Untold History; The Story of Robert Mugabe - Freedom Fighter or Mad Tyrant?

Victor Wairiuko February 23, 2023

Learn more on Robert Mugabe History, Robert Mugabe’s Early Life, Zimbabwe History, When did Gukurahundi Happen, Robert Mugabe House Blue Roof and Robert Mugabe's most famous quotes,

Robert Mugabe (1924–2019), the president of Zimbabwe since the country's independence in 1980, was one of the most infamous African leaders during the final years of his leadership and one of the longest-serving. 

He was a teacher by trade and was held as a political prisoner in Rhodesia for 11 years under Ian Smith's rule. He became the movement's leader of the Zimbabwe African National Union and was a key negotiator in the Lancaster House Accord of 1979, which resulted in the establishment of a fully democratic Zimbabwe.

robert-mugabe
Robert-Mugabe


Robert Mugabe History

The man who would become known as Robert Mugabe was born on February 21, 1924, in Kutama, a Jesuit missionary in what is now Zimbabwe but was once Southern Rhodesia.

The Roman Catholic Kutama Mission in Southern Rhodesia is where Robert Gabriel Mugabe was born on February 21, 1924. His mother, Bona, taught catechism, and his father, Gabriel Mugabe, was a carpenter.

Who Is the Father of Robert Mugabe

Gabriel Matibiri, a carpenter by trade and a member of the Shona tribe's Zezuru clan, was his father. Gabriel's father had been a prominent local chief in the area in the eighteenth century, but colonial control had caused the family to experience downward social mobility.

Bona was Robert's mother. She worked as a Christian catechism instructor at the Kutama mission. Together with Robert, she had three boys, Michael, Raphael, and Donald, as well as two girls, Bridgette, and Sabina.

Robert was born into a colonial nation, as are the majority of African countries. In the final years of the nineteenth century, the British colonized Southern Rhodesia, along with much of southern Africa, as part of Cecil Rhodes's initiative to have Britain acquire a continuous strip of land running from the Cape Colony at the southern tip of Africa all the way up to Cairo in Egypt. Rhodes was a leading proponent of British colonialism.

The British came close to accomplishing this, but Germany and Belgium's acquisition of territories in East Africa and the Congo stopped them.

Yet, Rhodes was able to get mining concessions and other rights for his British South Africa Company from the local African kings of these areas, allowing him to capture a sizable portion of land as far north as Lake Tanganyika and Lake Malawi.

In the early twentieth century, this was divided into a number of administrative regions that were governed in a quasi-British manner.

Mugabe's home region was governed under the name Southern Rhodesia, which was chosen in recognition of Rhodes' crucial contribution to the establishment of the British Empire in this area.

Before to British intervention, the area had a Shona majority and a Ndebele minority, therefore it was not uniform. Ethnic tensions would result in the post-independence period in this country, as in many other African nations.

Early in the 20th century, as a major influx of British colonists established vast agricultural plantations across the nation for themselves, both ethnic groups started to be displaced.

The British government did not formally establish Southern Rhodesia as a colony until 1923, just a few months before Mugabe was born.

Robert Mugabe’s Early Life

Robert experienced a turbulent upbringing. When he was just six years old, in 1930, his father Gabriel got into a dispute with the Jesuits in charge of the Kutama mission. The family was consequently requested to leave, and they were forced to relocate to a village some distance away.

Yet, the kids were still allowed to attend Kutama for their remaining classes, despite the fact that they had to travel far on foot now.

Another tragedy occurred in 1934 when Michael, one of his brothers, passed away from eating tainted corn.

Shortly after, their father Gabriel left the family and began dating another lady, with whom he had three more children.

Despite these difficulties, Mugabe did well in school. His contemporaries recall him as a conscientious student who was also distant and evasive.

Father Jerome O'Hea, a priest at the Kutama mission, took him under his wing and taught him about the Irish War of Independence, which had been waged against the British in the early 1920s. Many people believe that this influence had a considerable impact on Mugabe's political development.

Nevertheless, little is known about his politics in his adolescence. But, he was doing well in school, and in 1941 Kutama College awarded him a spot in a teacher training program.

He would work on this for several years until receiving his teaching degree in 1945.

Mugabe traveled extensively throughout Southern Rhodesia and further south in South Africa throughout the latter half of the 1940s and the early 1950s. At the same time, he pursued his own education, earning a Bachelor of Arts in history and English literature from the University of Fort Hare in the Eastern Cape of South Africa in 1952. Nelson Mandela had previously studied law at the same university a few years prior.

Mugabe's political awakening began during these years. In the years following the Second World War, calls for the independence of the major European nations' colonies in Africa grew.

The success of India, where Mahatma Gandhi helped lead the nation to independence from Britain in 1947, served as an inspiration for these African nationalists. In the years that followed, many Africans questioned why they, too, should not have the right to rule their own nations.

When in South Africa, Mugabe started to move in circles where individuals were debating these concepts and organizing into political organizations with the intention of pressuring the government into giving independence.

The white minority in South Africa, a self-governing colony since 1910, was primarily concerned with preventing the black majority from gaining political power, so the country's government started enforcing a system known as apartheid in 1948 to essentially completely deprive the black majority of political, social, and economic rights. Apartheid is an Afrikaans word that means "separateness" or "apartness."

Soon, a similar pattern would develop in Mugabe’s native Southern Rhodesia. Mugabe later claimed he In 1952, after experiencing a political awakening in South Africa that made him realize the injustice of colonial authority and the supremacy of a white minority of colonial families in his nation, Southern Rhodesia, he returned.

He spent the remainder of the 1950s mostly avoiding political participation and concentrating on teaching in Southern Rhodesia and subsequently in Northern Rhodesia, where he lived from 1955 to 1958. However, his conduct during these years barely seemed to reflect this.

