Robert Mugabe

Robert Mugabe led the guerrilla movement that ended white minority rule in Rhodesia and then governed independent Zimbabwe for 37 years, first as prime minister from 1980 and then as president from 1987 until a military intervention forced him out in 2017. Admirers saw him as a hero of African liberation; critics held him responsible for mass killings in Matabeleland, rigged elections and the collapse of the economy.

Mugabe was born at the Kutama Catholic mission in Southern Rhodesia on 21 February 1924, when the colony was part of the British Empire and ruled by its white minority. Raised largely by his mother after his father left the family, he was educated by Jesuits, trained as a teacher and studied at Fort Hare in South Africa, taking a degree in 1952. He taught in Northern Rhodesia and then in newly independent Ghana, at the start of the wave of decolonisation in Africa, where he said he finally embraced Marxism and met his first wife, Sally Hayfron.

Returning home in 1960, he joined the nationalist movement led by Joshua Nkomo, then in 1963 sided with the breakaway Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU). Arrested that December, he spent nearly eleven years in prison and detention, earning several degrees by correspondence. In 1965 Ian Smith's government declared Rhodesia independent of Britain to preserve white rule.

Freed in 1974, Mugabe crossed into Mozambique in 1975 and by 1977 was confirmed as ZANU's leader. Its army, backed by China, fought a guerrilla war against Smith's forces in which at least 30,000 people died. In speeches he called for armed struggle against the white settler state in harsh terms. Under pressure from his Mozambican hosts he accepted the 1979 Lancaster House talks in London, which provided for a ceasefire, elections and majority rule.

ZANU-PF won the February 1980 election, held amid widespread intimidation by several parties, and on 18 April 1980 the country became independent as Zimbabwe, with Mugabe as prime minister. He initially preached racial reconciliation. His government greatly expanded schools and clinics; adult literacy rose from about 62% to 82% by 2000. Statues of Cecil Rhodes came down, and Salisbury was renamed Harare in 1982.

Relations with Nkomo's ZAPU broke down. From 1983 the North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade waged a campaign against alleged dissidents in Matabeleland, known as the Gukurahundi, marked by massacres, torture and the deliberate restriction of food. Estimates of the dead range from about 10,000 to 20,000; Genocide Watch classified the events as genocide. Mugabe later called it "an act of madness". In 1987 ZAPU merged into ZANU-PF, leaving a de facto one-party state, and Mugabe became an executive president.

In the 1990s the economy stagnated, unemployment soared and Zimbabwean troops were sent into the Second Congo War in 1998. After losing a constitutional referendum in 2000, Mugabe backed the violent seizure of white-owned commercial farms, which he justified as reversing the taking of African land by white settlers in the 1890s. Agricultural output fell sharply, and by 2008 inflation exceeded 100,000% and much of the population depended on food aid. Elections in 2002 and 2008 were marred by violence against the opposition Movement for Democratic Change; in 2008 at least 153 of its supporters were killed and its candidate, Morgan Tsvangirai, withdrew from the run-off, leading to a power-sharing government. In 2002 Zimbabwe was suspended from the Commonwealth, which it left in 2003, and Western governments imposed targeted sanctions.

Mugabe won again in 2013, in a vote widely seen as neither free nor fair. When he dismissed his vice-president, Emmerson Mnangagwa, in November 2017, apparently to clear the way for his wife Grace, the army placed him under house arrest. Facing impeachment by his own party, he resigned on 21 November 2017. He died in Singapore on 6 September 2019, aged 95, and was buried at his home in Kutama.

Our 1960 map shows Southern Rhodesia under British rule, the 1985 map shows independent Zimbabwe during his premiership, and the 2000 and 2010 maps cover his later presidency.