Mugabe took Jewel of Africa and stripped it of all worth

Even by the abysmal standards of post-colonial Africa, ‘Comrade Bob’ was particularly bad.

Robert Mugabe was a much-hated national leader: few will genuinely mourn his passing. Picture: AP

They may shed crocodile tears and praise him as “an icon of Africa’s liberation”, but few will genuinely mourn the passing of Robert ­Gabriel Mugabe at the age of 95.

Nor should they, for the tragic, impoverished wreck of a country that Zimbabwe remains two years after he was deposed in an army coup stands as a monument to the destruction he wrought during his almost 40 years of terrifying ­tyrannical rule in a country that had long been regarded as the “Jewel of Africa”.

Even by the abysmal standards of post-colonial Africa, “Comrade Bob” was particularly bad, and it is to my everlasting shame that I played a very small part in helping him outsmart rivals and become Zimbabwe’s leader in 1980.

It was in the midst of the “chimur­enga”, the war of liberation being fought by Zimbabwe’s barefooted bush fighters against white rule. At a summit of post-­colonial leaders from across the African continent in Gabon, West Africa, crucial decisions were immine­nt on whether Mugabe or his arch-rival, Joshua Nkomo, should be supported to become Zimbabwe’s leader.

Mugabe was the outsider. In the media room as the crucial gathering got under way, he ­appeared downcast. Nkomo was surrounded by aides and helpers. Mugabe had only his loyal deputy, Edgar Tekere, with him. They ­desperately needed to type up a statement for the continent’s ­leaders but had no means to do so.

They fixed their eyes on my ­ancient Olivetti Letra 32 typewriter, in those days, in the late 1970s, the standard resource for foreign correspondents batting around the world’s troublespots. They asked if they could borrow it.

Mugabe sat at the keyboard pecking away, trying to compose his vital statement. It was clear his two fingers were hopeless.

To get him off my typewriter, I offered to help. He dictated while I typed. It did much, apparently, to swing Africa’s support behind him and eclipse Nkomo, enabling him to become Zimbabwe’s leader in 1980.

Yet on the occasions when I saw Mugabe afterwards, he never once recalled, much less thanked me, and that says much about the man who became one of the world’s most feared and corrupt despots.

The hauteur and disdain he displayed­ after I’d helped him out in Libreville became the hallmark of his destruction of a country that had been Africa’s breadbasket, and its emergence as the epitome of misrule and ­oppression.

At the beginning, of course, he sought to create a different ­impression. A devout Catholic, ­educated by Jesuits, he was deeply religious. In his first address after becoming president following the 1979 Lancaster House Agreement, he surprised even his supporters by declaring in clipped English that reflected his past as a language teacher: “I urge you, whether you are black or white, to join me in a new pledge … to forget our grim past, forgive others, and forget.”

Yet it was Mugabe who never forgot. “Mugabe hates … nobody hates like Mugabe,” a close friend of his told me years ago as I searched for an answer to the at times murderous malevolence that led him to turn on white farmers, who were the backbone of the economy and food supply chain.

Many attributed it to what happened when he was imprisoned by then-Rhodesia’s white rulers, who refused to let him attend the funeral of one of his children. In his lonely isolation, Mugabe was enraged. He never forgot or forgave.

He was a complex man: ironic­ally, despite his fierce anti-­colonial­ism, declared Marxism and determination to end British rule, throughout his years in power he retained many customs that echoed colonial rule. He ­entertained visitors with fine blends of English breakfast tea imported­ from London, served in Royal Doulton crockery, and maintained a deep personal ­admiration for the Queen.

Invariably, he dressed in pinstriped Savile Row suits and, when he wanted to, showed the manners of a sophisticated university don as he lectured listeners on the ­iniquities of those who criticised his regime.

His manner in private conversations was the ­antithesis of that of most despots. A stickler for protocol, he would frown on aides who did not ­observe the formality that he saw as essential to perceptions of the regime he wanted to build. Yet the sham became clear as he reduced Zimbabwe to a form of murderous oppression with few parallels in post-colonial ­Africa.

It didn’t take him long to bare his fangs. Soon after he came to power, Nkomo supporters began agitating against plans for one-party rule, and he launched his North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade on the hapless people of Matabeleland, Nkomo’s stronghold.

It became known as the Gukurahundi massacre, with 20,000 ­civilians slaughtered.

That 1982 massacre was a turning point. Mugabe showed his true colours as a tyrant intolerant of opposition.

As his country plunged into decades of famine, an HIV epidemic and hyperinflation in which the central bank printed useless notes, the arch-proponent of pan-Africanism and Marxism sought to ­apportion blame for the chaos and turned on the 4000 white farmers who did so much to keep the economy going.

Nothing better sums up ­Mugabe’s madness: the farmers were among Africa’s most efficient producers of food, ­essential to the country’s ­survival, yet he turned on them with a viciousness that still baffles many.

Zimbabwe’s famine is a direct consequence of that madness but, as the nation sunk into impoverishment, the tyrant would taunt his citizens by throwing lavish parties at which French champagne and caviar were served.

Few leaders in modern history have been more brazenly corrupt.

Mugabe was no founding ­father of Zimbabwe: he was more the appalling destroyer of the “Jewel of Africa”.