From there, he traveled to Ghana, which had recently attained independence in 1957, making it the first former European colony in all of Africa.

If there is a specific moment in Mugabe's life that can be identified as his turning point toward radical African nationalism, it was during this time in newly independent Ghana in the late 1950s.

He also started promoting Marxism, a political philosophy that was then popular among African nationalists, and he met Sally Hayfron, the woman who would become his wife and who also held the same political views.

As a result, in May 1960, he returned to Southern Rhodesia, with Mugabe now firmly dedicated to African nationalism.

He would become even more radicalized as events back home played out.

A black Southern Rhodesian politician by the name of Joshua Nkomo founded the Southern Rhodesian African National Congress in 1957 in response to the changing political landscape of Africa. The organization's objectives were to push for the country's independence from Britain while also making sure that the newly independent Southern Rhodesia would have a fully enfranchised black majority, unlike South Africa, where self-government had only led the minority white colonia.

The Colonial Government in Southern Rhodesia

The colonial government in Southern Rhodesia, which was predominated by white settlers and their descendants, responded in an unsettling way. Nkomo's Congress was outlawed in 1959, just two years after it was founded.

In the months that followed, the political climate of the nation grew more hostile, and Mugabe returned there in the summer of 1960. Leopold Takawira, a close friend of his, quickly persuaded him to join the National Democratic Party, a new political organization that had replaced the now-illegal Congress and had been founded in January 1960.

Mugabe accepted, and he soon began to actively engage in nationalist politics for the first time. Early in the 1960s, despite the country's political polarization, Mugabe's influence in Southern Rhodesian politics grew.

The British-organized conference held in 1961 in Salisbury, the capital of Southern Rhodesia, failed to resolve the conflicting demands of the black majority nationalist movement and the white minority colonial population.

Mugabe was speaking more and more at National Democratic Party meetings and rallies by this point, but the colonial authority soon outlawed the party as well in late 1961.

Mugabe was appointed the party's public relations director when yet another group was formed to get around the ongoing ban on Black Nationalist Parties.

The Zimbabwe African Peoples' Union, or ZAPU for short, was the name of the group.

The growing demand for independence and black majority rule, however, was receiving a significant amount of attention from the white minority group.

When only white individuals could vote in the Legislative Assembly elections in 1962, a new white minority party rose to dominance inside the colonial administration. This was the Rhodesian Front, a right-wing, conservative organization that was adamantly opposed to the growth of Black Nationalism.

Growing racial and political conflicts between ZAPU and the colonial administration headed by the Rhodesian Front characterized the years beginning in 1962.

By 1963, Mugabe had come to believe that military confrontation was necessary to grant Southern Rhodesia its independence and establish a Black Majority Government.

Several of his fellow ZAPU party members begged him to do this, but Joshua Nkomo, the party's head, was determined to use less explosive methods to pressure the British government into granting independence.

Due to Nkomo's stubbornness, Mugabe and a number of other ZAPU members decided to found a new party in August 1963 that would have a significant impact on Zimbabwe today.

It was the ZANU, or Zimbabwe African National Union.

It was just as hostile to Nkomo's ZAPU as it was to the colonial authority and dedicated to achieving independence and black majority rule in Southern Rhodesia through violent means, if necessary.

Mugabe became the first secretary-general of ZANU, but he did not have much time to enjoy his freedom in that capacity.

He was arrested in December 1963 and given a roughly two-year prison sentence for his subversive actions and remarks. Nevertheless, his sentence was later prolonged, and he ended up serving the following eleven years behind bars.

It would be November 1974 before Mugabe was released. But, Southern Rhodesia's politics would change in the interval. When Mugabe had just served two years of his prison sentence in 1965, the politics of Southern Rhodesia underwent a significant change.

With the ultimate goal of paving the way for all three colonies to finally attain independence at some point in the future, maybe as one entity in a federal union, Britain administratively united Southern Rhodesia to the neighboring colonies of Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland in 1953.

Unfortunately, the system immediately started to show weaknesses.

From the 1890s, Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland had both seen less significant colonization than Southern Rhodesia.

It was therefore more likely that the demands for black majority rule after independence would drown out the white minorities here. Yet in Southern Rhodesia, where more than 200,000 white settlers lived there and were committed to keeping their hold on the region, such was not the case.

As a result, they sought to establish an autonomous nation that would substantially resemble Apartheid South Africa. In order to maintain their hold on the nation, they were prepared to fight back against Britain itself if necessary.

Therefore, the colonial government headed by Prime Minister Ian Smith quickly moved to preserve white minority rule in Southern Rhodesia when both Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland were granted independence in the summer and fall of 1964 as the new nations of Zambia and Malawi under black majority rule.

Zimbabwe History

In 1965, they gave the nation a new name—Rhodesia—and unilaterally proclaimed their independence from Britain. The Bush War, known in Rhodesian history as the government's attempt to impose 200,000 settler whites' authority on the country's four million+ African black majority, began as a result.

This had been developing since the beginning of 1964, when ZANU was founded and its determination to start an armed uprising was made. But, even Joshua Nkomo's more pacifist ZAPU determined that the time for exerting more nonviolent political pressure was over when Smith's government implemented its policies the next year.

In large part because the government had access to modern weapons and support from neighboring South Africa, while its eastern neighbor was the Portuguese colony of Mozambique, whose right wing government was not supportive of the black nationalist struggle in Rhodesia, the war was fought with relatively poor results for the insurrectionists for much of the 1960s.

Internal conflicts between ZANU itself and between ZANU and ZAPU also hindered the conflict.

The fact that Rhodesia's white settler population was expanding as more individuals immigrated there from Europe throughout these years, eventually reaching a peak of nearly 300,000 in the 1970s, was a sign of the upbeat attitude of this society.

