Zimbabwe: After Mugabe, Looking Back

AfricaFocus Bulletin November 27, 2017 (171127) (Reposted from sources cited below)

Additional articles worth noting

MacDonald Dzirutwe, Joe Brock, Ed Cropley, “Special Report: ‘Treacherous shenanigans’ – The inside story of Mugabe’s downfall,” Reuters, Nov. 26, 2017 http://tinyurl.com/y6wwd2hy Reuters has pieced together the events leading up to Mugabe’s removal, showing that the army’s action was the culmination of months of planning that stretched from Harare to Johannesburg to Beijing.

Sarah Ládípọ̀ Manyika, “From Zimbabwe: The Best Books of the Mugabe Years,” Nov. 21, 2017 http://www.ozy.com – Direct URL: http://tinyurl.com/yaeuvdmf

Truth is said to be stranger than fiction, but Zimbabwe’s novelists have always shone a light on the truths — both complex and contradictory — of this nation. Mugabe himself embodies complexities and contradictions: He was a liberation hero and the first president of Zimbabwe who presided over a country that initially thrived, but at the same time there was a dark underbelly to his rule in the ’80s and ’90s. Then came the period of the 2000s when he led a country that was clearly in decline. These 10 books trace this arc of the Mugabe era.

Petina Gappah, “Mugabe and me: A personal history of growing up in Zimbabwe,” BBC, Nov. 25, 2017 http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-42109616

By the end of the academic year, I had studied constitutional law, and learned, through case law on illegal detentions, that all the time I had been gulping down books as a child in the library, a state of emergency had been in place in Matabeleland, and that region had been the theatre of mass killings by the army’s Fifth Brigade.

By the time I came face to face with Mugabe at my own graduation four years later, I was no longer a believer. Gone was the hero worship, but still left was deep and conflicted respect. As the Dean read out my achievements and I knelt before him to be capped, I looked into the face of my president. In that voice, the voice I had first heard in our township house when Zimbabwe was just a dream, Mugabe said to me, “Congratulations, well done.”

The last 17 years saw me count myself among his opponents as he waged another war, this time against the country he had promised.

We could not count all the bodies after that terrible war of liberation, but those that we could, we gave funeral rites and buried in places of honour. But how do you count the bodies of those who died in the war Mugabe waged against his own people?

Zimbabwe’s Political Watershed: A Tale of Failed Transitions

Paul Tiyambe Zeleza

Linked-In Pulse, Nov. 18, 2017 http://tinyurl.com/y9482jja

President Robert Mugabe, once the celebrated hero of Zimbabwe’s protracted liberation struggle who descended into an irascible octogenarian dictator, seems to have finally met his rendezvous with history. On Wednesday, November 15, 2017 the army overthrew him. He was placed under house arrest together with his much-reviled wife, notoriously known as ‘Gucci Grace’ or ‘DisGrace’. It has been an unusually slow motion and sanitized coup, homage to the unpopularity of coups in an increasingly democratic Africa. But it also underscores the fact that President Mugabe’s ouster arose out of an internecine struggle for power among the ruling elite. This suggests the limits of fundamental change in the immediate post-Mugabe era for the longsuffering masses of Zimbabwe.

…

Zimbabwe protesters on November 18, the Saturday before Robert Mugabe resigned. Credit: http://www.groundup.org.za

The Mugabe era began with so much promise in 1980 after a bloody liberation struggle that lasted almost two decades. It ended 37 years later in almost unimaginable ignominy, leaving behind a trail of economic mismanagement, widespread impoverishment, and millions of emigrants, not to mention the intangible but no less palpable wounds of national trauma, humiliation, and disillusionment. Much of the commentary in the African and international media has largely focused on the epic failures of the president and the outrageous foibles of his avaricious and ambitious wife. Specifically, they concentrate on the spectacular mistake President Mugabe made in firing his once close and loyal confidant Vice President Emmerson Mnangagwa, in an apparent bid to prepare his wife as his successor.

