Dinner With Mugabe

Heidi Holland

Penguin Books 2008

The title of Heidi Holland’s book Dinner With Mugabe is a captivating one, simply because it is such an unlikely scenario for any white journalist to find themselves in.  However, it is a slightly misleading title as it refers to a brief moment in 1975 when the author provided dinner and a safe house to the recently released from prison Robert Mugabe.  At the time hewas a relative non-entity compared to the international pariah he has now become. 

Holland’s book is an investigation in how this once mellow head-teacher turned into the monster he is today, tracking developments from his early childhood and important moments in his life that may provide some explanation to this mystery.  Holland does this by engaging with several people who knew Mugabe on a personal and professional level, including his brother Denato, the widow of Lord Soames, various members of the Rhodesian government including Ian Smith, and the enigmatic Professor Jonathan Moyo.  Holland uses psychological methods to construct a character sketch of Mugabe that has never been done before, which makes this book a compelling read.

The theme that reoccurs most frequently in this unauthorised biography is Mugabe’s childhood in Kutama.  He lost his two older brothers at a young age, and the responsibility to look after his family fell on his shoulders.  His father Gabriel left when Mugabe was young which led him to form a close bond to his mother.  The lack of a father figure is one explanation offered to Mugabe’s inability to take criticism all these years later.  Despite losing his brothers and father, he does appear to have had a fairly happy upbringing, spending a lot of his time reading or going to church with his mother.  As important as childhood is in the development of one’s character, I think this issue was probably overused in this book, as we are constantly reminded about his pious mother and lonely upbringing.

There are two moments in Mugabe’s life we are told of that I was convinced had a big impact on his later presidency.  Firstly, when Mugabe’s first son Nhamo died in 1966.  Mugabe was in prison when it happened, and was not allowed to attend the funeral despite convincing pleas’ that he fully intended to return to prison.   Holland’s description of this tragic affair is very emotional, and begs the question how long that type of animosity can be stored up for only to surface years later.  It reminded me that Mugabe was actually a human once, something I could not describe him as now. 

The second moment happened five years into Mugabe’s premiership, when an election is called for the 20 white seats reserved under the Lancaster House agreement.  Whites in Zimbabwe returned nearly all the seats to Ian Smith.  Denis Norman, Zimbabwe’s first Agriculture Minister, describes it in his interview with Holland as a “betrayal”, where Mugabe had done exceedingly well to placate white voters but they continued to vote along racial lines.  Even the most venomous Mugabe critics would agree that his first few years in office were a success, so I can certainly understand where at least some of his animosity towards white Zimbabweans would stem from.  Not that this would justify the action he would later take against them.

Whilst reading the various fascinating accounts of people who worked closely with Mugabe, I couldn’t help but feel that you can only do so much without meeting the person face to face.  The last chapter is a treat, as Holland saves the best for last with a very rare interview with Mugabe himself.  Most of his replies are the ones you would expect from his anti-white, anti-British, anti-everything disposition, but Holland carefully maneuvers her way around his rhetoric to get some interesting snapshots of the man.  There is even an air of reason when he speaks of Tony Blair’s refusal to adhere to the agreements made between Zimbabwe and former Conservative Government, and the disastrous letter sent to him by Clare Short.  He even goes as far to admit that he didn’t have any control over the farm invasions, but merely interprets the invasions as peasants taking land from the ‘British’.

This is a very thought-provoking book that has allowed for a rare look at one of the most despotic leaders in the world.  One of sad realities that struck me whilst reading it is the endemic racism that seems to exist at every level of Zimbabwe, which origins go back over a hundred years.  Everything seems to be black this, or white that.  I can only hope that young Zimbabweans do not inherit this tendency from their older generation, as it will do no good if Zimbabwe is to have a prosperous future.  Another thing that struck me, which is something that Prof. Moyo touches on, is how Mugabe stumbled into office.  I wonder how differently things would have turned out had Herbert Chitepo become Prime Minister, or Joshua Nkomo, or Josiah Tongogara. 

As Holland concludes, Dinner With Mugabe was not intended to offer an explanation of how one man destroyed a country.  All of the draconian laws Mugabe continues to use to suppress his people were inherited from the Rhodesian regime, and there were many external factors that could have driven another leader to take the same decisions.  I would recommend this book to anyone with an interest in the region, as it provides a new level of analysis of Zimbabwe that was desperately needed and will no doubt be the last.

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