Chapters
Shownotes Transcript
Ryan Reynolds here from Int Mobile. With the price of just about everything going up during inflation, we thought we'd bring our prices
down. So to help us, we brought in a reverse auctioneer, which is apparently a thing. Mint Mobile, unlimited premium wireless. How did you get 30, 30, how did you get 30, how did you get 20, 20, 20, how did you get 20, 20, how did you get 15, 15, 15, 15, just 15 bucks a month? Sold! Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch. $45 upfront payment equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on first three month plan only. Taxes and fees extra. Speeds lower above 40 gigabytes each detail. It's 1934. We're in Kutama.
a Catholic mission village in southeastern Africa. This settlement lies about 50 miles west of the capital, Salisbury, in British-ruled southern Rhodesia. A local boy, 10 years old, sits reading outside his grandparents' house. A bit of a loner, bright but shy, Robert Mugabe has grown up in the shadow of his elder brother. It's Michael, charismatic and highly intelligent, who always impresses the Jesuit priests at school.
Everyone expects great things of him. During term time, Michael and Robert live with their grandparents here in Kutama, though today the elder boy is visiting an aunt seven miles away. In characteristically energetic fashion, when he returns home, Michael runs the whole way. But as he jogs back into the village, it soon becomes clear that something is seriously wrong. Unknowingly, Michael is drunk from a gourd previously used to hold poison.
Locusts plague the crops in the area, and the grass must be sprayed regularly to keep them at bay. Even a tiny drop of the pesticide can be deadly. Young Robert watches on in horror as his teenage brother falls to the floor, clutching his stomach. Anxiously, their grandparents debate what to do. They don't dare take Michael to hospital in Salisbury. Rumor has it that the doctors there cut patients open at the drop of a hat. Instead, they call for the boy's mother.
But by the time Bona Mugabe arrives on the scene, Michael's condition has deteriorated. She begs for help from one of the local Catholic priests, an Irishman called Father O'Hay. He has a medical background. O'Hay is shocked at the state in which he finds the boy. The priest takes Bona outside, explaining that only God can save him now. Bona is a deeply religious woman, and she prays for her son to be spared. But within a matter of minutes, Michael is dead.
For the Mugabe family, losing their golden child is a crippling blow. But it won't be the last. Later that year, Bona's husband Gabriel walks out on them, starting a new family sixty miles away in Bulawayo. Devastated, she sinks into a deep depression. Her great consolation, as well as her closest confidant, is young Robert. The boy has always seemed older than his years,
He and his mother become inseparable, attending mass together no fewer than eight times every week. Gradually she transfers all the hopes she once held for Michael onto Robert instead. With self-punishing discipline, he throws himself into his studies. His teachers, not least Father O'Hay, are impressed. As a black child from a poor rural family, the boy's prospects in Rhodesia are severely limited.
But if anyone from Kutama can go far, the villagers agree, it's going to be this Robert Mugabe. What no one can predict is quite how far he will rise, or the dark path down which he will lead his people. For almost four decades, Robert Mugabe held the reins of power with an iron grip. As a youthful idealist, he dreamt of black majority rule
and he went on to lead a revolutionary movement that put Zimbabwe, as southern Rhodesia would come to be known, back in African hands. But once in power, he presided over a regime of corruption and brutality, lining the pockets of his cronies while torturing and abusing his own people. In many ways, Mugabe doesn't fit the picture of a typical dictator.
Cool and aloof, he lacked the larger-than-life personality of his contemporaries, Muammar Gaddafi and Idi Amin. He ruled quasi-democratically, preferring to rig elections and intimidate political opponents rather than seize power outright through military force. He cultivated a statesman-like image, taking tea with Queen Elizabeth II in his finest Savile Rose suits. Many of his people loved him.
enthusiastically voting again and again for the man who'd freed them from white minority rule. But beneath the surface, Mugabe governed through fear. Dissent was crushed, independent media shut down, opponents removed from the scene in a series of convenient accidents. He was a master manipulator, scapegoating one minority after another for his country's woes. So how did he come to power and cling on until the age of 93?
despite driving Africa's most prosperous country to economic ruin? And what did it take, ultimately, for his cabal of cronies to turn their backs on him? From Noisa, this is part one of the Mugabe story. And this is Real Dictators. To understand the tyrant Robert Mugabe grew into, it's important to know where he came from and the unusual combination of factors that forged his personality.