Mugabe and several other ZANU leaders were imprisoned during the time that all of this was going on. That was a difficult period for him, much of which was spent in the severely subpar Salisbury Maximum Security Prison and other prison institutions.

In shared cells with as many as a dozen inmates, there were frequently insufficient beds, forcing individuals to sleep on the floor. There were several reports of torture and other forms of prisoner maltreatment.

Robert Mugabe Education

He enrolled in a teacher training program after finishing elementary school and worked in a number of Rhodesian schools until being awarded a scholarship to the University of Fort Hare in South Africa, where he studied history and English.

After earning his degree in 1952, he went to Rhodesia to teach before relocating to Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) and Ghana, where he later married Sally Hayfron. During this time, he also earned further degrees from other universities.

Notwithstanding these difficulties, Mugabe concentrated on mentoring his fellow prisoners and furthering his own education, gaining two law degrees, a bachelor's in administration, and master's degrees in economics during the ten years he spent behind bars.

Additionally, he was able to continue leading the party from prison, along with others like Ndabaningi Sithole, who had founded ZANU alongside Mugabe and a number of other individuals and was also incarcerated for ten years.

It was extremely simple for the black African guards who kept watch over them to smuggle communications out of prison because many of them were sympathetic to their cause.

As a result, Mugabe, Sithole, and others were still able to significantly influence the Bush War's path during the 1960s and early 1970s while they were imprisoned.

In 1974, Mugabe, Sithole, and a number of other prisoners were lastly freed.

Soon after, the party split vehemently over tribal matters and how it should have handled the Bush War.

Sithole, for example, was more willing to start talks with the Rhodesian government in order to establish a black and white transitional administration, but Mugabe and others had lost interest by this point.

As a result, in 1975, ZANU divided into two distinct parties.

One of them, made up of Sithole's supporters, became known as ZANU-Sithole or ZANU-Ndonga, while Mugabe took control of the bigger part and gave it the name ZANU-Patriotic Front, or ZANU-PF.

Mugabe's elevation to full command of the ZANU's militant section came at a fortunate time, as the conflict was about to take an unexpected turn.

The Portuguese government was engaged in a protracted conflict with black nationalists in the neighboring country of Mozambique, which shared a long border with Rhodesia and was where ZANU militants had long operated.

A cease-fire was declared in September 1974, and Mozambique received its independence the following year. With this steadfast friend, ZANU-PF could now successfully combat the Rhodesian government.

As a result, the Bush War began to turn in the nationalists' favor starting in 1975. Mugabe ran the war and operated out of Mozambique throughout the majority of the middle to late 1970s.

He escalated the conflict by ordering a significant guerrilla offensive into eastern Rhodesia from Mozambique in January 1976.

The position of Smith's government was becoming less solid as a result of everything.

All white Rhodesians under the age of 35 were conscripted by 1976 in an effort to end the Bush War, but the nation was already becoming more and more isolated on the diplomatic front.

Even South Africa was split on whether it should support Rhodesia's participation in the Bush War, and Henry Kissinger, the American secretary of state, was pressuring the Salisbury government to develop a plan for a smooth transition to coalition governance between the black and white communities.

In the meantime, Mugabe was brutally consolidating his power over ZANU-PF in preparation for future black majority government.

He detained Wilfred Mhanda, a former ZANU-PF deputy leader, in 1977, and Josiah Tongogara, another potential opponent for control, died in a strange automobile accident two years later.

By the end of the 1970s, Mugabe had complete control over ZANU-PF as a result of all of this.

The white minority became more and more marginalized on the international stage as the Bush War dragged on.

The majority of its immediate neighbors were now providing shelter to Black Nationalist militants who could conduct operations over the border into Rhodesia after it lost its Portuguese partner in Mozambique.

Furthermore, it was made clear by the South African government that it did not support continued white minority rule in Rhodesia.

It was only a demographic concern.

White Rhodesians' numbers had fallen below 250,000 by 1979 as a result of the Bush War's intensity, which had caused many of them to start leaving the nation from the middle of the 1970s onward.

This meant that less than 4% of the people of Rhodesia were now white.

In striking contrast, South Africa had a population that was approximately 20% white, which allowed for the demographic viability of the continuation of Apartheid.

By the end of the 1970s, Smith was being pressured to negotiate even by the Apartheid government in Pretoria.

Additionally, Smith's government's use of chemical and biological weapons, such as bacterial agents that can cause cholera and anthrax, severely damaged Smith's reputation abroad.

By 1979, there was little choice but to negotiate because the country was cut off from outside assistance and white Rhodesians were leaving it.

All parties involved in the Bush War and the nationalist struggle in Rhodesia were invited to a summit at Lancaster House in Britain in August 1979 by the British government.

Committee met in September and discussed all the important subjects for three months. When it became evident that the Mozambican government would stop sheltering and supporting his militants if Mugabe did not participate in efforts to broker a peace agreement, he reluctantly agreed to participate after first refusing.

Even after agreeing to travel and showing up, he harbored doubts about the British government's intentions.

Despite his doubts, the other Black Nationalist groups' involvement was enough for a peace agreement to be reached in December.

The Lancaster House Accord laid forth a plan for the transition to a government with a black majority in a new country whose independence would be recognized by Britain and which was to be known as Zimbabwe, the African name for the country.

With the caveat that the white community would be permitted to keep its holdings in the nation and get 20 seats in the new 100-seat parliament reserved solely for them for a set period of time, the Bush War was to come to an end, and new elections would be held.

The Bush War commanders started returning to Zimbabwe as the Lancaster House Conference came to an end to deliver speeches to enormous crowds of supporters around the newly reconstructed nation.

It was unknown who would win the most votes in the elections because many of them had been unable to reside in Rhodesia throughout the 1970s. It was evident during the elections in February 1980 that Mugabe had the backing of the majority of Zimbabweans.

