Of Robert Gabriel Mugabe, the former schoolteacher, political prisoner and rebel leader who presided over Zimbabwe’s three-decade plummet from the Jewel of Africa to a crippled and mendicant state, it may fairly be said as follows:

He did not listen very well to others.

A Zimbabwean economics professor named Tony Hawkins once delivered this tart if understated verdict on the life and works of the man who ruled, or misruled, Zimbabwe for more than 30 long years, from 1980 until his death this past Thursday at the age of 95 in Singapore, where he was receiving medical treatment.

At the time Hawkins spoke, Mugabe had just unleashed a brutal government campaign called Operation Murambatsvina, or Operation Drive Out Trash, in which Zimbabwean soldiers and police first evicted hundreds of thousands of impoverished folk from their modest urban dwellings — shanties, for the most part — and then sent them packing on foot for an uncertain destination and a perilous fate.

The abandoned homes were torn down, and whatever possessions remained were either looted or left to rot amid the bulldozed rubble of what had once been neighbourhoods, places where flesh-and-blood humans had lived, loved, argued, hoped, and struggled to survive.

That spasm of destruction took place in mid-2005, and it was widely believed at the time that Mugabe’s central goal in the affair was to punish voters in urban areas, where support for his leadership had withered.

Whatever the president’s motives, the operation caused massive homelessness and spelled additional suffering for vast numbers of his nation’s already beleaguered citizenry, and it brought even more international condemnation raining down upon his stubborn, octogenarian head.

Not that Mugabe seemed to notice or to care.

Note: Most of this obituary was written in advance by Oakland Ross when he was on staff at the Star.

Or, as Hawkins observed during an interview with the Toronto Star at the time:

“He doesn’t listen very well to others.”

No, he did not, and the remark rendered in the past tense might fit nicely upon Robert Mugabe’s tombstone now that the dictator is dead.

His demise punctuates a long and mainly gloomy time for the gorgeous southern African land that was once a white-run pariah state called Rhodesia but later became the hope of Africa, under majority rule and a different name.

In 1980, Zimbabwe emerged from the ashes of a bloody liberation war, with Mugabe as its duly elected leader, first as prime minister and later as president.

Once regarded by some as a political visionary, a shrewd manager, and a champion of racial tolerance, Mugabe in his later years projected a radically different image — a vicious, authoritarian ruler who combined incompetence, greed and ruthlessness to bring down a once vibrant country, while reducing most of its inhabitants to a state of wholesale despair.

Later still, Mugabe sank ever more deeply into his dotage, a largely pathetic figure now, seemingly bewildered by the events unfolding around him. He seemed to offer little public resistance in November 2017, when he was summarily removed from office at the combined behest of the military, the public, and even his own political party following nearly 40 years in power.

He was replaced by Emmerson Mnangagwa, a former ally who ascended to the presidency with the support of the military, thereby blocking Mugabe’s second wife, Grace, from succeeding her husband in the presidency, which had apparently been their plan.

During the two years since Mugabe’s ouster, conditions in Zimbabwe have stubbornly failed to improve, and they have a lot of improving to do.

Over the course of Mugabe’s rule, his agents murdered tens of thousands of Zimbabweans in politically inspired violence. They displaced hundreds of thousands more. They drove millions into exile.

Meanwhile, Mugabe and his minions lurched from one ill-considered enterprise to the next, sending Zimbabwean troops to join a messy, multi-faceted armed conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo at an unsustainable cost in lives and dollars, then unleashing a sometimes violent campaign of land seizures within Zimbabwe itself, a campaign that lacked any trace of strategic planning and quickly gutted the country’s once formidable agricultural sector.

Once a net food exporter, Zimbabwe went on the dole with half its population of 11 million reliant on international assistance in order to survive.

The country’s economy did not merely suffer. It collapsed.

By the end of Mugabe’s rule, roughly 80 per cent of Zimbabwe’s workers were reckoned to be jobless, in an economy that had shrunk by about 50 per cent in just a few short years. Life expectancy at birth for Zimbabwe’s people fell from more than 60 years in 1990 to 43 in 2006.

And inflation? It scaled heights perhaps never before achieved in the annals of terrestrial economic affairs.

In November 2008, according to one U.S. academic, the annual inflation rate in Zimbabwe hit 89.7 sextillion per cent. That’s 89.7 followed by 21 zeroes.

They were essentially worthless, these slips of paper decorated with drawings of African wildlife and multitudinous noughts, but the central bank kept pumping them out all the same — or importing them from Germany — and people lugged their erstwhile pocket money around in huge bricks bundled together with elastic bands.

They had Robert Mugabe to thank for their pains, but he didn’t seem to hear them.

He didn’t listen very well to others.

Instead, during his 30 years in power, Mugabe listened primarily and perhaps exclusively to himself.

He was an odd individual, finicky in manner, who spoke with overprecise diction, walked with a mincing gait, dyed his hair an unconvincing black, and mostly failed to project an air of strength.

And yet he countenanced the deaths of thousands.

“This is the loneliest man you’ll ever meet,” said the late Heidi Holland, who wrote a vivid and perceptive book-length portrait of the Zimbabwean leader, entitled Dinner With Mugabe. “He’s never had any friends.”