There can be little doubt the president and his wife finally overreached and sealed their fate by unleashing forces that they could no longer control. But the dramatic moment we are witnessing in Zimbabwe is rooted in a longer and far more complex history that transcends the fatal flaws of the president, his wife, and the country’s other leaders, however critical their respective roles maybe. It can be argued the current conjuncture in Zimbabwe represents the confluence of three failed transitions. The first was the problematic transition from the liberation struggle to a developmental post-colonial state arising out of the country’s decolonization in the era of neo-liberalism. The second was the challenge of shifting from an authoritarian to a pluralistic order when the winds of democratization, for the ‘second independence’, began blowing across the continent. The third concerns the management of inter-generational contestations for power in anticipation of the postMugabe era.

…

But unlike many countries that got their independence in the 1950s and 1960s, Zimbabwe attained its independence during a period characterised by global economic crisis and the ascendancy of neo-liberalism. The first severely limited primary commodity and export driven economic growth enjoyed by many of the newly independent countries in the 1960s, while the second entailed the ‘rolling back’ of the state that severely curtailed the developmentalist ambitions of the new government. To be sure, in the early post-independence years Zimbabwe’s record of achievement in the provision of social services especially education and health care was very impressive. But it was unsustainable following the imposition of structural adjustment programs, which, as in much of Africa, took a heavy toll on the economy particularly social services and formal and public sector employment. In fact, the austerities of structural adjustment programs (SAPs) galvanized the increasingly pauperised urban middle classes and the rural masses still awaiting their fruits of Uhuru into the wave of protests and agitation that crystallized into struggles for democratization, for the ‘second independence.’

…

By the late 1990s the comrades in power could no longer fool their beloved masses in the rural areas, the restive armies of unemployed educated youths in the cities, and the workers flexing their industrial muscles and discovering a new political voice through mushrooming civil society organizations and the MDC.

…

By the end of the 1990s both rural and urban discontent were growing. Indeed, the rural areas bore the brunt of economic decline engendered by the draconian regime of structural adjusment imposed with missionary zeal by the gendarmes of global capitalism—the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. This was compounded by political terror as the increasingly besieged regime sought to shore up its dwindling legitimacy and tattered revolutionary credentials by tightening its grip on the peasantry, its symbolic and substantive basis of power. The costs of the economic crisis, as manifested in food shortages and the politicization of food relief efforts, finally broke the proverbial patient backs of the peasantry.

Connecting the two, the peasantry and the working classes, the rural and the urban areas, and the country’s other spatial and social divides, including the ethnicized divisions between the old political geographies of Mashonaland and Matabeleland, which the Mugabe regime had manipulated to weaken the opposition and maintain its iron grip on power, was the draconian ‘Operation Murambatsvina,’ officially translated as ‘Operation Clean Up,’ but literally translated as ‘getting rid of the filth,’ through which the government sought to drain the cities including Harare, the capital, of political opposition. The operation was launched in 2005 and affected more than two million people. The bulk of the MDC’s parliamentary seats from previous elections were located in the cities.

This criminal evacuation program, which was widely condemned within Zimbabwe and internationally including by the United Nations, led to the destruction of the informal sector in the cities and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people many of whom flocked to the increasingly destitute rural areas. This not only exacerbated rural poverty, but also helped dissolve some of the social and political boundaries, both real and imagined, between the rural and urban areas and dwellers, which raised national consciousness and reinforced opposition to the former liberation heroes turned into predators in power.

…

The violence and polarisation became even more evident in the election of March 2008. Preliminary indications were that the MDC was poised for victory both in the parliamentary and presidential elections. The government unleashed massive intimidation against the opposition and their supporters and perpetrated voter fraud, which provoked widespread condemnation at home and abroad. Both SADC and the United Nations tried to intervene. It took more than a month before the final results were declared after being doctored to prevent a run-off—the winner needed more than 50% for outright victory. Finally, on May 2 the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission announced that the MDC leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, had received 47.9% of the vote, trailed by President Mugabe who received 43.2%, and the rest went to minor candidates. For the Parliamentary elections the MDC secured 100 seats and the breakaway MDC-Mutambara 10 seats, while the ruling ZANU-PF garnered 99 seats. In the Senate ZANU-PF claimed 57 seats, MDC 24, and MDC-Mutambara 12.

