Mugabe's Legacy: Coups, Conspiracies, and the Conceits of Power in Zimbabwe

The 2017 party-internal coup in Zimbabwe and the subsequent death of deposed president Robert Mugabe demand careful, historically nuanced explanation. Mugabe's power over party and state for four decades was due to his Machiavellian moves, Cold War, regional, ideological, generational, inter- and intra-party tensions. David B. Moore's book, Mugabe's Legacy, delves into these questions, tracing how Mugabe reached the apex of the Zimbabwe African National Union's slippery slopes and how his successors struggle to balance Zimbabwe's political contradictions.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 304 pages
Publication date: 02 June 2022
Publisher: C Hurst & Co Publishers Ltd

Zimbabwe's party-internal coup of 2017, followed by the deposed president Robert Mugabe's death nearly two years later, demands a careful, historically nuanced explanation. How did Mugabe gain and retain power over party and state for four decades? Did the suspected and nearly real coups, the conspiracies behind them, and their concurrent mythomaniacal conceits ultimately, ironically, spell his near-tragic end? Has Mugabe's particular mode of power reached a finality with his own downfall, as his successors struggle more to balance Zimbabwe's political contradictions? Will the phalanxes arrayed against Mugabe's control fray further, as Zimbabwe fades?

Mugabe's Legacy delves deeply into these questions, drawing on more than forty years of archival and interview-based research on Zimbabwe's political history and current precariousness. Starting with the mid-1970s, it traces how Machiavellian moves allowed Mugabe to reach the apex of the Zimbabwe African National Union's already slippery slopes, through the complexities of Cold War, regional, ideological,generational, inter- and intra-party tensions. The lessons learned by the president and the nascent ruling party then turned gradually inward, ultimately arriving at a near-collapse that may now pervade all of the country's political space.

David B. Moore vividly charts this rise and fall, all the way to Zimbabwe's tenuous chaos today.

Dimension: 216 x 138 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781787387713