Robert Mugabe
Robert Mugabe’s political legacy stands perhaps as a warning of the danger of longevity in revolutionary politics. Born in 1924, into a devout Catholic family, his early education was gained at a Jesuit mission in the central province of Rhodesia, the future Zimbabwe. As a young man, Mugabe displayed no early signs of revolutionary zeal. He was abandoned by his father early in his childhood, and developed a strong, almost compulsive attachment to his mother. The regime at the Kutama Jesuit Mission, where he lived and studied, was benign, and lacked the overt racism of day-to-day life in the outside world. Mugabe, therefore, did not radicalize, but remained a conservative Catholic with an interest in education.
His first real experience of institutionalized racism came when he attended Fort Hare University, a black university in South Africa. But even then, he did not emerge with a great political consciousness. In 1958 he accepted a position as a primary school teacher in the newly independent Ghana, and it was there, for the first time, that he tuned his ear into the African revolutionary frequency.
In the meanwhile, in Southern Rhodesia, the future Zimbabwe, liberation fervor was seeping the subjugated black nation. On a visit back to Rhodesia in 1960, Mugabe was persuaded to join the nationalist party, the Zimbabwe African People’s Union, and at that moment, a revolutionary was born.
White Rhodesia, however, was not about to go down without a fight. Civil unrest and popular demonstrations simply resulted in heavier oppression and stronger emergency measures. In 1965, a hard-right, white nationalist government declared unilateral independence from Britain, creating a rebel republic. The entire spectrum of black nationalists in the country were arrested and imprisoned, Mugabe among them.
For ten years, Mugabe remained imprisoned, and it was during that period that a deep radicalization took root. The mild schoolteacher emerged as an iron-hard, fundamentally committed revolutionary whose passion very quickly projected him to the leadership of the movement. When, under international pressure, he and his cadre of revolutionaries were released from prison, he absconded immediately to Mozambique, and there began building a liberation army.
By then, the Zimbabwean liberation struggle had devolved into a full-blown civil war, far more brutal and bloody than any so far, and backed up by a fanatical determination on both sides not to yield. Mugabe, never a military leader, nonetheless drove the struggle. It was during this period that a dark, Machiavellian streak to his nature was revealed, in his willingness to sacrifice any number of lives, and to shed any amount of blood to achieve absolute victory.
The victory came in 1980, and Mugabe took power as one of the most impassioned and respected black leaders in Africa. The rot, however, had already set in, and within a decade, Mugabe’s rule had become violent and corrupt. By the end of the 1990s, Mugabe had become the quintessential corrupt African dictator, and his nation a signature basket case. Mugabe was deposed in 2017, but had he, like Machel, Lumumba and many others, died by the hand of the revolution, his fall from grace would not have been quite so complete.
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