The Independent Uganda: You get the Truth we Pay the Price
– ‘A reptilian quality’ –
“He was a great leader whose leadership degenerated to a level where he really brought Zimbabwe to its knees,” said University of South Africa professor Shadrack Gutto.
Britain’s former foreign secretary Peter Carrington knew Mugabe well, having mediated the Lancaster House talks that paved the way for Zimbabwe’s independence.
“Mugabe wasn’t human at all,” Carrington told biographer Heidi Holland.
“There was a sort of reptilian quality about him.
“You could admire his skills and intellect… but he was an awfully slippery sort of person.”
In the final decades of his rule, Mugabe — one of the world’s most recognisable leaders with his thin stripe of moustache and thick-rimmed spectacles — has embraced his new role as the antagonist of the West.
He used blistering rhetoric to blame his country’s downward spiral on Western sanctions, though they were targeted personally at Mugabe and his henchmen rather than at Zimbabwe’s economy.
– Pre-dawn workouts? –
“If people say you are a dictator… you know they are saying this merely to tarnish and demean your status, then you don’t pay much attention,” he said in a 2013 documentary.
After decades in which the subject of succession was virtually taboo, a vicious struggle to take over after his death became apparent among the party elite as he reached his 90s and became visibly frail.
He had been rumoured for years to have prostate cancer, but according to the official account, his frequent trips to Singapore were for treatment related to his cataracts.
Mugabe’s second wife Grace — his former secretary who is 41 years his junior and had been seen as a potential successor — boasted that even in his 80s he would rise before dawn to work out.
“It’s true I was dead. I resurrected as I always do once I get back to my country. I am real again,” he joked in 2016 after returning from a foreign trip, mocking rumours that he had died.
But in his later years, he has stumbled and fallen more than once and delivered the wrong speech at the opening of parliament in 2015.
– The Catholic Marxist –
Born on February 21, 1924 into a Catholic family at Kutama Mission northwest of Harare, Mugabe was described as a loner, and a studious child known to carry a book even while tending cattle in the bush.
After his carpenter father walked out on the family when he was 10, the young Mugabe concentrated on his studies, qualifying as a schoolteacher at the age of 17.
An intellectual who initially embraced Marxism, he enrolled at Fort Hare University in South Africa, meeting many of southern Africa’s future black nationalist leaders.
After teaching in Ghana, where he was influenced by founder-president Kwame Nkrumah, Mugabe returned to Rhodesia where he was detained for his nationalist activities in 1964. He spent the next 10 years in prison camps or jail.
During his incarceration, he gained three degrees through correspondence, but the years in prison left their mark.
His four-year-old son by his first wife, Ghanaian-born Sally Francesca Hayfron, died while he was behind bars. Rhodesian leader Ian Smith denied him leave to attend the funeral.
Years later, Mugabe had two sons and a daughter by second wife Grace.
The ambition of the First Lady, who had been viewed as a front-runner to replace her husband, is widely seen by analysts as the catalyst for the military takeover as the army refused to accept her as Mugabe’s potential successor.
“His real obsession was not with personal wealth but with power,” said biographer Martin Meredith.
“Year after year Mugabe sustained his rule through violence and repression — crushing political opponents, violating the courts, trampling on property rights, suppressing the independent press and rigging elections.”