Dr Sue Onslow is director of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies at the University of London and co-author of African Leaders of the 20th Century, Mugabe. He was an extraordinary amalgam of his formative experiences within his family, the formative experiences of his education, the wider colonial environment, and also the formative experiences as he was drawn into the energy and dynamism of African nationalism
He was a remarkable and complex individual. Rhodesia is a self-governing British colony established in 1923, only a year before Robert Mugabe's birth. It takes its name from the British mining magnate Cecil Rhodes, through his British South Africa Company. In the 19th century and into the 20th, Rhodes and his successors plundered this land for its mineral wealth.
fighting a brutal war against the indigenous people in which more than 50,000 of them were killed. A conflict known in the local language as the Chimuranga. In the 1930s and 40s, the legacy of violent oppression remains. Rhodesia is a deeply segregated society, ruled by a white minority. To grow up black is to be a second-class citizen.
For Robert Mugabe, it's the Catholic Church that offers the possibility of a brighter future.
It was a tough existence in an impoverished community, but he was rescued by his love of learning and the input from Father Jerome O'Haye, who really took on a mentor role for Robert Mugabe, who spotted in this studious child a love of learning, instilled in him great discipline. His mother also instilled in him the value of education and had invested in her son a faith that he would achieve great things.
Pious and disciplined, the young Mugabe seems an obvious candidate for the priesthood. But under Father O'Haye's tutelage, in his late teens he discovers a different vocation, setting his sights on becoming a teacher instead. It's a highly respectable job for a boy from his background. O'Haye enrolls Mugabe in the local teacher training college, helping cover the fees out of his own pocket. But despite the priest's faith in him, Mugabe is all too aware of how he's seen by many of the whites.
There's a very powerful anecdote of his childhood friend, Edison's Vogbo, describing seeing the vicar's wife disinfecting the sofa after he and young Robert Mugabe had been to tea. I mean, that would have been crushing to anyone. The segregated queues at the bus stop, in the post office, the realities of day-to-day street harassment by white colonial youths.
It was petty apartheid. It wasn't grand apartheid of South Africa, but it was day-to-day racial humiliation. At the age of 21, Mugabe graduates with a teaching diploma, the first of a dizzying array of qualifications that he will accumulate over the years. He leaves Kutama and begins his career in education, but he continues to spend every spare moment with his head in his books. After four years, Mugabe wins a scholarship to Fort Hare University in South Africa.
where a young Nelson Mandela has recently been expelled for taking part in a student protest. Unlike Mandela, Mugabe makes it as far as graduation, and on his return to Rhodesia, he begins two more degrees by correspondence. Nathan Dodso grew up in Zimbabwe and later worked there as an international journalist. He's now a senior lecturer at the University of Northampton. Everyone in Zimbabwe, you know, focused on education.
It didn't matter where you are, in the rural areas, in the cities, the focus was to get a good education because you always thought that is what will set you free. Mugabe being an educator himself, I think, saw the importance of it because throughout his life, he was constantly gaining more and more degrees to the point where he became one of the most educated leaders in the world.
He's a very intelligent man with a forensic ability to deconstruct argument and to come back with alternative views. This sense of being a teacher lasted with him throughout his life. In fact, he was known when he was president of Zimbabwe as the headmaster. So very much an austere, authoritative figure who came to believe not only the value of his learning, but also that he had all the right answers.
Throughout his twenties, Mugabe becomes fascinated by some of the radical political ideas he first encountered in South Africa. At Fort Hare, a group of communist students would gather to discuss socialist literature. Back home in Rhodesia, Mugabe orders his own copies of Das Kapital and some other Marxist tracts from a mail-order company based in London. But it's not until he travels to Ghana, well into his thirties, that his political consciousness is really awakened.
In 1957, the country achieves independence from British rule, thanks largely to its charismatic socialist leader Kwame Nkrumah. Ghana, until recently known as the Gold Coast, is an inspiring African success story. For Mugabe, it offers the glimpse of a possible future for Rhodesia if the white minority can only be encouraged to give up their power. Increasingly, Mugabe is convinced that they'll never be persuaded to go willingly.
