‘Mad Bob’: man or monster?

Securing an interview with Robert Mugabe was almost as demanding as researching and writing Dinner with Mugabe, her psychological study of the man, Heidi Holland tells Percy Zvomuya

Just before Robert Mugabe’s momentous escape from Rhodesia to Mozambique in 1975, he had dinner with journalist Heidi Holland. Mugabe had not been an expected guest. Rather, he was the unnamed “someone else” whom constitutional law expert and Zanu-PF sympathiser Ahrn Palley told Holland he would be bringing along for dinner.

Holland was surprised when she saw a lean, steel-faced, middle-aged man on her verandah. Here in the flesh was the man whose photograph she had published on the cover of Illustrated Life Rhodesia -- the magazine she edited against the instructions of her boss and to the fury of the Rhodesian security police, who banned it. Soon after that evening, Mugabe left the country and guerrilla warfare against the Rhodesian state intensified.

Thirty-two years later Holland met Mugabe again in an interview at his official residence late last year. If the dinner had been a chance meeting, the interview most certainly was not: Holland spent five weeks in Harare waiting for a gap to open in Mugabe’s diary. While the president flew off to Lisbon and attended to national and regional engagements, Holland waited in her hotel room ... and waited.

Although Holland says sheer persistence paid off, her struggle credentials might have been significant. Which her statement -- in which she claims “my own history [with the nationalists] went back quite far”-- doesn’t quite capture. It was a Catholic contact who finally smoothed the way: “Father Fidelis Mukonori got me the interview with Mugabe,” she says with gratitude in her voice.

Holland’s interview with Mugabe is most likely the first given to a foreign journalist since those he gave to Sky News in 2004 and the SABC in 2006. Holland describes Mugabe’s office as “quite plain, but elegant”; she was served a bun and a sausage on “very fragile” English porcelain. “That place is full of contradictions,” she says.

Mugabe sat in a gold-coloured, swivel high chair behind a dark wooden desk in an office dominated by a map of the world. “He is incredibly lonely. I don’t think I have met a person as lonely as him.”

Holland says one of the difficulties of the interview was that she didn’t know how much time she had. “I couldn’t dwell on a particular question. I covered a lot of ground, but not with the kind of depth I’d have wanted,” she says. Foremost in her mind were land restitution, the foundation of the Zimbabwe economic crisis and Gukurahundi -- where up to 20 000 civilians died at the hands of an army unit that reported directly to the president -- post-independence Zimbabwe’s most egregious moral stain.

The interview forms the basis of the concluding chapter in her tantalisingly titled Dinner with Mugabe (Penguin Books South Africa), an eminently readable psychological biography of the Zimbabwean president. While that far-off dinner might have been an impetus for the book, more pressing and contemporary was the reportage on Zimbabwe in the past eight years, which Holland characterises as “simplistic” and not “nuanced at all”.

“A lot of reporters didn’t review the history,” says Holland. In contrast her study features chapter-length, candid interviews about Mugabe with key actors in the operatic Zimbabwe saga. Among them are former Zanu-PF chief spin-doctor Jonathan Moyo; the late premier Ian “I Told You So” Smith; Lord Carrington, a junior minister in the Winston Churchill government and British foreign secretary at the time of the Lancaster House agreement in 1979; Zanu-PF founder member Edgar “Two Boy” Tekere; former agriculture minister Dennis Norman; and Mugabe’s niece Patricia Bekele.

Realising that Mugabe’s mental and emotional disposition is very complicated, Holland saw the need to work with psychologists -- three of them. They analysed and interpreted the interviews and the author added her own cogent, incisive and, at times, damning perspectives of Mugabe.

Holland acknowledges that even after working with psychologists she is not quite sure she has unmasked the man who thrives on public relations stunts.

“He suppresses a lot of things,” she says of Mugabe, whom she believes “embodies much of the pain and the anger that is felt in Southern Africa” towards colonialism.

Talking to Holland you get the sense that here is a book that portrays Mugabe in images other than that of the inexplicable, mentally unbalanced, “Mad Bob” monster who, in a moment of pique, ran down a nation that Julius Nyerere described as a jewel. “I suspected Britain, apartheid South Africa and white Rhodesians had a case to answer,” says Holland.

She set about finding people with whom Mugabe had interacted, including childhood mates, influential priests, political friends and foes and close relatives, and Donato, his younger brother. “I knew people who said he was a decent man once … and I spoke to dozens of people.”

As she researched and wrote the book she was acutely aware that time was rushing past and some of the key protagonists were dying. Since she began Donato and Smith have died.

Holland regrets not having spoken to James Chikerema, the late nationalist and Mugabe’s relative, who was bed-ridden at the time she was doing her interviews. Others, such as Tekere, Emmanuel Ribeiro, Lady Soames (wife of the governor of Rhodesia at the time of the transition), Kazito Bute (almost 100) and Catholic priests who are quite close to Mugabe, are frail and old.

Holland says that the older people she interviewed brought a certain authenticity, which younger interviewees might not. “I realised that old people tell the truth. They have no reason to lie,” she says. Holland points out that when they talked to her it was almost as if they were setting the record straight for posterity.

Holland insists that her book is not a revisionist take on Zimbabwe’s recent history. “One doesn’t want to soften the historical record … as what he [Mugabe] has done is catastrophic.” Her account is informed by the realisation that the “monster doesn’t tell us about ourselves, our systems and our history”.

She says she was pleasantly surprised when Donato, who bore a striking resemblance to Robert, agreed to see her. “One of the reasons I looked for him was to see if Mugabe looked after his family.” The picture she gleaned confirms that hunch. “He is not just this monster. He is a human being -- certainly not this one-dimensional villain. He is complicated, intense and an interesting person. People want him to be more evil than he actually is.”

She says there really is a softer side to Mugabe, who dotes on his teenage kids. (Mugabe’s first son with Sally, his late wife, died in the 1960s while Mugabe was in prison). Holland says he describes his daughter as “silent” and the two boys as “naughty”.

When we turn to talk about Michael, Mugabe’s elder brother, who died of suspected poisoning at 15, Holland says that while interviewing Mugabe it was as if it “was happening right in front of him again”. Michael’s death was a crucial and traumatic moment for Mugabe because he became, in effect, the first-born. Furthermore, he had to assume the responsibilities that came with being head of the family after Gabriel, his father, deserted them for Bulawayo, where he had another family.

I had the opportunity of listening to the audio discs of the interview with Mugabe. It is polite without being fawning and executed with canny guardedness by Holland.

It was a mighty surprise to hear the leader I have always thought a perpetually angry old man laughing and talking animatedly in a slightly accentuated and gravelly voice as Holland prods his memory.

In thinking and writing about her interviewees Holland gives us Robert Mugabe with all his fatal flaws, foibles, vices -- and virtues. For that reason Dinner with Mugabe is the best picture of the man that has ever been published. It is as exhaustive as is possible in the circumstances and tells us much about Zimbabwe’s painful past, its tolerable present and its citizens’ hidden selves, with all their triumphs and blunders.