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The man behind the fist
The Economist
March 29, 2007

http://www.economist.com/world/displaystory.cfm?story_id=8922493

IN AN African village, everyone is expected to work. From an early age children are taken to the fields and told to carry water or to hunt. Eight decades ago, when the land that is now Zimbabwe was run by British settlers, one small boy chose to toil for his family by taking on solitary tasks. Sent to herd cows, he would avoid other children and tramp off to isolated grazing spots. He would not scrap with the other boys, a traditional way of passing the time.

This weakling did not even play at hunting. Instead he would weave dry grass and reeds into small nets, stuffing them with feathers and moss. He would set his traps by a river and then wait for hours, resting with a book in the shade of a tree. Eventually he would snare a small bird or two, providing a tiny bit of protein for the family pot. None of this made him popular. He was bookish, a swot and very close to his mother. His father, a carpenter, had disappeared early.

Remarkably little is known about Robert Gabriel Mugabe, the man who has ruled Zimbabwe for nearly three decades and has led it, in that time, from impressive success to the most dramatic peacetime collapse of any country since Weimar Germany. Today Mr Mugabe is a near-parody of an African dictator. He sports a Hitleresque moustache. He waves his fists at campaign rallies, runs into crowds punching the air and spits personal abuse at his opponents. But his rivals and enemies have regularly underestimated him; and, in doing so, have made it all the harder to get him out of office.

His secret police, the much-feared Central Intelligence Organisation, spreads dread in the cities, especially the poorer townships, after dark. Early in March his goons hammered the country's opposition leader, a doughty but dull former trade-union leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, almost to death, provoking intense condemnation at home and abroad, but also successfully intimidating ordinary people. A gardener in Budiriro township near Harare describes how security men have harassed residents to stop street protests, even battering a pregnant woman until she lost her baby. On March 28th police again arrested Mr Tsvangirai.

The attacks on Mr Tsvangirai have improved his public standing—just as Mr Mugabe burnished his, long ago, by going to prison while fighting for an end to white rule. But another refrain did the rounds in Harare last week: if the leader of the opposition cannot guard himself, how can he protect his ordinary supporters if they dare to protest?

Young men are beaten regularly by police with truncheons known as knobkerries, long synonymous with repression in this part of the world. On March 27th a trade-union meeting in Mutare, in the east of the country, was stormed and broken up by police who claimed it was being held without permission. In the parks of Harare, groups of sullen security men with shotguns, rifles and riot gear can be seen lurking in the bushes. According to Chris Maroleng of the Institute for Security Studies, a South African research outfit, Mr Mugabe "has emptied out the state and filled it with the military". He may yet preserve his tottering regime by brute force alone.

Mr Mugabe is certainly willing to resort to force when cornered. But as long as the deft bird-catcher has other choices, he is probably clever enough to limit the violence. Though widely hated, he has a gift for making people do as he says. For roughly a decade pundits have predicted his imminent departure from office—forced out by elections, a referendum, political protest. But each time Mr Mugabe has held on.

Many Zimbabweans, paradoxically, both despise and admire him. Charismatic, well-educated and genuinely clever, he is not merely a thuggish clown like Uganda's Idi Amin. His commitment to improving schools for all Zimbabweans is widely known. Less noted is his personal role in doing so: even as president, the former schoolteacher took time to give lessons to staff at State House, teaching some who have since become ministers. Though the country is ruined, Zimbabwe's streets still throng with boys and girls in neat school uniforms.

Yoga and sadza

Mr Mugabe is also a shrewd performer, switching from Shona to English to send different messages to different audiences. He exploits foreign condemnation of his rule so effectively that Britain's government, especially, now rarely comments on Zimbabwe. His playground jibes against the foreign leaders he dislikes—Britain's Tony Blair is "a boy in short trousers"—provoke laughter even among the hungry who want to see him gone. Next month his government plans to set up a 24-hour propaganda station, News24, to counter "negative publicity" from the West. "Nothing frightens me," said Mr Mugabe at a meeting in Harare on March 23rd. "I make a stand and stand on principle here where I was born, here where I grew up, here where I fought and here where I shall die."

At 83 he still works punishing hours, rarely returning from the office until late evening, and is sharper minded than most, perhaps all, of his many opponents. He is said to rise before dawn, well before the rest of his young family, and to start the day with yoga exercises. He is frugal, typically taking no breakfast but sipping tea throughout the day. His doctors say he is in formidable good health.

