In Defense of Robert Mugabe
5 October 2025
When Joshua Nkomo and Ndabaningi Sithole first began intimidating black township dwellers, extorting local businessmen and planting bombs in department stores in the early 1960s, they were facing a tradition-minded, law-abiding society. As the Chiefs said about them and their tactics at the indaba in 1964, “This has never been done before.”
They were tough enough to fight the army and the police and terrorize tribesmen in the TTLs, but in the end they proved helpless against challenges originating from the ranks of chaos they themselves had unleashed. When you destroy the forces of law and order and tradition, you yourself are not immune. In the words of Edward G. Robinson: they could dish it out, but they couldn’t take it. You can win a game by cheating if everyone else is playing by the rules. But when everyone starts cheating, you won’t win. The best cheater will win.
Under pressure from South Africa in 1974, Rhodesia released all militants who had been held in Gonakudzingwa restriction camp. One of these was Robert Gabriel Mugabe. Upon release, Mugabe travelled to newly communist Mozambique where he secured the patronage of FRELIMO leader Samora Machel and the loyalty of ZANLA commanders there. Unlike Nkomo and Sithole, he had never been interested in courting favor with westerners. He did not formally become leader of ZANU until 1977. Until that time, he had not been a familiar name in western circles.
By 1978, most of the belligerents and their sponsors were thoroughly sick of the war and were either joining or negotiating with the “Internal Settlement” government in Rhodesia. Both black and white hearts had softened somewhat since 1965. The only hearts that had hardened were the British, who no longer regarded Rhodesia as a problem to be solved, but as a loss to be cut. To them, Ian Smith was public enemy number one and anyone who consorted with him might as well be contaminated with stench. No one else outside of Africa, with the possible exception of Bob Marley, even cared or was paying attention anymore.
For both black and white, the issue of authenticity had at some point become more important than winning the war. In her book, Fighting and Writing, Luise White questions what the military endgame for Rhodesia had been:
The war was never fought for total victory, whatever that might have meant, and there was never an imagined surrender of all guerilla forces... Instead, the peace Rhodesian officials imagined was one that included enough Africans so as to prevent future war... starting in the early 1970s, before the guerilla war intensified, officials and most officers understood that the peace had to be a negotiated settlement that would include Africans.
Perhaps if the British had recognized Abel Muzorewa as prime minister in 1979 and lifted sanctions, the rest of the world would have followed suit and Mugabe would have been isolated. Without the continued support of Machel in Mozambique and Nyerere in Tanzania, he would have had to fold, just as Smith had folded once he lost the support of Portugal and of Vorster in South Africa. As the last to transition from guerilla tactics to electoral politics, Mugabe would have been at a loss. Instead, he got to keep his army and bring guerilla tactics into electoral politics. Instead of being a latecomer to democracy, he got to be the last authentic guerilla, the medium he was particularly suited for. Or maybe it all would have happened just the same, but the morally clueless British revanchism guaranteed it.
None of this is to deny Mugabe his agency. He was probably smarter than everyone else. He was certainly paying more attention. He saw his chance and he took it. The point is that every type of political environment creates its own incentive system and every incentive system will select for the “winner” who is best suited to exploit it. The Rhodesian system, even under the Internal Settlement, was not the kind in which people like Mugabe could do well. But he was perfectly suited for the kind of mayhem that had been fostered for 20 years by both ZANU and ZAPU and underwritten by successive British governments and most other international players.
Once in power, Mugabe was careful to consolidate slowly. He launched the Gukurahundi massacres of Ndebeles in the early 1980s because the incipient ZAPU power base in Matabeleland posed a direct threat to his sovereignty. Other would-be dissidents were given a chance to succumb voluntarily. Nkomo was eventually allowed to return to the country as honorary vice-president, cut off from his base of power.