Instead, over the course of his rule, he seemed to retreat further and further into a sort of virtual world, a place of his own imagining, where he could countermand or rationalize the mostly grim proceedings taking place out in the real world, the beautiful but blighted land where most Zimbabweans were, and are, obliged to dwell.

He accepted none of the blame for their suffering, instead holding others responsible for whatever went wrong during his watch, as so much did.

In Mugabe’s invented world, Zimbabwe’s stupendous economic decline was not the result of cronyism, corruption or breathtaking mismanagement at home. It was the fault of western donor countries, their duplicity, and their campaign of economic sanctions. He singled out Britain, his country’s former colonial master, for inflicting much of the harm. He seemed to take it personally.

And the truth is, he wasn’t entirely off the money.

“Fifty per cent of what Mugabe says about global inequities and the interests of the West is probably correct,” commented a western diplomat in Harare during the latter years of Mugabe’s rule. “He’s not that far wrong.”

But it was Mugabe who manned the switches within Zimbabwe, and his decisions played a key part in precipitating, aggravating and then failing to limit the economic pileup that nearly totalled his country.

On matters of human rights, his record was possibly even worse — and, here, it really was his record. He was in charge. He fully deserved the condemnation he received from almost all directions.

Not that he accepted it. He never seemed to admit the criticism he received.

He didn’t listen very well to others.

It seems he had childhood issues.

Born on Feb. 21, 1924, Mugabe entered this world a poor man’s son, the third offspring of a carpenter named Gabriel Mugabe and his wife, Bona Shonhiwa.

His two older brothers died when he was very young, and his father abandoned the family when the future president was just 10.

It’s tempting to speculate about the role those early losses played in the development of his adult personality. In fact, it’s all but impossible not to.

“He is a weak man who can’t take rejection,” said Holland, speaking while Mugabe was still alive. “When he suffers humiliation, his thoughts turn to revenge. You can see that over his career. He’s very vengeful. The triggers for his anger are disillusionment, rejection and humiliation, which he’s suffered on a grand scale.”

He was a solitary youth — lonely and bookish.

Educated initially at a Jesuit missionary school in Harare, Mugabe went on to earn an economics degree at the University of Fort Hare in South Africa.

Between 1956 and 1960, Mugabe taught school in Ghana, which in 1957 became the first sub-Saharan African country to win independence under majority rule. There, he met and wed his first wife, a Ghanaian and fellow teacher named Sally Hayfron.

In 1960, Mugabe returned to Zimbabwe along with his young wife and soon threw himself into the mainly clandestine struggle for African liberation, proving himself to be a skilled orator and a formidable political tactician.

At the time, the land of his birth formed the southern half of a British colony bridling under imperial rule. The principal group lobbying for change was the Zimbabwe African Patriotic Union (Zapu), led by Joshua Nkomo.

Mugabe helped to establish a breakaway faction, called the Zimbabwe African National Union (Zanu).

The split was tribal. Zapu represented the Ndebele, the smaller of the country’s two main ethnic groups, while Zanu provided a political umbrella for the much more numerous Shona.

Nkomo was Ndebele; Mugabe, Shona.

In 1964, Northern Rhodesia was granted independence from Britain under majority rule and became the country known as Zambia. Southern Rhodesia took a different course.

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In 1965, rather than accept majority rule, the territory’s white elite issued a unilateral declaration of independence from Britain and confronted a mainly hostile world as the renegade state of Rhodesia. Their leader was a pugnacious sports fanatic named Ian Smith.

By this time, Robert Mugabe was in jail, after being arrested a year earlier and convicted of sedition. He would remain behind bars for 11 years and spent much of the time taking university courses by correspondence. He accumulated six degrees this way, for a total of seven.

Not long after his release in 1975, Mugabe was named leader of Zanu and was soon holed up in neighbouring Mozambique, which had won independence that year from Portugal.

In Rhodesia, meanwhile, a three-way armed struggle was underway, pitting the military wings of Zanu and Zapu against the Rhodesian armed forces. It was an ugly, brutal conflict marred by extreme cruelty on all sides. Tens of thousands were killed.

Eventually, however, it became apparent to Smith and to most of his fellow whites — who numbered fewer than 300,000 in a population of about six million Black residents — that the battle could not be won.

Three months of negotiations at Lancaster House in London finally produced agreement on a peaceful way forward, and Robert Gabriel Mugabe emerged victorious in elections held in 1980.

Zimbabwe was born.

Many whites fled, but not a few remained, and for a time their lives seemed blessed.

They lived in a glorious land, on sprawling farms or on wooded suburban estates, where they parked their Mercedes-Benzes and BMWs. They played golf, polo and tennis, spent their weekends boating on Lake Kariba, and had servants to handle all the chores. Flowering trees — jacarandas, flamboyants, tulip trees, and poinsettia — sparkled against the dun-and-olive veld, and the sun rarely ceased to shine.

What was more, the war was over, and peace prevailed.