Heidi Holland, the author of a forthcoming book, "Dinner with Mugabe", who has interviewed many relatives and colleagues of the president, sees him as sprightly and canny. Whenever possible he eats sadza—the local maize porridge—with a relish of vegetables, usually with his hands in the traditional way of the Shona people. Unlike many African dictators, with their fierce appetites for booze, meat and women, Zimbabwe's leader is teetotal, a near-vegetarian and by all accounts faithful to Grace, his young second wife. His tailor notes that Mr Mugabe's measurements (he likes vents at the sides of his jackets and cannot abide double-breasted suits) have not altered in 20 years.

Yet the old man seems to be ever more isolated. Just as the boy had few friends, argues Ms Holland, the president has grown increasingly lonely. His first wife, Sally, a Ghanaian, was probably his closest friend and adviser. Former ministers recall how Mr Mugabe, when mulling a tricky problem, would announce "I'll ask Sally", and the matter would be postponed until he had. Some date the beginning of Mr Mugabe's misrule, and the collapse of Zimbabwe, to her death in 1992, and his marriage to Grace, a former secretary, whose main preoccupation is shopping.

Certainly the president has grown touchy as the years have passed. One former cabinet minister, Jonathan Moyo, describes how Mr Mugabe fell into a fierce sulk after rivals suggested he quit, in 2006. For days the president refused even to meet any of his ministers and broke his silence only after his priest intervened. Others confirm his eerie ability to exert a "silent power": refusing, for example, to say a word in one-on-one meetings, to the deep consternation of the other party.

Today it seems that his isolation is growing, especially within the ruling Zanu-PF party. In December Mr Mugabe tried to convince his party to postpone next year's presidential elections until 2010, but the idea was not received with great enthusiasm, and the decision was delayed until a meeting of party leaders that is taking place this week. His one-time protégé, Emmerson Mnangagwa, who was so close to the president that he earned the moniker "Son of God", is thought to be plotting with Solomon Mujuru, the former head of the army and husband of the current vice-president, to persuade Mr Mugabe to go. Both men have fallen out of favour with the president, and the country's economic meltdown is hurting their vast business interests. They are said to be talking not only to each other, but also to Mr Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), though Mr Mugabe has sidelined many rivals before. And neither man, if he were to become Zimbabwe's leader, would be likely to be any less dreadful for the country.

An English gentleman

The time may have come when Mr Mugabe's great age—the average Zimbabwean woman can expect to die at just 34, the average man at 37—is a liability. Usually in Africa age is treated with enormous respect. Yet some now describe the president with open scorn. "It is time for the madala to go," says a resident of one township beside Harare, contemptuously using the Shona term for an old man. Mr Moyo snorts that "over the past few years Mugabe has lost his skills. Many are now saying this guy is a victim of old age."

But pinning down Mr Mugabe and assessing his weakness has proved remarkably difficult over the years. The man is constantly able to reinvent himself. He is part African populist, prepared to snatch agricultural land from commercial farmers—and thereby destroying one of Africa's most successful economies—yet part Anglophile gentleman. Though neither the Zimbabwean leader, nor Britain's government, is particularly keen to admit it, Mr Mugabe is in large part the product of Western, especially British, values.

He dresses in Western suits and reads the foreign press regularly, though almost never the local papers. One close observer says he is often seen with The Economist. Despite his diatribes against imperialists, he has an almost fawning respect for British tradition. Visitors, including his tailor, are almost always offered a cup of tea. When Mr Mugabe entertained foreign journalists after the elections in 2005, he posed between two (rather tatty) stuffed lions at his colonial-era pile, as servants padded around with trays in the background. He takes pains to instil good manners in his young children, explaining that these are the manners of British royalty.

It is commonly said that Mr Mugabe can appear to be more English than the English. He loves cricket, and has long been the patron of the Zimbabwe Cricket Union. Until targeted sanctions prevented him doing so, his favourite pastime was to travel to London. At the end of white rule in 1980 he formed relatively close relationships with the British officials who oversaw the transition, sensibly agreeing not to throw the white farmers out. When some of the farmers, in the late 1990s, started supporting Zimbabwe's opposition, Mr Mugabe felt betrayed by London.

If his identity is hard to pin down, his fears and hopes are easier to read. His greatest concern would seem to be avoiding an ignominious end while protecting his family. It is telling how Mr Mugabe has dealt with his predecessor, Ian Smith, the leader of white Rhodesia. He had strong reasons, both personal and political, for disliking him. He was imprisoned by the Smith regime, and was said to be particularly distraught when Mr Smith denied him permission to attend the funeral of his first son, who died at the age of four.

