The anti-climatic death of a man who ruined the country I call home
Robert Mugabe dominated so much of my own life and the life of Zimbabwe, the country where I was born and raised, and still, in some deep, alchemical way, consider home. Like most dictators he managed to be both ubiquitous and remote. For decades his brooding portrait stared balefully down from every office and shop in the country, hung there by law.
For years, I witnessed first-hand how the gears of his repressive regime ground, first as a lawyer helping to defend rival leaders, then as a journalist cataloguing the appalling human cost of Gukurahundi massacres in the southern Zimbabwe province of Matabeleland. For that, he had me accused of spying and declared an enemy of the state.
Twenty-five years later I witnessed the crackdown on opposition supporters in what his henchmen called Operation Ngatipedzenavo: Let Us Finish Them Off.
It was a torture on an industrial scale, committed on a catch-andrelease basis, with the victims carried back to their home villages, there to act as human billboards advertising their political stigmata, the consequences of opposing his tyranny.
Violence was always in Mugabe’s political DNA. It only became dormant for the decade or so when Zimbabwe
was a one-party state. He was always far more interested in power than in democracy.
Yet I found the news of his death oddly anti-climactic. Ever since he was ousted nearly two years ago by his consiglieri, Emmerson Mnangagwa, in what was essentially a continuity coup for the ruling Zanu-pf party, Mugabe had been fading and erratic. His final overreach after 37 years in power, was his effort to insert his wife, Grace, as his successor. That ran foul of two entrenched Zimbabwean traits: gerontocracy and misogyny.
Mugabe was 95 when doctors finally pulled the plug of the life-support machine in the luxury private clinic in Singapore where he commuted so often for specialised medical care.
His own country, Zimbabwe, remains on life support, skittering along the bottom of Africa’s economic league table. The healthcare system, once one of the continent’s finest – and one in which my mother worked as a doctor tirelessly for decades – is utterly derelict, its doctors on strike for a living wage.
Insofar as a country’s tragedy can be measured against its potential, the tragedy of Zimbabwe is an epic one, among the fastest contracting peacetime economies in history, mired in corruption and ineptitude, kept afloat only by the remittances of the millions (and I am one) who have fled into the diaspora. This is Mugabe’s enduring, unmourned, legacy.
Furious at his final humiliation at the hands of his formerly pliant underlings, Mugabe’s final wish was that he not be enshrined in Heroes’ Acre, where, by tradition, approved Zimbabwean independence leaders are congregated. But that wish looks set to be dishonoured, as Mnangagwa and his allies, having committed regicide, now rush to perform a final act of political taxidermy.