A flawed 'hero', a tortured legacy

For others, Mugabe is a murderous fraud. A man who skipped most of the liberation struggle, but claimed he was in the vanguard. A man who tricked and killed his way to the head of a party, while endearing himself to the same West he would conveniently use as scapegoats in later years.

A man who killed off his biggest challenger in a post-Independence genocide intended to entrench a one-party state. A man who when the economic goodwill he inherited after Independence began to peter out, embarked on ruinous populist programmes that he stubbornly persisted with despite the collapse of the country and its citizens.