In my part of Kenya, we have a tradition of naming people after key events and moments in history, and there are so many people of my generation named Mugabe that I grew up thinking it was a local name. Only later did I realize that it was a tribute to a man so many people held in high esteem. And when the news came in September that the 95-year-old former president of Zimbabwe had passed, it was met with a measure of disbelief. Having survived multiple assassination attempts and health scares, it seemed as if the old man would outlive us all.
Mugabe’s supporters insist that he was a paragon of Pan-Africanism, one of the last of a generation of fearless freedom fighters. For his opponents, he was an autocrat who spent the last 20 years of his life erasing any good he had done, with cronyism and a violent police state.
