Give a despot his due
So they're finally getting serious about rescinding the honorary degree the University of Massachusetts gave Robert Mugabe, the president of Zimbabwe. About time, and props to the students and to state Representative Kevin Murphy who kept pushing this when all the beautiful people in Amherst looked the other way.
Mugabe, who led the struggle against white minority rule in what was Rhodesia, was the great black hope for postcolonial Africa when he became Zimbabwe's first democratically elected leader in 1980.
It was a stroke of unwitting irony that UMass gave him a doctorate of law in 1986, because ever since Mugabe has been extremely good at thumbing his nose at international law, turning Zimbabwe, once Africa's rose, into an autocracy as indifferent to human rights as Rhodesia's British colonizers. At least the Brits stopped torturing people in the afternoon to take their tea.
UMass was entitled to honor Mugabe in 1986, but everything he's done since has shown him to be a thug and a brute and a racist to boot. The UMass trustees responded to years of documented human rights abuses by yawning. Last year, they said they wouldn't rescind the degree, but would write a letter expressing disapproval of Mugabe's behavior. This, no doubt, bothered Mugabe no end.
The trustees said they were very, very upset with Mugabe. That's like members of the Reichstag saying they didn't like the tone of Hitler's speech to them in 1933.
The trustees said they didn't rescind the degree because they had never rescinded one before. Following this magnificent logic, if you stumble across a dying person for the first time in your life, you should just keep walking, because, well, you never stopped to help a dying person before.
It's high time they restore the Blue Wall as a full-fledged bar and offer two-for-one Powerhouses before trustee meetings at UMass-Amherst. Seriously, if these clowns got loaded before their meetings, could they do any worse?
I would like to take this opportunity to introduce the UMass trustees to my pal Geoff Nyarota. When he was young, Nyarota worked as a teacher, because that was the only job the white Rhodesian government allowed educated blacks to hold. When Mugabe came to power, Nyarota was able to pursue his real calling, which was journalism. He became editor of the Daily News, which quickly became the best newspaper in Zimbabwe.
After Nyarota exposed the corruption endemic to Mugabe's regime, Mugabe did what any good despot would do: He had Nyarota arrested. Six times. When Nyarota wouldn't back down, they bombed his printing press. When he still wouldn't back down, they tried to kill him.
At that point, six years ago, Geoff Nyarota did what any good newspaperman would do: He ran. He didn't stop running until he got to Massachusetts, where the flagship state university had bestowed its highest honor on the guy who wanted him dead. Harvard's Nieman Foundation gave him a fellowship and a way to feed his wife and children.
The sanctuary is appreciated, but Nyarota wants to go home some day, and when he does, that will probably mean Mugabe is dead or in the dock at The Hague. When that happens, Zimbabwe will be better off.
Meanwhile, the traveling circus that is the UMass trustees will meet next month to sort this out. Luckily, they are not meeting in Amherst, which is located in a lovely part of Western Massachusetts known as Happy Valley because a disproportionate number of people there still wear Sandinista T-shirts and think Winnie Mandela was just swell.
Instead, the trustees will meet in Lowell, a real city where people have real jobs and don't have time to worry about tin-pot dictators who live off faded freedom fighter tales.
When the trustees sit down, they should make quick work of this, pausing only to cross out Mugabe's name and put Geoff Nyarota's name in its place.
Kevin Cullen is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at cullen@globe.com.
