Originally published in 2019 after Mugabe’s death.

The Big Bad Wolf in the minds of his past and future victims is the scariest, most unimaginably evil creature in the world. A merciless, invincible force of evil who is so powerful that the mere act of whispering his name can cause grown men and women to instantly drop dead to the ground from sheer fright. 

 I lived in Lebanon for a few years and quickly learned that the Big Bad Wolf had incarnated into a group of super-smart, super-devious neighbours down the road, known to one and all as “The Israelis”. Everything that could and did go wrong in the country was the fault of the Israelis, not whatever corrupt, barely functional Lebanese non-government was presiding over the nation’s stagnant affairs at the time.

 If a major sewage pipe cracked and foul-smelling gunge flowed onto the streets, it was another form of psychological warfare directed by the great enemy. If a cinema projector broke down during a family outing to a Disney movie, it was because the Israelis were trying to mess with the minds of the young kids. By necessity, the Lebanese Defence Forces concerned themselves with Israeli encroachment upon their borders when the Israelis were already messing with the most precious territory of all: the Lebanese subconscious.

 And so it was with Zimbabwe’s long-reigning Big Bad Wolf, President Robert Gabriel Mugabe aka The President, The Great Liberator, Father Of Not Even Half The Nation, He’s Not My Uncle, The White Supremacist’s Favourite African Role Model, and, before his recent passing The Poor Deluded Bastard.

 Robert Mugabe became Prime Minister of Zimbabwe in 1980 and then President in 1987. One can only guess how many Zimbabweans were born, went to school, got married and had their own children during his long reign. During the daylight hours Zimbabweans left their houses and walked past Uncle Bob’s chiselled features on every significant street billboard. When nightfall came, Uncle Bob followed his people into their dreams. A male friend of mine told me how – after being detained by the police and forced to spend a weekend in a shit-filled police cell with a group of other dissidents – he had wet his bed several times over the succeeding few months.  

 Is it any wonder that the man Robert Mugabe, over time morphed into “Uncle Bob” an unbeatable spectral figure who seemed nigh-on immortal? There were whispers that Uncle Bob had survived dozens of attempted assassinations since he became president. Did you hear the story about someone placing a grenade beneath Uncle Bob’s favourite Mercedes limousine? The grenade exploded and yet he walked away without a scratch even though three of his bodyguards had to be carried off to the hospital. Did you know that “someone” spiked Uncle Bob’s pot of breakfast tea with poison? He drank it all, went to bed early and woke up without even a headache. 

 Who could doubt that Uncle Bob was nigh on invincible?

 And then, one day, Zimbabwean’s woke up to a new impossibility. 

 Uncle Bob was no longer president. 

 The indispensable President Robert Gabriel Mugabe had been (reluctantly) removed from office by a bunch of former loyalists he had once regarded as family. Now he had to listen to these lying glory hounds claim they’d taken this drastic action because he’d supposedly lost a step or two, wasn’t fully competent and might have been a little bit corrupt!  

 What? 

 Uncle Bob couldn’t turn on a radio without hearing the two-faced, “magically innocent” Emmerson Mnangagwa tell the world that “President Mugabe’s poor policies had dragged Zimbabwe down? When Mnangagwa had sat in cabinet meetings with him and collectively backed these very same policies! Former colleagues were now openly questioning if he had moved aggressively to reclaim white-owned farms when these very same people now owned these farms! 

 Surely Almighty God Himself would not stand idly by and allow these deceitful miscreants to get away with such insane tomfoolery. Give it a few days and this shoddy cabal of filthy liars would be thrown out of the country by his loyal people!

 Long, stressfully slow days past while Uncle Bob sobered up and waited for justice to be delivered upon the vain, ungrateful heads of Mnangagwa’s gang of shameless traitors. 

 And yet the blue, cloudless skies didn’t fall. A plague of flesh-eating locusts didn’t flood the country. Mud covered zombies didn’t rise from the grave to smite Zimbabwe’s new power brokers and leaders down. No, instead people woke up and trudged off to queue for a loaf of affordable bread outside the nearest embarrassingly anaemic supermarket. Life (such as it was) continued without him.  

 Zimbabwe’s Big Bad Wolf had fallen… and the world didn’t even blink.  

 Uncle Bob stayed around for too long. His once fearsome claws had become fatally blunted. The magnificent fur that had made him the target of every great anti-Pan Africanist big game hunter had turned morbidly dull and perilously listless with age. There was a time when young Mugabe had only had to growl to make respected international leaders tremble with fear; now when he barked and shook his unsteady fist even his part-time maid sighed with boredom. 

 And then, perhaps unable to bear the painfully mundane hardships of his new day-to-day reality, the aged wolf let out his last bewildered sigh and went to sleep.  

 Sadly, Uncle Bob’s big old revolutionary Pan African heart didn’t give out while he drove a purpose-built armoured truck into the British parliament and demanded the head, hands, and feet of Tony Blair as a late-down payment on unpaid land reparations. No, Uncle Bob died (and who could have seen this coming?) meekly, quietly in a made in China bed in Gleneagles Hospital, Singapore.

 The Gleneagles hospital records will tell how many distinguished African historians flew into the country to record Uncle Bob’s last precious words. The hospital’s switchboard operators will have noted how many distinguished world leaders called in to share their sincerest condolences. Perhaps Uncle Bob’s smartphone records will reveal that Barrack Obama called to acknowledge his historic contribution to African liberation and his rightful place in the pantheon of indisputably great world leaders. 

 Who knows? 

 On the night of Uncle Bob’s death, some say that two ghosts were spotted lingering by the former president’s bedside and holding his hands. One ghost was said to have resembled Joshua Nkomo. The other ghost appeared to take after Ian Smith. If so, it’s good to know there’s no place for any lingering bitterness in the afterlife. 

 The Big Bad Wolf of Zimbabwean politics is dead.   Intriguingly, little seems to have changed. 

 No matter… Uncle Bob belongs to the past now.  

 Zimbabwe will surely never again hear from a wolf who has a growl and bite to match the young Mugabe in his prime when he took on all comers to free his country. 

samjhere@icloud.com