Robert Mugabe Won't Go

Mugabe's track record, even more than his poisonous narcissism, belies the conviction that he alone deserves to rule his birthplace. In the course of his long and twisting career, Mugabe has repeatedly bedeviled his critics and outsmarted his foes, apparently for the sole purpose of continuing to govern. Age has added an edge of foolish decorousness, especially since the death of his wife of three decades, Sally Hayfron, in 1992, and his remarriage four years later, at the age of seventy-one, to his secretary, Grace, forty-one years his junior. In 2005, he and Grace moved into a twenty-five-bedroom mansion that they had built with funds of unknown origin. Grace built another mansion, called Graceland, which was later sold to the Libyan government, at the time run by Muammar Qaddafi. Mugabe himself allowed that some “foreign governments” had contributed to his lavish lifestyle; the word around Harare was that Chinese money was involved.