Unmasking the man behind the stunts

Percy Zvomuya reviews Heidi Holland's Dinner with Mugabe, a book that the Zimbabwean leader's acolytes won't like

On world platforms, Robert Mugabe, eyes twitching and arms flailing, never misses an opportunity to proclaim the injustices and double standards of the West. The fact that Mugabe is a reserved, taciturn man -- whose idea of relaxing after a day's work back in the 1980s was reading a Graham Greene novel -- comes out in Heidi Holland's book.

Dinner with Mugabe (Penguin South Africa) is in equal measures touching and enthralling, damning and well-researched, reflective and pacily written. It's a psychological biography of the hero of the 1970s independence war against Ian Smith's government.

Holland spoke to Smith; Donato Mugabe (Mugabe's younger brother); Jonathan Moyo, his chief propagandist during the first half of this decade; Fidelis Mukonori, his priest and friend; Edgar "Two Boy" Tekere; and a host of other people who knew Mugabe as a child, then as an adult and now.

George Kahari, a sociology professor, says Mugabe developed a pathological hatred of his father when he deserted his mother. And this desertion and the subsequent dependence he had on his mother, Kahari believes, explain Mugabe's homophobia.

The difficulty with this kind of book is obvious: how do you get people to talk about the subject as honestly and truthfully as possibly -- and to a white woman? For, after all, even Mugabe's grip on power grows more tenuous while he still retains that power. I found, for instance, the account by Patricia Bekele, Sally Mugabe's niece, to be fluffy and idealistic. She obviously can't say anything really damning, even though Sally's last days were not particularly rosy especially when Grace Mugabe, then part of Mugabe's secretarial pool, became his mistress. The same criticism could be valid in the parts Holland interviews Donato.

The picture of the early Mugabe is that of a loner, an unambitious person, who is thrust into the leadership of a violent organisation, very much against his will. Tekere says he found Mugabe exasperating, indeed, infuriating whenever Mugabe blocked moves to purge leadership -- even in cases in which Mugabe stood to benefit. "At no stage do you find him doing anything to promote himself to a position of leadership. It's very strange. Even in Mozambique and at Lancaster House he seemed to be almost unambitious."

One of the beauties of Holland's work is sifting through the Janus-faced speak of "Two Boy" by using Tekere's own faux pas, such as justifying his use of a Jaguar by saying that the government "had so many social ills to address that it needed to move around fast". Here is how he diminishes Mugabe's role in the farm invasions: "He tried at first to find out what was going on but he was asked bluntly which side he was on: the war veterans or the white farmer? So he blessed it because he would otherwise have found himself at war with the guerrilla veterans or whoever was organising them."

What Tekere conveniently forgets is that the land invasions began after the February 2000 referendum, soon after the opposition had championed the "no" vote to a new constitution. In part it was a ploy to seal the rural constituencies from the Movement for Democratic Change and reports at the time suggested that the land invasions were not spontaneous but were carefully planned and organised by the Presidency.

The picture that emerges from the book reveals as much as it conceals. When asked how he felt about being refused permission to bury his son at the time he was in prison, Mugabe simply replies: "I am not bitter about people. I am bitter about the system."

But the real answer to that may lie in Lord Carrington's remark about why he preferred the late nationalist Joshua Nkomo to Mugabe. "He wasn't an intellectual like Mugabe but he was a human being."

Dinner with Mugabe may not be the kind of the book that Mugabe acolytes or his ardent critics will like. The former could find some of the analyses too damning and some of the interviews not deferential enough; the latter might find the humanising of the "monster" disconcerting. For, by stripping and unmasking the man behind the stunts, Holland makes Mugabe become like any of us -- a fragile, tragic and hurt man carrying so much pain and so much history.

He invites the Shakespearean notion of whether he is "a man more sinned against than sinning". Dinner with Mugabe is without doubt a brilliant achievement.