Robert Mugabe: Political Thought and Practice as the Will to Power

Abstract

The present study examines Robert Mugabe’s political thought and practice as the Will to Power. A reading and an interpretation of Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophical concept of the Will to Power as a spirited drive for conquest and domination is mobilised to understand Mugabe’s enduring appetites for power and domination in Zimbabwe. The study that employs qualitative methodology to analyse and interpret Mugabe’s words and actions assumes that he was corrupted by power as much as he corrupted it. He grew up lonely and aloof and took too seriously a prophecy about his divine commission for great leadership and developed an overwhelming god complex. Mugabe grew an entitlement to power that made him see his political opponents as sinners that must be condemned and eliminated. In his leadership he combined methods of coercion and arts of soliciting the consent of Zimbabweans to his rule. Given power and treated as a hero without strong democratic checks and balances, this study notes, any leader can become a Mugabe. In a paradoxical way he became a fighter against Rhodesian settler colonialism that once in power reproduced in Zimbabwe colonial modes of rule to the extent that he appeared like a native coloniser. Under Mugabe Zimbabwe became what Achille Mbembe noted as a postcolony that is a domain of the madness and excess of power. Mugabe became a performer for power, pretending to refined education and enacting a brave military leader in pursuit of power. He deployed tantalising rhetoric of reconciliation and statesmanship that concealed his despotism. In excitement about an emerging great hero Zimbabweans did not care about putting up measures and institutions to check the excesses of power. Mugabe’s seeking, finding, and keeping power by any means necessary led him to desires of a one-party state under his life presidency in Zimbabwe. This desire led him to commit the Gukurahundi Genocide to silence opposition. The Genocide became a performance of evil in pursuit of absolute power. The study concludes by suggesting another mode of power and politics that put human liberation before partisan and personal power. Enrique Dussel’s concept of the Will to Live as a philosophy of the politics of liberation is noted as thinkable alternative. More than a simple condemnation of bad and evil leadership this study is also a critique of careless followership of sycophants and flatterers that irrigates tyranny in leaders.