Mugabe: The man behind the monster

By Oskar Wermter SJ
One man is ultimately responsible for Zimbabwe’s national catastrophe, though his supporters share in his guilt: Robert Gabriel Mugabe.

He told his police and party supporters: “Bash them!” This is on record. The excuse that these atrocities are being committed by “over-enthusiastic” supporters without his knowledge and approval is demonstrably false. He does know and he approves.

Who is this man? Was he born such a fiend?

Mr Mugabe grew up on the Catholic mission at Kutama, 90km from Harare, where his father was employed as a carpenter. His mother was devoted to the Church and the bright young boy got a Catholic education in the family, from the French-Canadian Marist Brothers of Kutama College and his Jesuit parish priest, Fr Jerome O’Hea.

Other than the village children round about he was very keen on his school work and always seen with a book in his hand even when herding cattle. Fr O’Hea thought highly of him and, like his stern mother, expected great things from him. He was a loner and reacted with anger to the other children making fun of him.

According to biographer Heidi Holland in Dinner with Mugabe (Penguin Books, 2008), he suffered a deep trauma when his father left wife and family to work in a faraway city where he married another woman. Suddenly the young boy was head of the family. Bright and ambitious, but essentially angry, lonely and insecure — that about seems to sum up young Robert. Apparently he has never really changed.
Just as he reacted with anger to this rejection by his father so he has reacted to any other rejection he had to endure in later life. The Rhodesians put him into detention without trial for 11 years, and when his only child, little Nhamo (“Suffering”), died in Ghana, they denied him permission to go and bury him. He has never forgotten.

After independence in 1980 he tried to reach out to the whites, even Ian Smith. They were happy enough that he did not touch them then, but, not really trusting him, they gave him the cold shoulder—another rejection for which he did not forgive them. When they supported the opposition he saw this as another treachery. He took his revenge. In the process he destroyed agriculture.

Mr Mugabe took a string of degrees while in detention. He studied law and economics, but he never practised law and was never in business. And studying in the loneliness of his prison cell, he was never exposed to the cut and thrust of intellectual debate.  He learnt his politics in the fratricidal infighting of the liberation movements. His personal experience was: you must be tough, uncompromising, aggressive, and use violence to get anywhere. The other leaders who agreed to negotiate fell by the wayside. He came out tops, holding out until the end. He does not believe in dialogue. You can only lose. This is his greatest weakness: he cannot accept criticism, being called into question, meeting opposition of any kind. He responds with anger and aggression.

Some years back before another election he met church people. He was very friendly, even charming, praised the church for its great work. When some leaders got up and asked for dialogue between church and government even after the elections he promised that would be no problem. But when the Catholic bishops wanted to talk to him over the report “Breaking the Silence” on the civil war in Matabeleland 1983-87 in which his troops slaughtered maybe 15,000 civilians (“Gukurahundi”), he refused to meet them.

Even as far back as 1983, when the bishops for the first time had to denounce his government’s action in the Matabeleland conflict, he hit back fiercely and ridiculed the bishops as those “sanctimonious prelates”, despite the fact that he was being celebrated as hero and liberator by many Church people. This was the time when his admirers first allowed him to address congregations in churches, an opportunity he has been exploiting to his political advantage ever since.

Maybe the Church should have retained a little bit more dignity in dealing with him. While showing courtesy and respect, the Church might have done better to retain a certain distance and independence, while keeping lines of communication open for critical dialogue. The Church has failed to make Mr Mugabe really one of her own. He wants to be known as a “devout Catholic”, but he is not a living member of the Church, in contrast to his first wife Sally who at least in her last years was a regular communicant. He has not internalised Christian social ethics.

Was there ever the chance of a middle-way between adulation and confrontation? Church leaders in recent years have tried dialogue, but normally ended up looking ridiculous because it was so obvious that he was merely using them and playing with them. There was no honesty in that dialogue, which to him means having it all his way.

His inability to face opposition and deal with criticism has destroyed him intellectually. He has produced a false ideology for himself which serves his political purposes but does not stand  any reality test. He is stuck in the past and keeps fighting the whites, the British, the western colonial powers. Since he never has to face critics, nobody tells him the world has moved on. And he gets uncontrollably angry when somebody tries to do so, like those unfortunate journalists in Egypt recently.

It is probably too late now, but could the Church have done better in dealing with him? What went wrong? There will have to be one big post-mortem once he is gone, and this will be one of the questions to ask.