In elections that the British closely watched and oversaw, ZANU-PF garnered 63% of the vote.

ZANU-PF was able to gain 57 of the 80 seats available to the black majority in the new parliament, which helped Mugabe win the presidency.

His closest rival, the ZAPU of Joshua Nkomo, won 20 seats with 24% of the vote.

With 83% of the white vote, Ian Smith's Rhodesian Front was able to win all 20 of the seats in the parliament designated for the white minority.

Therefore, Robert Mugabe took the oath of office as Zimbabwe's first Prime Minister on April 18, 1980, barely hours after the British Government officially recognized Zimbabwe as an independent nation. He would switch offices to comply with the constitution's requirements, yet he would hold onto his position for 37 years.

When Mugabe's ZANU-PF government took office in the spring of 1980, managing the shift from white minority rule to black majority rule was its top priority.

In order to do this, Mugabe preached the necessity of rapprochement between the two communities in a number of public statements throughout the first few weeks and months of his time as prime minister.

There were initially significant efforts made to accomplish this.

For instance, Mugabe's administration made every effort to persuade white settler families that they would be secure in their farms in the early 1980s, despite the country losing about 1,000 white Zimbabweans per month to emigration to South Africa, Britain, and other nations.

By keeping true to himself and encouraging others to do the same, Ian Smith made an effort to support the new regime.

Also, the government initially did not intervene with the white landowners since it received significant tax money from the agricultural plantations owned by the white community.

By 1981, however, tensions began to rise as nationalists began tearing down statues of Cecil Rhodes and other colonial leaders across the nation and renaming Salisbury as Harare.

Following Smith's accusation that ZANU-PF was encouraging corruption in the government and Mugabe's personal support for the establishment of a one-party state, there was a rift between the two.

The relationship between the Mugabe dictatorship and white Zimbabweans eventually became irreparably damaged.

The white population had decreased from a peak of 300,000 in the 1970s to just over 100,000 by 1985, in any case, as many had emigrated to South Africa or Britain.

This number continued to decline over the ensuing years, reaching a nominal level of little more than 50,000 by the end of the century—a figure that was repeated in many African nations with minimal settler colonial histories.

According to the terms of the Lancaster House Agreement, white Zimbabweans were required to keep their lands unless they voluntarily chose to sell them.

As a result, many of the people who stayed continued to play a significant role in the economy long into the 1990s while becoming progressively marginalized in the politics of the nation.

Several white settlers built airstrips on their vast plantations so they could fly in and out by charter plane and continuing to enjoy rich lives mostly separated from the rest of the population.

Even this, though, was short-lived, and the Mugabe dictatorship began an aggressive strategy of land appropriation in the middle of the 1990s. The remaining traces of colonial Rhodesia were substantially eradicated from Zimbabwe in the 1990s and 2000s with the transfer of substantial estates from white settler families into black African ownership.

This was primarily focused on the future.

Zimbabwe Economic Boom

Beyond difficulties of race relations between whites and blacks, the economy and ethnic conflicts among black Zimbabweans were two of Mugabe's first government's most pressing concerns in the 1980s.

The economy was in a really good place at first. Due to its oppressive government and its unilateral proclamation of independence from Britain in 1965, Rhodesia had been subject to a significant number of economic and political sanctions by the international world for years.

These were lifted in 1980 when Zimbabwe's government gained legitimacy.

Following the abrupt opening of markets that had been closed to the nation for years, there was an economic boom.

Also, with racial tensions between whites and blacks being relatively low in the early 1980s, agricultural plantations that were predominantly controlled by white people were allowed to freely export their products overseas thanks to a cooperative financial agreement between them and the government.

As a result, Zimbabwe's GDP per capita increased from little over $900 in 1980 to $1100 in just two years, representing a growth rate of about 20%.

For Zimbabwe's recent independence, the indicators were positive.

This was short-lived.

Another significant feature of the early 1980s was that Zimbabwe received huge lines of credit from the United States, Britain, and other nations who were eager to try to draw Zimbabwe closer to them in the ongoing Cold War, which was entering a period of heightened tensions at the time.

Mugabe's administration took up a lot of debt. It should be noted that a significant portion of the funds were used by the Mugabe administration to start building a modern healthcare system and hundreds of new schools across the nation.

Because of this, throughout the 1980s and 1990s, basic healthcare services, such as access to vaccines, considerably extended, and literacy rates significantly rose, with over 80% of Zimbabweans being literate.

These were good things, but as the ZANU-PF party hierarchy started to enrich themselves in the 1980s, a large portion of the borrowed funds were wasted through corruption.

Due to this, Zimbabwe's early 1980s economic euphoria quickly petered out and was replaced by a period of economic deterioration as it started to run budget surpluses of almost 10% of GDP and accumulate significant sums of foreign debt.

The fact that Zimbabwe's population increased from just over seven million in 1980 to over ten million in 1990—a demographic boom that caused significant levels of unemployment by the end of the 1980s—compounds this issue.

The resolution to the other significant problem Mugabe's first administration faced was even more tragic.

Despite the Lancaster House Accord effectively ending the Bush War in 1979, several guerrilla groups continued to operate in Zimbabwe, mainly in the western region of Matabeleland.

Due to racial tensions among the nation's black population, there was a lot of hesitation to lay down arms.

• Was Mugabe a Shona?

Bantu people, who made up the majority of the black population in Zimbabwe, were separated into various ethnic tribes, the Shona and the Ndebele being the most prominent.

Over 70% of Zimbabwe's black population was Shona, of which Mugabe was a member, while the Ndebele made up only 20%.

Given Mugabe's ethnicity and the fact that people of Shona descent made up the majority of ZANU-PF, many Ndebele believed the new administration would disenfranchise them.

