Beyond Mugabe-centric narratives of the Zimbabwe crisis

The figure of President Robert Gabriel Mugabe seems to be haunting not only the Zimbabwean internal political landscape but also academic narratives of the crisis that engulfed the country at the beginning of the third millennium. Books informed by divergent ideological and disciplinary persuasions continue to be written by those who participated in the liberation struggle, such as Zvakanyorwa Wilbert Sadomba, keen to articulate the ‘authentic’ objectives and agendas of the liberation struggle as having been betrayed by Mugabe, while also describing their individual roles in the struggle as heroic and selfless compared to Mugabe's actions – seen as informed by the imperatives of gaining and holding power. Non-Zimbabwean scholars like Daniel Compagnon and Richard Bourne, keen to understand what went wrong in Zimbabwe, also focus on the culpability of Mugabe. Those Zimbabweans who emigrated to South Africa, Botswana, Britain, and other parts of the world – and whose experiences are documented by Jonathan Crush and Daniel Tevera, along with their evaluation of the decade-long crisis – hold Mugabe responsible for destroying the economy and authorizing state violence on citizens. Thus Mugabe emerges in most of the recent literature as this larger-than-life political figure who was midwife to the birth of the nation before becoming its undertaker.