Robert Mugabe and the Will to Power in an African Postcolony

Robert Mugabe and the Will to Power in an African Postcolony

Author: William J. Mpofu

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Published: 2020-08-29

Total Pages: 429

ISBN-13: 9783030478780

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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.


Robert Mugabe and the Will to Power in an African Postcolony

Robert Mugabe and the Will to Power in an African Postcolony

Author: William J. Mpofu

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-03-04

Total Pages: 410

ISBN-13: 3030478793

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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.


Mugabeism?

Mugabeism?

Author: Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2015-12-26

Total Pages: 641

ISBN-13: 1137543469

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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.


Mugabe

Mugabe

Author: Stephen Chan

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2019-04-18

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 1838608877

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On 21st November 2017 Robert Mugabe resigned as President of Zimbabwe after 37 years in power. A week earlier the military had seized control of the country and forced him to step down as leader of the ruling Zanu-PF party. In this revised and updated edition of his classic biography, Stephen Chan seeks to explain and interpret Mugabe in his role as a key player in the politics of Southern Africa. In this masterly portrait of one of Africa's longest-serving leaders, Mugabe's character unfolds with the ebb and flow of triumph and crisis. Mugabe's story is Zimbabwe's - from the post-independence hopes of idealism and reconciliation to electoral victory, the successful intervention in the international politics of Southern Africa and the resistance to South Africa's policy of apartheid. But a darker picture emerged early with the savage crushing of the Matabeleland rising, the elimination of political opponents, growing corruption and disastrous intervention in the Congo war, all worsened by drought and the HIV/AIDS crisis. Stephen Chan's highly revealing biography, based on close personal knowledge of Zimbabwe, depicts the emergence and eventual downfall of a ruthless and single-minded despot amassing and tightly clinging to political power. We follow the triumphant nationalist leader who reconciled all in the new multiracial Zimbabwe, degenerate into a petty tyrant consumed by hubris and self-righteousness and ultimately face an ignominious endgame at the hands of his own army.


The Zimbabwean Crisis after Mugabe

The Zimbabwean Crisis after Mugabe

Author: Tendai Mangena

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-12-30

Total Pages: 283

ISBN-13: 1000520994

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This book examines the ways in which political discourses of crisis and ‘newness’ are (re)produced, circulated, naturalised, received and contested in Post-Mugabe Zimbabwe. Going beyond the ordinariness of conventional political, human and social science methods, the book offers new and engaging multi-disciplinary approaches that treat discourse and language as important sites to encounter the politics of contested representations of the Zimbabwean crisis in the wake of the 2017 coup. The book centres discourse on new approaches to contestations around the discursive framing of various aspects of the socio-economic and political crisis related to significant political changes in Zimbabwe post-2017. Contributors in this volume, most of whom experienced the complex transition first-hand, examine some of the ways in which language functions as a socio-cultural and political mechanism for creating imaginaries, circulating, defending and contesting conceptions, visions, perceptions and knowledges of the post-Mugabe turn in the Zimbabwean crisis and its management by the "New Dispensation". This book will be of interest to scholars of African studies, postcolonial studies, language/discourse studies, African politics and culture.


Robert Mugabe

Robert Mugabe

Author: Stephen Chan

Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 9780472113361

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An informed, insightful biography of Zimbabwe's first--and only--president which tells of his fateful path from revolutionary patriot to ruthless dictator


Robert Mugabe

Robert Mugabe

Author: Martin Meredith

Publisher:

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13:

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Martin Meredith pieces together the riveting and tragic political story of what happened to Zimbabwe and to a leader who once represented one of the world's best hopes for democratic Africa.


Robert Mugabe

Robert Mugabe

Author: Sue Onslow

Publisher: Ohio University Press

Published: 2018-03-05

Total Pages: 167

ISBN-13: 082144638X

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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.


What Happens After Mugabe?

What Happens After Mugabe?

Author: Geoff Hill

Publisher: Penguin Random House South Africa

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13:

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After 25 years in power, Robert Mugabe is under increasing pressure to step down and allow democratic reform in Zimbabwe. Amnesty International rates the country among the worst for torture and abuse of human rights, the Commonwealth has suspended Zimbabwe's membership, and even in Africa there is growing outrage at what some see as a rogue state. In the past five years, millions of words have been written about the tragedy -- including more than a dozen books -- but few have focused on what might happen when freedom comes. As things stand, schools and hospitals have collapsed, a third of the population lives in exile and 3 000 people die of AIDS every week. Once Africa's second-biggest exporter of food, 70 per cent of the country lives under conditions of famine in the wake of violent land reform. What will it take to rebuild Zimbabwe? This gripping, incisive book discusses many relevant issues and asks serious questions, including: - Will 4 million exiles go home to a country with 80 per cent unemployment? - Should there be war-crimes trials? - Can the economy be revived? -Where will the billions of dollars come from that are needed to put things right? What Happens After Mugabe is meticulously researched, with material drawn from hundreds of interviews inside Zimbabwe and among exile communities in Britain, the US and South Africa.