PORTRAIT
A very black leather skin, like Croco. Glasses sometimes smoked, often circled in gold, always severe. A mustache, in a toothbrush, covering just the philtrum: the genus Hitler, not Charlot. A stamp of hair like the coquetry of a dictator of another era. His name fooled all over Africa: Robert Mugabe. The Liberator of Ancient Southern White Rhodesia, the Father of the Independence of Black Zimbabwe, a brave young idealist, who became the still the oldest Tyrant in the world yesterday, died Friday at the age of 95, announced Friday the current head of state Emmerson Mnangagwa. Two years ago, our pen Marc Messier had dedicated a long portrait.
Botox to fill his wrinkles, blood transfusions to rebuild a youth, the illusions of an old man, who falls asleep in full investiture of a Chinese Nobel. In his last years of power (he was forced to resign in November 2017), he appeared as a fossil of decolonization that could no longer take two steps without the help of his bodyguards, an old dotad that spoke exactly the same speech a few weeks apart, a nonagenarian at the end of the race suspended from his power.
He also exercised a deaf and blind power, absolute and implacable in Zimbabwe, the Garden of Eden Doris Lessing, the great English novelist, Nobel of Literature, whose imagination was born there, on the highlands of this country , long considered the breadbasket of southern Africa
Zimbabwe, a country of misery
A country of cocagne, become, under the rule of "Mudhara" ("the old man" in Shona language), a country of sorrows and misery: 80% unemployed, 2 dollars a day to eat, AIDS, cholera, famines, an average life expectancy of 50 years, a country of beggars and street vendors. A people that is starving before a regime that is filling. Cobalt dollars and American dentists flingering lions. A ruined Zimbabwe, rotted by corruption, where the opponents are stumbling. Kidnappings, torture, jail for homosexuals and elephant skin ...
A Zimbabwe clubbed, at the slightest demo, by a "Mugabean" army formed in North Korea. Instructors straight from Pyongyang. 11,000 km away with Harare. A 30 year old friendship between Robert Mugabe, aka "Comrade Bob" and Kim Il Sung, the eternal Father of North Korea ... Marxism and the Revolution at the crossroads of Asia and Africa.
Mugabe, born to a depressed mother and abandoned by his father
Robert Gabriel Mugabe, born February 24, 1924. A subject of King George V (Rhodesia is English). The capital is called Salisbury. A hut in a village created by missionaries. Little Robert is the 3rd child of a family of 6. His mother is depressed, very pious, his father will leave everyone, when Robert is 10 years old. The child is gifted, thoughtful, studious and very believing ... He will become the darling of one of the Jesuits of the mission, a fervent advocate of racial equality, who will tell him Irish legends and stories of Revolution. A character, an intelligence, a purse.
The young Robert Mugabe will study in South Africa, in the same way as Nelson Mandela. In 1957, it will be Ghana, the first independent country on the African continent, which is home to all African students who dream of getting rid of white colonizers. The meeting with his first wife, with whom he will have a son who will die, while Robert Mugabe will be in prison following his political and nationalist activities. The far-right white leader Ian Smith, who then runs Rhodesia, will refuse him the right to go out to attend his son's funeral. The beginning of his hatred of whites.
No national reconciliation in Zimbabwe
Ten years in prison, a few years in guerrilla warfare in Mozambique before delivering his country in 1980. Mugabe will then carry all the hopes of a country of nearly 10 million people at the time. 95% black, a few thousand white farmers. The time of national reconciliation, a time of peace and prosperity that will not last. The death of his wife, the marriage with the next, the current First Lady, 40, her youngest daughter ... She is 50 years old today, Grace, nicknamed "Disgrace", by her people, an African Imelda Marcos, crazy crazy about shoes. The beginning of Madness of "Mudhara".