SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 7 , 2019. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE A
lation continued. In 2014, Presi-
dent Barack Obama excluded him
and Sudanese leader Omar Has-
san al-Bashir — the latter pursued
by the International Criminal
Court o n genocide charges — from
a 2014 summit in Washington of
50 African leaders. Nonetheless,
many Africans applauded Mr.
Mugabe’s defiance and viewed
him as a champion in the struggle
against neocolonialism, and the
next year, Mr. Mugabe began his
one-year ceremonial role as chair-
man of the African Union, a body
representing many of the conti-
nent’s g overnments.
Back in sole control, Mr.
Mugabe sought to clear o ut poten-
tial rivals to Grace Mugabe suc-
ceeding him as leader of Zimba-
bwe. He ousted two successive
vice presidents, including Mnan-
gagwa in early November 2017,
while naming his wife as head of
ZANU-PF’s influential women’s
league.
Grace Mugabe’s unstable be-
havior had increasingly alienated
her from party elders. In the sum-
mer of 2017, a 20-year-old South
African m odel accused h er of beat-
ing her with an electrical cord.
Grace Mugabe escaped prosecu-
tion in South Africa by invoking
diplomatic i mmunity.
For the generals and security
establishment, Mnangagwa’s
ouster — a government spokes-
man accused him of “disloyalty,
disrespect, deceitfulness and un-
reliability” — appeared to be the
last straw. A week later, the army
made its move, confining Mugabe
to his home in the northern Hara-
re suburbs.
Even while seeking to orches-
trate the struggle for succession,
Mr. Mugabe had been in steep
physical decline for several years.
Cameras caught him stumbling
down the steps of a dais in Febru-
ary 2015, while later that year he
read to parliament t he State o f the
Nation address h e had given to the
same chamber a few weeks earlier.
But he clung tenaciously to
power even after his ouster from
leadership. On the same day the
ruling c ommittee of ZANU-PF vot-
ed for his dismissal, he gave a
rambling and disjointed televi-
sion address to the nation in
which he conceded that changes
were needed but initially refused
to announce his resignation, pro-
longing the leadership crisis. He
announced his resignation after
lawmakers began impeachment
proceedings against him.
Proud, obstinate and self-
righteous to the end, Mr. Mugabe
never accepted responsibility for
the d amage h e caused h is country.
For all his intelligence and cun-
ning, critics said, he never made
the jump from running a libera-
tion movement to governing a na-
tion. Instead, he turned one of
Africa’s most promising national
experiments into one of its most
embarrassing failures.
new [email protected]Fr ank el was The Washington Post’s
southern Africa bureau chief, based in
Harare.plotting to kill Mr. Mugabe — only
later t o be acquitted.
Zimbabwe’s economic and po-
litical misery deepened. Basic
public services such as water and
sanitation, public schools and
hospitals collapsed, and by 2008
the rate of inflation exceeded
10 million percent. Even many of
Mr. Mugabe’s former allies called
on him to step down. He was
outpolled by Ts vangirai in the
2008 presidential election but re-
fused to cede power.
Mr. Mugabe won a sixth term as
president after Ts vangirai
dropped out of the runoff contest
because of threats against his life.
But conditions continued to de-
teriorate so rapidly that Mr.
Mugabe was finally forced to ac-
cept a power-sharing arrange-
ment with his rival. The aging
president retained full control of
the security forces and other in-
struments of s tate repression.A last straw
As his megalomania and isola-
tion grew, Mr. Mugabe’s rhetoric
became more extravagant and bi-
zarre. He accused “gay gangsters”
in British Prime Minister To ny
Blair’s government of fomenting
political violence. He compared
Blair and President George W.
Bush to Benito Mussolini and
Adolf Hitler, and accused them of
waging “a relentless campaign of
destabilizing and vilifying my
country.”
The economy plummeted so far
that Mr. Mugabe was forced to
accept some reforms. Inflation
stabilized, average annual growth
rates rebounded, and the Euro-
pean Union lifted its 12-year-old
sanctions while maintaining a
travel ban on Robert and Grace
Mugabe. Ts vangirai’s opposition
party splintered, paving the way
for Mr. Mugabe’s landslide elec-
toral victory in 2013 and an end of
power s haring.
Zimbabwe’s international iso-Zimbabwe’s uneasy stability b e-
gan t o crumble in the late 1 990s a s
inflation, unemployment and the
AIDS epidemic ate away at the
country’s social and economic
gains. Faced with rising discon-
tent, Mr. Mugabe targeted one of
the country’s most visible minori-
ty groups: the 4,500 white com-
mercial f armers.
Mr. Mugabe dispatched thou-
sands of unemployed war veter-
ans and street thugs to harass the
owners and seize their property.
The government instituted a
“land reform” policy that turned
over the most successful farms to
the p olitical elite.
Productivity p lummeted — pro-
duction o f corn, Zimbabwe’s m ain
staple, fell by two-thirds — and the
country swung from being a net
food exporter to a basket case
within a few years. Nearly 1 mil-
lion black farmworkers and their
families lost their jobs a nd h omes,
according to a 2008 study by Zim-
babwean economists for the U.N.
