HIS life merits little more than a footnote in Zimbabwean history, but footnotes can be illuminating. Canaan Banana was Zimbabwe's first black president, serving as head of state for seven years after independence in 1980. It was a ceremonial post, however: real authority lay with the prime minister, Robert Mugabe.

For much of his time in office, President Banana's job was to look dignified at posh events, such as Prince Charles's wedding to Lady Diana Spencer. His light workload left him with plenty of time for his hobby, which was raping his male attendants. Though he lacked real power, he was quite powerful enough to torment underlings with impunity, despite the fact that homosexual acts are punishable by jail terms of up to ten years in Zimbabwe.

It was only when one of his victims killed a man that the story came out. In 1997, Jefta Dube, a former bodyguard who was on trial for murder, pleaded in mitigation that the man he shot had humiliated him by calling him “Banana's wife”. He told the court that while he was in Mr Banana's service in the mid-1980s, the president had repeatedly raped him. The first time, he said, Mr Banana played cards with him, drank with him and drugged him. He woke up on the carpet of the State House library with no trousers, and was greeted by a smiling president who said: “We helped ourselves.”

Mr Banana denied it, but several more accused him. A gardener, a cook, policemen and other flunkies recalled systematic abuse. An air force officer said he escaped Mr Banana's advances only by pushing him into a swimming pool. In 1998, Mr Banana was convicted of 11 counts of “sodomy” and “unnatural acts”. He fled the country before sentencing, apparently for fear that Mr Mugabe intended to have him killed. Nelson Mandela, then South Africa's president, persuaded him to return to Zimbabwe. He served eight months of a ten-year sentence, during which he was often allowed out shopping.

Even a little power corrupts

Canaan Sodindo Banana was born in 1936 near Bulawayo. He was educated at a mission school, and ordained as a Methodist minister in 1962. Before long, Reverend Banana became enthused with the ideals of liberation politics, and started to denounce the white racist regime of what was then called Southern Rhodesia from the pulpit. He wrote an updated version of the Lord's Prayer, beginning “Our father who art in the ghetto” and including lines such as “Teach us to demand our share of the gold/Forgive us our docility/As we demand our share of justice.”

His preaching disturbed the authorities, but won him plaudits within the black liberation movement. At first he worked with Bishop Abel Muzorewa, a moderate but ineffectual liberation leader, but in 1976 he defected to Mr Mugabe's party, ZANU. When Zimbabwe became independent, ZANU picked him as its figurehead, partly because of his struggle credentials and partly because he was from the minority Ndebele tribe, whose members mostly supported Mr Mugabe's main rival, Joshua Nkomo.

As head of state, Mr Banana never really commanded respect. His name did not help, and in 1982 a law was passed banning jokes about it. While Mr Banana was president, Mr Nkomo fell out with Mr Mugabe, and a few hundred of Mr Nkomo's supporters took up arms against the regime. Mr Mugabe sent his best troops to crush the revolt, and to massacre between 10,000 and 20,000 Ndebele civilians suspected of supporting it.

While Mr Mugabe's men were systematically torturing his kin and torching their huts, Mr Banana said nothing. But he did help broker an accord between ZANU and Mr Nkomo's terrified party, ZAPU, to form a unity government in 1987. ZAPU was swallowed up, and Mr Banana was swept aside as Mr Mugabe created an overweeningly powerful executive presidency, and took the job himself.

Mr Banana doubtless expected to spend the rest of his life comfortably doing what people expect of retired statesmen. He led a mission from the World Council of Churches to apartheid South Africa, observed that country's constitutional convention on behalf of the Commonwealth, and tried to broker peace in Liberia on behalf of the Organisation of African Unity. The state looked after him well, providing him with a lavish tax-free pension, cars, servants and a lifetime exemption from import duty.

He thought he could get away with his crimes because ZANU politicians usually can. While president, he was at pains to present himself as a man of the people, dressing up in overalls and feeding his chickens for the cameras. But in private he had grander ideas of his station. When Mr Dube begged him to stop molesting him, he refused with the words: “I am the final court of appeal.”

After Mr Banana died, reportedly of cancer, he was denied the hero's burial that senior ruling-party hacks traditionally receive. Not because he was a rapist, but because he had been publicly revealed to be a homosexual shortly after Mr Mugabe had denounced such people as “worse than dogs and pigs”. In Zimbabwe, it is better to brutalise a hundred little people than to embarrass the president.