BLACK MAGIC AND ATTACK IGUANAS
Wrangles over a dead depot's resting place, plus an industrialist's killer pets
MAGIC MUGABE
When Zimbabwean despot Robert Mugabe died in 2019, age 95, he gave orders that he should be buried on the family homestead in the village where he grew up, an hour outside Harare, thwarting his successor Emmerson Mnangawa’s plan for him to be laid to rest in a national monument. To make sure he stayed there, the family interred him in a steel coffin and filled the grave with concrete. Before his death, Mugabe had insisted his wife, Grace, remain with his body until burial as he believed it was at risk of being used “for rituals or witchcraft” by his former colleagues in the Zanu-PF party.
Opponents of Mugabe’s chosen burial site were not finished though. In May 2021, two years on, a traditional court found Grace Mugabe guilty of breaking traditional norms by burying her husband in his home and said that the former president “shall be exhumed and reburied at the National Heroes Acre in Harare within 30 days or before the 1st of June 2021,” a move that his nephew Patrick Zhuwawu decried as having occult motives. He said it was “a desperate bid” by Zanu-PF leaders to obtain a mystic sceptre known as tsvimbo yaMambo: “There is an obsession with this sceptre that they believe conferred on Robert Mugabe special powers. It was always talked about, but I don’t believe it ever existed and certainly was not buried with him.” Zhuwawu believes growing economic chaos and a general election due in 2023 are making the Zimbabwean leadership increasingly reliant on superstition, leading to this latest exhumation attempt. “President Mugabe was a Catholic and did not believe in the occult like other members of the party,” he said.
Grace Mugabe refused to attend the hearing, and so was fined five cows and a goat. The family rejected the ruling and lodged an appeal against it – so, for the moment, Robert Mugabe is staying put. (For more on Mugabe, see FT328:48-50.) Times, 17 May; voazimbabwe. com, 6 June 2021.
SO, MR BOND...
Irénée du Pont (1876-1963), former President of the DuPont chemical company, collected a pack of trained iguanas up to 3ft (0.9m) long at his mansion in pre-revolutionary Cuba. Du Pont, reputedly an extreme right-wing, racist, anti-Semite, regularly walked them on leashes and on command could make them rush from their pens and surround him, standing to attention; on another command they would attack to kill. boingboing.net, 8 Sept 2021.
To make sure he stayed there, they interred him in a steel coffin