Robert, dis-Grace and their two possessed Thugabes
What it was like the day Grace Mugabe ensnared Robert? Imagine it is February 1992, shortly after the death of his first wife, Sally. Mugabe is at his desk on an uncomfortable call to Sally’s family in Ghana. Grace, his secretary, is typing away in an adjacent room.
I imagine the phone conversation: “Oh, these things are always hard” and “Oh, everyone seems to be coping” and “Now listen to me, you backward peasant, I stashed an enormous amount of stolen money in her name in your country and I bloody well want it back.”
“Um, about that money,” the voice on the phone in Ghana says. “No, I don’t think we’ll give it back to you.” Mugabe attempts to swallow his fist, but when he cannot squeeze his teeth over his knuckles he hurls the handset at the portrait of Queen Elizabeth. He screams and goose-steps up and down his office making unpleasant remarks about the quality of infrastructure in Accra before collapsing.
Sensing her moment, Grace creeps in and waits at his desk as he crawls back. “There, there,” she says soothingly. He lifts himself into his chair and slumps his head in his hands. “All of the hundreds of bleeding-heart white liberal millions … gone.”
“Well,” his doe-eyed secretary says gently, placing her arm around his shoulders, “we’ll just have to start again, won’t we?”
In 2000, Mugabe was only eight years into “starting again” when he was threatened by electoral defeat, something that resulted in nonsense called “land reform”.
White farmers being violently evicted enraged many whose vengeance fantasies included go-fast boats packed with marines charging up the Limpopo. Little did they know a fate akin to an agonising death was manifesting itself in the form of two brats.
Ever since I got into a fight with one of them six years ago, I’ve been curious about the excesses of dictators’ children in SA.
The son of Cameroon’s Paul Biya ostensibly rented a mansion in Hyde Park. Marko Milosevic banked some of his father’s blood millions in Bedfordview.
There was the clown Teodorin Obiang Nguema, the Michael Jackson of Equatorial Guinea, whose properties in Clifton have been attached. The individual with whom I fought was a white knight to Rosebank’s budget hooker industry in the wake of the global financial crisis; his family has a reputation for eating people.
From what I’ve read, the Mugabe boys are proper trouble. These aren’t your garden variety feral children, but narcissistic thugs on Instagram who like tacky champagne and silly shoes, and who probably use hip hop language to threaten their nannies to dare not forget their peanut butter and jam sandwiches when they return from menacing Joburg’s northern suburbs.
Their unhinged mother believes the boys’ behaviour is due to “evil spirits” that can be exorcised with an extension cord. Mugabe, a refined Englishman, must be looking at this episode and wondering: “Am I married to a woman, or am I living inside one of Shaka Zulu’s prophecies (the one where Henry Cele played him)?” It’s a desperate situation for a leader one oil change away from a tank of formaldehyde.
It’s not going to be the end he envisaged. Banned from everywhere else, I see Mugabe resigned soon to a care facility, possibly in St James, Cape Town, where he will be propped on a pillow, groaning things like: “So much money … so far away” or “What the bloody hell is a Little Wayne anyway?”