Yes, one can speak ill of the dead.
I met Robert Mugabe in the late 1970s. What he told me still haunts me.
The Zimbabwean rebel leader wanted to be a different kind of African president. He was — just not the way I thought he meant.
“We are not going to make the same mistake the rest of Black Africa has made,” Robert Mugabe told me in the late 1970s in an interview for Newsweek. “We are going to learn from their mistakes.”
We met in Mozambique, the headquarters for his guerrilla army, which was then locked in a seemingly interminable war against the white minority regime in Rhodesia. The conflict would claim an estimated 20,000 lives, most of them black nationalist guerrillas and African civilians, and was marked by terrible atrocities on both sides.
Tragically, Mugabe, who died Thursday at age 95, would make good on his promise to learn from the mistakes of fellow African leaders, turning into an art form the corruption and brutality that had plagued African nations since the first country in Sub-Saharan Africa won its independence in 1957.
One statistic sums up what Robert Mugabe did for his people: At independence in 1980, the average life expectancy for a Zimbabwean was about 60 years old; by 2006, that had dropped to 37 for men and 34 for women, the shortest in the world.
https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/world/2...nt-zanu-pf
Oh, yes -- the currency became worthless:
![[Image: 250px-Zimbabwe_%24100_trillion_2009_Obverse.jpg]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3e/Zimbabwe_%24100_trillion_2009_Obverse.jpg/250px-Zimbabwe_%24100_trillion_2009_Obverse.jpg)
The dollar is welcome in Zimbabwe. Canada, US, or Hong Kong. But life4 was good for the dictator...
https://www.google.com/search?q=mugabe+m...e&ie=UTF-8
Here lived "Comrade" Robert Mugabe.
I met Robert Mugabe in the late 1970s. What he told me still haunts me.
The Zimbabwean rebel leader wanted to be a different kind of African president. He was — just not the way I thought he meant.
- By Lawrence Pintak
- on September 6, 2019 6:20 pm
“We are not going to make the same mistake the rest of Black Africa has made,” Robert Mugabe told me in the late 1970s in an interview for Newsweek. “We are going to learn from their mistakes.”
We met in Mozambique, the headquarters for his guerrilla army, which was then locked in a seemingly interminable war against the white minority regime in Rhodesia. The conflict would claim an estimated 20,000 lives, most of them black nationalist guerrillas and African civilians, and was marked by terrible atrocities on both sides.
Tragically, Mugabe, who died Thursday at age 95, would make good on his promise to learn from the mistakes of fellow African leaders, turning into an art form the corruption and brutality that had plagued African nations since the first country in Sub-Saharan Africa won its independence in 1957.
One statistic sums up what Robert Mugabe did for his people: At independence in 1980, the average life expectancy for a Zimbabwean was about 60 years old; by 2006, that had dropped to 37 for men and 34 for women, the shortest in the world.
https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/world/2...nt-zanu-pf
Oh, yes -- the currency became worthless:
The dollar is welcome in Zimbabwe. Canada, US, or Hong Kong. But life4 was good for the dictator...
https://www.google.com/search?q=mugabe+m...e&ie=UTF-8
Here lived "Comrade" Robert Mugabe.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.