A Tyrant in Zimbabwe

Though not the worst that continent can produce, Robert Mugabe is the last surviving participant in what Lord Byron (who said he longed to see it) called Africa’s “first dance of freedom.” Actually, Byron would have been more prophetic to call it “Africa’s first dance of power” after a period in which sovereignty had been removed from the continent’s indigenous rulers and vested in colonial interlopers. In hindsight, it appears that almost all African anticolonial political leaders were engaged not so much upon a freedom struggle as on a power struggle.

Mugabe may now strike us as a suitable hate figure, and there is no doubt that he has done incalculable damage to his country; he is said to have produced the most rapid and severe contraction of any economy in modern history. Yet the fact that there is a head of a formally constituted opposition, Morgan Tsvangirai, for the police to beat up, and that a judge of the Zimbabwean high court recently ordered the police to return the passports of two members of the opposition who had been arrested at the airport while trying to leave the country, suggests that Mugabe’s regime is less fully dictatorial than many other African regimes established in the immediate wake of independence.

About the Author

Anthony Daniels

Mr. Daniels, a retired doctor who worked in several parts of the world, is the author of Mass Listeria, a book about health scares.

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Though not the worst that continent can produce, Robert Mugabe is the last surviving participant in what Lord Byron (who said he longed to see it) called Africa’s “first dance of freedom.” Actually, Byron would have been more prophetic to call it “Africa’s first dance of power” after a period in which sovereignty had been removed from the continent’s indigenous rulers and vested in colonial interlopers. In hindsight, it appears that almost all African anticolonial political leaders were engaged not so much upon a freedom struggle as on a power struggle.

Mugabe may now strike us as a suitable hate figure, and there is no doubt that he has done incalculable damage to his country; he is said to have produced the most rapid and severe contraction of any economy in modern history. Yet the fact that there is a head of a formally constituted opposition, Morgan Tsvangirai, for the police to beat up, and that a judge of the Zimbabwean high court recently ordered the police to return the passports of two members of the opposition who had been arrested at the airport while trying to leave the country, suggests that Mugabe’s regime is less fully dictatorial than many other African regimes established in the immediate wake of independence.