Liberator who became a tyrant
strange thing for all of us to see. When the cattle were settled, he would sometimes sit in the shade under the trees.”
Mugabe’s academic brilliance laid the foundations for his future and the sense of entitlement that would eventually ruin his country. Father Loubière was succeeded by a Father O’Hea, who became Mugabe’s mentor and surrogate father. He believed the quiet, studious boy was destined for great things.
“Our mother explained that Father O’Hea had told her that Robert was going to be an important somebody, a leader,” said Donato. “Our mother believed Father O’Hea had brought this message from God; she took it very seriously. When the food was short she would say: ‘Give it to Robert.’ We laughed at him because he was so serious, until he became cross. Then our mother told us to leave him alone.”
“Mugabe’s secret was that he was always the cleverest person in the room,” Africa correspondent Simon Allison wrote of Mugabe. In 1950 he won a scholarship to Fort Hare where the political views of giants such as Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo and Julius Nyerere were shaped. Robert Sobukwe was a contemporary.
“The impact of India’s independence, and the example of Gandhi and Nehru, had a deep effect,” Mugabe said in an interview with The New York
Times before Zimbabwe’s independence. “Apartheid was beginning to take shape. Marxism-Leninism was in the air.
“From then on I wanted to be a politician,” he said. After graduating from Fort Hare, Mugabe spent time teaching in Ghana and met his first wife, Sally Hayfron, a teacher who had grown up in a political family. In Ghana, the first country to gain independence from colonial rule, he experienced majority government and met the country’s first democratic leader, Kwame Nkrumah.
Mugabe and Sally moved to Southern Rhodesia, as Zimbabwe was then called, and married in 1961.
Here Mugabe entered the fractious world of
African nationalist politics. In the two decades that followed, today’s allies would become tomorrow’s opponents in the fight for majority rule. Plots would twist and change with unlikely scenarios and unexpected outcomes. Key figures included Joshua Nkomo, leader of the Zimbabwe African People’s Union party, and Rev Ndabaningi Sithole, who founded the Zimbabwe African National Union (Zanu).
In the end, Mugabe, the scholarly aesthete who resembled a Jesuit priest more than a revolutionary, would emerge the undisputed victor among his political rivals.
In 1963, after the banning of the newly formed Zanu, Mugabe was detained for “subversive speech” during a crackdown on political activists by prime minister Ian Smith, notorious for running in 1964 on the ticket of “a whiter, brighter Rhodesia”.
Mugabe spent the next decade behind bars. While he was imprisoned, his infant son died of malaria in 1966 and the authorities refused to let him travel to Ghana for the funeral. Many years later, he said he lost that anger because “suffering had been rewarded with victory”.
In jail, Mugabe refused to break under pressure — whereas the Zanu founder and leader, Ndabaningi Sithole, apparently did, renouncing subversion and terrorism after he was sentenced in 1969 for incitement.
By the time he was released in 1974, Mugabe had taken over as leader of Zanu in prison.
He escaped to Mozambique to join the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army, which was waging war against the government in the Rhodesian bush war, or Chimurenga (Shona for “revolutionary struggle”). At least 20,000 people were killed during the conflict.
Mugabe’s position as leader was far from secure among the movement’s military wing. However, by a series of adroit manoeuvres that established his early reputation for ruthlessness, Mugabe sidelined his opponents in the military command and in 1977 he was elected president of Zanu.
The revolutionary who was never seen to bear arms or fight in battle during the war against white minority rule was the undisputed leader.
“Mugabe politicised Zanu to an unprecedented degree. He subordinated the military leaders to party rule and infused the sense of nationalist struggle with his pan-Africanist ideals. The combination of the gun and Mugabe’s political ascent sparked the imagination of young people in Rhodesia, and they flocked to fight under his banner,” wrote Stephen Chan in The Guardian.
Trained with Chinese assistance in Mozambique and Tanzania, Zanu soldiers were sent back to fight the white regime.
After seven years of war the opposing sides were ready to negotiate and in 1980 the country ran its first democratic elections, which Mugabe won by a landslide, taking 57 of the 100 parliamentary seats
At first Mugabe struck a note of conciliation, disarming his erstwhile enemies and was anointed the firebrand nationalist loved by the international community.
“Remain calm,” Mugabe told the nation. “Respect your opponents and do nothing that will disturb the peace. We must now all of us work for unity, whether we have won the election or not.”
But it wasn’t long before the revolutionary demonstrated that his thirst for power was limitless; that he had always intended to stay in power “until God says, ‘Come’ ”, as he declared in a speech before the AU in 2016.
The first indications of Mugabe’s tyrannical bent emerged as early as 1983 when the army’s feared Fifth Brigade launched a campaign of terror against the Ndebele people in Matabeleland in western Zimbabwe to eliminate any opposition to Mugabe’s rule.
Foreign diplomats chose to ignore the Matabeleland bloodshed and it went largely unnoticed by the international community. Survivors pointed out that this was in contrast to the international outcry that erupted when white farmers were forced off their land years later.
Twenty years after independence, a white minority, accounting for less than 2% of the population, still controlled more than half the arable land. Mugabe incited war veterans to invade farms in a ploy to shore up support.
The liberation giant steadily morphed into the caricature of a tinpot dictator complete with Hitler moustache, a figure of great contradictions, the emperor without any clothes in sight who stole elections and tortured opponents.
His delusions of omnipotence were only magnified by his fellow African rulers loath to do anything but kowtow to one of the liberation elders.
Even his dotage did little to diminish his stature. In 2014 he assumed the rotating, one-year presidency of the 15-nation Southern African Development Community. Then, in early 2015, the AU appointed him chairman for the year.
In Zimbabwe, reaction to his death was met with mixed feelings. Some even said they would miss him.
“Let’s get our facts right, Mugabe is our founding father. He is among the first and leading nationalists of our country and we will miss what he stood for more that he has now died,” said the Catholic church’s Father Fidelis Mukonori, who brokered the deal that saw Mugabe resign as president in 2017 after 37 years. “The world, especially Africa, will miss him. He was a larger-than-life character.”
Paulos Chiwore, a 39-year-old father of three, has struggled to fend for his family and parents in the rural area of Mhangura since Mugabe was toppled from power.
“Mugabe was better, prices were stable and the only wrong he did was allowing his wife to taste power,” said Chiwore.
For opposition leader Tendai Biti, Mugabe should be allowed to rest in peace.
“He is gone and although we have so many bad memories of arrests, torture and beatings and jailing, we chose to let him rest in peace. There is no bitterness on my part.”
Much of Mugabe’s legacy remains a contradiction. He was the Mao-jacketed revolutionary who loved cricket.
He was the leader who presided over a country with an 80% unemployment rate — and still thought he could run it best.
He was the British-bashing president who fumed when his knighthood was revoked.
He was the aesthete who married a Guccigrabbing secretary while his people starved.
He was a strict Roman Catholic who fathered two children while his first wife was dying.
He was a noted scholar with a string of degrees whose wife had a fraudulent PhD.
He was a nonsmoking teetotaller whose tearaway sons popped exorbitant bottles of champagne while people starved.
But one aspect of the Robert Mugabe legacy is unambiguous. He was willing to trash his own country to retain the levers of power.
Plots would twist and change with unlikely scenarios and unexpected outcomes
The revolutionary who was never seen to bear arms or fight in battle during the war was the undisputed leader