Robert Mugabe was the first prime minister and, later, first president of an independent Zimbabwe, formerly Rhodesia.
A qualified teacher and able negotiator, he was regarded on his assumption of power as the one man capable of healing the wounds left by years of civil war.
But his brutal suppression of a revolt by the Ndebele people of the south provided an early taste of the methods that would make Zimbabwe a byword for political repression and economic mismanagement.
In 1996 – four years after his first wife Sally died, aged 59 – Mr Mugabe married his former secretary, Grace Marufu, 40 years his junior, in a tribal ceremony. She became his mistress while they were both still married to other people and had two children with him before Sally’s death and one after.
Mr Mugabe started his political career fighting against the white minority government of Ian Smith.
He was detained for 10 years until 1974 before leaving for Mozambique, where he helped dictate the Zimbabwe African National Union’s (ZANU) role in guerrilla warfare.
When, in 1978, Mr Smith bowed to external pressure and agreed to representative elections, they were won by the rival UANC, the only black party to have renounced violence.
The UK and the US, however, refused to lift sanctions, and a conference of all parties was organised at Lancaster House in London.
Mr Mugabe, as leader of the ZANU, which drew support from the majority Shona people, attended the talks, with Margaret Thatcher, as effective prime minister-in-waiting.
In the ensuing elections, in March 1980, ZANU-PF (Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front) won 57 of 80 seats in the new parliament, where a further 20 seats were reserved for the country’s white minority.
Mr Mugabe himself survived two assassination attempts during the campaign.
He became prime minister but the result also gave rise to an uneasy coalition with his Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU) rivals, representing the Ndebele.
In 1983, he dismissed ZAPU’s Joshua Nkomo from his cabinet, triggering an armed rebellion in Ndebele land.
This was put down with marked brutality by elements of the new Zimbabwe army, whose training had been conducted along North Korean lines.
Afterwards, in 1987, Mr Mugabe marked his assumption of unchallenged power by abolishing the office of prime minister and declaring himself executive president.
He was subsequently re-elected in 1990, 1996 and 2002, in elections where fairness was increasingly called into question.
Mr Mugabe styled himself as the “Grand Old Man” of African politics, with defenders saying his government achieved notable improvements in both health and education for the black majority.
But he was reviled in the West as an authoritarian who mishandled the economy and resorted to violence to maintain power.
The country’s economy collapsed under his rule, and massive imports of foreign aid were needed simply to feed the people as hyperinflation hit from the late 1990s.
By 2009, Zimbabwe stopped printing its currency and in 2015 it announced plans to completely switch to using the US dollar.
Grace Mugabe’s lavish lifestyle, earning her the nickname “Gucci Grace”, failed to ingratiate her to the Zimbabwe people – as they struggled to buy basic necessities she would go on spending sprees, once reportedly splashing £75,000, and withdrawing more than £5m from the Central Bank of Zimbabwe in the years up to 2004.
She was also embroiled in corruption over real estate in Zimbabwe and Hong Kong, and has a reputation for violence, punching a Sunday Times photographer in the face outside a luxury hotel in Hong Kong – but was granted immunity by China because she was Mr Mugabe’s wife.
Military intervention in the civil war in the neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo also proved a heavy financial burden for Mr Mugabe.
But it was the forced distribution of land that proved decisive, turning what had been an exporter of food into a country with five million people dependent on food aid.
When Mr Mugabe became prime minister, some 70% of arable land was owned by about 4,000 descendants of white settlers.
Favouring a “willing buyer, willing seller” plan for the gradual redistribution of land, little was achieved until Mr Mugabe began using force in 1999 and 2000.
Self-styled “war veterans” invaded white-owned farms, and the British public quickly became familiar with stories of beatings, rape and killings.
The farm invasions severely affected agricultural production, leaving much of the country’s population lacking enough food to meet basic needs.
In 2002, the Commonwealth suspended Zimbabwe’s membership. When this was extended 18 months later, Mr Mugabe pulled his country out.
The US, meanwhile, had imposed sanctions of its own, saying the situation in Zimbabwe endangered the entire southern African region.
In 2004, the African Union openly criticised Zimbabwe’s open violation of human rights, citing the arrest and torture of lawyers, journalists and MPs.
Mr Mugabe was accused of using starvation as a conscious political weapon, by denying food aid to those areas supporting the opposition.
He was initially defeated in the presidential vote in 2008, with Morgan Tsvangirai winning by 47.9% to 43.2%.
But ahead of a run-off between the two as neither had secured 50% of the vote, a violent campaign against supporters of Mr Tsvangirai saw scores killed and thousands displaced.
Mr Tsvangirai pulled out of the run-off, and Mr Mugabe was re-inaugurated despite strong international condemnation of the election.
In the same year he had early prostate cancer and despite treatment being available in Zimbabwe, he travelled to Singapore – chartering Air Zimbabwe’s only long-haul aircraft – to be treated in a hospital which he regularly frequented for health check-ups paid for by Harare.
Mr Mugabe won another presidential election in 2013, but the ballots were widely not considered free or fair, with claims of vote rigging and fears over violence.
Last year, he sacked his first vice president – Emmerson Mnangagwa – with speculation he was about to appoint his wife Grace as his successor.
On 15 November 2017, the national army placed him under house arrest and days later he was sacked as leader of the ZANU-PF.
The party than issued an ultimatum calling for him to resign, and began impeachment proceedings when he refused. He later resigned, and negotiated a deal which exempted him from prosecution and protected his business interests.
Weeks after Mr Mugabe was forced to resign, in what he called a coup, he went for a medical check-up in Singapore, paid for with his pension which guarantees him foreign health care.
At least 20 aides accompanied him on each Singapore trip, claiming a day rate in foreign currency and accommodation in top hotels.
