Robert Mugabe, the despot I knew

Robert Mugabe, the despot I knew

Robert Mugabe is under house arrest and the military appear to have taken over Zimbabwe. The Australian 12:00AM November 17, 2017 Save BRUCE LOUDON

It was in the midst of the "chimurenga", the war of liberation being fought by Zimbabwe's barefooted bush fighters against white rule, and Robert Gabriel Mugabe appeared downcast. With virtually all the postcolonial leaders from across the African continent gathered in Libreville, the capital of Gabon in West Africa, crucial decisions were imminent on support for Mugabe or his arch-rival, Joshua Nkomo, as the future president of a black-ruled Zimbabwe. Mugabe, leader of the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front dominated by the Shona tribe, was the underdog despite the battlefield successes of his guerilla fighters. Nkomo, as garrulous as Mugabe was austere and cerebral, was leader of the more moderate Zimbabwe African People's Union party. Mugabe, bespectacled and a devout Catholic despite his hardline Marxism and dedicated pan-Africanism, desperately needed to type up a statement arguing his cause for presentation to the leaders. But he had no means to compose it. Other than for his then loyal deputy Edgar Tekere, he was virtually alone in Libreville, without the support staff and facilities that Nkomo had with him. In the entrance hall to the media room at the summit, Mugabe and Tekere eyed off my Olivetti Lettera 32 portable typewriter, in those days

in the late 1970s the standard equipment for foreign correspondents batting around the world's trouble spots. They politely asked if they could borrow it. Mugabe sat at the keyboard, pecking away, trying to compose his vital statement. It was clear his two fingers were hopeless.

In my own interests and to get him off my typewriter, I offered to help. The two men dictated the statement to me. I typed it out. It did much, apparently, to help Mugabe win more support from Africa's top leaders, and enabled him ultimately to eclipse Nkomo and, in 1980, to become independent Zimbabwe's first leader.

Yet on the occasions when I saw Mugabe afterwards, he never once recalled, much less thanked me, for what, with hindsight, was clearly an act of misguided generosity to a man who was to become one of modern history's most feared and appalling tyrants.

Forty years on, aged 93 and facing the long overdue demise of his odious regime, he has, it seems, lost none of that imperiousness or arrogance. Few at the time -- least of all in Britain as the departing colonial power -- foresaw the devastation that Mugabe, with his hardline Marxist principles, would wreak on a country Julius Nyerere, the scholarly "mwalimu" who led Tanzania to freedom, rightly described as the "Jewel of Africa".

Zimbabwe was indeed that. It still should be. But 40 years of misrule and oppression by Mugabe has turned what was -- as Zimbabwe and before that Rhodesia -- Africa's breadbasket into a horrifying nightmare of a basket case that has become a byword for bad government and corruption.

The sort of intellectual hauteur that Mugabe displayed after I'd helped him out in Libreville has been the hallmark of his tragic destruction of a country that, when he took over, was the envy of Africa. Samora Machel, the leader of neighbouring Mozambique, had warned Mugabe against allowing Zimbabwe to fall apart and go the way of the former Portuguese colony in which fleeing whites and others poured concrete down toilets and sabotaged vital infrastructure as they raced to the airport.

Initially, Mugabe reconciled with Nkomo despite their deep tribal differences. He showed remarkable restraint. Despite his firebrand anti-colonial past, he kept on the white commander of the armed forces as well as all the key officials in the police and intelligence services. He pledged to protect white property and pensions. And he did -- at least in the beginning.

In his first address to the nation after becoming president following the 1979 Lancaster House Agreement, he surprised even his own supporters by declaring in the clipped English that reflected his past as a language teacher: "I urge you, whether you are black or white, to join me in a new pledge ... to forget our grim past, forgive others, and forget."

After the bloody years of chimurenga it was what the anxious central African nation wanted to hear. Many of the 300,000 whites were leaving, but Mugabe's assurance persuaded many, too, that perhaps things would be OK.

It didn't take long, however, for Mugabe to bare his fangs. When Nkomo supporters began agitating against Mugabe's plans for one-party rule, he launched his North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade on the hapless people of Matabeleland in what became known as the Gukurahundi massacre in which 20,000 civilians were murdered by soldiers loyal to Mugabe.

The 1982 massacre was a turning point. Mugabe showed his true colours as a tyrant intolerant of opposition in any form. The country's security apparatus -- ironically, with the man now mentioned as his likeliest successor, Emmerson "The Crocodile" Mnangagwa, as the main enforcer of the brutality -- became even more oppressive as it sought to wipe out any manifestations of opposition and outrageously rigged elections to ensure Mugabe stayed in power. The vote went against him, yet somehow Mugabe stayed in power.