In 1958, Nkrumah hosts the first all-African people's conference in the Ghanaian capital, Accra. Mugabe attends and is transfixed by the vision of an Africa freed from white rule.
Robert Mugabe attended a number of Nkrumah's rallies and was fired up by this charismatic emphasis on African nationalism, African transformation. And he's also cross-fertilized with his Marxist outlook, ideas of the role of the state in the economic transformation of society, the role of the party in terms of organization.
There was this amalgam of Afro-nationalism, Pan-Africanism and Marxism. Living in Takoradi, a coastal city 120 miles from Accra, Mugabe is supposed to be focusing on his work at the local teacher training college. But for once, he finds himself getting distracted, and not just by politics, by one of his new colleagues, a dynamic Ghanaian 20-something called Sally Hayfront.
Theirs is not exactly a traditional courtship. In three years they never once see a movie together, but they do find a powerful and lasting bond in their shared passion for the new African nationalism. Before long, Robert and Sally are engaged. The only question is where they should make their home together. In the new utopia of Ghana? Or back in southern Rhodesia, where the idea of black majority rule is beginning to gain traction as well? Activists are proposing the country change its name.
rejecting the colonial moniker in favour of Zimbabwe. In the language of Mugabe's Shona tribe, it means House of Stones and refers to some of the country's most ancient monuments. In 1960, Robert Mugabe brings Sally home with him, ostensibly to introduce her to his mother before the wedding, but it's a holiday that will change the course of both their lives.
The land down under has never been easier to reach. United Airlines has more flights between the U.S. and Australia than any other U.S. airline, so you can fly nonstop to destinations like Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane. Explore dazzling cities, savor the very best of Aussie cuisine, and get up close and personal with the wildlife. Who doesn't want to hold a koala? Go to united.com slash Australia to book your adventure.
On July 19th, a man called Leopold Takawira is arrested under the Unlawful Organizations Act. A Catholic teacher, Mugabe knows from his school days, Takawira has become a leading figure in the nationalist movement. That evening, Mugabe joins a crowd of around 7,000 people intending to march the eight miles from the black suburb of Highfield to the Prime Minister's office in Salisbury. The protesters are stopped by Rhodesian riot police in the township of Harare,
two miles from the city centre. But the demonstration continues, and by noon the following day, their numbers have swelled to 40,000. A platform is hastily constructed for activists to address the crowd. And one of the men asked to speak is Robert Mugabe. Introduced as a brilliant scholar with multiple degrees, Mugabe speaks passionately about his experiences in Ghana, offering a vision for the future of his own country, in which blacks are no longer second-class citizens.
When he's finished, the crowd erupts in ecstatic applause. Without really meaning to, Mugabe has just become a key member of the nationalist movement, and it's clear that there's no going back. He resigns from his teaching post in Ghana and devotes himself to activism. Three months later, he's elected as publicity secretary for the new National Democratic Party.
It doesn't take long for Mugabe to clash with the NDP's leader, a veteran trade unionist called Joshua Nkomo, a larger-than-life figure, quite literally a 21 stone. Nkomo sees himself as the father of Zimbabwean nationalism. But to the wiry young Mugabe, his ideas are just not radical enough. There was a rivalry between the man of greatest standing and visibility and the younger man.
I think Mugabe was also influenced by ideas of the importance and the role of violence, that the colonial state was inherently repressive and violent. Therefore, violence was necessary as a cathartic manifestation of the wish and will of the people. It was a valid tool. Robert Mugabe opposed Nkomo's apparent willingness to negotiate. With the nationalists in the ascendancy, the white minority government concedes ground.
A new constitution put forward in 1961 begins the desegregation of Rhodesian society, as well as offering the NDP limited representation in Parliament. When Nkomo agrees to the proposal, Mugabe is incensed. To his mind, the government's offer of just under a quarter of all parliamentary seats is not nearly enough. Mugabe and his comrades aren't the only ones who are angry.
On the other side of the political spectrum, the far-right Rhodesian Front sees a surge in popularity among white voters. Whites still control most of the country's politics. In an election the following year, the Front sweeps to victory. The NDP reforms as the Zimbabwe African People's Union, or ZAPU for short. Its leaders are in two minds as to what to do next.
