Zimbabwe’s ruthless strongman

How did Mugabe come to power?

For most of the last century, the Montana-sized country, known then as Rhodesia, had a white-supremacist government. A civil war finally resulted in full elections with voting rights for blacks in 1980, and the nation was rechristened Zimbabwe. The Marxist Mugabe, who had distinguished himself as head of one of the political parties that waged the struggle for self-rule, was elected prime minister. He was a controversial choice, because during the war, guerrilla forces loyal to him committed brutal massacres of civilians. But he was also an intelligent and charming leader. Ian Smith, the last prime minister of Rhodesia, described him as “a balanced, civilized Westerner, the antithesis of the communist gangster I had expected.”

Was he popular?

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At first, yes. The black majority had great respect for Mugabe as the first black prime minister. The white community supported him, and both the U.S. and Britain offered his new country large loans. Inheriting a prosperous nation with a thriving agricultural industry, Mugabe was viewed as a figure of hope for the entire continent. But the honeymoon didn’t last long. The apartheid regime in South Africa, horrified by Zimbabwe’s successful black revolution, tried to assassinate Mugabe in 1981. Soon afterward, he began a ruthless campaign to eliminate any domestic opposition. Using troops that had been trained by North Korea, he tortured and killed thousands of black civilians in the province of Matabebeland. By the late ’80s, his black rivals had been eliminated, and Mugabe consolidated his power by changing his role from prime minister to president and giving himself great authority.

What did he do with this power?

He and his party, Zanu-PF, ran the country into the ground. Under his rule, the inflation rate soared to 150 percent, and unemployment to a shocking 50 percent. Fully a quarter of the adult population contracted the AIDS virus. Mugabe, meanwhile, spent millions of dollars building lavish mansions for his young wife. To avoid a military coup, he kept the army occupied by sending troops to fight in Congo’s civil war—which cost millions more. With his popularity in steep decline, Mugabe found a scapegoat for the country’s poverty in the country’s white landowners. Blaming them for all ills, he launched a program of “land reform.”

What did that mean?

In 1990, Mugabe’s Zanu-PF government mandated that half of the land belonging to white farmers would be allocated to blacks. In itself, that was not a controversial proposal. The colonial legacy of white ownership was so outrageously unfair—whites composed less than 1 percent of the population but controlled 80 percent of the best farmland—that even most whites believed it was essential to share the country more equitably. But there were many questions about the process. How would the government go about divvying up the land? Who was going to set up the new farmers with tools and training? What would happen to the black families who worked the land for the white farmers? How was the government going to compensate the white farmers, as it was constitutionally required to do? Mugabe had no answers. By 1998, only 71,000 farms had been resettled, less than half the goal. And many of them had been given not to the poor, but to Mugabe’s cronies.

How did the country react?

Political opposition to Mugabe’s rule grew. In February 2000, opponents defeated a proposed constitutional amendment that would have expanded Mugabe’s powers and allowed white farmland to be seized without compensation. Then, in the parliamentary elections a few months later, an opposition party won 57 seats, just five fewer than Mugabe’s party. Mugabe nonetheless continued seizing white property. He encouraged roving gangs of his supporters to evict white farmers, and to kill those who resisted. When the courts tried to stop him, he overruled them by fiat. “Our party must continue to strike fear in the heart of the white man, our real enemy,” he said. He also went after his black opponents, killing at least 30 politicians and activists. This past March, he would have been voted out of office, but he rigged the presidential election and declared himself the winner. In response, the Commonwealth, a group of 54 nations, mostly former British colonies, suspended Zimbabwe from the organization.

Was Mugabe chastened?

Not at all. He ordered an immediate halt to production on all white farms and announced that the farmers must leave by the summer or be thrown out. That left much of the nation’s crops rotting in the fields. With farm production already down 40 percent because of a severe drought, the order virtually ensured devastation and death. Some 6 million of Zimbabwe’s 11 million people are now facing starvation.

How does Mugabe justify this policy?

The 78-year-old dictator says he is undoing 120 years of colonialism. Having expelled the white farmers, Mugabe has chosen a new scapegoat in British Prime Minister Tony Blair, a critic of Mugabe’s policies. “He forgets that his ancestors oppressed us here for many years,” Mugabe said in The New York Times. “We brought democracy to this country. We brought human rights.” Mugabe’s stand has been backed by the presidents of Mozambique and Namibia, but other African leaders deplore it. “Mugabe’s almost a caricature of all the things people think black leaders do,” South African Nobel laureate Desmond Tutu told the Times. “One just wants to weep.”

The long road to liberty

The land that is now Zimbabwe was part of various African empires over the centuries; by the time the British arrived, it was ruled by the Ndebele tribe. In 1888, Cecil Rhodes, head of the De Beers diamond company (and patron of Oxford’s Rhodes scholarships), won gold-mining concessions from the Ndebele and promptly took away their sovereignty. He set up the British South Africa Company to administer the area, which became known as Rhodesia. White miners and settlers poured in. In 1922, the whites voted to make Rhodesia a self-governing colony of Britain, and over the next few years, they prohibited blacks from learning skilled trades or owning farmland. In the 1960s, Britain finally insisted that Rhodesia grant blacks the vote. Desperate to preserve apartheid, the white-supremacist government declared independence from Britain. But black political parties began a guerrilla war, and whites began to flee. The white exodus accelerated in the mid-’70s, when the independence of Angola and Mozambique altered the balance of power in the region. By 1980, white rule had collapsed, and independent Zimbabwe was born.