Robert Mugabe
Robert Mugabe ruled Zimbabwe for thirty-seven years, from the independence election of 1980 that he won as the guerrilla leader the white settlers had feared most, through the reconciliation of the first years that made him the West's favourite African statesman, the massacres in Matabeleland that killed perhaps twenty thousand Ndebele in the 1980s and were not much noticed, the seizure of the white-owned farms from 2000 that collapsed agriculture and the currency, and the inflation of 2008 that reached a figure with more zeros than the notes had room for, to the November 2017 evening when the army put him under house arrest and his own party voted to expel him, at ninety-three. He resigned as parliament began to impeach him and died in Singapore two years later. He was born at the Kutama mission in 1924, a Jesuit-educated teacher who took degrees by correspondence, taught in Ghana under Nkrumah, and came home in 1960 to the nationalist movement, which the Rhodesian government jailed him for in 1964. He spent ten years in prison, earning more degrees, and was refused leave to bury his son. Released in 1974, he went to Mozambique and took over ZANU and its guerrilla army from the front, and by 1979 the war had forced Ian Smith and Britain to Lancaster House, whose settlement he signed without liking. He won the election of February 1980 outright, told the whites on television that the past was past, and governed for a decade as a Marxist who kept the settlers' farms and the World Bank's goodwill while the Fifth Brigade, trained by North Korea, dealt with Nkomo's Ndebele. He made himself executive president in 1987 and absorbed Nkomo's party the same year. The turn came at the end of the 1990s, when a new opposition, the MDC, beat him in a constitutional referendum in 2000, and he sent the war veterans onto the white farms. Four thousand farms went in a few years, food production halved, and the elections of 2002 and 2008 were won by violence, the second after his opponent Tsvangirai withdrew from a run-off to stop the killing of his supporters. A unity government with the MDC from 2009 to 2013 stabilised the currency by abolishing it. His second wife Grace's ambition to succeed him, and the sacking of the vice-president Mnangagwa in her favour, brought the generals in. Mnangagwa, restored, gave him a state funeral he had refused in advance.
- Lived: 1924 CE – 2019 CE
- Nationality: Zimbabwean
- Roles: president, prime minister, revolutionary
