Thread: Mugabe dies; liberated Zimbabwe, then held it for 37 years

Former Zimbabwean leader Robert Mugabe, an ex -guerrilla chief who took power after independence from white minority rule in 1980 and presided over a country whose early promise was eroded by economic turmoil and allegations of human rights violations, has died in Singapore at the age of 95.He enjoyed strong support among the population and even the West soon after taking over as Prime Minister and Zimbabwe’s first post-colonial leader. But was reviled in later years as the economy collapsed and human rights violations increased. His often violent takeover of farms from whites who owned huge tracts of land made him a hated figure in the West and a hero in Africa.

His successor President Emmerson Mnangagwa confirmed Mugabe’s death in a tweet Friday, mourning him as an “icon of liberation.” He did not provide details. South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said in a statement that Mugabe died in Singapore, where he has received medical treatment in recent years.

His popularity began to rise again after Mnangagwa failed to deliver on promises of economic recovery and appeared to take an even harsher and more repressive stance against critics. Many began to publicly say they missed Mugabe.

Forced to resign amid pressure from the military, his party and the public in November 2017, Mugabe was defiant throughout his long life, railing against the West for what he called its neo-colonialist attitude and urging Africans to take control of their resources — a populist message that was often a hit, even as many nations on the continent shed the strongman model and moved toward democracy.

A target of international sanctions over the years, Mugabe nevertheless enjoyed acceptance among peers in Africa who chose not to judge him in the same way as Britain, the United States and other Western detractors.

“They are the ones who say they gave Christianity to Africa,” Mugabe said of the West during a visit to South Africa in 2016. “We say: ‘We came, we saw and we were conquered.’”

Even as old age took its toll and opposition to his rule increased, he refused to step down until the pressure became unbearable in 2017 as his former allies in the ruling party accused him of grooming his wife, Grace, to take over — ahead of long-serving loyalists such as Mnangagwa, who was fired in November 2017 before returning to take over with the help of the military.

Spry in his impeccably tailored suits, Mugabe maintained a schedule of events and international travel during his rule that defied his advancing age, though signs of weariness mounted. He walked with a limp, fell after stepping off a plane in Zimbabwe, read the wrong speech at the opening of parliament, and appeared to be dozing during a news conference in Japan. However, his longevity and frequently dashed rumors of ill health delighted supporters and infuriated opponents who had sardonically predicted he would live forever.

“Do you want me to punch you to the floor to realize I am still there?” Mugabe told an interviewer from state television who asked him in early 2016 about retirement plans.

After the fighting between black guerrillas and the white rulers of Rhodesia, as Zimbabwe was then known, ended, Mugabe reached out to whites. The self-declared Marxist stressed the need for education and built new schools. Tourism and mining flourished, and Zimbabwe was a regional breadbasket.

However, a brutal military campaign waged against an uprising in western Matabeleland province that ended in 1987 augured a bitter turn in Zimbabwe’s fortunes. As the years went by, Mugabe was widely accused of hanging onto power through violence and vote fraud, notably in a 2008 election that led to a troubled coalition government after regional mediators intervened.

“I have many degrees in violence,” Mugabe once boasted on a campaign trail, raising his fist. “You see this fist, it can smash your face.”

Mugabe was re-elected in 2013 in another ballot marred by alleged irregularities, though he dismissed his critics as sore losers.

Amid the political turmoil, the economy of Zimbabwe, traditionally rich in agriculture and minerals, deteriorated. Factories were closing, unemployment was rising and the country abandoned its currency for the U.S. dollar in 2009 because of hyperinflation.

The economic problems are often traced to the violent seizures of thousands of white-owned farms that began around 2000. Land reform was supposed to take much of the country’s most fertile land — owned by about 4,500 white descendants of mainly British and South African colonial-era settlers — and redistribute it to poor blacks. Instead, Mugabe gave prime farms to ruling party leaders, party loyalists, security chiefs, relatives and cronies.

