How Britain helped Robert Mugabe rise to power

A century ago today, Robert Mugabe was born. The man who would come to rule over Zimbabwe between 1980 and 2017 was a brutal and autocratic tyrant. Mugabe shattered his country’s economy, oversaw vicious human rights abuses and left public services, especially healthcare, in ruins. But while Britain would ultimately see Mugabe as an adversary, it played a key role in his rise to power.

Mugabe was, of course, not any western government’s ideal candidate to lead a newly independent African nation. He was a Marxist-Leninist who believed in command economics; in his guerrilla phase in the 1970s, Mugabe had been given unconditional support by the People’s Republic of China. But Britain was not presented with an ideal choice. Margaret Thatcher’s government needed to resolve the crisis in Rhodesia: Mugabe seemed the best man to deliver a stable settlement for the country and the region.

Mugabe came to power under the terms of the Lancaster House Agreement, the 1979 concordat which concluded the Rhodesian Bush War and allowed the transition from a white minority-ruled international pariah to an independent, democratic nation with a formal constitution.