Nkomo favors leaving the country and setting up a government in exile, while Mugabe believes they must start training soldiers to fight. The disagreement eventually causes a split in the nationalist ranks between Nkomo's ZAPU and a breakaway group known as ZANU, the Zimbabwe African National Union. Robert Mugabe will have to wait to become ZANU's leader. For now, he takes up the position of Secretary General.
The political dispute soon spills into violence, with petrol bombs, arson attacks, and gang warfare between the rival supporters. It doesn't help that Zappu and Zanu are divided almost entirely along traditional tribal lines, and Komo's supporters come from the Ndebele community in the west of the country. Zanu takes its support from the majority Shona tribe. The two factions seem as determined to fight each other as they are to oppose the white regime.
Then, in 1964, the Rhodesian Front government moves against the two sets of nationalists simultaneously. The Front's new prime minister is a bullish former RAF fighter pilot named Ian Smith. He orders both ZANU and ZAPU to be banned, with their leaders thrown into prison. The Rhodesian security forces had a sophisticated surveillance state.
So there would be sweeping up political dissidents, political activists, combined with the putting down of street protest and street violence. I mean, we see this time and again, how a repressive state picks up those it deems to be the political dissidents and charges them with draconian legislation and then issues draconian prison sentences precisely to silence them.
Like many of his comrades, Robert Mugabe finds himself saddled with an indefinite prison sentence. Now married to Sally and with an infant son at home, the timing isn't exactly ideal. But he's determined to make the most of his time inside, signing up for three more correspondence degrees and making sure to educate his prison mates as well as himself. These months, these years, however long it takes, must not be wasted, he tells them.
They continue to read, they debate politics. Robert Mugabe continues to teach. So in a way, the debates around the nationalist movement take place inside Rhodesia's prisons, not in the wider community, because they disappear from view. There's no reference to them in the mainstream press. There's no mention of them on the radio. So this is a struggle that goes on inside prison rather than within the country at large. With the Black nationalists marginalised,
the far-right government sets its sights on another enemy, Great Britain. There's no love lost between Ian Smith and the new Labour administration of Harold Wilson in London, which sees the Rhodesian Front as the party of backward-looking racists. It was anti-communist, it was anti-African nationalist, it was anti-socialist, and it was anti-British. Yet they believed themselves to be the repository of British values, of European values, of civilisation.
So a view that deviant Britain under the socialists and Harold Wilson had gone to the dogs. This was a bankrupt country, but that Rhodesia, this exciting new possibility that they could launch this idea based on these racial hierarchies and build a country, which of course went directly against the tide of international opinion and racial opinion. They were swimming against the tides of history. In 1965...
The Rhodesian Front issues a unilateral declaration of independence, severing Rhodesia from Britain for good. But for Mugabe, it will be the action they take, or rather refuse to take, the following year that will confirm his personal hatred of the white regime. After more than two years inside, Robert Mugabe has grown used to the routines of prison life. In many ways they suit his ascetic, highly disciplined personality.
Every morning he wakes at 4:30 am, begins the day with meditation, and then buries himself in his books. Meals, exercise, and social interaction all take place at regular, specified times. So when a guard pays an unscheduled visit to his cell, one day in December 1966, Mugabe knows that something is amiss. Mugabe is led through the prison to an interview room, but not for interrogation this time. His sister Sabina is there.
Her eyes are red, her cheeks streaked with tears. Under the watchful eye of a Rhodesian special branch officer, Sabina tells Mugabe the awful news: his beloved three-year-old son, Michael, is dead. The boy had been staying with Sally and her parents in Ghana when he was struck down with cerebral malaria. Mugabe is floored. For once, his cool, aloof facade cracks, and he weeps inconsolably as he's led back to his cell.
For several days he barely speaks to the Tsar new comrades locked up with him. But it's what happens next that stings almost as much as the loss itself. Mugabe petitions Prime Minister Smith for a temporary release, so that he can travel to Ghana to bury his son. The prison authorities are confident that he can be trusted to return, but Smith personally rejects the request. Mugabe remains in jail. Sally is left to grieve alone. "It was grotesque at multiple levels.
It was grotesque in terms of its violation of the importance of grieving and acknowledging the death in Roman Catholic practice, but also in Zimbabwean practice. It was an enormous, enormous emotional blow to Robert Mugabe. And of course, he and Sally Mugabe never had other children. It was a lasting tragedy as well as an immediate tragedy, which no parent ever gets over.
