NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2019 47In my part of Kenya, we have a tradi-
tion of naming people after key events
and moments in history, and there are
so many people of my generation named
Mugabe that I grew up thinking it was a
local name. Only later did I realize that
it was a tribute to a man so many people
held in high esteem. And when the news
came in September that the 95-year-
old former president of Zimbabwe had
passed, it was met with a measure of dis-
belief. Having survived multiple assas-
sination attempts and health scares, it
seemed as if the old man would outlive
us all.
Mugabe’s supporters insist that he was
a paragon of Pan-Africanism, one of the
last of a generation of fearless freedom
fighters. For his opponents, he was an
autocrat who spent the last 20 years of his
life erasing any good he had done, with
cronyism and a violent police state.
Both of those things are true. He indis-
putably sacrificed a great deal personally
in the struggle. Ian Smith’s apartheid
administration drove Mugabe and thou-
sands of others into a guerrilla war in
which Mugabe was, for example, forbid-
den from returning home to Zimbabwe
to bury his only child by his first wife.It is difficult to overstate how nasty
and violent minority rule was in Zim-
babwe. By 1980, when Zimbabwe finally
achieved independence, 90 per cent of
the country’s agricultural land was held
by 11 per cent of the population – the
white minority. For Africans in former
settler colonies, where a stalled decolo-
nization left land in the hands of similar
minorities, Mugabe’s land reclama-
tion project remains something to be
admired.
But the current generation of Zimba-
bweans grew up only knowing Mugabe
the autocrat. So they are finding it hard to
reconcile the glowing tributes coming in
from across the continent with the man
who destroyed so much of their future.
The Zimbabwean economy crumbled
under his choices. The land reclama-
tion project descended into farce as
reclaimed farms were distributed to
cronies. Mugabe became increasingly
violent towards the opposition, and
opponents began dying in questionable
circumstances. There were the gukura-
hundi – pogroms from 1983-87 against
the Ndebele minority by Mugabe’s
Shona majority – and violent urban
‘renewal’ projects that left many dead and
homeless.
Eventually, Mugabe would even
make a farce of the Pan-Africanism
he wanted to represent. Africa’s youth
will remember him not as the eloquent,
clear-minded independence icon, but an
ornery old man fond of rambling dia-
tribes against things that he felt were ‘un-
African’, including LGBTQ+ rights andAfter Mugabe
VIEW FROM
AFRICA
women wearing trousers. By the time he
was deposed by his own army, he had lost
all credibility as an exemplar of Africa’s
struggle for independence.
Reconciling these two legacies will be
an ongoing project, particularly for insti-
tutions like the Zimbabwean presidency
and the African Union, which took an
ambivalent position towards Mugabe,
even after he left office. History struggles
to make sense of figures like this because
we like them to come neatly packaged
in categories of good or evil. Overall,
regardless of the good he may have done
in the past, it would be cruel to hold him
up as a hero when so many of his victims
are still alive and struggling, and when
his legacy continues to poison the coun-
try’s politics. O
NANJALA NYABOLA IS A POLITICAL ANALYST
BASED IN NAIROBI, KENYA. SHE IS THE AUTHOR OF
DIGITAL DEMOCRACY, ANALOGUE POLITICS: HOW
THE INTERNET ERA IS TRANSFORMING KENYA (ZED
BOOKS).ILLUSTRATION: KATE COPELAND