Robert Mugabe, former Zimbabwe strongman passed away in a Singapore hospital on Friday 6th September 2019. A state funeral was held for him at a near-empty stadium in Harare last Saturday.
Dozens of leaders were in attendance, including Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo who led the Nigerian delegation. According to plans, his remains will be interred in a month’s time when preparations would have been finalised for his official mausoleum at Heroes’ Acre in the heart of the capital.
He had been a fixture in his country’s politics for some 37 years. Shy and almost effeminate, his outer demeanour belied the man of steel – an African despot who spoke English with the polish of an Anglo-Saxon aristocrat. A grandfather who doted on children; he could be witheringly cold and severe. An austere teetotaller, he had vast business interests; with castles in Scotland and mansions in South Africa, Malaysia, Dubai and Hong Kong. His birthday banquets included endless courses of elephant, buffalo, antelope, impala and a lion. An avowed catholic, he thought nothing of taking another man’s wife.
I once sat behind him at an international summit in Malabo. I remember the old man who sat glumly like a statue. But when it was his turn to speak his eloquence was electrifying. Mugabe was the most erudite statesman I had the honour of listening to, barring Henry Alfred Kissinger, former US Secretary of State.
Robert Gabriel Mugabe was born on 21 February 1924, at Kutama catholic mission in Mashona land. His grandfather reputedly served in the court of the great Ndebele monarch King Lobengula. His father Gabriel Mugabe Matibili walked out on the family for another woman in Bulawayo. His elder brother passed away, and soon thereafter, his younger brother also. Those tragedies cast a shadow over his childhood.
He attended St. Xavier’s College Kutama, founded in 1914 by the Jesuits. Its motto is rather very telling: “Esse Quam Videri” (To be rather than to seem to be). Schoolmates remember him as academically outstanding, but reclusive. He was mentored by the local Irish priest, father Jerome O’Hea, who describes him as a “fine heart and a fine mind”.
In 1949 he won a scholarship to Fort Hare University College in South Africa, at the time the Oxford and Harvard of the emerging black elites of East and Southern Africa. There he met future anti-apartheid leaders such as Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe, Joe Matthews and Duma Nokwe. Oliver Tambo and the legendary Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela would have graduated a decade earlier. He himself left the institution with an honour’s degree in History and English in 1952.
Related News “I once sat behind him at an international summit in Malabo. I remember the old man who sat glumly like a statue. But when it was his turn to speak his eloquence was electrifying. Mugabe was the most erudite statesman I had the honour of listening to”
Returning home to Southern Rhodesia as it then was, he taught in local schools before moving up north to Lusaka in what was then Northern Rhodesia; he subsequently immigrated to Ghana, which, under Kwame Nkrumah, had become the hotbed of pan-African nationalism on the continent. While working at St. Mary’s Teacher Training College Takoradi, he met Sarah Francesca “Sally” Hayfron who became his wife. Sally was a bright and vivacious young woman who shared his radical politics. They had a son, Michael Nhamodzenyika, who passed away in 1974.
In 1960, he returned to Salisbury (now Harare) to cast his lot with his people. It earned him a long prison sentence, from 1964 to 1974. During those painful years he taught literacy, English and mathematics to inmates. He also read voraciously; earning degrees in law, economics and public administration as an external student of the University of London.
In 1974, he crossed the border into Zambia to join ZANU. Kaunda and his hosts and had to leave for Mozambique. His charisma and eloquence made him a natural leader, especially following the untimely death of Bernard Chitepo in 1975. Driven to exhaustion by the bush war, in 1979 Ian Smith and the racist minority regime agreed to the Lancaster House talks under British Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington.
Robert Mugabe won the elections as Prime Minister on 18 April, 1980. It was a time of great optimism and hope. During the first decade of independence Zimbabweans were relatively prosperous. Mugabe was the undoubted star on the Southern African firmament. But things soon went awry. Tensions with arch rival Joshua Nkomo and his ZAPU led to the horrendous Gukurahundi military campaigns in Matabele land. More than 20,000 perished. It has been said that Mugabe was slow to raise the land question because he did not wish to jeopardise the prospects for majority rule in neighbouring South Africa. After the country achieved majority rule in 1994, he felt more emboldened to demand that Britain pay up for land reforms as agreed in the Lancaster House settlement. British intransigence gave him a free hand to do what had to be done.
Forcible seizure of white farmlands without compensation angered Western powers, especially when some of the choicest parts were allocated to himself and his cronies. The West imposed crushing economic sanctions. The British inevitably took back their honorary knighthood. The economy collapsed precipitately. Hyperinflation skyrocketed to a record-breaking 132,000,000 percent in 2008. The $1 trillion Zimbabwe bill remains a collector’s item to this day. It seems plausible, as has been alleged, that some foreign powers waged a secret currency war by flooding the country with fake Zimbabwe dollars so as to destroy the country. In response, Mugabe ordered the Reserve Bank to unilaterally adopt the US greenback as a national currency.
It was a smart move. Americans were pushed into a game-theoretic position where they could not prevent Mugabe from using their own national currency as legal tender of Zimbabwe. A big headache was the dire shortage of small change. The adoption of the South African Rand as an ancillary currency was a welcome respite from those constraints. Unemployment rose to 80 percent, even as HIV/AIDs and poverty brought the country to its knees. Some 4 million out of a population of 16 million fled the country. That was about a quarter of the entire population.
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