20 April 1980: Robert Mugabe at a religious service in the year when he became Zimbabwe’s first democratically elected leader. (Photograph by Jean-Claude Francolon/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images) By Percy Zvomuya About a kilometre from State House – the official residence of the Zimbabwean president, where Robert Mugabe lived until the mid-2000s before moving to his hideous mansion popularly known as Blue Roof – is the National Archives. The squat edifice holds a rambling but fascinating interview that a government functionary conducted in the 1990s with Mbuya (Gogo) Bona Mugabe, the mother of the former president who has died at the age of 95. It is one that might help us answer the often repeated question: What happened to Mugabe? The interviewer had been sent to Mbuya Bona with the brief to help construct a hagiography of her son, Mugabe, who was born in 1924 at Kutama, a missionary station founded by the Catholic Church 80km west of Salisbury (now Harare). Here, he
Economics, Business and Finance