For Robert Mugabe, it entrenched his bitterness against the colonial system and his resolve. It scarred his soul. It's another eight years before Mugabe is finally released from jail. By this time, his fellow inmates have chosen him as the new leader of ZANU, following a vote of no confidence in the previous leader. Dr. Chipo Dendere is a Zimbabwean-born political scientist based at Amherst College in the United States.
He was educated and he was well-spoken. They knew that they needed somebody who would be able to fit this narrative of a public leader. People didn't realize how sinister and how power-hungry he would become. But outside the prison walls, almost no one knows who Mugabe is. During his time in jail, ZANU has built up its military wing. The Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army, or ZANLA, has been growing.
Based in neighboring Mozambique, this guerrilla force has been crossing the border at night to clash with Rhodesian government troops. On occasion they've battled Joshua and Como's rival nationalists as well. And Como's men are operating out of Zambia. The multi-layered conflict has come to be known as the Second Chimurenga, harking back to the colonial war in the late 19th century. To cement his position as the new political leader of ZANU,
Mugabe knows he will have to get his Zandla fighters based in Mozambique on side. Having spent a decade hidden away in jail, that's a tall order. The one man he really needs to win over is Zandla's military chief, Josiah Tungogara.
During the Liberation War, Zanler, with its very tough and ruthless military commanders, certainly enjoyed a reputation and a standing within the wider movement that eclipsed Robert Mugabe. Because Robert Mugabe was not a successful combatant. He was a civilian.
He was the very antithesis of the big-shouldered bombastic military leader. He was seen as quite demure, bookish, the political operator, but certainly not the leader of a successful revolutionary movement achieved through armed force. The Rhodesian Front government released Mugabe from prison in the hope that he would attend peace talks in Zambia, geared towards a negotiated settlement with the white regime.
In fact, Mugabe is bitterly opposed to this notion. He is sure he can beat the enemy on the battlefield. Ian Smith is soon regretting his decision to set him free. In April 1975, following the arrest of several close allies, Mugabe is forced underground. He uses his old Catholic networks to evade the authorities. With the help of a sympathetic nun, he is smuggled across the Mozambique border.
It takes about a year for Mugabe to secure the support of the key guerrillas in Mozambique, and another year before he is formally elected as ZANU president. But gradually, he wins everyone round. He may be bookish, but he carries himself with the steely authority of the headmaster, and the fighting men come to respect his resolve. Despite his slight frame, Robert Mugabe can be an intimidating physical presence, as journalist Nathan Dodzer will observe some years later.
The first time I actually saw him, I was called. I was not actually dressed for work or anything like that. I had three-quarter length shorts. And I remember walking into the state house and one of his press officers at the time says, we can't introduce you to the president dressed like that. So when I did, you know, walked into the office and I remember him just staring at me because the shorts, you know.
A friend of mine, another former colleague, said that the first time he met him, when he caught his eyes, he felt very much intimidated. I mean, you can imagine someone to command a guerrilla army had to demand a level of respect. It doesn't have to say anything. It just has to look at you. With his leadership of ZANU signed and sealed, Mugabe throws himself into the Chimurenga. Wisely, he leaves the military strategy to Tongogara.
focusing instead on propaganda efforts within Zimbabwe, as well as securing foreign support for the armed struggle. Despite his Marxist credentials, he finds the Soviet Union largely unresponsive. They've already thrown their hat in with Joshua Nkomo's rival Nationalist Army. So instead, Mugabe rallies material assistance from the Chinese, who supply generous quantities of weapons.
That didn't mean that they were the foot soldiers and the proxies of Beijing. But there was a solidarity, a broad front, a popular front, if you like, in struggling against white-majority regimes which represented white monopoly capitalism. From Mozambique, Mugabe's fighters rely on the support of the local peasantry to carry out their military incursions into Zimbabwe.
Those who were caught helping the rebels know they faced devastating consequences at the hands of the Rhodesian government soldiers. Gabriel Schumba grew up in Chivi, part of Zimbabwe's Mishingo province. During the liberation war, he was a child of preschool age. He remembers how, on occasion, the adults in his village would decamp to the mountains to hold all-night vigils, known as punggwes for the guerrillas, leaving Gabriel and his siblings home alone.
