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Robert Mugabe, the first prime minister and later president of independent Zimbabwe, who traded the mantle of liberator for the armor of a tyrant and presided over the decline of one of Africa’s most prosperous lands, died on Friday in Singapore, where he had been receiving medical care. He was 95.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/06/obituaries/robert-mugabe-dead.html
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Robert Mugabe's Journey From Freedom Fighter to Oppressor

The shine soon began to dull, though. For one thing, Mugabe was ruthless against his rivals. From 1983 to ’87, the Gukurahundi massacres against the Ndebele ethnic group left as many as 20,000 people dead, attacks that took place when Mnangagwa, who has the ominous nickname “The Crocodile,” was a security minister. And over the decades, the Zimbabwe African National Union–Patriotic Front (ZANU–PF), the movement he founded, was itself subject to repeated purges when various factions threatened Mugabe’s rule.

Then there were his disastrous land reforms. In the late 1990s, trade unions gave birth to a new political force, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), and the new party soon mobilized to hand Mugabe a stinging defeat in a referendum on a new constitution. That year, under pressure from so-called war veterans—liberation fighters who had demanded land compensation in the aftermath of independence—Mugabe incited a wave of violent invasions of white-owned commercial farms that were owned for generations.

The move alienated the West, though, and led to the collapse of Zimbabwe’s once-rich agricultural sector. Millions fled the country. Sanctions were imposed. The economy nose-dived and inflation reached ludicrous levels last seen in Weimar Germany, during the Great Depression, and in the breakup of Yugoslavia; at its peak, in November 2008, inflation in Zimbabwe was estimated at 79.6 billion percent. The following year, Zimbabwe stopped printing its own money, and began using currencies from other countries.

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/09/robert-mugabe-dead-zimbabwe/597574/