Mugabe was born in Zvimba, 60 kilometers (40 miles) west of the capital of Harare. As a child, he tended his grandfather’s cattle and goats, fished for bream in muddy water holes, played football and “boxed a lot,” as he recalled later.

Mugabe lacked the easy charisma of Nelson Mandela, the anti-apartheid leader and contemporary who became South Africa’s first black president in 1994 after reconciling with its former white rulers. But he drew admirers in some quarters for taking a hard line with the West, and he could be disarming despite his sometimes harsh demeanor.

“The gift of politicians is never to stop speaking until the people say, ‘Ah, we are tired,’” he said at a 2015 news conference. “You are now tired. I say thank you.”

https://www.apnews.com/a4431dbe792b4a33814e25ca75b4bb68

It was the breadbasket of Africa until him and his cronies liberated it from the white farmers. many he kicked out came to the uk and a lots sent their kids through Lackham college of agriculture up the road from where i live - there are two sides to the story but many of the indigenous families that worked on the farms ended up homeless and jobless.

Originally Posted by NamPikToot

It was the breadbasket of Africa until him and his cronies liberated it from the white farmers.

Yep no doubt that destroyed the countries economy. Fair bit of SA's here in the states that got the fuck out.

Not often you can think ill will towards the dead and be reasonably confident you are with the majority.

Resurrecting cliquish Rhodesia and white colonial rule - the origins for Mugabe's inspirations.
A civilised oligarchy is in order.


Where's that damn feel-good United Nations when ya need 'em....

Zuma and ANC seem to be following a similar path. You'll not find me arguing against the idea of wealth redressing but there has to be balance and a way of managing it so as to ensure the wealth generating businesses continue to support the country.

Corruption is in the African's blood. They really should stop pumping foreign aid into the continent, it serves no purpose.

Originally Posted by harrybarracuda

Corruption is in the African's blood. They really should stop pumping foreign aid into the continent, it serves no purpose.

Add: the discontinuing of covert foreign military presence, as well.

Originally Posted by HuangLao

Add: the discontinuing of covert foreign military presence, as well.

If you know about it, it ain't covert, is it?

My Geography teacher in the early '70s was from Tanzania and hated Mugabe with a passion. Never trust a backward Yorkshireman, Ebagum! was his favourite joke. He loved Africa but never returned, blaming the USA for destroying Rhodesia and other British colonies...

He was a great teacher, had the class building African mud huts on the rugby pitch one weekend.

For some a tyrant, for others a liberator, not so unusual case...

I'm guessing there will be official days of mourning.....

Originally Posted by HuangLao

Add: the discontinuing of covert foreign military presence, as well.

Someone needs to keep the islamic terrorists under control, these tin pot nig nog generals with 100 self-awarded medals don't have a fucking clue.

Can't even rescue schoolgirls from thugs

It is usually in bad taste to say of the recently deceased that his death came far too late. But even those most sentimental about Robert Mugabe, the first leader of Zimbabwe, will admit that if he had been hit by a bus on the streets of Harare 25 years ago, or crushed by a landslide of Chanel bags after one of his wife Grace’s shopping sprees in London or Paris, the world would be a better place. Instead, Mugabe died yesterday in Singapore at the age of 95, far from the country he first liberated from white-minority rule, then laid to waste over a 37-year rule that began brutally and ended in pathetic squalor.

I understand why some might remember Mugabe mistily. He was a hero to the Non-Aligned and to liberation movements everywhere. He behaved with remarkable consistency through the years, and like Nelson Mandela—the liberation figure to whom he is so often unfavorably compared—he endured political imprisonment and emerged somehow stronger rather than weaker for it. To these heroic qualities, Mugabe added a few with special appeal to intellectuals. A teacher by training, he spent his imprisonment in near-constant study, earning degrees in law and administration from the University of London by correspondence. It is said that even while president of Zimbabwe, he sometimes flew to London secretly to browse new titles at Dillons, a huge bookstore in Bloomsbury.