Development Program.
Mr. Mugabe’s unbroken string
of electoral success ended in Feb-
ruary 2000, when voters rejected a
draft constitution that would have
legitimized his vastly increased
power. Four months later, a new
opposition party, the Movement
for Democratic Change, won 57 of
the 120 elected seats in parlia-
ment, capturing urban centers
throughout the country and fall-
ing just short of a majority.
The government responded
with a wave of repression, round-
ing up opposition leaders and at-
tacking urban demonstrators,
while in the countryside armed
gangs destroyed the homes and
food supplies of opponents.
Mr. Mugabe branded his foes as
traitors and saboteurs, shut down
independent media outlets and
undermined the country’s inde-
pendent judiciary. Opposition
leader Morgan Ts vangirai was
beaten, arrested and charged w ithand tribal as well as ideological.
Mr. Mugabe worked to hold to-
gether a consensus in part
through dispensing jobs and pa-
tronage to his allies and targeting
common enemies, real and imag-
ined.
He singled out Zimbabwe’s
small gay community, among oth-
er groups, denouncing LGBT indi-
viduals as “lower than dogs and
pigs” and ordering the expulsion
of a gay organization from the
Zimbabwe International Book
Fair in 1995. He claimed that
homosexuality had been un-
known in Africa before European
colonization and blamed it for the
AIDS crisis, when in fact hetero-
sexual activity w as the m ain c ause
of AIDS in Africa.
After his first wife, the former
Sally Hayfron, died in 1992, Mr.
Mugabe married his secretary a nd
longtime mistress, Grace Marufu,
41 years his junior. She set a new
standard for conspicuous con-
sumption, acquiring the deroga-
tory nickname “Gucci Grace” and
shattering his reputation for per-
sonal honesty. More than one
flight of the state-owned Air Zim-
babwe was canceled at the last
minute so that she and her entou-
rage could fly to Europe for a
shopping spree.
Mr. Mugabe had three children
with Marufu. A complete list of
survivors was not immediately
available.
Although much of black-ruled
Africa suffered bankruptcy and
famine, Zimbabwe retained a
modest measure of prosperity.
Zimbabwe’s farmers not only fed
the c ountry’s own rapidly e xpand-
ing population — now more than
16 million — but exported corn
and other food to its hungry
neighbors. Mr. Mugabe’s govern-
ment instituted health and e duca-
tion programs that lowered the
infant mortality rate and in-
creased the n umber of high school
and u niversity graduates.opposition erupted into a full-
scale civil w ar in which more than
30,000 people died. When Mr.
Mugabe was released in 1974 in
one of several abortive peace ef-
forts, he joined his comrades in
the bush. A self-declared Marxist,
Mr. Mugabe was considered a shy,
somewhat bookish intellectual, in
marked contrast with his hard-
ened comrades.
Like many liberation move-
ments, Mr. Mugabe’s was a hot-
house of suspicion and betrayal.
Many members died under mys-
terious circumstances — some-
times at the hands of white assas-
sins, other times by the long
knives of their comrades. As lead-
er, Mr. Mugabe rode the back of a
tiger; h ad he ever fallen off, h e too,
in all likelihood, would have been
devoured.
He d eveloped a sharp contempt
for t he British government, which
was unable to bring Smith’s re-
gime to heel; for the Soviet Union,
which backed his rival, Nkomo,
during the liberation struggle;
and for the West in g eneral, whose
sanctions campaign against Rho-
desia was halfhearted and i neffec-
tive.
Smith’s putative allies in South
Africa, fearing that the conflict
was destabilizing the region, final-
ly forced his government into
peace talks. Mr. Mugabe emerged
from exile and won a decisive ma-
jority in the country’s first free
election in 1980, the y ear the coun-
try became known a s Zimbabwe.
He came to power — as prime
minister and, starting in 1987, as
president — initially pledging to
bury old a nimosities.
“If yesterday you hated me, to-
day you cannot avoid the l ove that
binds y ou to me and m e to you,” h e
solemnly told his countrymen
April 18, 1980. Still, even in those
early days, he warned that “the
open hand of reconciliation, if re-
jected, could turn into a clenched
fist.”Devolution of a nation
Paranoia was one legacy of the
war. Mr. Mugabe, as elected lead-
er, characterized political oppo-
nents as “enemies,” freely used
detention without trial and other
emergency powers t hat he inherit-
ed from the white regime, and
intimidated opponents in his
drive for a one-party state.
Each year, he sent several thou-
sand soldiers — spearheaded by
the North Korean-trained Fifth
Brigade — into southwestern
Matabeleland, Nkomo’s ethnic
and political stronghold, ostensi-
bly to root out armed dissidents.
The main victims of these cam-
paigns, which killed several thou-
sand people, were minority Nde-
beles.
Nkomo eventually submitted,
folding his party into Mr.
Mugabe’s ruling organization in
return for an end to the brutal
attacks a gainst h is followers.
