Book: Dinner with Mugabe
Author: Heidi Holland
Publisher: Penguin (2009). First published 2008.
Volume: 261 pages
Price: Shs 29,900
Reviewer: Martyn Drakard
Available from Aristoc
Finally, a piece of investigative writing that attempts to fathom Robert Mugabe, the MAN. Journalist Heidi Holland, with the help of psychologist Shayleen Peeke, has recently produced a fascinating "psycho-biography" of the African leader the West cannot begin to like or understand. In an impressive series of interviews with people who have known Mugabe well she pieces together his nuances of character that make up the man.
Younger brother, Donato, knew him as sensitive, a book-worm, a loner, never harsh, determined yet insecure. The favourite of his mother, Bona, who foresaw great things for him, Robert inherited her discipline and grew closer when his father migrated to Bulawayo for work, and remarried. To Patricia Bekele, the niece of first wife, Sally, and who lived with them in State House, he was a gentleman of impeccable manners, speech and dress.
The most tragic event in Mugabe's life was the death of his three-year old son, Nhamo, in Ghana while he was in Salisbury remand prison, and Ian Smith's refusal to let him go bury him.
Fellow guerrilla, Edgar Tekere, attributes his dictatorial tendencies to political innocence, and being spoilt by the obsequiousness of his 'courtiers', to the point where his word was law and dissent became unthinkable.
Lord Carrington, mediator at the Lancaster House talks, respected him, and admitted that the Rhodesia problem had to be settled quickly, for political and strategic reasons, and managed to manoeuvre it through, more or less to everyone's satisfaction, but leaving the land question unresolved.
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Lord Soames, last governor of Rhodesia, and his wife, Mary, struck up a trusting friendship with Mugabe, which he never forgot. Mary Soames saw the country's problems originating in the short-sighted attitude of many Whites thinking they would rule forever.
The author catches up with Ian Smith in South Africa shortly before he died. Mugabe had tried to connect with the Rhodesian leader, but the two men were too dissimilar in character and too alike in leadership styles to really get on.
According to Denis Norman, a White farmer whom Mugabe appointed to his cabinet, Mugabe's anger towards Britain began with a tactless, dismissive letter from Blair's International Development Minister, Clare Short, over the land issue, which put him in a fix so that one day he dropped an unthinking remark to the war veterans who were pressing him. He told them to "simply take the land", which they did, and he tried to patch up legally afterwards.
She also interviews Fr Fidelis Mukonori, his adviser, and other religious leaders. Her conclusions are confused, however, since she sees the Church as working hand-in-hand with a tyrant. The truth is that Mugabe's harshest critics within Zimbabwe are precisely Catholic clerics and laity.
School-mate and now historian, Lawrence Vambe, contends that Mugabe's campaign of rage and revenge was to expose Western double standards. She admires Morgan Tsvangirai for trying to stop the rot spreading whereas the rest of Africa, including South Africa which was flooded with Zimbabwean refugees, looked the other way.
