Robert Mugabe

President of Zimbabwe (1987–2017)

• Born: February 21, 1924
• Birthplace: Kutama, Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe)
• Died: September 6, 2019
• Place of death: Singapore

Mugabe was a major leader of the movement to dismantle the minority white government in Zimbabwe and, following independence in 1980, he served as the country’s first prime minister and then its first president. His office was marked by an intense nationalism that degenerated into despotism.

Early Life

Robert Mugabe was born in the small village of Matibiri, about forty miles north of Salisbury in the British colony of Southern Rhodesia (now northwest Zimbabwe). He was a member of the Shona ethnic group, which was by far the largest group in the colony. He had a very close relationship with his mother, especially after his father, a village carpenter, abandoned the family in 1934. An outstanding student, he was educated at the local Kutama mission school, which was operated by the Jesuits and Marist Brothers. After earning his teaching license in 1944, he taught in a number of rural schools in the colony.

In 1949, Mugabe was awarded a scholarship to study at the prestigious Fort Hare University in South Africa. While there, he was profoundly influenced by the social theories of Karl Marx and Mao Zedong. Following graduation, he taught school in Ghana and earned degrees from three different universities. He enthusiastically supported the policies of Ghana’s then-prime minister, Kwame Nkrumah, who was the leading voice in favor of pan-African unity, socialism, and anticolonialism. During this time, Mugabe met his first wife, Sally Hayfron. Everyone was impressed by Mugabe’s natural abilities, but some colleagues later complained that he was egocentric and not much of a team player.

Life’s Work

When Mugabe returned to Southern Rhodesia in 1960, he was firmly committed to the struggle for black majority rule. Hoping to become a career politician, he joined Joshua Nkomo’s left-of-center National Democratic Party, which later was named the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU). Splitting with Nkomo in 1963, he and Ndabaningi Sithole founded the more radical Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU), which was committed to socialism and a single-party system. Both ZAPU and ZANU were banned by Prime Minister Ian Smith’s right-wing government, which was attempting to obtain independence based on the principles of racial segregation and white supremacy.

In 1964, Mugabe was prosecuted on charges of “subversive speech,” and he spent the next ten years in prison. Smith’s regime did not even allow Mugabe to attend the funeral of his four-year-old son. During this decade, he read widely and took correspondence courses, earning graduate degrees in law and public administration. In 1974, while still in prison, he replaced Sithole as ZANU’s leader. After Mugabe was freed in 1975, he and Nkomo served as joint leaders of the Patriotic Front of Zimbabwe, which conducted guerrilla operations against Smith’s minority government.

In 1979, Smith’s regime finally yielded to international pressure and entered into the Lancaster House Agreement, which ended the war and established the Republic of Zimbabwe. After ZANU won the republic’s first elections in February 1980, Mugabe became the prime minister. One of his first acts was to form a coalition government between the ZANU (dominated by the Shona people) and Nkomo’s ZAPU (which primarily represented the Ndebele).

For two years, Mugabe’s policies were pragmatic and designed to reassure white farmers and businessmen. He respected the new constitution’s guarantees of civil liberties and equal rights for citizens of all races. One of Mugabe’s main goals was to increase the number of black-owned farms. White farmers, who represented 1 percent of the population, owned about 70 percent of Zimbabwe’s arable land. Great Britain agreed to contribute funds for land redistribution. The sale of land was voluntary, and resettlement proceeded very slowly.

In 1982, Mugabe ended the coalition government and expelled Nkomo, who had been accused of plotting a coup. The result was a civil war between the Shona and the Ndebele. During 1983 and 1984, Mugabe’s army, under the command of Air Marshall Perence Shiri, conducted a reign of terror in Matabeleland, reportedly killing twenty thousand Ndebele civilians. The economy suffered, and many white Zimbabweans emigrated. In 1987, the parliament abolished the office of prime minister and named Mugabe as president. The next year, ZAPU’s leaders agreed to merge their party into the reorganized Zimbabwe African National Union-Popular Front (ZANU-PF).

Following the formation of ZANU-PF, Mugabe’s government grew increasingly authoritarian. When he was reelected president in 1990, opponents claimed that his party had engaged in widespread voter fraud. In 1992, Mugabe convinced parliament to pass a revised Land Acquisition Act (first enacted in 1985), which authorized the government to require owners of large properties to sell their largest plantations.

Mugabe’s wife, Sally Hayfron, who had been a moderating influence, died from kidney disease in 1992. In 1995, he began a campaign against homosexuality, a practice he blamed on European imperialism. Two years later, Britain charged Mugabe’s government with corruption and withdrew its financial support.

