Section:GDN 1N PaGe:38 Edition Date:190907 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 6/9/2019 17:25 cYanmaGentaYellowbl
- The Guardian Saturday 7 September 2019
(^38) World
Robert Mugabe
1924-2019
Hero to villain How Mugabe
became Africa’s fallen angel
David Smith
T
hree great questions
dominated the 37-year
rule of Robert Gabriel
Mugabe. One was the
mystery of how a giant
of Africa’s liberation
movement, an intellectual who
preached racial reconciliation long
before Nelson Mandela emerged
from prison, could turn into a
caricature of despotism. Another
was what kind of future he would
bequeath Zimbabwe, a beautiful yet
troubled country he ruled for most
of the years since its independence
from the British in 1980. The thirdwas the nature of his passing: would
he die or be deposed?
We got the answer to the last
question in November 2017, when
Mugabe was fi rst ousted in what
was in eff ect a military coup , then
ruthlessly sacked by his own party.
Reluctantly, bewildered and shaken,
the ailing president stood down.
His last weeks in power had been
dominated by a power struggle
between his wife, Grace, and the
former vice-president Emmerson
Mnangagwa , a long-serving veteran
of the country’s 1970s liberation
wars who had always been seen
as a likely successor. The news of
Mugabe’s departure was greeted
with rejoicing across the nation.
For the other two questions, thereare clues but no easy answers to
the making of this dictator. He was
abandoned by his father as a boy;
he suff ered the deaths of a three-
year-old son and a compassionate
wife. He had an arguably warped
fascination with Britain.
Mugabe was awarded an honorary
knighthood by the Queen, then
stripped of it , an insult he never
forgave. The former colonial power
shaped his dress code, manners and
vision to the end. “Cricket civilises
people and creates good gentlemen.
I want everyone to play cricket in
Zimbabwe,” he once said. “I want
ours to be a nation of gentlemen.”
Zimbabwe is a nation whose
gentleness and articulacy seem at
odds with its history of torture andthuggery; a fertile land with the best
climate in the world, brought to the
edge of ruin.
Mugabe created Zanu-PF, the
ruling party, in his own image,
and sought to do the same with
Zimbabwe. He rose with quiet
determination and ruthlessness.
Raised a Catholic and educated
at missionary schools, he moved
to the University of Fort Hare in
South Africa for the fi rst of his seven
degrees and became a teacher in
Ghana. When he returned to the
then Rhodesia in 1960, his political
activism earned him a 10-year prison
term for “subversive speech”, after
which he fl ed to neighbouring
Mozambique to lead the guerrilla
forces of the Zimbabwe African
National Union (Zanu) – which
had split from Joshua Nkomo ’s
Zimbabwe African People’s Union
(Zapu) – in a war against Ian Smith ’s
government that left 27,000 dead.
The 1979 Lancaster House
agreement in London brought
independence to Zimbabwe and
Mugabe returned home a hero. He
announced a policy of reconciliationand invited white people to help
rebuild the country. “If yesterday I
fought you as an enemy, today you
have become a friend,” he told them.
“If yesterday you hated me, today
you cannot avoid the love that binds
me to you.”
He initially ran a coalition
government with Nkomo, but the y
fell out. Then came a big argument
against the notion that Mugabe
was a good man slowly corrupted
by power: Gukurahundi , or “the
rain that washes away the chaff
before the spring rains”. As early
as 1982 his North Korean-trained
Fifth Brigade crushed an armed
rebellion by fi ghters loyal to Nkomo
in the province of Matabeleland. His
rival’s party, Zapu, was ethnically
largely Ndebele , while Zanu was
predominantly Shona. This divide
underlay vicious ethnic cleansing in
the mid-80s, when at least 20,000
people died in Matabeleland.
Few in the west noticed, or
wanted to. They preferred to see
an economy that was growing
as agriculture boomed. Mugabe
built clinics and schools, turning▼ Robert Mugabe, then Zimbabwe’s
president, gives a speech in 1997
about compulsory land resettlement
PHOTOGRAPH: C COLLINGRIDGE/AP PHOTO1976
1986
1988
1996
1979
▲ Mugabe with
Joshua Nkomo,
top, and at the
Rhodesia peace
conference in
London With Fidel
Castro in Harare With Margaret
Thatcher. Far
right, Mugabe
getting married
to Grace
PHOTOGRAPHS: AP;
ANL/REX; DOMINIQUE
FAGET/AFP/GETTY;
JOAO SILVA/APRELEASED BY "What's News" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws