Obituaries of Robert Mugabe, the former leader of Zimbabwe who died in Singapore on Friday at the age of 95, tend to divide his history into three eras: the revolutionary leader of the liberation struggle against white minority rule; the statesman who negotiated with Britain and the white rulers for the creation of Zimbabwe and soon became its first leader; the despot who ruthlessly crushed his opponents and drove his land into penury.

But it is hard to determine when one period began or another ended. There were signs of the budding tyrant already in Mr. Mugabe’s dealings with revolutionary comrades during the liberation wars of the 1960s and ’70s. And when Mr. Mugabe was finally overthrown by the military in November 2017, long after he had laid waste to his once-prosperous land and revealed his dictatorial face, the generals treated him with almost reverential deference. Announcing “Comrade” Mugabe’s death on Friday, his successor, President Emmerson Mnangagwa, spoke only of the “icon of liberation,” with no mention of his ouster.

That reverence for the leaders of liberation struggles, however unfortunate their post-liberation rule, is not unique to Zimbabwe, or to Africa. The fight against colonial rule invariably becomes the founding narrative of a new nation: It was so in the United States, and even more so in developing nations that achieved independence after World War II. Mao Zedong’s huge portrait still gazes down on Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, where the movement against the chairman’s authoritarian legacy was so brutally crushed, and Fidel Castro is still revered across much of Latin America, though he drove Cuba into economic ruin and more than a million countrymen into exile.

Some African nations have been especially loath to strip the halos off revolutionary heroes, given the instability of countries shaped more by the imperial designs of European rulers than by ethnic boundaries. Honorifics like “comrade” still echo the romance of revolutionary Pan-African ideologies. As late as 2015, with Zimbabwe already in ruins and Mr. Mugabe unwelcome in much of the world, the African Union appointed him chairman for the year.