Despite international condemnation and interventions, violence and intimidation against the opposition continued, which saw dozens of people killed. The MDC decided to withdraw from the second round of presidential elections scheduled for June 27, 2008. President Mugabe won 85.51% of the vote in a much-reduced turnout placed at 42.37%. He was sworn in immediately after the results were announced. The regional bloc and the African Union called for Government of National Unity (GNU) between ZANU-PF and the MDC, which was eventually formed in early 2009 under which Morgan Tsvangirai became Prime Minister. It was a bloated government with two deputy vicepresidents, two deputy prime ministers, 31 ministers, 8 ministers of state, 20 deputy ministers, and 9 provincial governors.

The oversize government was not matched by its efficacy, let alone were the political divisions overcome. Indeed, as with most marriages of convenience, it was a fragile, acrimonious, and temporary union that crumbled several years later. To be sure, under the GNU, the economy recovered from the economic crisis of the 2000s that was characterized by endemic shortages of goods, hyperinflation measured in the trillions, the collapse of educational institutions and health facilities, massive unemployment, and migrations of an estimated 3-5 million to South Africa and other neighbouring countries as well as Europe and North America.

…

The political respite that came with the containment of the MDC proved short-lived. Assured of its political dominance, ZANU-PF turned inward, and intra-party contestations over the post-Mugabe era heated up. As in many other dictatorships in post-colonial Africa, openly discussing the president’s fraility and demise were taboo. But everyone knew the old man was on his last legs as evidence mounted of his growing physical and mental infirmity. Predictably, the struggle centered on the position of the Vice-Presidency in which intra-Shona ethnic, generational, and gender cleavages reared their ugly heads. Ideology had long ceased to be a factor notwhitstanding invocations of tired socialist rhetoric and empty obeisance to protecting and promoting the ‘revolution.’

In recent years the intra-ZANU conflict has centered on the war veterans’ and postlibration generations coalesced around two key protagonists. On the one hand is the 75-year old Vice President, Mr. Mnangwaga, the cunning and ruthless ‘Crocodile’ infamous for orchestrating the Matabeleland massacres of 1983. On the other is the Generation 40 faction of post-liberation apparatchiks and looters beholden to the President’s wife, the combative 52 year old Ms. Grace Mugabe, who had since acquired an insatiable hunger for power beyond her earlier shopping addiction. Both sought the ouster of Ms. Joice Mujuru, a renowned war veteran in her own right, as Vice President, which happened in December 2014. Soon after Ms. Mujuru was expelled from ZANU-PF. Mr. Mnangwagwa and Ms. Mugabe fell into openly bitter jostling for power within ZANU-PF and for the president’s ear. The latter enjoyed the upper hand of marital intimacy and the support of the G40, while the former had the support of the war veterans and most crucially the military.

The reckoning came following the ouster of Mr. Mnangwagwa as Vice President on November 8, 2017. For the military and political elite that had accumulated vast wealth in an increasingly impoverished country and enjoyed political power for decades the prospects of Ms. Mugabe and the G40 supplanting them was anathema. They struck back on November 15. The hapless President quickly discovered that the weary population was not on his side as it marched in the streets of Harare with ecstacy not seen since independence. Even his party seemed more interested in protecting its hold on power and economic interests than in protecting him. Party branches passed no confidence votes in him and an emergency meeting was called to formally remove him as party leader. As with many dictators power oozed out of the once beloved and longdreaded President’s hands like air out of a deflated balloon.

…

The immediate trigger of President Mugabe’s fall came from the regime’s failure to manage the transition from the nation’s octogenarian founder to a successor and new political dispensation. The fratricidal conflict in ZANU-PF between the two generations means that the struggle for Zimbabwe’s future, the country of my birth whose struggles for liberation I cherish and whose bright future I yearn for, means the post-Mugabe era will be a troubled one. The vicious struggle between the two factions is less about charting a more productive future for the country, and more about safeguarding their ill-gotten wealth built on the carcasses of deepening poverty for millions of workers and peasants, not to mention the immiseration of significant sections of the middle classes. In short, both factions have profiteered from President Mugabe’s political repression and economic plunder.

