The Zimbabwean leader who liberated and ravaged his nation

Robert Mugabe wrested his country from the hands of colonial oppressors only to hold it in his own iron grip for nearly four decades. When Mugabe became the first prime minister of the newly independent Zimbabwe in 1980—after leading a successful guerrilla war against the white minority government of Rhodesia—his rise was seen as a beacon of hope for the African continent. Bob Marley and the Wailers played at his inauguration in Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital, and Britain’s Prince Charles was on hand as the Union Jack was lowered and the new nation’s flag raised. For a time, Zimbabwe flourished. Mugabe built schools and clinics for the country’s long-neglected black majority while touting reconciliation with white landowners. But it soon became clear that Mugabe would brook no challenge to his authority—opponents died in mysterious “car accidents” or were beaten into submission by security forces—and under his tyrannical leadership Zimbabwe went from relative prosperity to being an economic basket case. “Zimbabwe is mine,” he declared in 2008. “Only God can remove me.”

Mugabe was born outside Harare in the then–British colony of Southern Rhodesia, “in an area set aside by the white authorities for black peasants,” said The New York Times. His carpenter father abandoned his wife and four children when Mugabe was 10 years old, leaving the family in poverty. Educated in Jesuit missionary schools, Mugabe “was a studious, earnest child who later recalled being happy with solitude as he tended cattle, so long as he had a book under his arm.” He earned a scholarship to South Africa’s University of Fort Hare, “Nelson Mandela’s alma mater and the incubator for a generation of activists,” said The Washington Post. After graduating in 1952, Mugabe worked as a schoolteacher in Northern Rhodesia—now Zambia—and Ghana, which was then at the forefront of the African liberation struggle. Returning home in 1960, he became active in nationalist politics and was arrested by white authorities in 1964. Mugabe would spend more than a decade in prison without trial.

Civil war erupted in Rhodesia after the white government of Prime Minister Ian Smith declared independence from Britain in 1965, hoping to prevent a transition to multiracial democracy, said The Times (U.K.). Mugabe was released from prison in 1974 during a round of abortive peace talks, and slipped across the border to Mozambique. That country would serve as the base from which Mugabe—“not a fighter by training or temperament”—prosecuted a relentless guerrilla war against Smith’s regime. Worn down by international sanctions and conflict, Rhodesia in 1979 agreed to hold multiracial elections. Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African National Union party triumphed, and Mugabe took office pledging to bury old animosities. He didn’t, said the Los Angeles Times. In the early 1980s, Mugabe deployed his North Korean–trained Fifth Brigade to the region of Matabeleland, the ethnic stronghold of his political rival Joshua Nkomo. Villagers were burned alive in their huts and “men were seized, tortured, and killed.” Up to 20,000 people died in the ethnic-cleansing campaign. As Mugabe clung to power through “violence and vote fraud,” the country sank into economic ruin, said the Associated Press. The decline accelerated with the launch of his “land reform” program in 2000, under which farms were often violently seized from whites and handed to military veterans and political cronies. The agricultural sector collapsed, leaving 300,000 black farmworkers jobless, and inflation soared to more than 200 million percent. Yet Mugabe clung to power into his 90s, said Reuters.com. His suspected plan to hand power to his much younger wife—known as Gucci Grace for her lavish lifestyle—was foiled by a 2017 military coup that led to Mugabe’s forced resignation. “If people say you are a dictator, they are saying this merely to tarnish you,” he said in 2013. “My people still need me and when people still need you to lead them, it’s not time, sir, doesn’t matter how old you are, to say goodbye.”