Deja Vu

The Supremes

Tags:

Africa,

dictators,

Paraguay,

Robert Mugabe,

Zimbabwe

“‘Only God Will Remove Me!’” South Africa Sunday Times, June 22, 2008.

Pressure from Africa and abroad is piling up on Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe ahead of Friday’s presidential run-off.

But, ever-immune to criticism, the ageing dictator continued with his hardline rhetoric this week.

Addressing local business people in Zimbabwe’s second city, Bulawayo, on Friday, Mugabe insisted he would not step aside for the Movement for Democratic Change, which beat his Zanu-PF party in the parliamentary and first-round presidential poll on March 29.

“The MDC will never be allowed to rule this country — never ever,” he declared.

“Only God, who appointed me, will remove me — not the MDC, not the British. Only God will remove me!”

I, The Supreme, by Augusto Roa Bastos, 1974. (Helen Lane, trans.)
An ideal example of the Latin American “Dictator Novel,” Augusto Roa Bastos’s I, the Supreme (Yo, el Supremo) examines the life and times of José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, who called himself “El Supremo” while he ruled Paraguay for a quarter century between 1814 and 1840. Cryptically and complexly recounted, Roa Bastos assumes the role of “compiler”; the text of the novel is supposedly composed of fragments of the dictator’s papers—public and private—and of questionably reliable notes taken by his amanuensis. Different narrators, including the “compiler” himself, tell different parts of the story, which ends here with the dictator’s death.

You say you do not want to witness the disaster of your Country, that you yourself have paved the way for. You will die first. That part of you which sees what is mortal will die. You cannot escape seeing what does not die. Because the very worst thing of all, grotesque Archi-loco, is that the dead man suffers, everywhere and always, no matter how completely dead he is, regardless of how much earth and oblivion are piled on top of him. You believed that the Country you helped bring to birth, that the Revolution that came forth armed from your cranium, began-ended in you. Your own pride made you say that you were the offspring of a terrible parturition and a principle of mixture. You fooled yourself and fooled others by pretending that your power was absolute. You lost your oil, you old ex theologian passing yourself off as a statesman. You believed you were playing your game of absolute passion to the limit: everything or nothing. Oleum perdidiste. You ceased to believe in God, but neither did you believe in the people with the true mystique of Revolution; the only one that leads a true locomotive-engineer of history to identify himself with its cause, not use it as a hiding place from his absolute vertical Person, in which worms are now feeding horizontally. With grand words, with grand dogmas that appeared to be just, once the flame of Revolution had been extinguished in you you continued to hoodwink your fellow citizens with the most contemptible baseness, with the most vulgar and perverse of ruses, that of illness and old age. Sick with ambition and pride, with cowardice and fear, you shut yourself up within yourself and turned the necessary isolation of your country into the bastion-hideout of your own person. You surrounded yourself with scoundrels who prospered in your name; you kept at a distance the people from whom you received power and sovereignty: well fed, protected, taught fear and veneration, because in your heart of hearts you too feared the people but did not venerate it. You turned yourself into a Great Obscurity for the people-mob; into the great Don-Amo, the Lord-and-Master who demands docility in return for a full belly and an empty head. Ignorance of a time at the crossroads. Better than anyone else, you knew that so long as the city and its privileges hold dominion over the totality of the People, Revolution is merely a caricature of itself. Every truly revolutionary movement, in the present era of our Republics, begins, solely and self-evidently, with sovereignty as a real whole in act. A century ago, the Revolution of the Comuneros failed when the power of the people was betrayed by the patricians of the capital. You wanted to avoid that. You stopped halfway, and did not form true revolutionary leaders but a plague of toadies trailing after your shadow. You misread the will of the People and as a consequence you misused your power, as your dotard’s affections spun around gerontropically in the vacuum of your all-embracing will. No, little mummy; true Revolution does not devour its children. Only its bastards; those who are not capable of carrying it out to its ultimate consequences. Beyond its limits if necessary. The absolute does not tremble to carry out its thought to the very end. You knew that. You copied it in those papers addressed to no one, destined to end up as dead letters. You hesitated. You too are doomed. Your punishment is worse than that of the others. For you there is no redemption possible. Oblivion will devour the others. You, ex Supreme, are the one who must render an account of everything and pay up to the very last quarter. . .

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