He would later return to the Singapore hospital, where Mr Mnangagwa said he was unable to walk, but would remain supported by the Zimbabwe government.
His death in Singapore was confirmed on 6 September 2019.
Robert Mugabe: The most controversial quotes from Zimbabwe’s former leader
Robert Mugabe was a controversial character in global politics, before his ousting as Zimbabwe’s president in 2017 after nearly four decades of rule.
It was a leadership marred by violence, persecution and corruption – and the former president’s outspoken tendencies caused controversy, too.
Following his death, we have curated some of the most revealing quotes Mr Mugabe made during his lifetime.
:: He responded boldly to premature rumours of his death (2012)
“I have died many times. That’s where I have beaten Christ. Christ died once and resurrected once. I have died and resurrected and I don’t know how many times I will die and resurrect.”
:: And was enthusiastic about Hitler (2013)
“I am still the Hitler of the time. This Hitler has only one objective, justice for his own people, sovereignty for his people, recognition of the independence of his people. If that is Hitler, then let me be a Hitler tenfold.”
But he seemed less keen on Nelson Mandela (2013)
“Mandela has gone a bit too far in doing good to the non-black communities, really in some cases at the expense of (blacks)… That’s being too saintly, too good.”
:: And much less on LGBT people (2010)
“Worse than pigs and dogs… Those who do it, we will say, they are wayward. It is just madness, insanity.”
:: On his affair with Grace, who he married in 1996 following the death of his wife, he was unapologetic (1998)
“I wanted children and this is how I thought I could get them. I knew what I was doing and my wife knew.”
:: Decades ago, on Zimbabwean independence, Mugabe had been conciliatory (1980)
“It could never be a correct justification that because the whites oppressed us yesterday when they had power, the blacks must oppress them today.”
:: Later on seizing farms, he adopted a different tone (2000)
“You are now our enemies because you really have behaved as enemies of Zimbabwe. We are full of anger. Our entire community is angry and that is why we now have the war veterans seizing land.”
:: On Britain, Zimbabwe’s former colonial ruler (2001)
“The British were brought up as a violent people, liars, scoundrels and crooks… I am told that [former British prime minister Tony] Blair was a troublesome little boy at school.”
:: And colonialism in general (2015)
“African resources belong to Africa. Others may come to assist as our friends and allies, but no longer as colonisers or oppressors, no longer as racists.”
:: Mugabe’s final statement as president, made in a resignation letter, prompted jubilation (2017)
“My decision to resign is voluntary on my part,” the letter said.
“It arises from my concern for the welfare of the people of Zimbabwe and my desire to ensure a smooth, peaceful and non-violent transfer of power that underpins national security, peace and stability.”
Mugabe: The day I got under his skin
Sky’s chief correspondent Stuart Ramsay – the third foreign journalist to ever interview Robert Mugabe – recalls the 2004 meeting.

My palms were sweating. I couldn’t talk to my colleagues.
I kept going over my notes and my questions time and again; imagining a scenario where an interview we had worked to set up for over a year would be a disaster, with me to blame.
We were in the ante room of the office of the Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe.
He rarely gave interviews and we had been threatened with arrest, imprisonment and deportation, and had been subjected to a barrage of abuse from Zimbabwe’s government ministers on television and in newspapers.
However, there we were, just a few feet away from a man who had dominated southern African politics for decades. A man accused of murder, human rights abuses, kleptocracy, political fraud and racism.
But he was also a man revered by black African leaders and black people.
A revolutionary soldier who fought in the bush, who served years in prison, who took control of a nation and ended white-minority rule.
A man who went to the United Nations and told the West, and anyone else who would listen, that Africa wasn’t for being pushed around anymore; that black people had the right to be treated with respect and their
international observations given equal weighting to anyone else.
See what I mean? I was petrified!
We were called in. We had 10 minutes to set up lights and cameras, check sound, make sure we were ready.
Then he walked in. I moved towards him to shake hands, he was humming a song, I think.
He was small, immaculately dressed, his moustache and hair perfect, his skin beautifully smooth and shining.
This was absolute power personified.
He cared not a jot what I was going to ask him. He was mildly interested that we were there and that his staff had arranged for the interview to take place. I was certain right then that the interview we had sweated over day and night for months was nothing more than a brief interlude in his morning.
I saw the hands of Sky cameraman Garwen McLuckie shaking as he attached the microphone to the president’s lapels while they exchanged pleasantries about the weather and their families.
Honestly, I would have laughed if I could have but I could barely swallow.
Then we were off.
My nerves disappeared, I wasn’t going to let him off anything. I was prepared, I had the economic figures, I had seen the victims of torture, been chased by his thugs, I knew the history.
As the third foreign journalist to ever interview President Mugabe I felt the weight of responsibility and in the first moments I felt enormously honoured to represent everyone who ever wanted to ask this dictator a question.
I remember at one point really getting under his skin and he threw a bottle past me in disgust.
We had been scheduled 15 minutes. I think we exchanged with each other for well over an hour.
He loved it. He didn’t care what I thought – he wanted to explain himself and I let him.
I have never been a shouty aggressive interviewer. I believe the guilty will hang themselves. I think he did. Nobody can argue the indefensible for ever.
Eventually the staff called the interview to an end. I thanked him and we posed for pictures.
He was an utter gentleman and very engaging. We talked about holiday destinations and I said I liked travelling in Africa and he said he particularly liked the Far East.
“In fact,” he said with a beaming smile, “I’ve just come back from Singapore. I absolutely love it there.”
That morning I had read in the papers that two journalists had been imprisoned for the slanderous allegation that the president had just returned from Singapore on vacation.
Says it all I guess, but what an experience.