A degree in violence

Mr Mugabe is certainly still extremely bitter about this period. When asked in 2001 if he recognised that Zimbabweans were suffering because of his rule, he growled back that he had been jailed by Mr Smith and "we suffered more under the British." Yet the cantankerous Mr Smith, who kept up his verbal attacks on Mr Mugabe for years, was never touched or encouraged to leave (though he voluntarily retired to South Africa a year or so ago).

Perhaps Mr Mugabe considered his white predecessor a spent force; more serious opponents were put down brutally. Even if Mr Mugabe treated Mr Smith gingerly, he has the blood of many others on his hands. He once boasted that, in addition to his seven academic degrees, he had a "degree in violence". Rival leaders in the independence movement died mysteriously as Mr Mugabe took charge, one in a car crash but (some said) riddled with bullets. An opposition newspaper saw its printing press blown up and journalists tortured. Young opponents of the regime have been dragged to camps where women are raped and men are beaten.

One particular concern of Zimbabwe's leader is that he may face prosecution for overseeing the massacre of thousands of villagers by North Korean-trained soldiers in Matabeleland, in the south-west of the country, in the early 1980s. A bill calling for a new inquest into the Gukurahundi, as the killings were known (it means "the early rain that washes away the chaff"), is about to be introduced into parliament.

The opposition MDC, if it ever rules alone or in coalition (at the moment, it is too broke and divided even to organise mass protests), says it would not call on the state to try Mr Mugabe for these killings. But it wants either a private prosecution or a case brought in an international court. Many other instances of state-sanctioned murder and torture might be examined too, including those strange deaths of Mr Mugabe's rivals at the time of independence. Loss of immunity is one of the main costs, to him, of losing power; he could probably not be persuaded to go unless some comfortable deal for him was worked out in advance.

Yet he may be eased out eventually, not least because his African neighbours are increasingly embarrassed by him. The arrest and beating of opposition leaders has made it difficult for the region's leaders to sit on their hands. At an emergency meeting of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) this week, Zimbabwe was back at centre-stage. President Levy Mwanawasa of Zambia has put the matter bluntly: he compared Zimbabwe to the foundering of the Titanic, and said that quiet diplomacy had failed.

But African leaders are unlikely to get out their megaphones. Their mumbling and conciliation have continued. Only a few weeks ago, Mr Mugabe landed a power deal with Namibia that should help ease Zimbabwe's crippling power cuts. He also paid a recent visit to oil-rich Equatorial Guinea, which seems happy to assist. Angola has been rumoured to be ready to send paramilitaries to help retrain the Zimbabwean police, although both sides have now denied this.

So Mr Mugabe, for all his flaws, can still count on his anti-colonial credits across the region. Most important, he can still count on them in South Africa, though his relations with the ruling African National Congress are as sour as can be. He derides South Africa's president, Thabo Mbeki, whom he sees as a grey, cautious upstart (and who is a generation younger). Repeatedly Mr Mbeki has tried to broker talks between the opposition and the ruling party on power-sharing in Zimbabwe, while failing to offer any threats if Mr Mugabe does not agree. When Zimbabwe faced expulsion from the IMF, South Africa offered to help if the regime cleaned up its political and economic act. It was snubbed, and the central bank mopped up all the foreign exchange it could find to pay the IMF.

All in all, Mr Mbeki has been left looking foolish and powerless. Today South Africa provides Mr Mugabe with the most effective international cover for his misrule, in part because Mr Mbeki, seeing in Zimbabwe a mirror of his own country, dreads the idea of a trade-union leader overturning the rule of an independence party.

The star and the sun

A more important relationship, however, may have been with Nelson Mandela. Some date the start of Mr Mugabe's misrule to the emergence of his rival as the great independence hero of Africa. Until Mr Mandela left his apartheid prison, in 1990, Mr Mugabe could do no wrong. He was feted as an anti-apartheid leader, a man who reconciled different races and presided over a shining economy. Mr Mugabe was the star of the region, but then the sun rose.

Mr Mandela promptly stole all his attention; South Africa's vastly bigger economy drew investment, press coverage, foreign plaudits. To Mr Mugabe's evident personal dismay, Zimbabwe was cast into the shade. Mr Mandela's biographer describes Mr Mugabe twitching with distaste and annoyance when the two men met, shortly after the South African won his freedom.

No love is lost between the two elder statesmen. Just as Mr Mandela emerged as the voice of reconciliation and modernity in Africa, Mr Mugabe reverted to populism, land-grabs and bashing foreigners. It is quite possible that Mr Mugabe, increasingly bitter, dreams of holding on to power long enough to see the back of some of his foreign rivals. He would love to be in office when (in the middle of the year, most probably) Mr Blair resigns. Mr Mbeki has only a couple of years to go. Mr Mandela's health is fading fast.

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