CAMDEN — Organizers of this year’s Camden Conference have their fingers crossed that the keynote speaker will be able to deliver her address.

Margaret Dongo, a one-time guerrilla fighter in Zimbabwe’s struggle for independence, is now engaged in a pitched battle with the southern African country’s president, former guerrilla leader Robert Mugabe.

Dongo, disappointed with the turn Mugabe’s ruling party has taken, launched Zimbabwe’s second political party on Dec. 20. As recently as Feb. 8, The New York Times reported, Mugabe was pushing his country toward a constitutional crisis.

The Times earlier reported that 23 army officers had been arrested for plotting an overthrow. Mugabe suggested the country’s supreme court resign and threatened Zimbabwe’s independent newspaper.

“Things are very electric over there, and they change from day to day,” said Andy Rheault, the program chairman of the Camden Conference, an annual international affairs symposium.

The subject of this year’s event — the 12th such conference — is sub-Saharan Africa. The conference runs Feb. 26-28 at the Camden Opera House.

Landing a figure of Dongo’s stature to deliver the keynote address is a coup, but that has been the tradition of the conference since it began in 1988. The first conference featured Brent Scowcroft, who served as national security adviser to President Bush, former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, and William Cohen, former U.S. senator and current secretary of defense.

“They have always had an international flavor, if not a focus,” said Rheault. “In the early days, they tended to have a thematic base,” covering such issues as the environment, the notion of what it meant for the United States to be a superpower and the role of the press. More recently, the conferences have focused on regions: Latin America, China, Russia, Japan and Islam have been topics.

The conferences draw about 350 people each year, from as far away as Washington, D.C., New York and the Midwest, Rheault said, but most come from within a 50-mile radius of Camden.

The Camden Conference was born when former Camden resident Bob Tierney suggested one of the local Rotary clubs hold a symposium. Others in the community with an interest in foreign affairs quickly got on board, and the conference was launched.

The Camden area is known for having several retired CIA officials as residents, but Rheault dismisses this as an explanation for the hold that international affairs has in the small coastal community. Some of those who serve on the conference’s board of directors and on the advisory board may have backgrounds in the military or foreign service, but Rheault believes that well-educated area residents, regardless of their professional background, are eager to learn more about the world.

“Our audience is well-informed with an interest in foreign affairs,” he said.

“In the early days we had an advisory board with a lot of prestigious names on it,” Rheault said, but currently, almost all have ties to the Camden area.

After each conference, attendees are surveyed on their interests in the following year’s subject. Sub-Saharan Africa topped the Pacific Rim as a region worthy of study this year.

“We felt it was timely and appropriate,” Rheault said.

Dongo’s address at 8 p.m. Friday will surely not be academic. While still a teen-ager, she joined Mugabe’s guerrilla forces. She was 15 when independence was won in 1980.

As passionate as she was about independence, the treatment of women in the guerrilla camps, where chiefs would target young girls for nighttime exploitation, changed Dongo’s focus to human rights.

After Zimbabwe won independence, Mugabe’s party took control but corruption soon took hold, Dongo has said. She ran against a candidate for the president’s party for a seat in the parliament and lost, but went to court to challenge the results, believing there had been fraud. The court agreed, another election followed, and she won.

“We have lost the direction, we have lost our ideology,” Dongo is quoted as sayting in a release announcing the conference. “We fought to gain the power to serve the people; now we use that power to serve individual wealth.”

After her address in Camden, Dongo is to speak at Bowdoin College in Brunswick and at Harvard University, then to visit the U.S. State Department in Washington.

In addition to Dongo, guest speakers include Clive Gray, an economist from the Harvard Institute for International Development; Paul Tiyambe Zeleza of Malawi, director of the Center for African Studies at the University of Illinois; Celestin Monga of Cameroon, a representative of the World Bank; and Thelma Awori of Uganda, an administrator for the United Nations Development Programme for Africa.

One challenge the Camden Conference faces is drawing young attendees. The conference is required for a class in African studies at the University of Maine, and scholarships are made available for students throughout the state, Rheault said.

For more information, call 236-1034, or visit the conference Web site at: www.camdenconference.org.