Robert Mugabe

Biography

Robert Gabriel Mugabe was born in 1924 at Kutama in Southern Rhodesia to a poor Shona family and educated by Catholic missionaries. He trained as a teacher, studied at the University of Fort Hare in South Africa, where he met African nationalists and Marxist ideas, and later earned further degrees by correspondence while teaching in Southern and Northern Rhodesia, before taking a teaching post in Ghana.

Back home in 1960 he joined the nationalist movement, first in the National Democratic Party and ZAPU, then in 1963 as secretary-general of the breakaway Zimbabwe African National Union. Arrested for subversive speech, he spent about eleven years in prison and detention. Released in 1974, he went to Mozambique, took control of ZANU and its guerrilla army in the war against Ian Smith's government, and took part, reluctantly, in the 1979 Lancaster House talks that ended the war.

His ZANU-PF won the 1980 election and he became prime minister of independent Zimbabwe. His government expanded schooling and health care, but from 1983 the army's Fifth Brigade carried out the Gukurahundi massacres in Matabeleland against supporters of Joshua Nkomo's ZAPU, killing at least 20,000 people. He became executive president in 1987 and chaired the Non-Aligned Movement, the Organisation of African Unity and later the African Union.

From 2000 he backed violent seizures of white-owned farms, which helped bring food shortages, hyperinflation and economic collapse, and he kept power through elections marred by violence and fraud. In November 2017 the army and his own party forced him to resign in favour of Emmerson Mnangagwa. He died in Singapore in 2019.