Forgotten hero: The late US Pres Jimmy Carter’s role in Zim remembered

By Staff Reporter
THE United States envoy to Zimbabwe, Pamela Tremont Thursday reignited one of Zimbabwe’s forgotten heroes, the late Jimmy Carter by naming the largest conference space at the mission after the late former President.

The Carter administration assembled a high-powered negotiating team, led by UN Ambassador Andrew Young and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, to coordinate with the British and hammer out a settlement.
These negotiations, spearheaded by the Americans, led to the Lancaster House talks in Britain, and the free elections in 1980 and black majority rule in an independent in Zimbabwe.
Said Tremont; “His commitment to Zimbabwe’s future was not just a political decision but a deeply personal conviction that all people should have an opportunity to contribute to the future of their nation. It is fitting that this room, used to bring people together, bears the name of a leader who believed in the power of diplomacy and peace-making.”
Foreign Affairs Minister, Prof Amon Murwira who also graced the event expressed gratitude over the noble gesture.
“Former President Jimmy Carter’s commitment to human rights and justice was instrumental during Zimbabwe’s journey to independence…. We extend our heartfelt gratitude to all who contributed to Zimbabwe’s independence – those who fought bravely for freedom and those who supported them from afar, including the late President Carter,” he said.
Records show there was another reason for Carter’s interest in Southern Africa: race. Carter grew up in the segregated South of the 1920s and 1930s. As a child, he did not question the racist strictures of the Jim Crow South, but as he matured, served in the US Navy and was elected governor of Georgia, his worldview evolved.
He appreciated how the civil rights movement had helped liberate the US South from its regressive past, and he regretted that he had not been an active participant in the movement. When I asked Carter why he had expended so much effort on Rhodesia, part of his explanation was:
I felt a sense of responsibility and some degree of guilt that we had spent an entire century after the Civil War still persecuting Blacks, and to me the situation in Africa was inseparable from the fact of deprivation or persecution or oppression of Black people in the South.
Parallels with the US South
Carter’s belief that there were parallels between the freedom struggles in the US South and in southern Africa may have been naïve, but it was important.
Influenced by Andrew Young, who had been a close aide to Martin Luther King, Carter transcended the knee-jerk anticommunist reaction of previous American presidents to the members of the Patriotic Front, the loose alliance of insurgents fighting the regime of Ian Smith.
Young challenged the Manichaean tropes of the Cold War. He explained in 1977:
Communism has never been a threat to me … Racism has always been a threat – and that has been the enemy of all of my life.
Young helped Carter see the Patriotic Front, albeit leftist guerrillas supported by Cuba and the Soviet Union, as freedom fighters. Therefore, unlike the Gerald Ford administration which had shunned the Front and tried to settle the conflict through negotiations with the white leaders of Rhodesia and South Africa, Carter considered the Front the key players. He brought them to the fore of the negotiations. This was extraordinarily rare in the annals of US diplomacy during the Cold War.