The tyrant of Zimbabwe

During Robert Mugabe’s 37-year rule over Zimbabwe, the country endured political violence, economic crisis and mass murder Was Mugabe from a wealthy family?

No. He was born in 1924, in the British colony of Southern Rhodesia, to a carpenter who abandoned his family. Educated at a Jesuit mission school, he was nurtured by an Irish priest, Father Jerome O’hea, and became a devout and lifelong Catholic. While studying for his first degree in South Africa, he joined the ANC, the country’s liberation movement – and became a committed Marxist while studying for his third in newly independent Ghana. On returning home to work as a teacher, Mugabe became active in nationalist politics. In 1964, the year before the country’s colonial prime minister, Ian Smith, unilaterally declared independence on behalf of its white minority, Mugabe was sent to jail for more than ten years for giving a “subversive speech”. (In jail he gained four more degrees.) On his release in 1974, Mugabe went to neighbouring Mozambique to join the armed struggle against the Rhodesian army.

How did Zimbabwe gain its independence?

In the mid-1970s there were two main black nationalist parties, the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (Zapu), led by Joshua Nkomo, and the Zimbabwe African National Union (Zanu), of which Mugabe became leader. Zanu was backed by China and recruited mainly from the majority Shona group – today, about 70% of the country’s 16.5 million people – while Zapu, backed by Russia, drew its support mainly from the Ndebele, the largest minority (about 20% today). They joined to form the Patriotic Front, during the War of Liberation or Bush War, in which about 30,000 people died. In 1979, after 15 years of war and facing growing pressure from abroad, Smith signed the Lancaster House Agreement in London, which created the Republic of Zimbabwe. In the elections of February 1980, Zanu-pf, as it had become, won 57 seats to Zapu’s 20, and Mugabe became prime minister.

Was Mugabe tyrannical from the very start?

Not as the world saw it. His rule began with great optimism – Bob Marley played at his inauguration – and he worked hard to convince the country’s nearly 200,000 whites, especially its 4,500 commercial farmers, that they could trust him. Yet he’d always made it clear that “the multiparty system... is a luxury”, and in no time had turned Zimbabwe into, effectively, a one-party state. In 1982, he accused Nkomo, his Zapu rival, of planning a coup, dismissed him from government and then launched a campaign of terror against the Ndebele. Between 1983 and 1987, Mugabe’s North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade, sent in to crush Ndebele “dissidents” in Matabeleland, killed more than 20,000 people. In 1987, Mugabe merged Zapu into Zanu-pf and made himself president.

How did he handle the economy?

At first, he was pragmatic. A mainstay of the economy was the farmland granted by the colonial rulers to white farmers in the 1890s; and at Lancaster House, he agreed not to touch this land for ten years, unless a “willing seller and willing buyer” could be found. Ten years into his rule, whites still owned a third of the country’s arable land, and up to the mid-1990s the economy remained fairly robust – allowing high government spending on education and other services for the black majority.

When did the economy collapse?

Although some land was redistributed in the 1980s, white ownership of the best land remained a source of huge resentment. So, in 1990, Mugabe changed the constitution to enable his government to requisition it. White farms began to be taken over, a process vastly accelerated in 2000, when a fast-track land reform programme was introduced: veterans of the Bush War marched on white-owned farms across the country, seizing all but a few hundred. Several white farmers and many more of their black employees were murdered. However, the land was taken over not by landless peasants, but by politically connected people with no experience in running commercial farms. Most failed; about two million African farm workers lost their jobs; foreign aid was withdrawn. By the autumn of 2008, the official inflation rate had reached 231,000,000% and about 80% of the population was unemployed. There were terrible food shortages and very large numbers of Zimbabweans emigrated.

How was Mugabe able to retain control?

Because he kept the support of Zanu-pf, the security forces and other African leaders. Faced with a serious challenge from trade unionist Morgan Tsvangirai – who in 1999 had formed the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) – his regime grew ever more repressive: it cracked down on media freedoms and bulldozed pro-opposition shanty towns. Tsvangirai went on to beat Mugabe in the first round of the 2008 presidential elections, but before the next round, some 200 MDC supporters were murdered; thousands more were raped or tortured. Tsvangirai dropped out of the race. He was eventually made prime minister in a coalition, but given little power. In 2013, Mugabe won a clear election victory, widely thought to have been rigged, and promptly removed Tsvangirai.

So why has Mugabe’s power finally crumbled?

Essentially because of his second wife, Grace. The pair began an affair when Mugabe’s first wife, Sally, was terminally ill, and married four years after her death in 1992. “Gucci Grace”, infamous for her lavish spending, is widely thought to have encouraged Mugabe’s kleptocratic excesses. The couple have assets worth an estimated $1bn. “I have very narrow feet,” she once said, “so I can only wear Ferragamos.” What really did for Mugabe, however, was the way Grace plotted her way to the top of Zanu-pf. In 2014, she began a series of attacks on a potential heir to Mugabe, Joice Mujuru, who was fired later that year. But in her recent attempts to remove another rival, Emmerson Mnangagwa, she seems to have met her match (see box).