His first wife and intellectual, political and romantic partner, Sally, who had been with him since before his incarceration and right through to in dependence, died nine years ago. Lonely, because many of those he counted among his friends, at home or abroad, have either retired or died. So he accelerates up the league table of international pariahs, a lonely, desperate and ill man. Now he is the man whom Desmond Tutu, the former archbishop of Cape Town, once described as "almost a caricature of all the things people think black African leaders do". Mugabe was then the embodiment of that optimism, giving hope to a generation born too young to be carried away by the idealism of the 60s, but too early to be moulded by the cynicism of the 80s. "For anybody who cared about Africa there was just a huge optimism about the country." "A third of my class, which graduated in 1980, came straight here," says one Zimbabwean who was studying in England at the time. And yet Comrade Bob, as he was affectionately known, had done it.Īs reactionaries fled, idealists poured in to help build a new Jerusalem. Not exactly a propitious time for a self-confessed Marxist to take over from a white minority in the mineral-rich, fertile soil of Southern Africa. It was 1980 - four years after the Soweto uprisings in neighbouring South Africa had seen hundreds of young black people killed by the apartheid regime a year after Margaret Thatcher had come to power in Great Britain and a year before Ronald Reagan would be sworn in as US president. The day after the election, recalls one, some white children were sent to school with bags packed for a flight, in case rumours of his victory were true. When he won a resounding victory the white Rhodesians had no idea what to do. Twice, in the run-up to the first elections, Mugabe narrowly escaped death at the hands of pro-Rhodesian hardliners, courtesy of British-made landmines. In March 1980, the Guardian talked of "the delays in allowing Nkomo and Mugabe to import their election cars, and publicity material, the hold-ups in providing them with telephones, the dawn searches of hotel rooms and campaign offices, the confiscation of pamphlets and posters, the arrests of campaign workers and candidates". Just to make sure, they used precisely the tactics of intimidation and petty harassment that they accuse him of today.
White Rhodesians and the British government, believing their own propaganda, were convinced Mugabe was a communist, white-hating psychopath who would lose the elections.
In the press he was hailed as "Southern Africa's Clem Attlee" and "The thinking man's guerrilla."īob Marley, one of the few artists to be invited to the Zimbabwe independence celebrations in 1980, named a song after the new nation and when he got there found that the guerrillas already knew the words. Although it is difficult to imagine it now, Mugabe was once not only the pride of Africa but the toast of the liberal world. Mugabe holds an intense jealousy for Mandela. He was being upstaged by the world's most popular politician on his home turf." "He just sat there and if you knew him you could tell that he was mad," says one longstanding colleague within Mugabe's Zanu PF party. His temper was frayed, his ego diminished and his face taut - desperately withholding any hint of emotion. Meanwhile Mugabe looked on, expressionless, from his seat, a spectator in a play in which he was billed as the co-star.
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