Reclaiming the land was one of the main drivers behind the s war which brought Mr Mugabe to power. The son of a carpenter who abandoned his family, as a child Mr Mugabe was said to have been a loner, who spent much of his time reading. Ms Hollande wrote that after his elder brother died of poisoning when Mr Mugabe was just 10, his mother became depressed and the young Mugabe would do everything he could for her, to the extent he was teased as a "mummy's boy" at school.
He eventually qualified as a teacher and in went to work in Ghana, which had just become the first African country south of the Sahara to end colonial rule. Encouraged by his Ghanaian wife, Sally, and the pan-Africanist speeches of Ghana's leader Kwame Nkrumah, Mr Mugabe became determined to achieve the same back home.
On his return in , he started to campaign for an end to discrimination and was jailed for a decade after being convicted of sedition. While in prison, his supporters wrested control of Zanu, the biggest party fighting white rule, and installed him as leader. On his release, he was supposed to remain in the country but with the help of a white nun, he was smuggled over the border into Mozambique and the Zanu guerrilla camps.
After Mr Mugabe won the elections which led to independence, he pursued a policy of reconciliation with the white community despite the bitterness built up during the war. In a national address after becoming prime minister, he declared: "If you were my enemy, you are now my friend.
If you hated me, you cannot avoid the love that binds me to you and you to me. At that stage, he was not too sure of himself. There were very strong people in Zanu who were not afraid to oppose him. He would never take a decision on his own" - Dumiso Dabengwa. He wanted education for all. He wanted health for all. He would let me have my way or we would reach a compromise" - Dumiso Dabengwa. He brought in people who he could influence.
Several people were compromised - he held something over them" - Dumiso Dabengwa. He is not the person I knew. He changed the moment Sally died [in ], when he married a young gold-digger [Grace Mugabe]" - Wilf Mbanga. He allowed Ian Smith, the Rhodesian prime minister who had once declared that black people would not rule the country for 1, years and who reportedly personally refused to let Mr Mugabe leave prison for the funeral of his then only son, to remain both an MP and on his farm.
At this point, according to Mr Madhuku, Mr Mugabe's hold on power was relatively weak, so he realised he had to reach out to his former enemies.
Former home affairs minister Mr Dabengwa said Mr Mugabe was even less self-confident earlier on in his political career. He would never take a decision on his own but would always check with them first.
But slowly, he consolidated control - first over the party which led the war against white-minority rule and later the country as a whole - until the point where his was the only voice that counted. Throughout his time as president, his closest allies were always those with whom he had endured the hardships of life during the guerrilla war of independence. When they felt their grip on power, and its trappings, were threatened, they reverted wholeheartedly to the conflict mentality.
The British have decided to take us on through the MDC," he told a election rally. This meant opposition supporters were denounced as traitors - a label which could mean an immediate death sentence. Mr Chimutengwende argued that the scale of the violence was exaggerated and in any case sought to distance it from Mr Mugabe: "It is not the leader who throws a stone, or asks his followers to throw a stone.
But Mr Dabengwa, the minister in charge of the police in , said Mr Mugabe's Zanu party had been using such methods since the election. He said that fighters from Zanu's armed wing had been sent out into rural areas to ensure villagers voted the "right" way, partly through all-night indoctrination sessions, known as "pungwes". Although he won those elections in , and formed a coalition government with Zapu, the underlying tensions burst into open violence just two years later. Zapu leader Joshua Nkomo was accused of plotting a coup and the army's North Korea-trained Fifth Brigade was sent to his home region of Matabeleland.
More than 20, people were killed in Operation Gukurahundi, which means "the early rain which washes away the chaff". At the time, South African double-agent Kevin Woods was making daily reports in person to then Prime Minister Mugabe for the internal security force, the Central Intelligence Organisation. In the end, a subdued Mr Nkomo once more agreed to share power with his enemy in order to end the violence in his home region - a forerunner of what later happened to the MDC.
Before he was finally ousted, his political low point was in , when MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai beat him in a presidential election, although not by enough for outright victory, according to the official results. There were numerous reports Mr Mugabe was on the verge of resigning, although Mr Madhuku said he did not believe them, as the president subsequently demonstrated his determination to remain in power. Again, a setback led to a sustained campaign of violence against his "enemies".
The army and Zanu-PF militias attacked MDC supporters around the country, killing more than and forcing thousands from their homes. It became obvious that Zanu-PF would not relinquish its grip on power and Mr Tsvangirai withdrew from the second round, saying it was the only way to save lives. Zimbabwe's economy continued its freefall, reaching its nadir when people were dying from cholera in Harare because the country did not have the foreign currency to import the necessary chemicals to treat the water.
Under intense pressure, Mr Mugabe agreed to a coalition government with his long-time rival and, under MDC stewardship, the economy recovered.
But Prime Minister Tsvangirai was severely tarnished by working with Mr Mugabe - the president always managed to keep real power for himself and his allies. By the time of the election, Mr Mugabe did not need to resort to extreme violence to win easily. He had once more demonstrated his remarkable skills of political survival and he remained in power until he was forced out in Mr Mugabe justified the land invasions by saying the UK's Labour government, in power since , had reneged on a British promise to fund peaceful land reform.
While it might be expected that an avowedly Marxist liberation fighter would have more in common with the Labour Party than the Conservatives, the opposite turned out to be true. But of course what happened later was a different story with the Labour Party and Blair, who you could never trust". Under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, the UK accepted that as the former colonial power, it had the moral duty to help finance the process of buying white-owned land and redistributing it to black farmers.
But after a report found the process had been tainted by cronyism, British funding was put on hold. The new Labour government took matters further and declared: "We do not accept that Britain has a special responsibility to meet the costs of land purchase in Zimbabwe.
In , Mr Mugabe observed: "Mrs Thatcher, you could trust her. Mugabe won elections at the end of a black nationalist guerrilla war against white-minority rule in the rebel British colony of Rhodesia, and immediately called for an end to enmity between the races. Even as thousands of suspected black dissidents were massacred in a military crackdown starting in , the West turned a blind eye, said David Moore, a professor of development studies at the University of Johannesburg.
In his supporters violently took over white-owned farms, a watershed moment in relations between the West and their protege. As an early sign of protest, British military instructors who had been posted to the country for 22 years were pulled out in The EU and the US imposed sanctions, including travel bans on Mugabe and his henchmen for violence, electoral fraud and undermining democracy.
But there is little doubt that being prevented from making his usual shopping forays to London hurt a man who loved cricket and was something of a closet Anglophile. Mugabe blamed Western sanctions for the economic collapse, although they were targeted at him and his cronies personally, not at the economy. In Mugabe lost the first round of the presidential vote against his long-time rival Morgan Tsvangirai. We change lives. We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides.
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