Most people assumed that the only way Robert Mugabe would give up being president was to die in his bed.

He probably thought so too.

In fact the last of the old-style 1970s and 80s liberation leaders most untypically resigned in writing. Perhaps that says something about the way the world has changed in the 21st century.

No storming the presidential palace, no ugly end at the hands of a crowd like Colonel Gaddafi, no execution by firing squad like President Ceausescu of Romania, no hanging like Saddam Hussein.

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Zimbabwe, in spite of everything Robert Mugabe visited upon it, is essentially a peaceable, gentle country. And despite all the immense crimes for which he was responsible, he is in some ways an intellectual, rather than a brutal thug.

He’ll be remembered for the massacres in Matabeleland in the 1980s, for the farm invasions of the 1990s and later, and for the brutal repression of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change when they seemed on course to win the 2008 presidential election.

The man who seems about to take his place, former vice-president Emmerson Mnangagwe, was deeply involved in most of those crimes, yet people in Zimbabwe - like the outside world - will be so relieved to see Mugabe go that they will be tempted to forget all that.

They’ll also forget the few unquestionably good things Robert Mugabe did. Zimbabwe, for instance, has an extraordinarily high literacy rate, because of him.

But that’s certainly not what he’ll be remembered for.