A Changed Man

Today I found out three things about Robert Mugabe I didn't know before. First thing- he was once a teacher. Many attributed the previous excellence of schools in Zimbabwe to this fact. (Now the system is falling apart, partly because so many teachers who voted for the MDC have fled the country.) Oddly, I didn't find this (the fact he was once a teacher) at all surprising. The link between teaching and the potential for dictatorial behaviour on a grand scale is fairly obvious.

Secondly, he was jailed by the Smith regime for ten years and completed several degrees in prison. Thirdly, said regime denied him permission to leave prison to attend the funeral of one of his children who passed away during his imprisonment.

I don’t think this necessarily turned him into a monster. One only has to look at the example of Mandela to see the emptiness of such simple equations. But I don't suppose he left prison particularly endeared to his captors, or possibly the world in general. Anyway, awareness of these things helped make him a little more human for me. A little. Paradoxically that served to make him even more frightening.