Communism is the natural form of government for ethnic states not because of communist infiltration from the Soviet Union or Communist China, but because the appeal of centralized control is almost unavoidable with governments who see their role as asserting the rights of one group over others.
Most African states embraced communism from the very beginning. However, the extent to which they implemented one-party command and control policies is largely uncorrelated with the degree to which they were avowedly communist. Hastings Banda, president of Malawi for 30 years, was a self-described anti-communist. But his rule was not notably less autocratic or economically corrosive than those of Soviet affiliated Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia, People’s Republic of China-affiliated Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, or staunchly communist Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe.
In his autobiography, Malcom X described the state of mind of the newly empowered African elites in the early 1960s:
I sat with a passionately political African. He almost shouted in his fervor. “When people are in a stagnant state, and are being brought out of it, there is no time for voting!” His central theme was that no new African nation, trying to decolonize itself, needed any political system that would permit division and bickering. “The people don't know what the vote means! It is the job of the enlightened leaders to raise the people's intellect.”
Several decades later, Ian Smith described the appeal communism had to Zimbabwean officials:
I remember, going back a few years now, speaking to one of the government ministers who had a university degree and clearly was no fool. ‘You are an intelligent person,’ I said. ‘How can you support a failed policy like communism?’ After thinking for a few moments he replied: ‘It has nothing to do with the philosophy of communism, which is foreign to us black people. What appealed to us most over our induction into communism was the firm instruction that: “Once you become the government, you remain the government for ever”.’
Now, some of this is simply greed and lust for power that is universal human nature that with the departure of colonial powers had nothing to keep it in check. But this collectivism also has a deeper, structural logic.
Discrimination by one racial group against others does not make for an environment of meritocracy even among the group doing the discriminating. The Jim Crow south in the United States was not particularly known as a place of upward mobility or fairness among whites or as an environment of economic prosperity in general. In Zimbabwe in the 1980s, a government official who had the power to dismiss whites from the security forces and civil service merely because they were white was likely to hire blacks for preferential reasons as well and not on the basis of superior qualifications.
And just as merit suffers in the public sector, so property rights suffer in the private sector. In Zimbabwe, even whites who bought property after 1980 found themselves relieved of it at mob-point with no legal redress. Neither will this be an environment where black property owners are likely to be secure in their property. Property will be treated essentially as government jobs are, as a trophy awarded to loyal supporters. Confiscated white-owned farms are not then placed on the open market to be bid on by black buyers who can then own them without fear of further confiscation. The farms are instead distributed among government officials and their friends on the basis of loyalty.
Whether through wealth or through public office, white faces in prominent places provoke the anger of the public. The nephew of a minister getting control over a parastatal entity or given ownership of a commercial farm may lead to grumbling complaints. But a white man who rose to such a position would evoke an intense racial ire that any black government would be bound to defer to. In fact, the only way a white man could have anything worth having and keep it is if people believed he had not secured it by his own efforts, but instead had been awarded it as a reward for his political loyalty. It is an inherently anti-free-enterprise mindset. And none of this is Robert Mugabe’s fault.
In the post-Mugabe era, Emmerson Mnangagwa has made a big show of welcoming exiled white farmers back to Zimbabwe. He even appointed some to meaningless government positions just as ZANU-PF does to buy the loyalty of their black supporters. What he didn’t do is offer them either a return of their property or compensation thereof. The best the farmers can hope for is to run the farms either as tenants or as employees of the new ZANU-PF owners. And even this is contingent on their continued loyalty to the party.