As a result, even after the installation of black majority government, significant numbers of them continued a low-level insurgency in the west of the country.

A large portion of these additionally backed Joshua Nkomo's ZAPU party, which served as Mugabe's primary foe during the majority of Zimbabwe's early independent existence.

When did Gukurahundi Happen?

Following multiple new uprisings in Matabeleland in the latter part of 1980 and 1981 as well as the finding of a sizable arsenal in February 1982, Mugabe's government started to confront the issue of the Ndebele resistance in that region.

Early in the 1980s, President Kim IL Sung of North Korea and President Robert Mugabe's government came to an agreement wherein North Korea would send experts to Zimbabwe to train a special division of Zimbabwean forces.

• Gukurahundi Meaning

Formerly known as the Fifth Brigade, Mugabe changed their name to the Gukurahundi, which means "the early rain that washes away the chaff before the spring rain" in order to send the new military force to Matabeleland to cope with the ongoing insurgency.

To put an end to the disturbance, the Gukurahundi moved hundreds of soldiers into Matabeleland starting later that year.

They employed ruthless tactics.

All Ndebele men of fighting age were typically treated as dissidents.

Hundreds were frequently rounded up and detained.

Some of them received re-education placements.

Others were put to death right there and then or vanished into prison facilities, never to be seen again.

On the banks of the Cewale River in March 1983, 62 men and women were collectively killed in an infamous tragedy.

In Zimbabwe, tens of thousands more Ndebele people were jailed and forced to flee throughout the middle of the 1980s, in what is now known as the Gukurahundi Genocide.

Midway through the 1980s, as racial relations with the white community had deteriorated, the economy was starting to exhibit severe structural flaws, and western Zimbabwe was experiencing genocide, Mugabe's focus shifted to consolidating his power after new elections and the conclusion of his first term as prime minister.

He believed the timing was right to do so following ZANU-resounding PF's victory in the 1985 General Election, in which the party received 77% of the vote and 64 of the 80 seats available to the black majority in the National Assembly.

As a result, extensive constitutional reforms were put into place in 1987.

Mugabe assumed the new office of President of Zimbabwe, which combined his previous roles as head of state and supreme commander of the Zimbabwean armed forces, and gave him near-dictatorial authority.

ZAPU, which had served as the principal opposition party among the black community, was absorbed into ZANU-PF at the same time.

The Lancaster House Accord, which stipulated that the white roll should only exist during the period of transition to black majority rule, finally allowed white Zimbabweans to vote separately to elect 20% of the National Assembly. Nevertheless, this was permitted.

Despite the legality, the net impact of these constitutional amendments was that ZANU-PF now controlled all aspects of Zimbabwe, with Mugabe serving as the country's de facto ruler.

Zimbabwe maintained a respectable status in the international community in the late 1980s despite a growing drift toward tyranny.

Due to Mugabe's membership in the Non-Aligned Movement, a group of states that formed in the middle of the 1950s among countries that desired to maintain a mostly autonomous attitude in the Cold War between the United States and its allies and the Soviet Union and its Eastern Bloc, this was possible.

After several years of India's leadership of the Movement, Mugabe took over as its head in 1986. The choice of Mugabe was significant since the South African government's failure to end its Apartheid practices was one of the main concerns of the Non-Aligned Movement in the middle of the 1980s.

For years, there had been increasing calls for Nelson Mandela's release, the deputy president of the African National Party and a symbol of resistance against Apartheid, as well as growing international condemnation of the white minority government of South Africa.

By serving as its leader during a time when the United States intensified its economic sanctions against the South African government, Mugabe was now able to earn political significance on the global stage.

The Non-Aligned Movement's position helped to abolish Apartheid in South Africa in the early 1990s and eventually resulted in Mandela's release from jail in 1990.

At this point, we could hesitate to ask: Who was Robert Mugabe, the guy who by the end of the 1980s had become virtually the dictator of Zimbabwe?

His political views were generally incompatible.

His economic policies scarcely showed any significant dedication to the same, despite the fact that he claimed to be an African nationalist who also embraced Marxism-Leninism and a socialist platform.

As time passed, his vehement hatred of colonialism and the countries that had participated in it in Africa seemed to characterize his political views.

As time passed and the last significant remnants of colonial power were eliminated in Zimbabwe, this started to sound paranoid.

Robert Mugabe Wife

He was reserved on a personal level and had few close acquaintances.

His first wife Sally, whom he wanted to be known as Amai, which is Arabic for "Mother of the Nation," was his closest confidante.

Nonetheless, this did not stop him from having an extramarital relationship with Grace Marufu starting in 1987. As a result, a daughter named Bona was born in 1988, and a boy named Robert was born in 1990.

When Grace Mugabe and Sally Mugabe got married in 1996, Grace officially assumed the role of first lady of Zimbabwe as Sally Mugabe passed away in 1992 from kidney failure.

She quickly rose to prominence in politics, despite being known for her lavish spending.

More generally, as he aged, Mugabe developed a reputation for his haughty demeanor, odd fashion choices, and quirky behavior, occasionally drawing comparisons to both Adolf Hitler and Jesus Christ.

The state Zimbabwe found itself in during the 1990s under his rule was everything but holy, despite his increasing messianic complex.

Inflation started to soar starting in 1990, which was a development that would have catastrophic effects on the Zimbabwean economy many years later as the economy continued to deteriorate.

Efforts to support local industry were impeded by corruption and a lack of investment, and unemployment remained high.

Mugabe then introduced high taxes to pay for these initiatives in the middle of the 1990s in an effort to settle anger over the denial of pensions to former guerrilla combatants, which led to strike action in 1997.

There were severe food shortages across the nation a year later.

