November 7, 2019 23
Exit Mugabe
Joshua Hammer
Two Weeks in November:
The Astonishing Untold Story of
the Operation That Toppled Mugabe
by Douglas Rogers.
London: Short Books,
283 pp., £14.99 (paper)
In November 2017 Emmerson Dambudzo
Mnangagwa, Zimbabwe’s seventy-five-
year-old vice-president, fell afoul of
his mentor, President Robert Mugabe.
Mnangagwa, nicknamed the Croco-
dile, was a former guerrilla and a wily
infighter who had kept his footing for
years in the constantly shifting politics
of Zimbabwe’s ruling African National
Union– Patriotic Front (ZANU- PF),
but a feud with the president’s ambi-
tious wife, Grace Mugabe, had thrown
him off balance. The previous August,
Mnangagwa had nearly died after eat-
ing a picnic lunch at a rally in the town
of Gwanda; the would- be killers, rumor
had it, put arsenic in a dish of ice cream
produced by Grace’s dairy farm. Only a
medical evacuation by air to South Af-
rica and days of treatment in a Johan-
nesburg hospital had saved him. Now,
after being described as disloyal by the
man whom he hoped one day to succeed
as president, Mnangagwa found him-
self out of a job, stripped of his security
detail, and running for his life.
Disguised in oversized women’s sun-
glasses and a wide- brimmed safari hat,
he set out from Zimbabwe for Mozam-
bique in a three- car convoy with his
three sons and a few supporters. But se-
curity agents recognized him at the bor-
der crossing, drew their guns, and forced
the group to retreat. They took refuge
in a mud hut outside the border town of
Mutare. Then Mnangagwa, joined by his
eldest son, Junior, walked along a smug-
glers’ trail through the mountains, trav-
eling by moonlight to elude the police.
Searchlights and barking dogs forced
him to crawl through the dirt. Near the
border, he and his portly son—who
was clutching his father’s $8,000 Louis
Vuitton Président briefcase—inched
across a minefield, a remnant of the
guerrilla war of four decades earlier.
Crossing into Mozambique, they were
accosted by a local witch doctor who
demanded a payoff to appease the an-
cestral spirits protecting the area from
trespassers—“a very African toll gate,”
Junior would later say—and narrowly
avoided an untimely end at the hands
of an AK-47- wielding bandit. After
twenty- four hours on the run, Mnan-
gagwa arrived, with blistered feet and
mud- caked clothing, in the frontier
town of Manica.
Two Weeks in November: The As-
tonishing Untold Story of the Op-
eration That Toppled Mugabe by
Douglas Rogers relates in dramatic
detail Mnangagwa’s flight across the
border and transformation—however
briefly—into a sympathetic, even he-
roic figure, as well as the bizarre twists
and turns that, a few days later, would
lead to the overthrow of one of Africa’s
longest- ruling dictators. A Rhodesia-
born writer who has lived in the United
States for almost two decades, Rogers
is also the author of The Last Resort
(2009), a bleakly comic account of his
parents’ attempts to hold onto their
farm and backpackers lodge in Zimba-
bwe’s eastern highlands near Mozam-
bique at the height of Mugabe’s violent
and disastrous land reform campaign.
That book captured the capriciousness
of life under an aging, vindictive ruler
and recounted the wily games that the
elderly couple played—including turn-
ing one wing of the lodge into a brothel
serving local politicians—to ward off
Mugabe’s goons. A decade later, while
Rogers was on a return trip to Africa
to see his parents and to travel with
three friends through Mozambique in a
vintage Mercedes—“The Hangover set
in Latin Africa,” he calls it—Mugabe’sgrip on power began to falter. Rogers
cut his Mozambican idyll short and
headed to Harare, where he witnessed
the last act in an African tragedy.In 1980 Mugabe was elected prime
minister after an eight- year insurgency
against Rhodesia’s white- minority
government, which had unilaterally
declared independence from Great
Britain in 1965, and changed the coun-
try’s name to Zimbabwe. He inherited a
modern infrastructure and an economy
that, though battered by the conflict,
remained largely intact. White- owned
farms produced tobacco for export,
and the country could draw upon vast
reserves of gold, silver, chrome, dia-
monds, and other resources. Mugabe
preached reconciliation and continuity,
asking Zimbabwe’s 270,000 whites, in-
cluding 4,500 farmers, to stay and help
build the country, downplaying his
Marxist background, and reaching out
to Western democracies for economic
and technical support. In 1990, when I
visited Zimbabwe for the first time, it
had one of the continent’s most literate
populations, its best health care sys-
tem, and a thriving tourism industry.
Mugabe was revered across Africa as
a giant of anti colonialism and a victor
over a white racist regime.
Within a few years, however, Zim-
babwe had become a failed state. In
1998 Mugabe sent thousands of troops
to the Democratic Republic of Congo,
ostensibly to prop up the shaky regime
of President Laurent Kabila, but also to
loot the country’s diamonds and other
minerals. The invasion turned into acostly failure that stirred up resent-
ment toward Mugabe’s corrupt inner
circle and helped the Movement for
Democratic Change (MDC), the popu-
lar opposition party, gain support.
