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A story often heard about Robert Mugabe is that he came to power in 1980 as Zimbabwe’s national hero in the struggle for black majority rule and did a decent job as president for about twenty years. He turned wrong in 2000 when he instigated brutal expropriations of white-owned farms. Since then, he has gone from bad to worse, rigging elections and ruthlessly suppressing political opponents and dissidents.
Two recent authoritative articles maintain, however, that he was cold-blooded and tyrannical well before he took office. Together, they put paid to the myth that Mugabe was a capable leader who only became corrupt after two decades of power.
Judith Todd has written a book about her life in Zimbabwe. She is the daughter of Garfield Todd, who briefly held office as prime minister of Southern Rhodesia in 1953. After his reform policies were rejected by the white minority, he and his daughter supported the movement for black majority rule.
The book blows sky-high the usual picture of Zimbabwe as having been run more or less reasonably by Mugabe, until his defeat in the constitutional referendum of 2000 caused him to pull down the pillars of the temple. As becomes all too clear, the worm was in the apple from the start, with the new regime adopting a totalitarian and often violent attitude towards opposition.
Torture, corruption and disregard for the rule of law were the norm right away – indeed, the real question is how on earth Lord Soames, Britain’s proconsul in charge of the transition to majority rule, could have permitted the 1980 election.
Mugabe broke all the rules – his guerrillas roamed the villages when they should have been at assembly camps, there was widespread intimidation and open violence against many opposition candidates: one such candidate was last seen pinned to the ground having red hot coals rammed down his throat.
New Republic Africa correspondent James Kirchick highlights the contrast between Mugabe’s thuggish behaviour in Zimbabwe and the saintly reputation he once enjoyed among Western liberal elites.
[O]ver several years in the early 1980s, Mugabe executed what arguably might be the worst of his many atrocities, a campaign of terror against the minority Ndebele tribe in which he unleashed a North Korean-trained army unit that killed between 10,000 and 30,000 people.
Yet, even in the midst of these various crimes, Mugabe never lost his fan base in the West. In 1986, the University of Massachusetts Amherst bestowed on Mugabe an honorary doctorate of laws just as he was completing his genocide against the Ndebele. In April of this year, as the campus debated revoking the degree it ought never have given him, African American studies professor Ekwueme Michael Thelwell, who had been in favor of honoring Mugabe two decades ago, told the Boston Globe: "They gave it to the Robert Mugabe of the past, who was an inspiring and hopeful figure and a humane political leader at the time." Similarly, in 1984, the University of Edinburgh gave Mugabe an honorary doctorate (revoked in July of this year), and in 1994, Mugabe was inexplicably given an honorary knighthood by Queen Elizabeth II.
Western media and political leaders turned against Mugabe after he attacked white farmers, but it has taken even longer for mainline Western churches to condemn his brutal regime.
h/t for L.A. Times link: Sobering Thoughts
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