Monster presided over slaughter and pillaging
TO call any man a true monster is certainly not to mince words, especially when he has just died. But Robert Mugabe was truly a monster of a man.
I was in the then Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, in its dying days. The entire British Empire in Africa was in the throes of being given its independence, country by country. The newly elected leader, usually the choice of the majority tribe, took over.
In theory it was all about the triumph of democracy. In reality the values of the African were simple, traditional and unswerving. Every newly enfranchised voter simply voted for their tribal leader. The biggest tribe then ruled with a rod of iron.
Democracy was the white man’s bizarre aberration. Only in Whitehall, the Guardian and the studios of the BBC did anyone seriously kid themselves that democracy had really replaced imperium. It was all going nicely according to script until…
In Southern Rhodesia, creation of Cecil Rhodes, the white tribe rebelled. In most African colonies the whites were the British administrators who had homes to go back to in Britain. Here the whites were Africa-born, inheritors of farms and ranches created by their grandfathers.
And they made plain they were not going anywhere or handing over anything.
It led to ex-Spitfire pilot Ian Smith leading a government notorious for its illegal UDI – Unilateral Declaration of Independence from Britain, which led to sanctions, a blockade and a bush war. Separate armies – ZAPU and ZANU, led by Mugabe a Marxist intellectual, drawn from rival tribes, eventually emerged victorious.
That rivalry led to a terrible massacre in Matabeleland after the war was over when Mugabe sent in his North Korean-trained 5th Brigade to slaughter tens of thousands of men, women and children from the other tribe.
White farms were confiscated and pillaged. Mugabe and his cronies spent like billionaires.
Inflation wrecked this once rich, beautiful land that recalled the line of a poem “where every prospect pleases and only Man is vile”. And that Robert Mugabe certainly was.