Mugabe, who has often raised the issue of colonialism, began to progressively blame Britain for Zimbabwe's economic woes after the country had been independent for almost fifteen years.

One of the few advantages Zimbabwe's economy experienced during these years was the exodus of hundreds of thousands of young people looking for employment overseas.

As a result, the 1990s saw a slowdown in the 1980s' rapid population growth, which lessened the need for the government to provide work for them. Although it benefited the government, this hardly qualifies as an accomplishment of any kind.

When Mugabe wasn't blaming British colonialism for Zimbabwe's problems in the 1990s, he was fixated on another growing obsession: his conviction that a homosexual conspiracy was behind Zimbabwe's ills.

It is not difficult to understand where Mugabe's latent homophobia may have come from as someone who was raised as a Christian conservative in Africa during the 1920s and 1930s, but it reached an extreme level in the 1990s when he started making public pronouncements in which he claimed gay people were sub-human and that homosexuality had been imported into Africa by the British and other colonial powers.

Some of this became outright illogical, such as when Mugabe asserted that he and an independent Zimbabwe were being pursued by a, quote, "gay mafia."

Even though it may be tempting to write these utterances off as the rambling fantasies of a paranoid man, they had actual implications because they were made by a dictator and a head of state.

Because of this, during the 1990s and 2000s, homosexuality was very intolerable in Zimbabwe.

Of course, there is disagreement over how much of this rhetoric Mugabe actually believed and how much of it he simply stoked to divert attention from the nation's appalling economic performance.

Zimbabwe's participation in the Second Congo War is another action Mugabe may have taken to divert attention from his own government's poor handling of the nation and underlying corruption.

This started in 1998, mostly as a continuation of the First Congo War that had started in the middle of the 1990s as a result of agitation over Joseph Mobutu's tyranny in Zaire and the spillover of the Rwandan civil war and genocide into the east of the Congo.

With almost five million casualties to date, the Second Congo War would eventually become the worst conflict to take place anywhere in the globe since the Second World War.

This was partially caused by the military support given to various groups by so many of the neighboring nations in what has essentially been a civil war for control of various regions of this large country.

Mugabe took the initiative in this regard.

He was chairing the defense arm of the Southern African Development Community when the violence broke out in August 1998.

Mugabe swiftly ordered Zimbabwean troops into the Congo to back Laurent Kabila, the country's new leader. Around 10,000 troops were eventually sent there, and Kabila also received air support from him.

Mugabe also persuaded Namibia and Angola to join the battle, escalating tensions in a conflict that would continue to burn for another 25 years.

Mugabe's reputation on the international stage was rapidly deteriorating as he became entangled in the Second Congo War and with it, Zimbabwe's.

There were many factors at play in this situation, including the regime's violations of human rights, blatant disregard for democratic principles, and corrupt behavior, as well as its attitudes toward homosexuality in Zimbabwe and the increasingly oppressive way Mugabe was seizing the little white Zimbabwean-owned land that was left and giving it to favored ZANU-PF members.

In 1997, shortly after Tony Blair's new British administration took office, it discontinued payments to Zimbabwe that had been made for seventeen years as a condition of Mugabe's government upholding the Lancaster House Agreement's land clauses.

In 1999, human rights organizations denounced Mugabe's visit to London.

Due to the government in Harare's failure to carry out the reforms that the IMF believed required to get the funding, as well as its political failings and violations of human rights, the IMF stopped providing funding to it that same year.

Zimbabwe was finally kicked out of the Commonwealth of Nations, the British umbrella organization for former colonies, in 2002.

By this point, Mugabe had been widely denounced as a pariah by the world community.

In the 2000s, circumstances at home got even worse.

Mugabe started a new scheme of rapid land redistribution at the end of the 1990s, under which enormous farms that had been owned by European settlers would be handed to black Africans in small allotments.

This included an effort to boost ZANU-waning PF's support across the nation.

The course of action was terrible.

There is little question that the former owners had managed these sizable farms successfully, even though the monopolization of big estates in the hands of the white minority was undoubtedly a crime from the colonial era.

It changed after 2000 since many of individuals who received their property had no prior farming experience. Predictably, nationwide output levels drastically decreased starting in 2002.

For instance, the production of maize, a main crop in the nation, fell from almost two million tonnes in 2000 to less than half a million tonnes in 2008.

Thus, the 2000s brought food shortages and the arrival of humanitarian aid organizations to the country in an effort to avert a widespread famine for Zimbabweans, who had already experienced economic decline and significant political unrest in their nation for the first twenty years of Mugabe's rule.

All of this stood in stark contrast to the lifestyle that Mugabe, his second wife, their children, and the leaders of ZANU-PF led.

Mugabe undoubtedly benefited from his position of power, but after the death of his first wife in 1992, Grace Mugabe gained notoriety as "Gucci Grace," jet-setting to Paris for extravagant shopping sprees and constructing several palaces around Harare, one of which was dubbed "Graceland" in a nod to Elvis Presley's fabled mansion.

There have been others like her.

For decades after they gained power, many other top members of ZANU-PF loaded their own wallets with the help of the idea of reclaiming land from white settlers for black Africans, which they frequently used to facilitate their own benefiting from land redistribution.

Robert Mugabe House Blue Roof

The party, which engaged in patronage through gifts and bribes, began to dominate politics and business. The effects of all of this were evident in the northern Harare district of Borrowdale, where ZANU-PF members constructed several mansions, the most infamous of which was 'Blue Roof,' the residence of the Mugabes.

All of this stood in stark contrast to the widespread poverty and squalor in the rest of the nation.

During the end of the 1990s, as Zimbabwe's economy collapsed and the country became more and more isolated, Mugabe for the first time encountered domestic challenges to his authority.

His choice to enter the Second Congo War without consulting the National Assembly or other pertinent parties made the situation worse. Maybe not unexpectedly, after learning of a plot to overthrow Mugabe, more than twenty military officers were detained in January of the following year.

