Instead of leading his people to the "promised land," Mugabe, the first prime minister of the newly-named Zimbabwe, has amassed a fortune for himself, his family and followers and has presided over the murder, torture and starvation of those who oppose him. This biography offers some explanations for Mugabe's behavior. With the death of his wife in 1992, a moderating influence was lost, and as the years go by, he continues to show himself intolerant of any opposition as he proceeds toward the creation of a one-party state, even though evidence suggests that his country is in terminal decline.
Instead of leading his people to the "promised land," Mugabe, the first prime minister of the newly-named Zimbabwe, has amassed a fortune for himself, his family and followers and has presided over the murder, torture and starvation of those who oppose him. This biography offers some explanations for Mugabe's behavior. With the death of his wife in 1992, a moderating influence was lost, and as the years go by, he continues to show himself intolerant of any opposition as he proceeds toward the creation of a one party state, even though evidence suggests that his country is in terminal decline.
This book is a philosopher’s view into the chaotic postcolony of Zimbabwe, delving into Robert Mugabe’s Will to Power. The Will to Power refers to a spirited desire for power and overwhelming fear of powerlessness that Mugabe artfully concealed behind performances of invincibility. Nietzsche’s philosophical concept of the Will to Power is interpreted and expanded in this book to explain how a tyrant is produced and enabled, and how he performs his tyranny. Achille Mbembe’s novel concept of the African postcolony is mobilised to locate Zimbabwe under Mugabe as a domain of the madness of power. The book describes Mugabe’s development from a vulnerable youth who was intoxicated with delusions of divine commission to a monstrous tyrant of the postcolony who mistook himself for a political messiah. This account exposes how post-political euphoria about independence from colonialism and the heroism of one leader can easily lead to the degeneration of leadership. However, this book is as much about bad leadership as it is about bad followership. Away from Eurocentric stereotypes where tyranny is isolated to African despots, this book shows how Mugabe is part of an extended family of tyrants of the world. He fought settler colonialism but failed to avoid being infected by it, and eventually became a native coloniser to his own people. The book concludes that Zimbabwe faces not only a simple struggle for democracy and human rights, but a Himalayan struggle for liberation from genocidal native colonialism that endures even after Robert Mugabe’s dethronement and death.
What is distinctive about this book is its interdisciplinary approach towards deciphering the complex meanings of President Gabriel Mugabe of Zimbabwe making it possible to evaluate Mugabe from a historical, political, philosophical, gender, literal and decolonial perspectives. It is concerned with capturing various meanings of Mugabeism.
Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe sharply divides opinion and embodies the contradictions of his country’s history and political culture. As a symbol of African liberation and a stalwart opponent of white rule, he was respected and revered by many. This heroic status contrasted sharply, in the eyes of his rivals and victims, with repeated cycles of gross human rights violations. Mugabe presided over the destruction of a vibrant society, capital flight, and mass emigration precipitated by the policies of his government, resulting in his demonic image in Western media. This timely biography addresses the coup, led by some of Mugabe’s closest associates, that forced his resignation after thirty-seven years in power. Sue Onslow and Martin Plaut explain Mugabe’s formative experiences as a child and young man; his role as an admired Afro-nationalist leader in the struggle against white settler rule; and his evolution into a political manipulator and survivalist. They also address the emergence of political opposition to his leadership and the uneasy period of coalition government. Ultimately, they reveal the complexity of the man who stamped his personality on Zimbabwe’s first four decades of independence.
This book is the first to tackle the difficult and complex politics of transition in Zimbabwe, with deep historical analysis. Its focus is on a very problematic political culture that is proving very hard to transcend. At the center of this culture is an unstable but resilient ‘nationalist-military’ alliance crafted during the anti-colonial liberation struggle in the 1970s. Inevitably, violence, misogyny and masculinity are constitutive of the political culture. Economically speaking, the culture is that of a bureaucratic, parasitic, primitive accumulation and corruption, which include invasion and emptying of state coffers by a self-styled ‘Chimurenga aristocracy.’ However, this Chimurenga aristocracy is not cohesive, as the politics that led to Robert Mugabe’s ousting from power was preceded by dirty and protracted internal factionalism. At the center of the factional politics was the ‘first family’:Robert Mugabe and his wife, Grace Mugabe. This book offers a multidisciplinary examination of the complex contemporary politics in Zimbabwe, taking seriously such issues as gender, misogyny, militarism, violence, media, identity, modes of accumulation, the ethnicization of politics, attempts to open lines of credit and FDI, national healing, and the national question as key variables not only of a complete political culture but also of difficult transitional politics.
For more than a decade, Ian Smith served as Rhodesia's Prime Minister during the era of white minority rule. Following his death in 2007, he is still a man with the ability to excite powerful emotions. To some he is anbsp;leader whose formidable integrity led him into head-to-head confrontation with the Labor government of Britain in the 1960s. To others he is a demon best known for stating "I don't believe in black majority rule ever, not in a thousand years," for staunchly opposing Britain's insistence that majority rule be implemented before the nation’s independence, and for imprisoning the leadershipnbsp;of the newly emergednbsp;black nationalist movement.nbsp;In this revealing autobiography, Smith tells his own side of the story and reveals how he sought to keep Rhodesia on a path to full democracy during the West's decolonization of Africa. He tells the remarkable story behind the signing of the country’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence and addresses the excesses of power that the current president, Robert Mugabe, has used to create the virtual dictatorship which exists in Zimbabwe today. This is a revealing and prescient historical document from a controversial figure charting the rise and fall of a once-great nation.
The crisis that has engulfed Zimbabwe since 2000 is not simply a struggle against dictatorship. It is also a struggle over ideas and deep-seated historical issues, still unresolved from the independence process, that both Robert Mugabe's ZANU PF regime and Morgan Tsvangirai's MDC are vying first to define and then to address. This book traces the role of politicians and public intellectuals in media, civil society and the academy in producing and disseminating a politically usable historical narrative concerning ideas about patriotism, race, land, human rights and sovereignty. It raises pressing questions about the role of contemporary African intellectuals in the making of democratic societies. In so doing the book adds a new and rich dimension to the study of African politics, which is often diluted by the neglect of ideas.
Robert Mugabe, one of the world’s most infamous dictators, rose to power in Rhodesia, the southern African region now known as independent Zimbabwe. As a leader in Rhodesia’s nationalist resistance movement of the 1970s, Mugabe mobilized his compatriots in their struggle for control of the white-ruled African nation, which had declared independence from Great Britain in 1965. The bloody civil war finally ended with Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980. As the president of the newly free nation, Mugabe was a beacon for black African self-rule, raising hopes on the continent and around the world. However, through a series of ill-conceived economic programs and a disastrously mismanaged land-redistribution scheme, Mugabe and his corrupt government brought ruin to his homeland. Creating a harsh climate of fear, brutality, and zero tolerance for opposition, Mugabe’s rule drained a once prosperous nation of its economic and human resources. In Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, learn more about the internal workings of one of the modern world’s most devastating dictatorships.