A few years later, Mugabe unleashed
war veterans and cronies to seize, often
at gunpoint, the property of white farm-
ers, many of whom were MDC support-
ers. Thousands of farms passed into the
hands of people who had no experience
in commercial agriculture, with pre-
dictably disastrous results. Exports of
tobacco, Zimbabwe’s main cash crop,
collapsed, foreign exchange dried up,and imported goods disappeared from
stores. Mugabe ordered his finance
minister to print money in ever- greater
amounts to pay government salaries,
setting off an inflationary spiral that
reached 80 billion percent in 2008.
Schools and hospitals collapsed, lit-
eracy plummeted, and infant mortality
rates soared. Mugabe oversaw the most
precipitous economic collapse outside
of war in decades—a distinction that
has only recently been surpassed by
Niedés Maduro in Venezuela.
In 2008 Morgan Tsvangirai, the char-
ismatic leader of the MDC, defeated
Mugabe in the presidential election.
ZANU-PF officials falsified the vote
count, forcing a second round, and
thugs carried out beatings, torture, and
the murders of more than 193 MDC ac-
tivists in order to intimidate the opposi-
tion. Tsvangirai dropped out of the race
to stop the violence. South Africa and
other nations in the region then pres-
sured Mugabe into accepting a “Govern-
ment of National Unity” that included
representatives of the MDC, but this
did little to restrain the ZANU-PF’s ex-
cesses. In 2013 David Coltart, a human
rights attorney from Bulawayo and MDC
leader who was serving as the minister
of education, confronted Mnangagwa,
then the defense minister, in a cabinet
meeting with evidence that ZANU-
PF was plotting to steal the next elec-
tion. “Stick to education,” Mnangagwa
growled, “and leave the politics to us.”By 2017, ZANU-PF’s brand of poli-
tics had turned particularly brutish.
Mugabe was ninety- three and fallingasleep at meetings, and the question
of succession preoccupied his under-
lings. The story of the infighting that
tore the party apart and set the stage
for Mugabe’s fall has been told before,*
but Rogers unearths a trove of new de-
tails. At the time, the favorite to suc-
ceed Mugabe was Mnangagwa, who
had been appointed vice- president in
December 2014. A teenage fighter in
a guerrilla unit called the Crocodile
Gang during a 1960s insurgency (from
which he got his nickname), he was
captured and sentenced by a Rhode-
sian court to death, later commuted
to ten years in prison, for blowing up
a train; after he served his prison term,
he was released into exile in Zambia.
Mnangagwa studied law in Lusaka and
grew close to Mugabe in Mozambique
during the insurgency of the 1970s.
After Britain officially granted Zim-
babwe independence in 1980, he rose
rapidly through the ranks of ZANU-PF.
“If Robert Mugabe was bookish, wiry
and erudite, ED was his physical and
verbal opposite,” writes Rogers, refer-
ring to Mnangagwa by another of his
nicknames, formed from the initials of
his first and middle names. “Burly and
broad- shouldered, he had the lumber-
ing gait of a buffalo, and an inscrutable,
taciturn manner.”
Mnangagwa carried out some of the
regime’s darkest deeds. As Mugabe’s
national security minister in 1983, he
gathered intelligence on opposition fig-
ures and helped to oversee Operation
Gukurahundi (Shona for “the early
rain that washes away the chaff”), the
army’s massacre of about 20,000 puta-
tive dissidents from the Ndebele ethnic
group in Matabeleland. “He’s deeply
implicated in all of this,” David Coltart
told me. Fifteen years later, according
to Coltart, Mnangagwa had a hand in
the looting of diamonds in Congo that
enriched Mugabe’s inner circle. Several
sources claim that in 2008 he helped
coordinate the targeting of Tsvan girai’s
supporters across the country.
On the other side loomed Grace
Mugabe. A former secretary in the
presidential office pool, she had caught
Mugabe’s eye in 1988 while his first
wife, Sally, was dying of cancer. Grace
married him in 1996, four years after
Sally’s death. Dynamic and rapacious,
the First Lady had grown accustomed
to the spoils of power, including a $23
million Chinese- style villa known as
Blue Roof, a profitable fruit and dairy
farm seized from a white owner, and
getaways to Malaysia and Singapore
aboard a commandeered Air Zimba-
bwe jet. Her frequent shopping trips
abroad had earned her the derisive
nickname Gucci Grace. In 2014 her
husband appointed her the head of
the ZANU-PF Women’s League and a
member of the party’s decision- making
body, the Politburo. In that position,
she engineered the ouster of another
rival, Vice President Joice Mujuru, a
former guerrilla nicknamed Comrade
Spill Blood.
Mnangagwa had the allegiance of
the ruling party’s old guard, known asZimbabwean Vice President Emmerson Mnangagwa, left, and President Robert Mugabe
at Mugabe’s ninety-second birthday celebrations, Masvingo, Zimbabwe, February 2016Philimon Buiawayo/Reuters*See my “Zimbabwe: Enter the Croco-
dile,” The New York Review, April 5,
2018.