Robert Mugabe, the homophobic leader of Zimbabwe for 37 years, is dead at 95. During his leadership of the Republic, Mugabe threatened to jail and behead gays, calling them “inhuman“. Mugabe’s death was announced by its current president, Emmerson Dambudzo Mnangagwa.
The NYT reports: ‘Mr. Mugabe, the world’s oldest head of state before his ouster in 2017, was the only leader Zimbabweans had known since independence, in 1980. Like many who liberated their countries, Mr. Mugabe believed that Zimbabwe was his to govern until the end. In a speech before the African Union in 2016, he said he would remain at the helm “until God says, ‘Come.’” Throughout, Mr. Mugabe remained inscrutable, some would say conflicted. Remote, calculating, ascetic and cerebral, a self-styled revolutionary inspired by what he once called “Marxist-Leninism-Mao-Tse-tung thought,” he affected a scholarly manner, bespectacled and haughty, a vestige of his early years as a schoolteacher. But his hunger for power was undiluted.’