Within ten years, poverty was on the rise again and resentment against the crass opulence of Mugabe’s inner circle was growing, especially among the younger generation. And the sense of political stability that was starting to return in the 1990s was not good for him. Some people actually began to associate freely and seek redress for their grievances. He attempted to head this off in 1999 by proposing a constitutional referendum that would give him greater powers, but this only led to a groundswell of popular organization against him and the referendum was defeated. Surprised by their own success, the “No” campaigners quickly organized to run candidates in the next election under the banner “Movement for Democratic Change” (MDC).
After Mugabe had removed all white appointees from government and army positions in the early 1980s, had removed Ian Smith from parliament in 1985, and ended the guaranteed parliamentary seats for whites in 1987, white people were no longer a direct threat. Due a combination of black population growth and white out-migration, whites’ proportion of the population had fallen from almost 5% in the 1970s to less than 1% in the 1990s. They no longer sought autonomy or collective rights. But they still believed, as Smith had, that their financial acumen was vital to the country’s interests and would protect them. They also imagined that because they had forfeited their own political organization, they were free to participate in the political activities of others as they saw fit. And they openly and overwhelming backed the causes of “No” and MDC.
White business success and political participation were two indirect threats that Mugabe could not afford to let stand. Just as the continuing prevalence of white faces in the military, court system, and civil service in 1979 had made Muzorewa look like a sellout, so too did the continuing dominance of whites in the private sector twenty years later make Mugabe look like a sellout. This easily fed into long-standing paranoia of Africans that the crafty white man was only pretending to share power with them, but was really secretly controlling and oppressing them behind the scenes. This is why so many blacks had rejected the constitutional reforms of 1961 and repeatedly dismissed calls for “responsible government” as dog whistles for white supremacy. And now, after 20 years of rule by the most radical revolutionary anti-white African nationalist on the continent, whites in Zimbabwe were getting richer while blacks got ever more hopelessly poorer. And now the rich whites were bankrolling the opposition right under the government’s nose. This made Mugabe either a sellout or a hoodwinked fool. Any other black African leader would have ended up facing a similar dilemma.
Mugabe was quick to exploit this kind of paranoia. He knew how to handle poor and angry people. He returned to his roots and went after the emerging middle class. Descriptions of the ensuing chaos often focus on the murder and pillage of white farmers, but their many black employees were treated no better and the same went for the small class of independent black farmers. Anyone who did not rely on the ruling party for sustenance was fair game. Mugabe’s followers must have known by this point that robbing the last few productive people of their property and destroying the means of creating wealth would not feed the country’s hungry poor or improve the nation’s long-term economic prospects. Violence and power were reward enough for them, and some could expect to make off with some loot in their pockets.
What was sacrificed was not just the country’s ability to provide for itself, but the security of life, property, and the rule of law. The same means that had been used to destabilize Rhodesia were now being deploying against its successor country, and by the same people. Zimbabwe starved, bled, and despaired, and Mugabe remained firmly ensconced until 2017, when he was finally deposed, aged 93 and in failing health. As is often the case with autocrats who have eliminated the opposition, his deposers were those closest to him.
By the end, even Mugabe’s earliest and staunchest defenders turned against him. They bemoaned his autocratic ways and his betrayal of the revolution and of the country. But they miss the point. There is little reason to think that if only Nkomo, Sithole, or even Tsvangirai had been in power, things would have ended up much differently. Indeed, the best that could be said about Mnangagwa is that things haven’t gotten worse.
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It’s not easy being leader of a decolonized country. You really have no good options. Growing poverty leads to anger, while any wealth that can be found leads to resentment. Old ethnic hostilities flare up. All you can do is try to save yourself by robbing and embezzling to buy the loyalty of cronies and thinking up bombastic new campaigns to channel people’s misery away from yourself.
Most of the first generation of African presidents started out as optimists. Some, like Balewa in Nigeria and Lumumba in the Congo, were assassinated early on. The rest eventually became autocrats. But Mugabe was something of a natural at this kind of thing. Even in his early days he was noticeably joyless. He didn’t become a central figure in his country’s story until after it became clear that despite its unique history and promise, Zimbabwe was going to follow the same predictable path as the others. Cometh the hour, cometh the man.