INTERVIEW: Humanizing the tyrant: Mugabe dissected in new biography

Mar 19, 2008, 5:03 GMT

A file photograph showing Zimbabwe President, Robert Mugabe, addressing ruling party supporters at the Mahusekwa Stadium south-east of Harare, Zimbabwe, 05 March 2008. EPA/BISHOP ASARE

Harare/Johannesburg - It took around a year and a half of nagging his priest to act as go-between and, in the end, several weeks of sitting by the phone in a Harare hotel, to get the interview.

But Heidi Holland's patience was richly rewarded: in December 2007 the Rhodesian-born, South African-based author was granted a two-and- a-half-hour audience with Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, who is facing a stiff challenge to his 28-year rule in elections this month.

The interview - the first by a foreign journalist with Mugabe in three years - serves as the climax in Holland's psychological biography of the 84-year-leader entitled Dinner with Mugabe that went on sale in South Africa this week.

In the book, Holland sets out to understand, drawing on testimony from people who have had close dealings with Mugabe, how a seemingly model post-independence African president morphed into a venom-spitting tyrant.

Drawing on insights from Mugabe's brother, Donato, former Rhodesian leader Ian Smith and former British foreign secretary Lord Carrington, among others, Holland builds a portrait of an immature man with an inflated sense of his own greatness and a sensitivity to criticism incompatible with high office.

Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa put some questions to Holland about the seminal moments in Mugabe's transformation from soft-spoken moderate into cartoon-like character dubbed 'Mad Bob.'

dpa: In the book you describe Mugabe as emotionally immature. Was Robert Mugabe ever fit to govern?

Holland: Psychologically, he was too weak. He couldn't resist revenge when people crossed him. When you position yourself to be leader of a country, of course people are going to contradict you. He would have made a very good teacher. (Mugabe began his professional life as a teacher). He would have been fine in that very closed environment.

dpa: What do you think was the turning point in his leadership?

Holland: 'The first moment was when the white Rhodesians voted against him in favour of Ian Smith in 1985 (five years into independence and after he had extended the hand of friendship to the white minority). More than anything he was really, really hurt by that.

Then the (apartheid-era) South African government destabilized him so early on (by allegedly bankrolling spying and sabotage operations in Zimbabwe). They wanted him to misbehave. It made him want revenge again. That's where Gukurahundi (the massacre in the 1980s of thousands of civilians loyal to his former comrade-in-arms Joshua Nkomo in Matabeleland) came from ... That blighted his whole presidency.

And then (former British international development secretary) Clare Short's letter (to Mugabe in 1997 in which she stated the Labour government no longer felt a responsibility to pay for land reform in Zimbabwe). He realized Britain had cast him adrift. His problem with Britain was on the scale of a big family quarrel. He nearly cried in the interview when he talked about the Royal Family.

dpa: You mention in the book that there's a banner hanging in the presidency in Harare proclaiming 'Mugabe is right.' What's that about?

Holland: You wonder if he has to remind everybody (he is right). If you go into his orbit you're either good or bad. The minute I confronted him he was furious. There were little sparks coming from his eyes.

dpa: Is he delusional?

Holland: Yes. When he said (in the interview, about the state of the economy): 'What is lacking now are goods on the shelves. That's all,' I said to Father Mukonori (Mugabe's priest) afterwards: 'He is deluded about the economy' and Mukonori replied: 'Yes he is but that's because people don't tell him the truth.'

dpa: Did you detect any sense of sadness about him?

Holland: I had such a sense of loneliness about him. Now that he knows that he has screwed it all up.

dpa: Does he?

Holland: The fact that he reacts so adversely to any suggestion that things are not as he suggests itself suggests he knows they are (screwed up).