In spite of these highbrow tastes (and an unimposing physical presence), Mugabe became the political figure of choice for the Zimbabwean guerrillas who, during the years in the 1970s after his imprisonment, used Mozambican territory to conduct raids against the Rhodesian military. The Rhodesians hit back against civilian targets, and the black population of the borderlands suffered terribly. Aided by the Chinese, Mugabe prolonged and intensified that war, knowing that as it got worse, international support for regime change would improve. In time, no other moral conclusion was possible: The white-minority government needed to negotiate its own surrender.

The standard way of absolving Mugabe for his wartime tactics is to note the justice of his cause, and the unlikelihood that it would have prevailed without violence. History has long since granted that absolution, and indeed honored Mugabe for his courage. The sins he never even attempted to erase were against his comrades in liberation, whom he treated with brutality and suspicion.

He locked up, tortured, and assassinated members of his movement whom he suspected of loyalty to other guerrilla factions. Once in power, the maniacal power-lust of Mugabe the revolutionary became a state religion, a cult of personality that ensured Zimbabwe under Mugabe would never develop the institutions and goodwill that would allow it to flourish as an independent nation. His ultimate crimes were against his country, and his fellow citizens, whom he abused, starved, and robbed. From 1983 to 1987, Mugabe’s army—trained by North Korea—killed tens of thousands of civilians in the Matabele region of Zimbabwe, on the grounds that a rival revolutionary faction (Soviet- rather than Chinese-backed) still enjoyed support there, and threatened Mugabe’s rule.

Mugabe left his inaugural promise—that “yesterday I fought you as an enemy, [but] today you have become a friend and ally”—unfulfilled. Indeed, he made a mockery of that promise in his actions against anyone even remotely perceived as disloyal. After the genocide in Matabeleland, he turned against white Zimbabweans, sanctioning a grisly demagogue, Chenjerai Hunzvi, to whip up vigilante fervor against white farmers. (Hunzvi called himself “Hitler” and “Zimbabwe’s biggest terrorist.”) The Zimbabwean agricultural industry, the country’s largest earner of foreign currency, collapsed, and by the late 1990s Mugabe began resorting to mass-printing of currency to make budget.

I first visited Zimbabwe around that time, with about 300 U.S. dollars stuffed in my socks. That fragrant currency, so desperately coveted by Zimbabweans aware that their government was laser-printing their own money into worthlessness, lasted me nearly a month. For $2, I could get a clean bed and a full English breakfast; for $5, I could eat in the best restaurants in Mutare. Many Zimbabweans, by contrast, had nothing to eat at all. Stores sold their stock for outrageously low prices, with no hope of profit, just of slower immiseration. Dillons of Bloomsbury might have had the newest titles, but I once bought a hardback novel in Harare for three-quarters of one cent.


Hyperinflation is the perfect strategy for the corrupt, because whoever is in charge can designate cronies to receive the privilege of changing money at the government rate and ration out hard currency to everyone else in meager quantities. Mugabe’s allies became rich, while ordinary people were reduced to starvation and supplication. Those who challenged this arrangement seldom escaped punishment.

Once, I was riding a train from Harare to Bulawayo, and I shared a first-class car with a Dutch tourist and a government official from the capital. The government official was well fed and talkative. The Dutchman, who liked horses, said that he had tried to visit the polo grounds, which were marked on his tourist map of Harare. Suddenly, while he peered over the fence in search of ponies, a Toyota screeched up next to him. Men grabbed him by his wrists and crammed him into the back seat, before leading him to the basement of a nearby building. The polo grounds were Mugabe’s private turf, he was told, and his security worried that he was a mercenary scouting the area. (Mugabe survived many assassination attempts.) The government official gave a low whistle when he heard the description of the building, and told us that few had ever emerged from that basement without injury.

