We need to change the way we talk about African rulers - starting with Robert Mugabe

Mugabe was no saint, but we’ve got his record wrong, and it’s going to cost us if we don’t set it right

Robert Gabriel Mugabe, President of Zimbabwe (1980–2017)

I didn’t hear the name Robert Mugabe until I was about thirteen. When I finally did, I was told the story of a brutal dictator in a far-away land.

That’s so often the story with post-colonial leaders in Africa. We’re told that they were once-promising leaders of thriving new democracies, breaking off the chains of colonial rule, only to become tyrants who crushed their own people under their thumb. Dictatorial rule imposed, land seized, economies crashed and billions of dollars’ worth sent away to their accounts whilst their people struggled to get by. The Mugabe I knew, as someone who heard only snippets of information about him on the news, was the archetype of this. All most people understood was that he had been in power for more than thirty years, that he was rich and his people were poor, and that the value of the Zimbabwean dollar had plummeted in a way so disastrous it put Weimar Germany to shame (and wasn’t that the cause of a thousand renditions of the exact same joke).

I never thought to question the picture, and I don’t know anyone else who thought to do so either. Mugabe was a brute, no more needed to be said. And when the military finally ousted him from power in 2017, after thirty-seven years of his rule, it was cause for celebration. The man who succeeded him as President, “The Crocodile” Emmerson Mnangagwa, would, at last, bring prosperity to his country that had once been “the breadbasket of Africa”. Having been condition our whole lives to think of Mugabe as evil, so many of us accepted this as good news. Why wouldn’t we? Thirty-seven years of dictatorship were over. Thirty-seven. That sounded right for the length of the rule of a monarch, but for a President it was unimaginable.

The problem was, we never heard about what happened in thirty-seven years, apart from a few choice moments. When white farmland was taken over, that reached the news. The “Gukurahundi” massacre remains attached to the Mugabe name. Out of all the reports on the man, however, very few care to look at the ways he bettered Zimbabwe during his rule. At one point, the country had access to universal healthcare. Life expectancy for men rose to sixty by 1986, an impressive result for the times, given the conditions he was working in. He gave black students access to “meaningful education” for the first time, and his policy of reconciliation between black and white Zimbabweans helped to avoid new guerrilla conflicts breaking out, after the struggle his own Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) and other groups had just concluded. The way the news spoke about Mugabe, you’d never find out about this. I wouldn’t imagine it had happened.

We were never told the truth about Mugabe. The media lied by omission, focusing on the negative side of his rule and never once addressing the positives. He remained popular among many voters, especially those in rural areas, for his entire rule, but only the voices of his detractors reached us.

It is important, however, that I stress the term ‘lie by omission’ because what we do hear about Mugabe is largely true, and utterly damning. The man allowed for ethnic violence against supporters of opposition parties. He embezzled huge chunks of state assets, and by one record during his time in power Zimbabwe, a country with a total GDP of $17.85 billion, lost “one billion dollars a year” to corruption. While he came to power in a free election and remained where he was without subverting democracy, by the time the early 2000s came about his popularity was suffering and he turned Zimbabwean elections into nothing more than a farce.

From the top of society through to the bottom, an attitude of terror prevailed. Mugabe was known to many as a man who kept his “iron fist” hidden inside a “velvet glove”. Any outside kindness could turn to anger in a second, and then right back again. By all accounts, he was “charming” in person and “loyal to a fault” as a friend, but he did not suffer dissent. In an interview with Channel 4, Wilf Mbanga, a journalist who was a friend of Mugabe in the early years of independence, noted that Mugabe had “no bitterness” upon being released from prison by white authorities after ten years of detention for the crime of supporting majority rule for the black population. Yet when those farmers did not engage with programs to return farmland to black owners, after it had been robbed from them by British colonialists, they became enemies of the state. Wilf Mbanga suffered too. When he set up an opposition newspaper in Harare, the capital, he was denounced and became a lifelong enemy of his former friend.

So was Mugabe evil? No. Was he good? Also no. He existed in a strange moral in-between that can only happen when a leader is around for such a long time that they can serve as two essentially different people. There are many arguments for why Mugabe changed so much between his first twenty years in power and his last seventeen, including the death of his first wife, Sally, and the manipulation of his good nature by devious outsiders wishing to do harm to Zimbabwe or to advance their ambitions. We’ll never know for sure. What we do know is how Mugabe changed, and how he did so for the worst. As a new leader, he made Zimbabwe a better, safer place to live. People lived longer, made good money, and no longer suffered under minority white rule. But it will take Zimbabwe decades to recover from the damage he wrought during his later decades in power, to its economy, and to the democratic process over which, even under their new leader Mnangagwa, the Zimbabwean people do not have full control.

The problem is that a nuanced picture of Mugabe is never shown. It cannot be allowed to exist. There has been a campaign against Mugabe since his first day in power to portray him as a threat. A 1980 report from the BBC covering his election opened with the words, “it’s alright for the Africans, but what about the whites?” The way the media talks about the man has not changed one bit since that day, except to become especially negative during the land seizures, in which they refused to report any facts other than that land was being taken, and not that any potential benefits were squandered by acts of “deliberate sabotage” on the part of white landowners.

And Mugabe isn’t alone. Many great post-colonial leaders in Africa, if we hear about them at all (names like Sankara, Nyerere and Nkrumah don’t mean much to almost anyone in my area), are spoken of as irredeemable dictators. This prevents us from having genuine conversations about the good they brought to their countries, along with the bad. It means we can’t conceive of why men like Mugabe or Colonel Gaddafi can remain in power for such incredibly long periods. The intention, on the part of the few companies that operate most of the media we receive in the Western world, is not to uphold the idea of the ‘African ruler’ as a corrupt and incompetent murderer — their only aim is to report facts they deem interesting, and a report on new housing or education programs don’t tend to make the cut, while ethnic violence and political repression does. However, they cannot be unaware that they uphold that ‘African ruler’ idea as a consequence.

It is incumbent on the media to change the way they talk about post-colonial leaders, or else the conversation we have about them will remain ahistorical and largely pointless. It’s also important that we understand why people might support these leaders, and not just why they might oppose them.

Believe me, I’m not trying to defend Mugabe. I’m trying to do justice to his legacy, and while that sounds like praise, it’s not. If I were to do justice to the legacy of John McCain or George H.W. Bush, this would be in reverse, and I would highlight their negatives which have been so outshone by every compliment that can be found under the sun. You could do the same for every post-colonial leader that has had their rule depicted unfairly, and many people have already set themselves to task working on it. It’s hardly a fun assignment, but we need to start changing the way we think and talk about these leaders, in the media and elsewhere, in academic circles and beyond. And until we do, we’ll fail to understand who they really were, and how they have shaped history.