A former ZANU-PF member named Morgan Tsvangirai founded a new political party in the same year to challenge Mugabe and ZANU-dominance PF's of Zimbabwean politics.

The MDC, or Movement for Democratic Change, was behind this. Tsvangirai made it clear right on that overthrowing Mugabe was his main objective.

Drawing attention to the Gukurahundi Genocide in the 1980s and publicly declaring that if he were in power, people would have to answer for what had happened were particularly explosive aspects of his activity in the years that followed.

He faced off against Mugabe in the presidential race of 2002, finishing just behind Mugabe with 42% of the vote.

Many believed that Tsvangirai would have won the election if it weren't for voter intimidation and fraud, which included the killing of numerous MDC leaders.

Despite this setback, Mugabe's reputation continued to decline in the years that followed. As elections approached in 2008, many people thought Tsvangirai's time had come.

Morgan Tsvangirai defeated Mugabe in the 2008 Zimbabwean presidential election.

He only received 43% of the vote in the first round, compared to Tsvangirai's 48%.

The vote was also heavily manipulated, and the outcome wasn't made public until a month following the vote.

In June of that year, Tsvangirai and Mugabe would face off in a second-round run-off if they failed to receive 50% of the vote or more, but in the interim, rising violence between the government and MDC supporters caused Tsvangirai to withdraw from the race.

At this point, Mugabe had already made it known in the public that he would never permit his rival to hold the office of president.

After months of additional violence, Mugabe finally agreed to a power-sharing arrangement in which Tsvangirai was given the lower position of Prime Minister but would keep the office of President.

What Caused Zimbabwe Hyperinflation

However, this was only a front, and Mugabe and ZANU-PF maintained to hold the majority of crucial ministries, as well as command of the army, security forces, and police.

When Mugabe unilaterally decided to name new provincial governors across the nation without first engaging Tsvangirai and his MDC government allies, it was a sign of his continued hegemony in Zimbabwean politics.

One of the most catastrophic episodes of hyperinflation that any nation has seen in modern times occurred during the time of Mugabe's new presidency and the power-sharing deal with Tsvangirai, as Zimbabwe's economy collapsed.

This resulted from years of financial mismanagement under Mugabe following independence.

For instance, during the 1970s, Rhodesia's inflation rate had been in the single digit percentiles.

In the 1980s, it swiftly started to consistently reach 10%.

The onset of hyperinflation didn't occur until the late 1990s, as a result of a number of factors, including a high national debt brought on by excessive borrowing in the decade before, a decline in economic output, price controls imposed by the government, as well as persistently bad fiscal policies.

Prior to roughly 200% in 2002 and 600% in 2003, it peaked at 50% in 1999.

The situation appeared to stabilize for a while, but when the global financial crisis hit in late 2008, Zimbabwe's economy entirely collapsed. This was made worse by the Reserve Bank's decision to start printing new currency, which would always result in increased inflation whenever it is done.

The government had stopped even tracking inflation by the late 2000s since it was thought to have exceeded a million percent.

The Zimbabwean Dollar basically lost all of its value at this point, and the country's economy began to revert to barter or the usage of foreign currencies.

A simmering anger about Mugabe's continuing rule in Zimbabwean society persisted at the same time.

Mugabe made his desire to run for president again in the upcoming election official in 2011.

It had been questioned whether he would do so, and many had assumed he would resign due to his deteriorating health as he approached his 90th year.

In order to draft a new constitution for the country, ZANU-PF and the MDC decided to postpone the election that was originally set for 2012 until the following year.

A referendum was properly held to approve such constitution in the spring of 2013.

The following year's presidential election was set for July, but many Zimbabweans and international observers overseas feared it would be significantly rigged so that Mugabe would once again defeat Tsvangirai.

Political opponents were attacked, and Mugabe forbade any Western monitors from entering Zimbabwe to check on the legitimacy of the polls, thus the months running up to it did not hold out much hope for anything else.

While doing this, he promoted himself by attending Pope Francis' inauguration in Europe and refused to rule out running for president in 2018 if he were to win a second term.

Tens of thousands of early ballots in his favor had been destroyed by the government, Tsvangirai and the MDC said at the same time.

Finally, the election took place on July 31, 2013.

Early in August, the results were made public.

According to these, Mugabe won with roughly 62% of the vote, while Tsvangirai received just 34%. This is a change from the 2008 first-round result, which had already drawn criticism for being invalid.

Also, ZANU-PF won two-thirds of the National Assembly seats.

As a result, unlike after the 2008 elections, when Mugabe and his party had to make accommodations for their opponents, in 2013 the lessons had been learnt, and the polls were rigged to give Mugabe and ZANU-PF a landslide victory.

As a result, Mugabe, who is 89 years old, was sworn in for a second term as president in late August.

This new tenure would, however, be marred once more by years of hyperinflation and falling living standards.

However, Mugabe's government was by this point completely despised by the world community, a condition that could not be changed until he consented to step down.

In the end, Robert Mugabe would rule Zimbabwe until late 2017, by which time he would have turned 93.

He made a noisy exit.

In November 2017, when the country's focus shifted to the 2018 elections and whether or not Mugabe would refuse to step down, a crisis started to develop.

He didn't seem to have any plans to do that, and government actions seemed to indicate that he was once more trying to crack down on political criticism ahead of the election.

Then, in early November, Mugabe fired Emmerson Mnangagwa, his Vice President, who was widely thought to be the candidate to succeed him as President and head of ZANU-PF the following year.

Mugabe and his wife, the First Lady Grace Mugabe, who had just become a potent political figure by seizing control of the ZANU-PF women's section, were also clearly at odds.