When my mother and father would go there, they would leave us alone with my sister, my young sister, and they would lock us up in the house. So at one point, when Ian Smith's soldiers came at night and they found that the village was almost deserted, they guessed that to all intents and purposes these people are in cahoots with the comrades or the guerrillas.
So they started burning the village down. We were only saved when one of those who had failed to attend the all-night vigil heard us screaming and the soldiers
These white soldiers, they turned back, broke the door down to find that there were children in there. And that's how we were saved, with the roof toppling over, burning immediately after we had been rescued. So it was one of those moments when we were young that remain etched in my early memories. For ordinary Zimbabweans, the violence can come from both sides.
Those unwilling or too frightened to cooperate with the rebels often suffer a worse fate at their hands than at those of the white soldiers. It rapidly became violence as a political language, intimidation, attacks against livestock, using rape, using mutilation, using brutal tactics to condition the peasantry, to support the revolution.
It was a brutal war, and the peasantry were caught up between this increasing use of violence in the rural areas and the repression of the Rhodesian security forces. They were really caught between the two.
When the guerrillas suspected that anybody had sold out, they would come and beat people up in the village. And I remember one of the adults who was suspected to be a sellout was beaten terribly. He was screaming all over the place, blood everywhere.
and he wore a long beard. They poured petrol all over his body and they started igniting him on the beard and he was running all over, you know, screaming until he died. During your childhood, it's something that traumatizes quite a bit to hear an old man screaming like that. As the years drag by, the war becomes increasingly bloody.
with large numbers of civilians, black and white, killed. The line between guerrilla warfare and terrorism is not always clear. In August 1977, Zandler militants bomb a Woolworths department store in the capital. As well as three white shoppers, eight black Rhodesians are killed, among them a child and two pregnant women. Meanwhile, Joshua and Como's fighters shoot down two commercial airliners using heat-seeking missiles supplied by Moscow.
As the fighting intensifies, the Rhodesian Front steps up attempts to bring an end to the conflict. They approach moderates within the black nationalist movement. The result of these negotiations is the proclamation of a new country: Rhodesia Zimbabwe. A churchman, Bishop Abel Muzurewa, takes the role of Prime Minister, with Ian Smith remaining in the cabinet as Minister without portfolio. For Robert Mugabe, this is totally insufficient.
He denounces the new set-up as a white puppet regime and vows to go on fighting. In the early months of 1979, a massive recruitment campaign sees Zandler's ranks swell. Soon, more than 10,000 guerrillas are poured into the country from Mozambique. Ultimately, it's the former colonial power, Britain, that brokers an end to more than 15 years of fighting.
Its new Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, has little sympathy for Robert Mugabe or Joshua Nkomo, regarding both as little more than terrorists. But on the advice of her Foreign Secretary, Lord Carrington, she agrees to host a peace conference in London. In September 1979, more than 70 delegates arrive at Lancaster House, a government mansion near Buckingham Palace. At the top of the guest list are Abel Muserewa and Ian Smith,
Opposite them are Mugabe and Nkomo, for the purpose of the talks, under a shared patriotic front banner. Amongst the others present is Zandla head honcho Josiah Tongogara. The point about the all-party negotiations at Lancaster House was to bring everybody on board, because the realization that unless everybody was on board, that the war would not stop.
So it was critical to bring Robert Mugabe into the discussions and to get his agreement. And the Brits realized the value of Robert Mugabe during the negotiations, and they in fact assigned special branch officers to protect him because the Rhodesians sent an assassination squad to try to take him out while he was in London. While Nkomo and even Tongagara look for compromise and reconciliation with their former enemies, Mugabe remains hostile and unyielding.
Mugabe and wife Sally have spent most of the war in Mozambique. It's only the intervention of that country's leader, Samora Machel, that forces Mugabe to negotiate.
He believed that he could win, that the war in the field was going his way, and that negotiations involved a betrayal, a sellout, and this was unnecessary compromise. And in fact, by the end of the Lancaster House negotiations, when Robert Mugabe didn't want to accept what had been hammered out, it was Samoro Machel who said, either you sign this, you can come back to Mozambique,
But you're going to be writing your memoirs on the beach. You're not going to be continuing the revolutionary struggle from rear bases because Mozambique wanted the war to end. It needed the war to end, as did Zambia. And you just have to look at the footage on YouTube of the final press conference. His body is taut with rage that he has been pressed into accepting this. So it was very reluctant indeed.