Read full article at http://tinyurl.com/y9482jja

Op-Ed: Beware ‘Crocodile’ Mnangagwa – Zanu-PF is not renewing, it is a snake shedding its old skin

Leon Mighti

Daily Maverick, 21 Nov 2017

https://www.dailymaverick.co.za – Direct URL: http://tinyurl.com/y9h6k982

Those who believe Robert Mugabe should be punished for crimes against humanity and stand trial, I agree with you. If you believe that then you must believe the same for the number one henchman, Emmerson Mnangagwa. We cannot have a fresh start without a full account from Mugabe and Mnangagwa about what they did, who they did it with, and why they did it.

Let me share my Zim story with you.

When my mother fell pregnant at the age of 19, the first thing she did was buy life assurance. She didn’t want her only son to suffer in case something happened to her. So, she went to Old Mutual and got the best life assurance package they had. I sometimes see those adverts in the morning and think of it. Pay such and such at 20 and get R3-million if something happens.

My mother never thought that she would only live to be 29. She passed away so suddenly. There was a big fight for custody and perhaps even because of that life assurance policy. When it was all over we were well into the post-2000 Zimbabwe. That funeral policy ended up being worth less than the amount of taxi fare it cost to travel to the bank.

My mother worked all those years for nothing. Think about that for a second if you are a person who pays life assurance today. Politics can mess up your bank balance and wipe away a lifetime of sweat and tears. That’s how I was personally affected by the Mugabe era.

When I, like millions of others, ran away to try to pursue my dreams elsewhere. I had nothing. I struggled to pay for my fees at Wits. I was homeless for years and watched my peers graduate and buy cars while I stood selling earphones on the university library steps.

I left Zim back then because I had nothing, I wanted to be somebody and have something like the boys in my classes at CBC. I left Zim coz of the poverty I was tired of breathing every day. I left Zim because I wanted to be a doctor so badly but I didn’t have a chance in Zim (my marks were good but not good enough) at the one medical school that was present at the time. Only 200 could make it in and there was no graduate entry programme.

When my father died he was a plumber for the national railway services, the NRZ. He was a foreman and was damned good at what he did. One of my uncles (his cousin) loved to mock him for being a handyman but he loved that job and the dignity it offered him to provide for his family.

When he passed away he died a pauper. He was making less than R500 a month – when the government chose to pay. …

My father did his best to give me the best education; he gave me an education he could never afford. I went to Marist Brothers in Dete, and I was always one of the people who had to explain my fees situation. My trunk was never full, and Kudzai Mucheriwa is my witness. But my Dad did the best he could. I even went to CBC in Bulawayo and my stepmother hated it, she complained daily. I will never forget what my father said to her, “If we have to eat amacimbi (mopane worms) daily till he finishes school, we will eat amacimbi daily.”

He would do piece jobs for pennies in the many months that government did not pay. My father died still walking to work coz he could not afford to catch a taxi. From Northend to the NRZ close to the factories, in Bulawayo. If you know that area, imagine a qualified technical graduate, top of his class, a man who once managed city of Bulawayo water systems, a foreman for years. Walking to work.

Under Mugabe my father watched his dreams and efforts to create something of value for his family melt away. He tried to get into another country like so many others did to escape that suffocating poverty but it caught up with him…

I tell you those true personal stories to preface this next sentence.

I hate Robert Mugabe.

I haven’t shared how one of my grandmothers told me horror stories about some of what happened to her friends and family during Gugurahundi (the notorious massacres). She used to cringe when she saw that mass murderer on TV speaking as if he was God’s gift to Africa and Zimbabwe.

I hate Robert Mugabe.

I hate him so much I have obsessed over him, studying him, studying his rise to power and how he was able to destroy so many lives. How could one man do this. It was at that point that I realised he was NEVER ACTING ALONE.

I know that he did not do what he did alone. He had some people co-starring with him in this movie of Evil that we have all been watching since 1979. Joshua Nkomo warned people back then not to vote for an Idi Amin. He meant Mugabe, he had seen enough to make the conclusion; they say character is prologue.