Many in the military found Mnangagwa's ouster to be a step too far, and on November 14, the Zimbabwean Defence Forces launched a coup. By the end of the day, they had virtually taken control of Harare, the nation's capital.

The leaders of the coup made it plain that their goal was to depose Mugabe rather than take over in a relatively bloodless coup.

As a result, on November 19th, ZANU-PF made the decision to replace Mugabe as their leader with Mnangagwa.

Even though, Mugabe refused to stand down, and it wasn't until the Zimbabwean parliament started to impeach him on November 21 that he eventually did, ending his 37-year reign as dictator and tyrant of Zimbabwe.

Three days later, Mnangagwa was elected as Zimbabwe's second-ever leader of independent Zimbabwe.

Upon his ouster from power, Mugabe did not need to leave Zimbabwe.

Instead, the Zimbabwean government gave him generous benefits and money to keep him in a big residence with lots of workers.

Additionally, he was granted a 10 million dollar severance package on top of the vast sums of money he had stolen from the state over the course of more than 30 years.

However, despite this generally amicable treatment, he was determined to stir up trouble and spent a significant portion of the first half of 2018 in the lead-up to the Presidential Election criticizing Mnangagwa and urging voters to support his opponent, Nelson Chamisa, the leader of the MDC, a development that many believed indicated a deal between Chamisa and Mugabe.

Despite this, Mnangagwa edged out Chamisa in the elections, whose legality was once again questioned.

This marked Mugabe's political career's unmistakable end.

Death of Robert Mugabe

He was already battling an advanced form of cancer at this point, and by late 2018, it appeared that he was unable to walk.

At that point, he had also left for Singapore to receive medical care of a caliber not available in Zimbabwe.

On September 6th, 2019, he passed away there.

He was buried in his hometown of Kutama after having his body returned to Zimbabwe for a proper state funeral.

Mugabe leaves behind a nation that had been destroyed by his brutal leadership.

The ZANU-PF party, which has a terrible track record of disrespecting democratic principles and whose politics are still plagued by massive corruption and illegitimacy, continues to rule Zimbabwe.

 The economy has been completely destroyed by the hyperinflation of the 2000s and 2010s, which was the result of decades of economic mismanagement by Mugabe's regimes.

Unemployment and poverty are pervasive, and a large portion of the economy runs on an informal basis.

Furthermore, what little money the nation does have is concentrated in the hands of ZANU-PF and its supporters. This appalling scenario is exemplified by Borrowdale, a posh neighborhood of Harare where the party's senior leaders reside in enormous homes.

In the meantime, the state of the nation's public services has deteriorated to intolerable levels, with hospitals and schools lacking even the most basic necessities.

It is hardly shocking that Mugabe passed away in a hospital in Singapore.

All of this stands in stark contrast to the situation when Mugabe assumed power in 1980, taking over a nation that had been ravaged by war but had been one of the most prosperous sections of the African continent by the middle of the 20th century.

The legacy of Mugabe and ZANU-PF was to make it one of the poorest continents.

Robert Mugabe is a very contradictory person.

His early years were largely unrelated to politics, but he was an excellent young man who earned several degrees and rose to respectability in the communities where he resided, both in Zimbabwe and overseas.

He didn't become politically aware until the late 1950s, when he was already in his mid-thirties, but once he did, he rose to prominence as one of the nation's most important black independence leaders.

Before Mugabe and ZANU-PF were able to end the rule of the white minority in Rhodesia, there were years of imprisonment and guerrilla warfare.

Mugabe was appointed as Zimbabwe's first prime minister after its name change.

Mugabe would have been regarded as a Zimbabwean Nelson Mandela had he established democratic norms and eventually handed up power, but instead, he chose the path that was all too frequently taken in post-colonial Africa, refusing to do so and consolidating power in his and ZANU-hands. PF's

Following independence, violence and economic deterioration spread throughout the nation, as they had done in other nations on the continent, as the initial excitement over the overthrow of white minority control faded.

Nevertheless, starting in the late 1990s, the economy entirely collapsed despite Mugabe's refusal to consider releasing his hold on the reins of power.

Finally, any traces of his former record of defying white minority control had long since been forgotten by the time he was forced to leave office in 2017.

His reputation as a tyrant had already diminished by that point, and his legacy will undoubtedly outlast all of his earlier accomplishments.

What do you think of Robert Mugabe?

Should he still be seen as an African freedom champion, or did his subsequent behavior as Zimbabwe's dictator and tyrant entirely negate all of his earlier successes?

Thank you very much for reading, and if you have any questions or comments, please let us know in the comment area.

Robert Mugabe's most famous quotes

These are some of his ‘deepest’ quotes that he is famous for.

1) “When your clothes are made of cassava leaves, you don’t take a goat as a friend.”

2) “If you are ugly, you are ugly. Stop talking about inner beauty because men don’t walk around with X-ray machines to see inner beauty.”

3) “When one’s goat gets missing, the aroma of a neighbour’s soup gets suspicious.”

4) “Treat every part of your towel nicely because the part that wipes your buttocks today will wipe your face tomorrow.”

5) “Sometimes you look back at girls you spent money on, rather than send it to your mum, and you realise witchcraft is real.”

6) “If President Barack Obama wants me to allow marriage for same-sex couples in my country (Zimbabwe), he must come here so that I marry him first.”

7) “What is the problem with deporting white men from Africa? We now have aeroplanes which can take them back quicker than the ships used by their ancestors.”

8) “Cigarette is a pinch of tobacco rolled in a piece of paper with fire on one end and a fool on the other end.”

9) Interviewer: “Mr President, when are you bidding the people of Zimbabwe farewell?”

Robert Mugabe: “Where are they going?”

10) “If I am given a chance to travel through time, I will go back to 1946, find Donald Trump’s father and give him a condom.”

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