I once interviewed Denis Norman, a former farmer who served in three of Robert Mugabe’s cabinets and knew him as well as any other white man. He told me a poignant story of his last meeting with the late Zimbabwean president before he retired to Sussex in 2003. “I said: ‘Before I go can you answer one question? Where did it all go wrong?’ He said ‘Has it gone wrong?’ I said ‘I know it’s gone wrong. You know it’s gone wrong.’ Mugabe paused, before saying quietly: ‘It’s not going right, is it?’”
Norman’s was a good question, for Mugabe was not always the monster he became. The former freedom fighter, who had spent ten years in a Rhodesian prison and was denied permission even to attend his three-year-old son’s funeral, astonished Zimbabwe’s fearful white minority when he became his newly-independent country’s first leader in 1980.
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