So today I want to caution against dancing in the streets for the next Idi Amin whose governmental and leadership CV is as horrific as that of Mugabe, the number one disciple of Mugabe for 41 years. The co-star of the Robert Mugabe show.

Mr Emmerson (Crocodile by reputation) Mnangagwa.

If I hate Mugabe, I must also hate this man; there is no Mugabe without Mnangagwa. Two sides of the proverbial coin.

…

So having said all of this we have to truly consider if this is a #Freshstart for Zimbabwe?

Those who believe Mugabe should be punished for crimes against humanity and stand trial, I agree with you. If you believe that then you must believe the same for the number one henchman Mnangagwa. We cannot have a fresh start without a full account from Mugabe and Mnangagwa about what they did, who they did it with, why they did it. Until those people in those “affected” areas are made whole. Until they receive justice and closure. It was not a moment of madness as Mugabe and Mnangagwa have said on record, it was an intentional, calculated mass execution on ethnic grounds of innocent civilians. To put it in perspective, 30,000 lives were lost in the fight for independence, and just three years after getting it more than 20,000 people never lived to see it because Mugabe and Mnangagwa had to settle a tribal score with Mzilikazi and Lobengula.

For those who believe that Mugabe must account for all the farms that ended up belonging to his wife and not the people, Mnangagwa must account for the same corruption, he owns many farms too, and so do many military generals. The economic and social crimes that they see all of a sudden, both the Lacoste faction and the G40 faction committed those crimes against the dowry of Chimurenga that is not theirs to self-appropriate. Mnangagwa must explain what happened to the 15-billion. Is this what he used to pay the army for its loyalty? Those are blood diamonds, for sure.

For those who say Mugabe has been rigging elections, has been suppressing rights of the people to movement, to free speech, to fair trial. To all those people I say you are absolutely right. Mugabe did all those things, and he did them with Mnangagwa. Who helped Mugabe arrest journalists and activists, where is Dzamara? Mnangagwa must tell us where they buried him.

…

Read full article at http://tinyurl.com/y9h6k982

If this issue was forwarded to you by email, and you want to receive AfricaFocus Bulletin regularly, sign up here.

AfricaFocus Bulletin is an independent electronic publication providing reposted commentary and analysis on African issues, with a particular focus on U.S. and international policies. AfricaFocus Bulletin is edited by William Minter.

AfricaFocus Bulletin can be reached at africafocus@igc.org. Please write to this address to suggest material for inclusion. For more information about reposted material, please contact directly the original source mentioned. For a full archive and other resources, see http://www.africafocus.org

https://www.sacurrent.com/sanantonio/gentle-giant/Content?oid=2268857

GENTLE GIANT

By Dick J. Reavis

At 79, he has outlived his most outspoken critics and several spans of public scorn. Most of those who know his name today are activists or labor liberals — and they have only praise for him, despite his long and entirely public or “open” membership in the Communist Party, USA.

“He’s a true organizer, of a dying breed,” says Graciela Sanchez, director of the Esperanza Peace & Justice Center.

Those who have dealt with Stanford over the years say that rather than pose as a militant, he speaks in the voice of consensus and prudence.

 Tom Flower, a Vietnam-era protester, now an Anglican minister better known for work among the homeless, argues that, “actually, John is pretty conservative about doing things that might upset people. He doesn’t like to put leaflets on people’s windshields, for example.”

But Stanford wasn’t always viewed as the mild character that he seems to be today. There was a time when he was seen as a threat to the free world.

In 1950, he entered the peace movement by circulating the Stockholm Peace Petition, which called for banning nuclear weapons, and was roundly viewed as a conspirator in a global plot to further Stalin’s aims.

Stanford says that the joined the Party on the day after his discharge from the U.S. Navy in 1946. He became an activist within weeks, soon after re-enrolling at the University of Texas at Austin. Late that year, the Houston Informer reported that Stanford gave a speech in the basement of a Baptist church, under the sponsorship of the youth wing of the NAACP.