The Lancaster House Agreement, signed on December 21, 1979, sets Zimbabwe on the road to a genuinely democratic and independent future. It brings an end to the Chimuranga, dissolves Muzarewa's contentious government, and sets a date for parliamentary elections two months later. Mugabe wastes no time in launching his own prime ministerial campaign.
Joshua Nkomo, having spent three months working with him under the Patriotic Front umbrella, is shocked to learn that Zanu intend to fight the election independently, thus splitting the nationalist vote. But Nkomo isn't the only rival on Mugabe's path to power. The guerrilla leader Tongagara also commands huge support and popularity. And, unlike Mugabe, he's a bona fide war hero. Six days after the Lancaster House Agreement is signed,
Mugabe goes on the radio to convey a sad message. Tongogara is dead, the victim, apparently, of a tragic Boxing Day car crash. Not everyone is convinced by the story. In fact, given the timing, both the CIA and Soviet intelligence are deeply suspicious. Throughout his political career, opponents of Robert Mugabe fell foul of Robert Mugabe and a number of them ended up dead. So there was a track record there.
So there were the accidents that would do something with people's cars. So we always heard about the accidents growing up. There were just lots and lots of accidents around. Car accidents. I had three accidents in a car and it was always four by fours that just suddenly come from nowhere and ram you to the side.
For the three years leading up to 2003, I had an accident of some sort, which is unexplainable. I'm not going to say it was either this person or that person, you know, but it was unexplainable. And, you know, that's how a lot of people's lives ended. With Tongogara out of the picture, it's Mugabe versus Nkomo. The veteran trade unionist has long been seen as the presumptive father of Zimbabwe.
Mugabe will have to work hard to convince the Zimbabwean people that he is the right man to lead the country. Jerry Jackson was working for the BBC in Zimbabwe during the 1980 election campaign.
Mugabe seemed a very austere, serious, but very well-spoken person. But he was a complete unknown to the people who lived in this country. I went to the first rally that he gave. I don't know how many people were there, hundreds of thousands. And you were seriously searched. Hands were run through your hair to see if you'd concealed anything weird. Joshua Nkoma, who was the opposition, I remember meeting with a crew interviewing him.
And they took my ballpoint pen and pointed it at a tree and pushed the end of the pen. And I thought, gosh, you guys have seen too many James Bond films or something. So there was a lot of paranoia. As the saying goes, just because you're paranoid, it doesn't mean they aren't out to get you. Both Mugabe and Nkomo have already dodged multiple assassination attempts, gunshots, grenades, kidnappings.
many of them at the hands of Ian Smith, who is now running against both of them in the election. Amongst many compromises that Mugabe bristled at, the Lancaster House Agreement set a quota of white seats in Parliament for the first ten years after independence. The Rhodesian Front is expected to sweep the board in these, but it won't be enough to get them anywhere near power.
Stephen Chan, OBE, is professor of world politics at SOAS, University of London, and author of Mugabe, A Life of Power and Violence. In 1980, he was sent to Zimbabwe as an election monitor for the Commonwealth Observer Group, which would validate the results of the vote. Professor Chan was struck by Mugabe's ability to connect with voters, especially in his own tribal language, Shona.
There's a certain rhetoric that when the person on stage says something and the audience agrees with it, they shout out a certain key word. If he denounces somebody, the word they use is 'abash', which is a hybrid word, being able to splash them up type of thing, down with that person, down with that thing. So it's almost like a football crowd. When people start chanting and the whole audience takes up the chant, what you've got is a very electric atmosphere. Mugabe is very good at that kind of thing.
Mugabe might be bonding with voters, but old habits die hard. His guerrillas have spent more than a decade intimidating rural Zimbabweans into supporting them, and they aren't about to stop now.