Mugabe’s reputation remained sterling in many circles through the mid-1990s, when he still had the shine of liberation and had not yet unleashed his vigilantes. (The international community was content to ignore the mass violence against blacks.) Universities granted him honorary degrees. If he had stepped down, he could have retired to a life of bibliophilism and listening to his favorite singers, Bing Crosby and Pat Boone. Or he could have been hit by a bus. Instead, he showed in the last two decades of his reign the same qualities that had made him effective as a revolutionary: conspiratorial fanaticism, unwillingness to change, sociopathic treatment of anyone questioning his rule.

By the time of Mugabe’s removal by coup d’état in 2017, he was widely ridiculed for dozing in public, and had become a mere mascot for the corrupt elites he had placed in power—chief among them his second wife, Grace. Elements of those elites, led by the military, removed him gently, not least to ensure that the even more sociopathic Grace would not succeed him. Mandela was mourned by the world. Mugabe, whose body is still in transit from Singapore, will have a far smaller funeral crowd, and more than a few of those will attend just to make sure that he’s finally, at long last, dead.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/ar...ewsstand-ideas

And Singapore has no morals taking his ill-gotten money to live out his last days while Zimbabwe is still a complete mess.

Originally Posted by TheRealKW

And Singapore has no morals taking his ill-gotten money to live out his last days while Zimbabwe is still a complete mess.

He's been going there for medical treatment for years.

But has he been there since April?

6 August 2019

Zimbabwe's former leader Robert Mugabe, 95, has been in hospital in Singapore since April, his successor Emmerson Mnangagwa has said.
Mr Mugabe was making "good progress" and could be discharged soon, Mr Mnangagwa added.


He did not disclose Mr Mugabe's illness. In November, he said the ex-president was unable to walk because of ill-health and old age.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-49250554

Originally Posted by harrybarracuda

Mr Mugabe was making "good progress"

Originally Posted by bsnub

Mugabe dies

Err... OK.

Agree with KW this piece of shite landed where shite is accepted for money - chinks don't give a fuk as long as there's a buck - scum

Originally Posted by NamPikToot

Agree with KW this piece of shite landed where shite is accepted for money - chinks don't give a fuk as long as there's a buck - scum

This amoral clause could easily apply most everywhere, as historic standing has merit.
Might check in the mirror first before expanding on who's of the highest ethos and whose not.

Blinded.

Originally Posted by harrybarracuda

They really should stop pumping foreign aid into the continent, it serves no purpose.

So true. There are a few good stories about this in one of Paul Theroux's books, Dark Star Safari. The continent is probably in a worse place than it was 50 years ago (for a number of reasons including corruption), despite the huge amount of aid pumped in.

Originally Posted by HuangLao

This amoral clause could easily apply most everywhere, as historic standing has merit.
Might check in the mirror first before expanding on who's of the highest ethos and whose not.

Blinded.

You haven't got a fucking clue have you Jeff?

Originally Posted by hallelujah

So true. There are a few good stories about this in one of Paul Theroux's books, Dark Star Safari. The continent is probably in a worse place than it was 50 years ago (for a number of reasons including corruption), despite the huge amount of aid pumped in.

I don't know if any but Mugabe ever managed 500 BILLION per cent inflation.

Foreign aid to Africa only replaces some of the money stolen by the leaders.
Dambisa Moyo ,a Zambian writer said aid should stop so it would make the leaders accountable to their people,
near all African leaders and their cronies are totally corrupt,they want to stay in power to steal and Mugabe
was up with the best.
It was a pity Mugabe was not killed during the bush war,was a few attempts but he was forewarned and never went near the action.
He was scheming coward who only wanted complete power just like his heroes like Mao,Hitler and Stalin.
He ruined a prosperous well run self-sufficient country that even in the war years exported food to black African countries when they could not even manage feed themselves though the food was unlabeled because the black leaders did not want to admit to their people the white Rhodesian farmers grew it.

^ There's also the issue of western aid agencies not doing their research on the ground either and failing to understand the local culture.

So much waste.