True to his word, Mugabe eschewed reprisals against his white-skinned adversaries, and he respected a constitutional deal that initially gave them 20 seats in the 100-seat parliament, far more than their numbers warranted.

If a heaven ever existed on earth, its name was Zimbabwe, and you could find it high in the southern African hinterland, between the towns of Mutare and Plumtree, Beitbridge and Kariba — or at least you could if you had money and especially if you were white.

The times were not nearly so splendid if you happened to be a member of the Ndebele tribe, who comprised about 20 per cent of the country’s population and who dwelled mainly in Matabeleland, in Zimbabwe’s torrid southwest.

In 1982, ostensibly to combat political unrest among the Ndebele, Mugabe dispatched the Zimbabwean army’s infamous Fifth Brigade — trained in North Korea, as it is invariably noted — and the unit embarked on a three-year rampage in which untold thousands of innocents were killed. Figures in excess of 10,000 dead are often cited nowadays, although the extent of the violence was not widely appreciated at the time.

Still, if anyone doubted Mugabe’s true nature, then the Gukurahundi — “the early rain that washes away chaff,” as the Matabele offensive was known — should have alerted them.

Because of the bloodshed, Joshua Nkomo — the Ndebele hero of the independence struggle — capitulated completely, accepting a neutered ceremonial post in the Mugabe government, while allowing his political party to be folded into Mugabe’s much larger organization, where it soon vanished.

Zimbabwe had become a one-party state, in fact if not in name, and Robert Gabriel Mugabe was its ruler.

Some say Zimbabwe’s fortunes went into decline after Sally Mugabe died of kidney failure in 1992.

The president would later wed his former secretary, Grace Marufu, a woman more than 40 years younger than he and someone who would soon distinguish herself as a sort of African Imelda Marcos, a woman whose greed knows no bounds, to borrow a memorable phrase.

If Sally had countered her husband’s worst political instincts while she was alive, the effect quickly evaporated with her death and was, if anything, thrown into reverse once Grace took up residence at State House, the sprawling presidential compound on Harare’s Borrowdale Rd.

That’s one view.

Others say Mugabe was always a vengeful man, no matter who shared his bed. Even a cursory glance at the record shows he rarely ever tolerated dissent and almost always rounded upon his enemies, claws extended, fangs bared.

Ian Smith was a notable exception to this rule. The irascible champion of white privilege remained in Zimbabwe for 25 years after independence and frequently railed against Mugabe, but he was left alone. He moved to South Africa in 2005 because of ill health and died there two years later.

By then, the bottom had fallen out of the Zimbabwean economy, a process that properly got going around 2000, after so-called veterans of the country’s independence struggle began to occupy white-owned farms, an often violent practice that Mugabe encouraged and that soon reduced the number of commercial farming operations from about 4,500 to only a few hundred.

Much and possibly most of this confiscated land ended up in the hands of Mugabe’s cronies, so-called “cellphone farmers,” who had no experience or interest in agriculture and instead used their new country properties for weekend getaways.

For an economy based primarily on agriculture, the consequences were disastrous.

Mugabe’s critics hold him to blame for this debacle, and so they should, but land is an albatross in Zimbabwe. Its equitable distribution had been at the heart of the bloody independence struggle, and Mugabe’s government was always under enormous political and moral pressure to move aggressively toward reform.

And yet, whenever he tried to so so, Mugabe ran smack into stubborn opposition from Britain and other western donor countries.

It was probably inevitable that something would give eventually, and eventually something did.

Still, whether you saw them as noble or egregious in principle, the wave of land seizures that began in 2000 were unredeemed bungles in practice. They proceeded with no economic planning and were quickly diverted from their avowed purpose — the equitable distribution of land — by swindles, shell games and sweetheart deals.

The poor did not benefit — the rich did — and the economy tanked.

Almost everybody suffered in the end.

Mounting discontent helped fuel the rise of a potent opposition force, the Movement for Democratic Change, under its trade-unionist leader Morgan Tsvangirai, and so began perhaps the darkest chapter in Mugabe’s political career.

Under the threat of defeat, he reacted as he almost always had whenever he was subject to attack, and his third decade in power resembled a tyrant’s handbook, a lurid primer in the uses of brutality, oppression, injustice and revenge.

Mugabe and his goons transformed their country into a prison cell, a torture chamber, and an early grave for thousands of its people.

In early 2008, through a combination of graft, terror and gall, he survived a shocking electoral loss to the MDC and held on as president.

Before long, however, international and domestic outrage forced Mugabe into a bizarre power-sharing arrangement with the opposition, under which he retained the presidency, albeit with reduced powers, and Tsvangarai signed on as prime minister.

Few expected the arrangement to last long, and it was widely anticipated Mugabe would step aside before the end of 2009 in order to enjoy the comforts of the 25-bedroom mansion he had built for himself at a reputed cost of $10 million in the Harare suburb of Borrowdale Brooke.

But 2009 came and went, and Mugabe — then 86 and frail — continued to cling to power.

It was not till eight years later that he was finally shunted aside in what amounted to a bloodless coup, a transfer of power in which he had no apparent say and that seemed to take him largely unawares. But that should come as little surprise.

After all, he didn’t listen very well to others.