In 1999, Mugabe’s government proposed a new constitution authorizing the seizure of land for redistribution without compensation. Early the next year, however, voters in a referendum rejected the proposal. In response, the War Veterans Association, with Mugabe’s approval, encouraged landless peasants to occupy white-owned farms, using force if necessary. Parliament then amended the constitution, making all the changes that Mugabe wanted. Occupations of white farms increased, often accompanied with great violence. Parliament further amended the constitution in 2005, nationalizing the country’s farmlands and disallowing landowners from seeking legal redress.

In the presidential election of March 2002, Mugabe faced Morgan Tsvangirai, the candidate for the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). Although Mugabe won with more than 56 percent of the votes, most foreign commentators charged that the election was rigged. Later that year, claiming the need to move peasants into rural farming areas, Mugabe ordered the bulldozing of shantytowns filled with about ten thousand desperately poor persons. Mugabe’s critics charged that the slum clearance, called Operation Murambatsvina (Operation Drive Out Trash) or Operation Restore Order, was politically motivated because a large percentage of the peasants in the shantytowns had supported the MDC in the election.

Zimbabwe barred European Union observers from examining the elections of 2002, and the European Union responded with a travel ban on Zimbabwean officials. In 2003, the Commonwealth of Nations suspended Zimbabwe from membership in the organization for eighteen months, thereby ending all foreign aid. Mugabe then withdrew his country from the Commonwealth. That same year, US president George W. Bush approved economic sanctions against Zimbabwe. In 2004, the executive council of the African Union issued a report charging Mugabe’s government with the arrest and torture of dissidents.

Zimbabwe increasingly suffered from severe economic problems. Agricultural production plummeted from a combination of land seizures and several years of drought. By the summer of 2007, the government reported an inflation rate of 7,000 percent, but Western economists declared that the actual amount was closer to 25,000 percent. Approximately 80 percent of the working population was unemployed. In a country that had once been called the breadbasket of southern Africa, at least 50 percent of the population was malnourished. The World Health Organization reported that the life expectancy for men was thirty-seven years and thirty-four years for women, the youngest age for any country.

On March 29, 2008, elections were held in which the ZANU-PF lost its parliamentary majority and Mugabe was defeated by opposition candidate Morgan Tsvangirai, but Tsvangirai had not won by a large enough margin to avoid a runoff election. In June, amidst widespread election fraud and violence against Tsvangirai's supporters, Tsvangirai withdrew from the elections. Less than a week later, Mugabe won the runoff election as the sole candidate, drawing international criticism. The University of Massachusetts and the University of Edinburgh revoked Mugabe's honorary degrees, and Queen Elizabeth II stripped Mugabe of his honorary knighthood. Despite the protests, Mugabe was sworn in for his sixth presidential term on June 29, 2008.

In September 2008, in response to widespread protests and international sanctions, the Zimbabwe government implemented a power-sharing agreement, through which Tsvangirai became prime minister, although he complained of Mugabe's disregard for the agreement and violent reprisals against his supporters. The Zimbabwe government implemented a new constitution in early 2013, which curbed the president's power, abolished the premiership, and set a limit of two five-year terms for the president. Mugabe and Tsvangirai again faced off in presidential elections in July 2013, with Mugabe winning 61 percent of the vote. Tsvangirai and his supporters alleged that the election was rigged.

By 2017, Mugabe's actions as president had led increasingly to efforts to push him out of office. Political leaders and citizens of Zimbabwe were especially affronted when he rather abruptly fired his vice president, Emmerson Mnangagwa, in early November in an effort to position his wife, the largely politically inexperienced Grace Mugabe, as his successor. As a result of this removal, the military intervened by putting Mugabe under house arrest; at that time, he was also expelled from the ZANU-PF. Within days, lawmakers brought a motion of impeachment against him, with the nation overall calling for him to resign. While Mugabe had initially continued to proclaim that he would not step down, in the face of impeachment proceedings, it was announced that he was resigning from his position on November 21. In 2018, Mugabe announced that he did not support his successor, Mnangagwa, who won the election on July 30, 2018.

On September 6, 2019, Mugabe died at a hospital in Singapore from an undisclosed illness at the age of ninety-five.

Significance

Despite deteriorating economic conditions and growing international criticism, Mugabe remained defiant and refused to step down as president. Mainly between 1964 and 1980, Mugabe had been the dominant leader of the struggle against white supremacy in Southern Rhodesia, for which he was praised and admired throughout the world. During his early years as prime minister, he was generally considered a democratic and progressive leader. Since the mid-1980s, however, he had been accused of oppressing ethnic minorities and harassing political opponents. After 1992, his policy of supporting the seizure of white-owned farmland did great harm to the economy, and his repressive policies against political opponents continued to hinder democratic reform in Zimbabwe. His resignation in 2017, therefore, after thirty-seven years as ruler, marked another significant turning point in the country's government and was met with mixed emotion.

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