“White students are learning that it is time for them to fight for the rights of the Negro people,” he declared, characteristically throwing in a bit of wishful thinking. “If we increase our unity, we can make of the South a place where everyone can have a decent living, health, and education facilities.”

Stanford, who is white, delivered his Houston speech to support a lawsuit by Heman Sweatt, a black postal worker, to gain admission to the University of Texas law school. It was not the kind of speech that ordinary white men gave in that era of poll taxes and statutory segregation.

“In the South in the 1930s and 1940s, there were very, very few whites who spoke out for racial equality,” explains Maurice Isserman, the nation’s leading scholar on American communist affairs. “To do so was to put your life at risk.

And in many instances, the white Southerners who were willing to take that risk were in, or close to, the Communist Party.”

Sweatt’s legal challenge, won in 1950, is today seen as a precedent to the more-famous 1954 ruling in Brown vs. Board of Education, which ordered the integration of all public schools.

Because of his victory, Sweatt posthumously became a Texas hero, his portrait displayed at the Institute of Texan Cultures, a scholarship and college campus named in his honor.

John Stanford was one of the few whites who spoke out for racial equality in the 1930s and 1940s. Photos by Mark Greenberg

The Meerschaum pipe Members of the Communist Party customarily don’t reveal the names of members or former members who are still alive. But Sweatt’s death has freed Stanford to declare that at the time of the suit, Sweatt, too, was a Communist Party member. Unlike Sweatt, Stanford was never closeted, even if it was because he had little choice, thanks to the Texas Legislature and the Houston police. He moved to the Bayou City following his graduation from UT, and on September 16, 1948 — El Diez y Seis de Septiembre, Mexican Independence Day — the bilingual agitator was arrested for distributing Party leaflets decrying “the ruthless economic, political, and social oppression of the Mexican-American people.”

In 1951, Texas passed a Communist Control Act that required Party members to register with authorities, and prescribed a two- to 10-year prison term for failure to comply with the law. The Party decided to challenge the law’s dubious constitutionality, and Stanford, who was by then living in San Antonio, volunteered to be the test case, mailing an open letter to officials in 1952, declaring his membership. According to the plan, he was to refuse to register when the authorities responded.

But the 1950s were tough times for even the Party’s bravest members. Eleven national leaders of the group had been indicted under federal anti-communist laws, and some of them were already behind bars. After Stanford mailed his statement, the Party’s leadership found that it didn’t have the resources to pursue the Texas challenge, and ordered him to go underground.

“The Party had made a big mistake,” Stanford observes today. “It thought that fascism was coming.” He doesn’t remember everything that happened afterwards, partly because aging takes a toll, and partly, he says, because he tried to forget.

“I used to keep photo albums,” he recalls, “but when I went underground, I cut the faces out of the pictures, so that the FBI wouldn’t harass my friends. But the thing is, then I forgot, too, and can’t match names with faces now.”

To avoid arrest, he fled to Alabama, and knowing no one, found a job as a waiter at a diner and tried to lay low. But he couldn’t; it wasn’t in him to sit on the sidelines. After a few weeks in Birmingham, Stanford began attending meetings of a committee that was opposing fare hikes on city buses. Alabama bus fare activists, however, were wary of the Texan who showed up as if from nowhere; they thought that he was an FBI agent.

Stanford’s arrangement with the Party — like a scene from a movie about the French Resistance — was that he was to stay out of view for six months, then place a classified ad in the leading daily newspaper, saying that he had lost a meerschaum pipe. The person who called to report the discovery of the meerschaum, the plan went, would become his contact with the Party.

Stanford placed the ad and a young woman called. He asked her to meet him at the diner on a Sunday morning, when business was slow. Joanna Tylee walked in, she recalls, and upon seeing the Texan whom she remembered from the bus fare meetings, thought that she had walked into a trap.

The pipe plot had a happy ending: Joanna Tylee is today Jo Stanford. Following their marriage, John returned to San Antonio, and with her, reorganized the city’s frightened Communists and raised two children in the Jefferson neighborhood.

A Rosewood raid Back in Texas, prosecutors hadn’t forgotten Stanford. Through informers, they and the FBI kept eyes on the quiet-spoken protester, and as late as September 1963, San Antonio Express and News headlines assured its readers that “D.A. Still Studying Stanford.”

