Robert Mugabe Dead at 95

*Content warning* I knew a guy who left his family behind in Zim and crossed the Limpopo river at night to try get some work in South Africa. He said guys would be mugged along the border, others attacked by crocodiles. Once he got into South Africa, he had to walk 40km to the nearest town. He worked there for a week trying to save R200 (+-$13) so that he could catch a bus to a bigger town. There he worked for someone for 3 weeks, and at the end of it, the guy ran away without paying them.
We now have these Xenophobic attacks happening. There is a security guard from Zim that works at a school near us. He lives in a township called Katlehong. Two nights ago he got a call from his neighbor to say that he mustn't come home because the mob had come past and they were coming back that night for him. He stayed over at a friends place, and heard the next day that they indeed came back that night and stormed his house and took everything. He was devastated because he has been slowly saving up and buying crockery and cutlery, clothes etc, but he was most upset about his food. He had been saving it for months to send back home to his family, and they took it all. It was only valued at R2000 which is about $135, but that's a lot of money for him considering the minimum wage is around $1.35 / hour. He was one of the lucky ones though, as others were assaulted and even set alight.
All that to say, when you speak to them, they are still willing to put up with that to get away from Zimbabwe. They were excited for a brief moment when Mugabe was overthrown, but they say the new guy is just as bad, if not worse. It's really sad to see.

He went 180 degrees from a revolutionary hero who helped liberate his country from colonial rule while championing democracy to being a ruthless demagogue who held onto power with an iron fist and oppressed and terrorized his own people.

Wish this kind of transformation were rarer than it is...

Kjbartolotta said:

W/o justifying his actions for even a moment, because they're unjustifiable, it's worth noting that Mugabe's decent into tyranny seems to have been motivated (in part) by endless betrayals from Western powers. He learned early the kind of game he was playing and played it, the end result seemed tragically inevitable.

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We have certainly been far from blameless when it comes to assisting with the creation of dictatorships.

Our decisions about which leaders are "good" versus "bad" tend to have more to do with who provides the best environment for our corporations to move in than the actual welfare of a nation's people.