouldn’t choose that picture. How could they feasibly use a picture like that as propaganda for Mugabe in light of Mugabe’s whole anti-British election campaigning? How can they explain to a Zimbabwean audience, that Mugabe himself would want to shake hands with the Prince after everything he has said about ‘imperial British colonial masters’? How would a picture of Mugabe shaking hands with the Prince sit alongside an incomprehensible article and meaningless graph (both of which appeared in the same issue of The Chronic) that boasted headlines and figure captions like these?
Had Prince Charles refused to shake Mugabe’s hand, as many in Zimbabwe and Britain wished he had, it would be quite a different matter altogether. I suspect The Chronic would have revelled in the opportunity to portray a member of the British household as a ‘white imperialist master’ refusing to shake the hand of a beleaguered ‘black liberation hero’. I can almost hear it, can’t you?
The Chronic can manipulate and distort information as much as it likes, but rest assured, Mugabe must have sen
sed people’s revulsion; he must have know that he was there like a bad smell, that his presence, at best, was tolerated out of respect for the Pope by people who have more dignity than he does. Zimbabweans should take comfort from that.
