Mugabe's Legacy

Zimbabwes party-internal coup of 2017, and deposed president Robert Mugabes death nearly two years later, demand careful, historically nuanced explanation. How did Mugabe gain and retain power over party and state for four decades? Did the suspected and nearly real coups, the conspiracies behind them, and their concurrent mythomaniacal conceits ultimately, ironically, spell his near-tragic end? Has Mugabes particular mode of power reached a finality with his own downfall, as his successors struggle more to balance Zimbabwes political contradictions? Will the phalanxes arrayed against Mugabes control fray further, as Zimbabwe fades?Mugabes Legacydelves deeply into such questions, drawing on more than forty years of archival and interview-based research on Zimbabwes political history and current precariousness. Starting with the mid-1970s, it traces how Machiavellian moves allowed Mugabe to reach the apex of the Zimbabwe African National Unions already slippery slopes, through the complexities of Cold War, regional, ideological, generational, inter- and intra-party tensions. The lessons learned by the president and the nascent ruling party then turned gradually inward, ultimately arriving at a near-collapse that may now pervade all of the countrys political space. David B. Moore vividly charts this rise and fall, all the way to Zimbabwes tenuous chaos today.