Mr. Mugabe struggled at times
to placate various blocs within his
power base, the country’s Shona-
speaking m ajority. D ivisions with-
in these blocs were geographicdile” f or his quick-to-strike s urviv-
al skills, Mnangagwa replaced the
ailing Mr. Mugabe in the 2017
coup, then was narrowly elected
president last year.
Mnangagwa has struggled to
achieve the economic recovery he
promised and has cracked down
on opponents with some of the
same repressive measures Mr.
Mugabe’s r egime wielded, c ausing
some Zimbabweans to say they
missed Mr. Mugabe.
Mr. Mugabe’s fall marked the
end of one of the last surviving
“Big Men” of the continent, the
onetime revolutionary leaders
who inherited the security appa-
ratus of their former colonial rul-
ers and used an iron fist to enrich
themselves and repress their citi-
zens.
In 1980, Mr. Mugabe took pow-
er in what was once white-
minority-ruled Southern Rhode-
sia after a protracted civil war. He
pledged pragmatism and recon-
ciliation. But after a promising
start, the country once known as
the breadbasket of southern Afri-
ca descended into a nightmare of
widespread unemployment, hy-
perinflation, hunger and disease.
Mr. Mugabe and h is cronies un-
leashed gangs of armed thugs to
beat up, torture and kill their po-
litical foes, while suffocating Zim-
babwe’s fledgling democratic in-
stitutions. The regime used food
aid as a way to reward supporters
and starve opponents. Epidemics
of AIDS and cholera ravaged rural
areas, and the country’s once-
thriving commercial farms were
gutted.
Cities s welled w ith hundreds of
thousands of displaced people
from the countryside. In 2 005, Mr.
Mugabe pitilessly carried out “Op-
eration Drive Out the Trash,” an
urban beautification effort that
made hundreds of thousands of
slum dwellers homeless.
Cars waited in line for days
outside filling stations, rationing
left most people with electricity
only every other d ay, and residents
went shopping with suitcases
filled with almost worthless cur-
rency, i ts value falling b y the hour.
Mr. Mugabe blamed those ills
and m ore on a long list of enemies,
foreign and domestic, while por-
traying himself as a beleaguered
African hero. He conjured a para-
noid vision of a major conspiracy
led b y white farmers and business
executives and their black politi-
cal puppets, and funded by evil
governments in London and
Washington.
But Mr. Mugabe’s downfall
came not at the hands of foreign
enemies but from his once-loyal
generals. They r ebelled a gainst his
attempt to install his mercurial
wife, Grace Mugabe, as
his successor, and placed him un-
der house arrest. Thousands
marched in the streets to support
Mr. Mugabe’s o uster, while h is for-
mer allies in the ruling Zimbabwe
African National Union-
Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) ex-
pelled him from his role as party
chairman, an ignominious col-
lapse for the only elected leader
Zimbabwe had e ver k nown.
As h e steered h is country over a
cliff, many observers puzzled over
how a leader once considered
principled, intelligent and incor-
ruptible could have descended so
far a nd so quickly. But the s eeds of
Mr. Mugabe’s ruinous reign were
there almost f rom the start.
A rebel rises to power
The son of a carpenter, Robert
Gabriel Mugabe was born Feb. 21,
1924, in the village of Kutama in
what was then the British colony
of Southern Rhodesia.
He was educated in Jesuit mis-
sionary schools a nd in 1951 gradu-
ated from South Africa’s Univer-
sity of Fort Hare, Nelson Mande-
la’s alma mater and the incubator
for a generation of activists who
led the struggle against white-
minority regimes throughout
southern Africa. (Mr. Mugabe lat-
er earned several other degrees,
some while i n prison.)
He returned to Rhodesia in
1960 and joined the Zimbabwe
African People’s Union, the domi-
nant black liberation movement
led by Joshua Nkomo. But stifled
by Nkomo’s a utocratic leadership,
Mr. Mugabe and a group of insur-
gents walked out three years later
to form the r ival ZANU-PF.
Rhodesia’s white-minority gov-
ernment under Prime Minister
Ian Smith defied the winds of
change that swept across Africa in
the early 1960s and unilaterally
declared its independence from
Britain in 1965, locking up thou-
sands of political opponents. Mr.
Mugabe spent more than 10 years
in prison without trial. While he
was incarcerated, his young son
died in 1966 of a form of malaria,
and he was denied permission to
attend the f uneral.
In 1972, the conflict between
Smith’s g overnment and the black
MUGABE FROM A
ROBERT MUGABE 1924-
Anti-colonial lion oversaw his own nation’s deterioration
AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
Robert Mugabe speaks to the media in Geneva in 1 97 6, four years before he took power in what was once white-minority-ruled Southern Rhodesia. He was one of the last
“Big Men” of Africa — revolutionary leaders who inherited colonial-era security infrastructure and used an iron fist to enrich themselves and repress their citizens.ODD ANDERSEN/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
From left, Mr. Mugabe stands in 1999 with his counterparts from South Africa and Namibia,
Nelson Mandela and Sam Nujoma. Zimbabwe’s fragile stability was by then starting to crumble.