Officials had plenty of authority under which to act against him: Augmented by new measures, Texas laws by then prescribed 30-year prison terms for unregistered Reds. But the feds asked that Texas officials wait to nab Stanford until he could be designated as a Communist by the federal Subversive Activities Control Board, which delivered its finding on December 26, 1963.

Hours later, search warrant in hand, seven men from the district and state attorneys offices knocked on the door of the Stanford home, which was then on Rosewood Street, in the Beacon Hill area. John Stanford wasn’t home; Jo admitted the raiders and promptly telephoned the press. Meanwhile, her visitors began boxing some 2,000 books and various papers, including the couple’s marriage license, insurance policies, and mortgage schedule. The raid lasted for five hours. When reporters arrived, according to the Express and News, Jo welcomed them with, “Come on in and join the party!” But then she caught herself. “Or should I use another word?” she joked. The searchers claimed that the raid was necessary to prove that Stanford was imperiling public safety by selling Communist books and tracts through a mail-order bookstore in his home called All Points of View, which he had been operating since 1961.

In the months that followed, Stanford and his attorney, the late Maury Maverick Jr., were frequent subjects of the local press, whose handling of the affair betrayed an acquired admiration for the suspect. Reporters described Stanford as “affable,” and “pipe-smoking,” a designation that, in days before bongs, connoted “reflective” and “calm.”

Litigation over the book seizure wound up before the U.S. Supreme Court, where Maverick pointed out that among the confiscated items were copies of legal opinions on anti-communist laws penned by Justice Hugo Black.

“The reference to Justice Black’s opinion brought chuckles from the bench and several humorous exchanges that brightened the hushed dignity of the marble courtroom,” Express writer Ned Curran reported from Washington when the Court heard the case.

To almost no one’s surprise, the Court ruled the raid on Rosewood invalid, and the DA’s men, driving a borrowed red-and-white pickup, returned Stanford’s books to Rosewood.

They probably didn’t intend to aid or encourage the unarmed Stanford to overthrow the government, but the lawmen also gave him a gun, a .38-caliber pistol that had been taken for evidence in an unrelated case. Stanford, who has always claimed that he is for “socialism by peaceful and democratic means,” promptly returned the weapon.

Lingering suspicions Stanford’s victory before the Supreme Court kept him under public glare even after the ruling was old news. In 1965, an Express reporter grilled Stanford, who attended a demonstration to protest the killing of Reverend James Reeb during the Selma-to-Montgomery march led by Martin Luther King Jr.

Perhaps hoping to tarnish the voting rights movement, the reporter asked Stanford to justify his presence at the event. “I participated for the reason tens of thousands participated across the country — as a protest against the brutality being practiced against the Alabama Negroes,” Stanford shot back.

Six months later, his activities were again assailed in the local press when he sent anti-war leaflets to a mailing list that he had compiled, drawing a complaint from a soldier’s mother — not in San Antonio, but in distant El Paso.

“I believe the wars in Vietnam and the Dominican Republic endanger the lives of all American servicemen — including this woman’s son,” he told an inquisitor from the Express.

In the years since Vietnam, Stanford has taken part in dozens of other causes: the unionization of Valley farm workers, the campaign to Free Angela Davis, protests over U.S. involvement in Central America, and since 2001, Thursday peace vigils at the San Fernando Cathedral.

At protests against the U.S. occupation of Iraq, he is saying much the same thing today that he has said since 1946. “Capitalism doesn’t have a future,” he maintains. He insists that Soviet interests were only a marginal concern of his. “We weren’t concerned about Stalin’s policies during the 1950s, we were fighting against the poll tax,” he says.

Young demonstrators may dismiss Stanford as too old, and his trademark causes too dated to be relevant now, but they don’t suspect him, as their forerunners did, of joining their protests with a hidden agenda in mind. The ironies of history are endless, and one of them is that it’s not because he has spent more than 50 years on the barricades, but because there is no longer a Soviet state, that nobody questions Stanford’s sincerity today.