Robert Mugabe
Robert Mugabe is spared a higher place on this list because he began his career as an authentic revolutionary, who faced down and toppled one of the most pernicious and violent colonial regimes of the age.
Rhodesia, like South Africa, attempted to institutionalize a system of racism based on white supremacy, resisting all efforts by the British to introduce independence under a system of majority rule. When, in 1965, the Rhodesian and British governments reached a stalemate, the white Rhodesian settler regime declared unilateral independence, and effectively went to war against its black majority.
Robert Mugabe was at the time a relatively humble primary school teacher working as an expatriate in Ghana, disinterested in revolutionary politics and pursuing a quiet, professional life. On a visit back to Rhodesia in 1962, however, he was persuaded to join the revolutionary movement as a youth organizer. Once inside the movement, he found himself a fish in water, and he rapidly began to rise through the ranks.
For most of the 1960s and early 1970s, he, along with every substantive black nationalist in Rhodesia, was imprisoned, released only under international pressure in 1974. From Rhodesia he fled to Mozambique where he established a revolutionary army, taking on one of the most efficient and ruthless military establishments ever seen in sub-Saharan Africa.
The Zimbabwe Liberation Struggle was a bloody, violent and heartbreaking saga that saw thousands killed and many thousands traumatized and displaced. In April 1980, however, Robert Mugabe presided over a ceremony in the newly named Harare that saw the old colonial flag lowered and the new flag of Zimbabwe raised. Mugabe was an international hero, an icon of liberation and the poster child of the new African age. He was feted, celebrated and lionized.
Somewhere along the way, however, this great revolutionary hero lost his way. Misguided, Marxist economic policies, combined with an increasingly centralized and draconian political environment, began to slowly erode his reputation, and leech economic vitality of his nation. To retain power, his methods became increasingly violent and extrajudicial. By the late 1990s, deep cracks had begun to appear in both the system and in Robert Mugabe’s political psyche. Patronage, massive corruption and an increasing reliance on the military saw his reputation steadily decline.
Matters came to a head in 2000 when a constitutional referendum was roundly lost by the government, indicating for the first time Mugabe’s vulnerability. To reclaim the favor of the masses, he seized vast amounts of privately owned agricultural land from the local white community and handed it over to landless blacks. This, of course, fill the original aim of the revolution, but at the same time, it pitched Zimbabwe into rapid economic collapse and hyperinflation.
From that point on, Mugabe’s methods became daily more questionable. Elections were rigged, the population was subject to violent repression and a system of political patronage grew that created an economic basket case out of a once vibrant and self-sufficient nation. By the second decade of the millennium, Robert Mugabe was an international pariah. The loss in lives and property of his regime is incalculable. When, in November 2017 he was ousted in a de facto military coup, the people of Zimbabwe flooded the streets in celebration. As we write, Robert Mugabe, ninety-five years old, is in self-imposed exile in Singapore.