The level of violence and intimidation, and all sides were doing it, but Zanler and Zanuck were the worst, was grotesque. There were no innocents in this because the Rhodesia security forces were also involved in bomb attacks on buses, attacks on presses. It was a wild campaign, without a doubt. When the results come through, they represent a resounding victory for Mugabe. His 57 seats give him a comfortable majority in parliament.
against 20 apiece for Nkomo and Smith. Former Prime Minister Muzerewa secures just three. Robert Mugabe was the victor through the ballot box. It had not been a free and fair election. There had been an extraordinary amount of violence and intimidation, but it was judged to be free enough. Certainly the result reflected very, very genuinely, I think, the feeling in the country as a whole. It was the outcome that the electorate, I think, desired.
Even people who supported other parties were happy with all over. People wouldn't be at war. That really did impress people that they were entering a new era. Just what this new era will look like remains to be seen. For many, both within Zimbabwe and abroad, Mugabe is still an unknown quantity.
I remember I was sitting at his feet when the election results were announced and I looked into his eyes and I was quite chilled. There was no warmth in him at all. And then, of course, very quickly after independence, the Gujarati massacres started. And so we all knew what we were actually dealing with. It will be three years before the first atrocities of Mugabe's regime begin. In the meantime, he will play the magnanimous statesman
Particularly important, he realizes, is to win round the white voters who form the backbone of Zimbabwe's economy. Douglas Rogers grew up on his parents' farm in Mutare, near the Mozambique border. He was 11 years old when Mugabe came to power. When he won the election, we were terrified, utter terror. I remember listening to the BBC that morning, the results came in, and it was just fear that we were all going to be slaughtered.
And a lot of white families fled literally overnight. But Mugabe made a speech soon after that on national television in which he sort of said, if I fought you as an enemy, I'm now your friend. And I remember my parents listening to that and took a deep breath. And literally a few months later, we were calling ourselves Zimbabweans. He appeared on what passed for Nationwide TV, which wasn't very, very nationwide.
but gave probably the speech of his life in terms of the need for reconciliation between black and white. I watched that in real time and it was actually very, very impressive. And I shared my room with all the waiters and the porters in the hotel where I was staying. The management certainly wasn't going to do anything like that for them, so I invited them all to my room. And everyone agreed this was the speech that was needed. Something old had ended and something new was going to start.
After the election, Stephen Chan stays on in Zimbabwe as an advisor to Mugabe's new government. It's clear from the start that integrating the fractured nationalists into a coherent leadership won't be easy. Those who had been in exile for the most part had been superbly educated. You probably had no greater number of PhDs around the cabinet table anywhere else in the world. But it also meant that those who had stayed and fought had sacrificed their education and they were not educated at all.
So I was given the Ministry of Youth, Sport and Recreation. And the minister herself was 26. Her battle name was Turai Rauka, which is Shona for "Let's spill blood on the battlefield." And she was a legend in terms of her own personal heroism. Absolutely fearless, but not well-educated. No idea how to run a ministry. The whole first year was learning how to do it.
For Prime Minister Mugabe, there remains one big question: what to do about his old rival, Joshua Nkomo?
Joshua Nkomo always saw himself as the senior figure. And so when Robert Mugabe won at the ballot box, Joshua Nkomo was insulted. He was furious. He felt that he had been betrayed. Robert Mugabe was more magnanimous, but that didn't mean in any way that he was prepared to see Joshua Nkomo treated as his equal. To begin with, Mugabe offers Nkomo the ceremonial position of president.
a high-profile role, but one that carries no real power. Nkomo eventually negotiates to serve as Minister of Home Affairs instead. This is an important brief, giving him control of the country's police force. But Nkomo and Mugabe have unfinished business, and in just a few years, their rivalry will spill out into violence again. At the age of 56, Robert Mugabe has achieved what once seemed impossible.
He has united his country under black majority rule. Revered at home and feted around the world, he seems to represent a brave new future for the whole of Africa. But in his years of struggle, Mugabe has already shown the ruthlessness that will come to characterise his four-decade regime. The intimidation of voters, the humiliation of opponents, and the suspicious deaths of potential rivals are all glimpses of Zimbabwe's dark future.
In time, the studious scholar will prove guilty of the most heinous brutality. And in his desperation to cling onto power, he will virtually bankrupt the most prosperous country in Africa. You can be educated. You can start with all the good intentions. But ultimately, if you resist opposition, you may end up destroying what you have built. If you become a dictator, you can end up destroying everything.
That's next time on Real Dictators.