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Robert Mugabe during his swearing-in ceremony in Harare,
2008
Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe was
feted as an African liberation hero and champion of racial reconciliation when
he first came to power in a nation divided by nearly a century of white
colonial rule.
Nearly four decades later, many
at home and abroad denounced him as a power-obsessed autocrat willing to
unleash death squads, rig elections and trash the economy in the relentless
pursuit of control.
Mr Mugabe, who died in Singapore
aged 95, was ultimately ousted by his own armed forces in November 2017.
He demonstrated his tenacity –
some might say stubbornness – to the last, refusing to accept his expulsion
from his own ZANU-PF party and clinging on for a week until parliament started
to impeach him after the de facto coup.
His resignation triggered wild
celebrations across the country of 13 million.
For Mr Mugabe, it was an
“unconstitutional and humiliating” act of betrayal by his party and people, and
left him a broken man.
Confined for the remaining years
of his life between Singapore where he was receiving medical treatment and his
sprawling “Blue Roof” mansion in Harare, an ailing Mr Mugabe could only observe
from afar the political stage where he once strode tall.
He was bitter to the end over the
manner of his exit.
On the eve of the July 2018
election, the first without him, he told reporters he would vote for the
opposition, something unthinkable only a few months before.
Educated and urbane, Mr Mugabe
took power in 1980 after seven years of a liberation bush war and – until the
army’s takeover – was the only leader Zimbabwe, formerly Rhodesia, knew since
independence from Britain.
But as the economy imploded
starting from 2000 and his mental and physical health waned, Mr Mugabe found
fewer people to trust as he seemingly smoothed a path to succession for his
wife, Grace, four decades his junior and known to her critics as “Gucci Grace”
for her reputed fondness for luxury shopping.
“It’s the end of a very painful
and sad chapter in the history of a young nation, in which a dictator, as he
became old, surrendered his court to a gang of thieves around his wife,” Chris
Mutsvangwa, leader of Zimbabwe’s influential liberation war veterans, told
Reuters after Mugabe’s removal.
Born on February 21, 1924, on a
Roman Catholic mission near Harare, Mr Mugabe was educated by Jesuit priests
and worked as a primary school teacher before going to South Africa’s
University of Fort Hare, then a breeding ground for African nationalism.
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Robert and Grace Mugabe
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Returning to then-Rhodesia in
1960, he entered politics but was jailed for a decade four years later for
opposing white rule.
When his infant son died of
malaria in Ghana in 1966, Mr Mugabe was denied parole to attend the funeral, a
decision by the government of white-minority leader Ian Smith that historians
say played a part in explaining Mr Mugabe’s subsequent bitterness.
After his release, he rose to the
top of the powerful Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army, known as the
“thinking man’s guerrilla” on account of his seven degrees, three of them
earned behind bars.
Later, as he crushed his
political enemies, he boasted of another qualification: “a degree in violence”.
After the war ended in 1980, Mr
Mugabe was elected the nation’s first black prime minister.
“You have inherited a jewel in Africa.
Don’t tarnish it,” Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere told him during the
independence celebrations in Harare.
Initially, Mr Mugabe offered
forgiveness and reconciliation to old foreign and domestic adversaries,
including Mr Smith, who remained on his farm and continued to receive a
government pension.
In his early years, he presided
over a booming economy, spending money on roads and dams and expanding
schooling for black Zimbabweans as part of a wholesale dismantling of the
racial discrimination of colonial days.
With black and white tension
easing, by the mid-1980s many whites who had fled to Britain or South Africa,
then still under the yoke of apartheid, were trying to come home.
But it was not long before Mr
Mugabe began to suppress challengers, including liberation war rival Joshua
Nkomo.
Faced with a revolt in the
mid-1980s in the western province of Matabeleland that he blamed on Nkomo, Mr
Mugabe sent in North Korean-trained army units, provoking an international
outcry over alleged atrocities against civilians.
Human rights groups say 20,000
people died, most of them from the minority Ndebele tribe from which Nkomo’s
partisans were largely drawn.
The discovery of mass graves
prompted accusations of genocide.
After two terms as prime
minister, Mr Mugabe tightened his grip on power by changing the constitution,
and he became president in 1987. His first wife, Sally, who had been seen by
many as the only person capable of restraining him, died in 1992.
A turning point came at the end
of the decade when Mugabe, by now a leader unaccustomed to accommodating the
will of the people, suffered his first major defeat at the hands of voters, in
a referendum on another constitution.
He blamed his loss on the white
minority, chastising them as “enemies of Zimbabwe”.
Days later, a groundswell of
black anger at the slow pace of land reform started boiling over and gangs of
black Zimbabweans calling themselves war veterans started to overrun
white-owned farms.
Mr Mugabe’s response was
uncompromising, labelling the invasions a correction of colonial injustices.
“Perhaps we made a mistake by not
finishing the war in the trenches,” he said in 2000.
“If the settlers had been
defeated through the barrel of a gun, perhaps we would not be having the same
problems.”
The farm seizures helped ruin one
of Africa’s most dynamic economies, with a collapse in agricultural foreign
exchange earnings unleashing hyperinflation.
The economy shrank by more than a
third from 2000 to 2008, sending unemployment above 80 per cent. Several
million Zimbabweans fled, mostly to South Africa.
Brushing aside criticism, Mr
Mugabe portrayed himself as a radical African nationalist competing against
racist and imperialist forces in Washington and London.
The country hit rock bottom in
2008 when 500 billion per cent inflation drove people to support the challenge
of Western-backed former union leader Morgan Tsvangirai.
Facing defeat in a presidential
run-off, Mugabe resorted to violence, forcing Tsvangirai to withdraw after
scores of his supporters were killed by ZANU-PF thugs.
South Africa, Zimbabwe’s
neighbour to the south, squeezed the pair into a fractious unity coalition but
the compromise belied Mugabe’s grip on power through his continued control of
the army, police and secret service.
As old age crept in and rumours
of cancer intensified, his animosity toward Tsvangirai eased and the two men
enjoyed weekly meetings over tea and scones, in a nod to Mugabe’s affection for
British traditions.
On the eve of the 2013 election,
Mr Mugabe dismissed cries of autocracy and likened dealing with Tsvangirai to
sparring in the ring.
“Although we boxed each other,
it’s not as hostile as before,” he told reporters.
Even as he spoke, Mr Mugabe’s
agents were busy finalizing plans to engineer an election victory through
manipulation of the voters’ roll, according to the Tsvangirai camp.
It was typical of Mr Mugabe’s
ability to out-think – and if necessary out-fight – his opponents, a trait that
drew grudging respect from even his sternest critics.
Writing in a 2007 cable released
by WikiLeaks, then-U.S. ambassador to Harare Christopher Dell reflected the
views of many: “To give the devil his due, he is a brilliant tactician.”
(Reuters/NAN)
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