The Zimbabwean dictator cares enormously about his legacy and longs to be respected again by the West

As Zimbabwe reflects on the 30th anniversary of its hard-won independence - and its seemingly interminable misrule by liberator Robert Mugabe - the most oft-asked question about the country's tragic decline has remained the same for many years: how did a leader with such great potential fail so resoundingly?

Part of the answer lies in the nature of the man at the helm and his socialization.
As a boy, Mugabe escaped the pain of an emotionally deprived family background by focusing on his intellect in the Catholic boarding school where a wealthy Anglo/Irish headmaster became his surrogate father - and Britishness his aspiration.

After entering politics, he spent 11 years imprisoned for his beliefs, acquiring six of his seven university degrees while behind bars. His enforced but preferred book learning at the expense of real-life experience intensified a utopian view of the world that was to prove disastrous for Zimbabwe in subsequent years.

Although a master strategist, outwitting his opponents for three decades, Mugabe believed independence would by definition bring prosperity to his country: his was a simplistic vision of Zimbabwe's well-fed, highly educated, smiling population waving flags and supporting him forever.

When people started challenging him, he succumbed to an intense bitterness and vengeance that ought in an ideal world to have disqualified him from leadership.

However, dodgy people everywhere rise to top positions despite personality disorders that bring untold suffering to others.

Mugabe's narcissistic tendencies meant that he cared much less over the years about the welfare of Zimbabweans and much more about his own gratification. Surrounding himself with acolytes from the start, his intolerance of criticism became a feature of his bullying style.   
The first of Mugabe's enemies to feel the force of his resentment were the Matabele people in the south of Zimbabwe, his traditional adversaries.

Within months of coming to power in 1980, Mugabe had recruited a ruthless North Korean fighting machine to murder up to 20 000 of his countrymen in a massacre known as Gukurahundi.

Although most observers believe he was simply hell-bent on eliminating his opposition, the extent of apartheid South African military involvement in the dissident activity which Mugabe claimed as his motive has never been revealed.

That he over-reacted horribly to the threat (albeit including a major South African-inspired attack on his air force) is clear, but why the international community – British soldiers being engaged in post-independence training exercises in Matabeleland at the time – remained silent in the face of bloodshed on such a scale is still largely unexplained.

The next target of Mugabe's vengeful personality were white Zimbabweans. In exercising their right to preferential representation under the British-brokered Lancaster House constitution that severed colonial ties in 1980, the former oppressors unwisely chose Mugabe's predecessor, Ian Smith, as their leader in 1985.

Although entitled democratically to vote for whomsoever they liked, Mugabe interpreted their endorsement of his arch-enemy as a racial gesture at a time when he had gone to great lengths to demonstrate his goodwill towards the white community.
Not surprisingly, given the Zimbabwean leading man's thin skin psychologically, Mugabe was hurt and angered at what he saw as the whites' racial rejection of him.

By way of revenge, he fired his white agriculture minister, Denis Norman, signaling the end of his romance with white Zimbabweans. (I must say in passing that, whenever I think of South Africa's racial voting patterns, I wonder why self-preservation hasn't played a bigger role in southern Africa's politics of whiteness.)

With many subsequent internal skirmishes dividing his ruling party and Mugabe's own popularity dwindling among Zimbabweans over the following years, the next focus of his retaliation was Britain, a nation he had revered and emulated (like most of us colonials) since childhood.

Here was a classic case of love gone wrong on both side, the mutual toxicity being as much Britain's failure to confront its colonial legacy – personified by Mugabe - as the Zimbabwe president's sense of betrayal by the Motherland.

In a strange diplomatic blunder that led to this third major instance of Mugabe's uncompromising vengeance, Britain's prime minister Tony Blair went along blindly with his cabinet colleague Clare Short's arrogant stance towards Zimbabwe's prickly president.
Notwithstand Margaret Thatcher's Tory government suspension of its land redistribution programme as a rebuke to Mugabe for squandering British taxpayer's funding, her successor John Major (affectionately called "Johnnie" by Mugabe) had subsequently patched up the relationship by promising to resume the land purchase deal on which Lancaster House's success had hinged 20 years earlier, yet Britain simply dismissed Zimbabwe's contention that the former colonial power had an obligation to fund land redistribution - on the spurious grounds that Blair's Labour party was not responsible for colonialism.

Mugabe was outraged. In response to Britain's provocation, on top of mounting internal pressures, he unleashed a land grab that eventually destroyed the economy - though not before pausing after his initial farm invasions to see, as he told me in an interview two years ago, how the British government would respond.

Alas, nobody stopped Mugabe from destroying his country. It's unlikely that anybody could have stopped him – or can stop him from holding Zimbabwe hostage to his own whims today.

Since South African president Jacob Zuma failed recently to persuade the old dictator to relinquish his stranglehold on power, who or what is left to reign in Mugabe?

I suspect his own fragile ego is the key to Mugabe's co-operation. He cares enormously about his legacy, shredded though it is all over the world. Three decades after the independence victory that brought him international recognition in the first place, he longs to be respected again by the very people he claims to despise - the West, and Britain in particular. Although it is a challenge too far for most peacemakers, the only hope of a breakthrough in Zimbabwe is the restoration somehow of Mugabe's reputation abroad - a very tall order indeed.