Mugabe, Robert

Mugabe, Robert 1924 –

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Robert Mugabe, the president of Zimbabwe, was born in rural Rhodesia (the country’s earlier colonial name), and spent his adult life struggling for the independence of Zimbabwe. He has led the country since 1980, first as prime minister and then as president. The son of Gabriel and Bona Mugabe, he managed to gain admission to South Africa’s Fort Hare University, which was then one of the few institutions reserved for non-white higher education in apartheid South Africa. He began to develop his political consciousness at the university and returned to Rhodesia in 1960, immediately joining Joshua Nkomo’s Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU), but he deserted Nkomo three years later to help establish the rival Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU). The two men conducted an uneasy rivalry, with periods of conditional cooperation, right up to Nkomo’s death in 1999.

This sort of political maneuvering characterized Mugabe’s rise to pre-eminence within ZANU itself, and rivals were either eclipsed or mysteriously died. At the foundation of ZANU, however, the radical demeanour of the party so alarmed Ian Smith’s white minority government that Mugabe was imprisoned without trial in 1964 and remained incarcerated for ten years. When, a year later in 1965, Smith declared unilateral independence from Britain rather than permit black majority rule, it was a sign to the imprisoned Mugabe that democracy and black rights would require armed struggle.

Mugabe studied intensely while in prison and acquired a list of degrees from the universities of London and South Africa, including two master’s degrees. His intellectual acuity has always been one of his hallmarks.

Mugabe was released from prison in 1974 and went to Zambia. While there he became president of ZANU, deposing another of his veteran rivals, Ndabaningi Sithole, and in 1975 the predominant figure in ZANU, Herbert Chitepo, was assassinated. Mugabe and many of his allies were immediately arrested in Zambia, but they were released a month later and made their way to Mozambique, where they fostered the armed insurrection against the Smith regime, using Mozambique as a base for their operations into Rhodesia. The war became sufficiently fierce and bloody for a series of international peace efforts to be launched from both Britain and the United States.

In 1979 the pressures of both war and international diplomacy led to negotiations among all parties under the chairmanship of the British foreign and commonwealth secretary in London, and it was agreed that a British governor would take charge of Rhodesia and conduct elections leading to independence under the name of Zimbabwe. Mugabe’s ZANU scored a comprehensive electoral victory. He increased the sense of surprise by immediately issuing a call for reconciliation and cooperation. Although he and Nkomo had negotiated jointly in London, Mugabe declined to form a coalition with Nkomo, but did provide him with a place in government.

The early years of rule astounded the international community with its moderation and liberalism, although it was only in the 1990s that full appreciation was gained of a secretive conflict in western Zimbabwe from 1982 to 1987. There, dissident supporters of Nkomo were ruthlessly crushed by Mugabe’s armed forces, with tens of thousands of innocent civilians killed. His pride and political capacity crushed, Nkomo was thereafter fully subordinate to Mugabe, but the outside world was prepared to turn a blind eye to a protracted episode where violence had replaced democracy.

Beginning in 1992, however, Mugabe began speaking intensely of land reform and redistribution. By far the majority of Zimbabwe’s arable land was still in white ownership, and political independence had not been accompanied by majority ownership of land. Even so, it took until 1997 when, after a bitter quarrel with British prime minister Tony Blair, Mugabe began to speak violently about seizing land without compensation.

Mugabe had won all of the elections held after independence. Although the 1990 elections occurred with much violence in the east of the country, Mugabe garnered legitimate electoral victories in all of them. In 1999, however, a formidable opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) emerged under Morgan Tsvangirai. The MDC inflicted a first defeat on Mugabe in February 2000, at a referendum over constitutional changes. In March, Mugabe unleashed the veterans of the liberation war to invade and take over the land of white farmers and to reassert violence into the political landscape. Since then, the economic and political travails of Zimbabwe have spiralled out of control.

Without a productive agri-industrial base, inflation in Zimbabwe had soared to 1600 percent by February 2007. The MDC suffered defeat at successive elections, and it is clear that Mugabe had resorted to rigging in order to ensure his victories. Political suppression increased as the economic meltdown of the 2000s continued.

Mugabe is now in his eighties and there is a debate as to his posterity. In the West, he is seen as the violent guerrilla leader who merely cloaked his ruthlessness for many of the years of his rule, but who has shown his true character in deliberately plunging his country into turmoil. Some view him as reasserting his early Maoist ideology in a Zimbabwean Cultural Revolution. Many in Africa, however, see him as the last great nationalist who, perhaps belatedly, was determined to assert the meaning of black majority rule in terms of ownership of land. Here he takes his place alongside such intellectual nationalist leaders as Amilcar Cabral and Kwame Nkrumah. This more sympathetic view suggests that, in the long term, Mugabe’s accomplishment will be recognized as a final, if messy, breakthrough to full nationalism. In the meantime, the messiness has gripped Mugabe’s land and people with catastrophe and deprivation.

SEE ALSO Autocracy; Cabral, Amilcar; Colonialism; Decolonization; Guerrilla Warfare; Land Claims; Land Reform; Liberation Movements; Nkrumah, Kwame

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Chan, Stephen. 2003. Robert Mugabe: A Life of Power and Violence. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Raftopoulos, Brian, and Tyrone Savage, eds. 2004. Zimbabwe: Injustice and Political Reconciliation. Cape Town, South Africa: Institute of Justice and Reconcilation.

Stephen Chan