The making of a monster

Mar 19th 2008
From The Economist print edition

REVILED by some, hailed by others, Robert Mugabe leaves few people indifferent. In power since 1980, he hopes the election on March 29th will hand him another presidential term. Meanwhile, Zimbabwe's economy is crippled, there are chronic shortages, official inflation is running at 100,000% or more and unemployment at 80%. How could a leader who extended a hand to white Zimbabweans after independence and sought to bring education and health to his own people have turned into the tyrant he is today?

Heidi Holland, a South African author and journalist who was brought up in Zimbabwe, first met Mr Mugabe in 1975, when a friend brought him to her house for a secret dinner as he was about to flee the country to wage a guerrilla war. The polite and considerate fugitive, who telephoned the next day to inquire about her toddler, seems to have little in common with the man she interviewed last December. Ms Holland explores this apparent transformation, interviewing many of the people who have known him over the years.
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As a boy Mr Mugabe was shy, sensitive and bookish, apparently without friends. After his carpenter father abandoned the family, the boy became the focus of his depressed and deeply Catholic mother, and a local missionary's protégé. Mr Mugabe's childhood left him with a shaky self-confidence but a ferocious self-discipline. At the same time, his mother's conviction that he was meant for great things helped give him a deluded sense of his own importance.

Ms Holland exposes another side of the man who is now regarded largely as a monster: his devoted marriage to his first wife, Sally, who was Ghanaian; his friendship with Lord Soames, Rhodesia's last British governor; the respectful and frank relationship he developed with Denis Norman, a white farmer who held several portfolios in his early governments. Most impressive was the magnanimous attitude he showed the Rhodesian ruler Ian Smith—who had sent him to prison for a decade and refused to let him travel to Ghana to attend his son's funeral—who was allowed to live on in Zimbabwe after he lost power.

Yet the shy country boy also harboured a vindictive streak and a taste for revenge. When most white Zimbabweans ignored his gestures of reconciliation in the 1980s, he flew into a rage. A letter from Clare Short, then the British minister in charge of foreign aid, pointing out that Tony Blair's new Labour government felt no responsibility towards financing land reform, cemented his dislike of the British prime minister. When white farmers threw their weight behind the opposition in the late 1990s, Mr Mugabe encouraged the war veterans to grab land.

Disappointment fuelled his paranoia. Mr Mugabe apportioned blame to others. His sense of power and entitlement grew as he became more repressive. He abandoned introspection and became increasingly disconnected from reality. The reserved but articulate teacher failed to realise that the liberation movement picked him to provide a respectable image. After 1980 the rest of the world, which had been so keen to see Zimbabwean majority rule as a success, chose to look the other way when he ordered massacres in Matabeleland in the south-west of the country. Many in the Catholic church, unable or unwilling to admit that the golden boy educated by missionaries was turning into a monster, continued to endorse him. And as those around him grew increasingly scared, they told him only what he wanted to hear. Once reserved and humble, Mr Mugabe could no longer tolerate criticism.

Ms Holland has spoken to former guerrillas, government colleagues, relatives and enemies to draw a nuanced portrait that contains much fresh detail about the president. Her interview with Mr Mugabe, who has not talked to a Western journalist for several years, lays bare a troubled personality. From his youth, Mr Mugabe had all the ingredients to become a tyrant. Many failed to read the signs—and to stop him while they still could.