When the Monsters Go Marching In: Mugabe the Production and Its Spectacles

Abstract

Mugabe became mad, politically. He was maddened not just by political opponents that drove him into public rage and insane performances of anger but mainly by political supporters and flatterers that called him a divine appointed representative of God on earth. They insulated him from the real world and suspended him in a mythical universe of delusions of grandeur. He was also mad to believe as true the assertions of vulgar flatterers and enterprising sycophants that called him a saint in spite of the diabolic violence that he punished Zimbabweans with. As a political extremist and tyrant, Mugabe was born and also made. There are enablers in shape journalists and political supporters who benefited from his patronage, confabulated and circulated myths and fictions about his divine commission and publicly sang his praises. To those Zimbabweans that fed fat from under his table he became a saint while to those he jailed and consigned to mass graves he became a true monster. To present himself as a true destined leader Mugabe came to be a performer on the one hand of intellectualism and on the other a gallant guerrilla, both which he was actually not. To some observers Mugabe was a tragic figure, either a good man that was failed by people around him or a terrible person that tried to be good and naturally failed. To others, Mugabe was a true Lucifer, a personification of treachery and evil. This chapter explores the political philosophy of Mugabeism that is actually a kind of madness, an absence that is present as Mugabe believed in nothing but power by any means necessary and unnecessary.