As the "Jewel of Africa" sank into years of famine, an epidemic of HIV, hyperinflation in which the country's central bank printed useless notes with an ostensible value of $Z1 trillion and systemic corruption among his close aides and acolytes plundered its resources Mugabe, the arch-proponent of pan-Africanism and Marxist, sought to apportion blame for the increasing mess.

That's when he targeted the country's 4000 white farmers who did so much to maintain the vital agricultural sector, anchoring it as one of the most efficient and productive in Africa. In an act of madness aimed at placating growing restiveness among chimurenga war veterans increasingly disenchanted by the country's economic and administrative collapse, Mugabe turned on what was far and away the most productive section of the economy.

More than 60 white farmers were killed as Mugabe incited the war veterans to invade and take over the productive farms. They were duly ruined after being handed over as payola to corrupt Mugabe supporters with no farming experience or even an inclination to farm. What little

remained of Mugabe's credibility as a leader was trashed, and Zimbabwe's continuing impoverishment and the fact three-quarters of the country's people were left needing help to maintain even a subsistence diet bears testimony to the immensity of his self-defeating folly.

Yet as rigged election followed rigged election and Mugabe advanced in years, he seemed to have learned nothing. Grudgingly, some white farmers were invited to return. But that did nothing to turn around a situation in which millions of Zimbabweans fled the impoverishment and tyranny to South Africa and other neighbouring countries.

It is not this, however, but the matter of the succession to his 40-year rule that has brought down Mugabe at 93. The old tyrant was unwilling even to contemplate the inevitability of his demise, much less hand over power. He would rule, he once said, "until God says come". He joked at one of his lavish birthday parties where champagne and caviar were always served to the country's elite that he had "died and been resurrected more times than Jesus".

What he didn't count on, however, was the ambition of his 52-year-old wife, Grace, dubbed "Gucci Grace". A former typist in the presidential secretarial office who was notorious for breathtaking spending excesses in places such as Hong Kong and Singapore, she worked on the old dotard over time to inveigle herself as his successor.

She outraged not only most Zimbabweans but also long-time comrades in arms such as 75-year-old Mnangagwa, who as vice-president and a close collaborator saw himself as next in line for the job. Last week "Gucci Grace" made her move. She persuaded Mugabe to fire Mnangagwa, not only from his government posts but also from his lifetime membership of the ruling party.

What he didn't take into account was the support Mnangagwa has in the armed forces, specifically from the top military commander, General Constantine Chiwenga, another long-serving Mugabe loyalist who has been at the epicentre of power for decades and is among those who have benefited from the years of being close to the president.

Reported to be under detention in his palatial mansion in the Harare suburb of Borrowdale, Mugabe is likely as defiant as ever and unwilling to concede that the end beckons for his regime.

That he could, apparently at the behest of his wife, turn so viciously on Mnangagwa, his enforcer of 40 years, speaks volumes about the man he

is. Tekere, who was with him at that summit meeting in Gabon, too, fell foul of him, despite being his closest aide. So did Josiah Tongogara, a legendary guerilla commander who did so much during the chimurenga.

Years ago when he was imprisoned for his political activities by Zimbabwe's then white rulers, one of Mugabe's children by his then wife, Sally, died. He was declined permission to attend the funeral. That, close Mugabe supporters have long believed, contributed heavily to the malevolence that underpins his character.

"Mugabe hates ... nobody hates like Mugabe," a close friend told me years ago as I searched for an answer to the malevolence that led him to turn on the white farmers and even those close to him.

"He never forgave the whites for the death of his child."

The complexities of his character could be seen, too, in the way, for all his pan-Africanism and nationalism, he sought, in Harare, to retain structures that were in some ways no different from their colonial past. He entertained visitors to fine blends of English tea served in Royal Doulton crockery and, despite being tossed out of the Commonwealth and railing against successive British governments, maintained a deep admiration for the Queen.

Invariably he dressed in Savile Row pinstripe suits and, when he wanted to, showed the manners of a sophisticated university don as he lectured listeners on the iniquities of those who criticised his despotic regime.

But in perpetuating, for four decades, one of modern history's most terrible tyrannies -- one that has cost his people dearly -- he has brought shame not only to Zimbabwe but to Africa as a whole.

Four decades later and with the benefit of hindsight, Mugabe's adversary Nkomo might have been a better bet.

But you wonder even about him: years ago, after Nkomo's guerilla fighters had shot down a tourist aircraft at Victoria Falls with a substantial loss of life, I found I was staying in the same hotel as him in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi.

I called his room late in the evening to ask him about what was a gross act of inhumanity against a clearly marked civilian flight. Nkomo had clearly had a good evening. He was so unmoved by the plight of the tourists that he fell asleep on the phone. His contented snores echoed down the phone line.

 ................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download