There were never any 'good old days'

Another View : Don't confuse criticism of Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe with a yearning for Ian Smith's Rhodesia, writes Petina Gappah

Writing in the UK Guardian this week, I reflected on what I considered to be the four key achievements of Zimbabwe which turns 30 today: the end of settler rule, the legal emancipation of women, enhanced standards of education and national cohesion.

I unleashed a storm of protest from Guardian readers. Zimbabwe has achieved nothing at all, was the general consensus. I was a Mugabe apologist, an appeaser, and a psychopathic accomplice to human rights abusers.

"How do you sleep at night?" asked one commentator.

"You cannot polish a turd," said one wit.

What I found particularly interesting about the responses, were the efforts to whitewash the inequities of Rhodesia.

This is one of the chief tragedies of Mugabe: he has bolstered the argument of those who believe that life for blacks was good and happy in Rhodesia.

As Zimbabwe turns 30, it is appropriate to reflect on just what being black in Rhodesia meant.

To put it starkly, your entire life path was limited by your race.

Minority rule by white settlers meant that black people, the majority of the population, were prevented from participating in the political life of the country.

Rhodesia had a system of qualified voting - only blacks who met criteria related to education and income were allowed to be registered on what was called the "B" electoral roll.

Whites were registered automatically on the "A" roll.

After Ian Smith signed the Rhodesian government's Unilateral Declaration of Independence from Britain in 1965, just over a quarter of a million whites had 50 seats reserved for them in the lower house of parliament.

The black population, 6-million strong, had eight directly elected seats, and another eight selected by traditional chiefs. The rationale for this policy was "no representation without taxation". Because blacks contributed less to the fiscus, the argument ran, they could not be represented at the same level as whites.

But the reason blacks could not contribute as much to the fiscus as whites was that the majority were kept in low-paying jobs - as messengers, house servants, clerks and low-level administrators.

The education system was designed to produce such workers. For my parents' generation, the most you could hope for professionally was to be a nurse or a teacher. Other professions were possible but were well out of the reach of the average black child.

In contrast, my generation, the generation born in the early '70s that started school under Smith but completed it under Mugabe, succeeded because the government invested in education and put in place an enabling structure. My parents' generation, and those before, succeeded not because of, but in spite of Rhodesia.

The little education that you did receive did not expand the horizons of where you could live. If you were black, you could live only in areas that were the worst developed in the country. Many townships had no electricity or phone lines until the dying days of Rhodesia. The rural areas had no amenities beyond one-roomed grocery and bottle stores - lots of bottle stores, in fact.

Black businessmen were encouraged to start bus companies and to build butcheries and bottle stores to serve the rural communities that the government could not be bothered with.

Even the pleasures of life were racially segregated. City councils invested in beer halls in the townships. Whites flew on Air Rhodesia to enjoy white leisure in tourist resorts and restaurants.

It gives me tremendous pride that Zimbabwe has a rich and complex artistic life. As an expression of the fundamental search for meaning, art is central to any society's understanding of itself.

But being black in Rhodesia meant that the human instinct to create was stymied or only supported if it served Rhodesia's aim of conditioning black people to accept their second-class status.

I will limit myself here to a consideration of the literature of the period. There is an extraordinary sentence in a novel by Patrick Chakaipa - a prolific writer and Catholic priest, who died as archbishop of Harare - in which he describes a female character as "Ainge akanaka seMurungu (She was as beautiful as a white).

The books of Chakaipa and the writers of that era that were published by the government-backed Southern Rhodesia African Literature Bureau - which encouraged Shona and Ndebele literature only - did not explore the conditions of the times. The books served only to persuade the native not to rebel against, but to accept the paternalistic description, provided by Smith, that Rhodesia's were the happiest natives in Africa.

What does it say about Rhodesia, which purported to educate the black population, that the first ever book published in English by a black woman was a volume of poetry by Kristina Rungano written in 1982 - two years after independence?

What does it say that Tsitsi Dangarembga was the first black woman in that nation ever to write a novel - eight years after independence?

No one can say that Zimbabwe at 30 is in a wonderful post-independence state. Even Zanu-PF, the architect of Zimbabwe's destruction - though it quibbles about the causes - has had to confront the sobering reality that 30 years of the party's rule has led to ruin and misery.

But what is equally true is that the desire for a better Zimbabwe is not a yearning for Rhodesia. Gappah is a Zimbabwean author based in Switzerland