Cecil the Lion and Robert Mugabe

I interviewed Robert Mugabe the day after he was elected Zimbabwe’s Prime Minister, in 1980, in the country’s only democratic poll. The election marked the end of a fifteen-year civil war and ninety years of British colonial rule. Mugabe made no pretense of sustaining democracy. “As you saw from the decision of the people, it is virtually only one party, the Patriotic Front, that is in power,” he told me. In a nine-way contest, his party had taken sixty-three per cent of the vote. “The rest of the parties have been rejected, so we have a one-party state already.”