After months of requests for an interview with Robert Mugabe and weeks of waiting in Harare, my patience finally paid off on December 21 last year. I was about to return empty-handed to Johannesburg when the long-silent telephone in my room at York Lodge in Harare rang at 9.30am.

Be at State House in half an hour, I was told. I grabbed the car keys and was on the road in less than 10 minutes. Once inside the grounds of the imposing colonial mansion, I was escorted by one security agent after another past rows of police cars, armed soldiers and Mugabe’s ever-ready motorcade towards the two stuffed lions that guard the visitors’ entrance and Mugabe’s domain.

There I waited in the elegant reception room amid displays of English porcelain, occasionally chatting to George Charamba, permanent secretary for information in the office of the president, for three hours. He told me that “His Excellency” viewed the interview as an opportunity to clarify some issues for the historical record and wanted to give it his full attention.

Suddenly all the officials in the reception area leapt to their feet and stood to attention. Charamba hissed at me to do the same. I turned to where their eyes were focused behind me and there, just inside a doorway, was Robert Mugabe.

He was wearing a dark suit and white shirt, with a patterned tie and matching red silk handkerchief tucked into his top pocket. He studied me silently.

When I finally entered the president’s office, after my handbag had been searched by a security agent, I was startled to see Mugabe sitting bolt upright in a tall, mustard-coloured chair behind his vast desk. He seemed oddly vulnerable but frightening, too – perhaps something to do with his stillness combined with his forbidding public image, his smallness amid the pomp.

He nodded, watching me closely. The tension in the room was suffocating. I asked Zimbabwe’s president if he found it difficult to talk about himself. “Yes.”

Why? “Because talking about oneself is praising oneself. I don’t like to talk about myself at all.”

Interestingly, when Mugabe told me he didn’t want to boast, it did not occur to him that I was asking about self-reflection. His first idea was that there were only good things to discuss. He did not consider good as well as bad because there is a division within himself where anything negative is externalised and only good qualities belong to him.

It’s a delusion that may have been fostered by a lonely childhood. Mugabe said that he was “a very shy person, a shy boy as I grew up, and yes, I still have a bit of it, inevitably”.

Indeed, his brother Donato had told me that books had been Mugabe’s only friends as a child. And Mugabe confirmed this: “That’s what my mother also used to say. Yes, I liked reading, reading, reading every little book I found. Yes, I preferred to keep to myself rather than playing with others. I didn’t want too many friends, one or two only – the chosen ones. I lived in my mind a lot. I liked talking to myself, reciting little poems and so on; reading things aloud to myself.”

This sense of isolation seems to have intensified when Mugabe’s father abandoned the family after his eldest son Michael died at 15 in 1934. “That was a terrible blow,” recalled Mugabe. “It was poisoning. In those days we used to be given some poisonous stuff to spray on grass to kill locusts. Michael possibly went into an auntie’s room and fetched a gourd that had held poison and used it to drink water. That’s what the person who was with him said he did.”

His own life, he speculated, would have been easier had Michael not died because his elder brother would have assumed the family responsibilities that fell instead on his own young shoulders. I asked him if he would recommend politics as a career to any of his three children. He paused, sighing as he looked down at his hands on his lap: “It’s painful, politics, yeah – it’s not a profession to which people must invite themselves, really. They must be invited by others.”

Was this an omnipotent belief that only he – or did he mean God – could appoint people to positions of power in Zimbabwe?

Throughout the interview the president’s tone was barely audible when he talked about himself or when I approached his personal concerns. It was as if he was trying to hide away. He cleared his throat often – perhaps another sign of his discomfort. He seemed at times apprehensive rather than defensive and often more frank than manipulative.

Although substantially truthful, he was often contradictory. But he did not see the contradictions because, like the seemingly respectable married man who makes his living as a drug lord, Mugabe holds parallel positions and talks about the one as if the other does not exist.

How would you describe yourself? “I feel I am just an ordinary person. I feel within me there is a charitable disposition towards others, just as I find charitable positions towards me from others. And I don’t make enemies, no. Others may make me an enemy of theirs, but I make no enemies. Even those who might do things against me, I don’t make them enemies at all.”

So you’re not a vengeful person. Are you a forgiving person?

“Yes, I think so. Otherwise I would have slaughtered lots of people, including Ian Smith [the former white prime minister of Rhodesia]. I always used to joke with Smith that he had borrowed hair [meaning Smith’s scalp] which rightly belonged to us, but he could continue to wear it . . .”

He mused almost wistfully about the attitude of the Zimbabwe white population towards his government: “It was actually the British who spoilt things for the whites.”

In Mugabe’s eyes, western leaders – particularly Tony Blair – were to blame for Zimbabwe’s land disputes because they had failed to provide millions in promised compensation to white farmers for land that had been taken from black people in the first place. To begin with, President Jimmy Carter and Margaret Thatcher had supplied funding for land reform – but not enough.

By contrast, John Major had become his “friend”, he said, after they “talked about land and he committed to review the matter”. He added: “If you take the Conservatives, [they are] much more mature [than new Labour]. They realise there is something called succeeding and hon-ouring both assets and liabilities.

“Alas, Major was defeated by Labour. In came new Labour. I spoke to Blair in Edinburgh. We spoke at quite some length, after we had been sending messages which were not being responded to. He said he had a team in his office which was looking at the matter [of funding for land reform]. Two years went by – no response – and we wondered what had happened.

“They don’t want our problems. They say it doesn’t come under the poverty relief programme they are running. They’re saying their policies don’t derive from the Conservative party and this [funding] was a decision of the Conservative party. No colonial responsibilities any more.”

His voice became eerily thin: “That was quite a damning response. It was a very ignorant response. There was a whole package which Blair had on his desk, left by Major, agreed to between the Conservatives and ourselves. What was going to happen to it?”

Mugabe spoke in a menacingly low tone. “They were going to tear it up,” he growled bitterly. “The stance we took was: they can refuse their money but the land is ours anyway. So keep your money and we’ll keep our land. So that became it. Then our people became disenchanted and the war veterans started moving on to farms and taking them.”

Why didn’t he stop them? Why did he allow the farms of people who had lived there for generations to be in-vaded? Again, the deluded mind had its explanation: “We didn’t regard it as legal, but we didn’t disallow it because we were taking action against the British government.”

Mugabe’s explanation of his government’s disastrous land grab was obviously the information he intended me to convey – and doubtless one reason why he agreed to speak to me when so many other interview requests from foreign journalists had been turned down over the years.

My purpose in obtaining the interview, however, was not to dwell on the land issue, but to explore the man. Why, I asked, do so many people fear you? “Perhaps because I’m quiet, I keep to myself,” he replied. But what people really fear about him is his instability. While he may not be mad in a clinical sense, his is a cut-off, make-believe world.

Curiously, for all his hatred of Britain’s colonial rule, he retains affection for the British royal family. “We’ve had every member of the royal family [to stay] at State House – every one of them,” he claims. “When we had the Commonwealth meeting here in 1991, we had the Queen staying. She loved it. We prepared a lot of things for her . . . And now, to this day, we treasure those moments and we have nothing against the royal family. If anything, we still have our love for the royal family, as I was telling Prince Charles when we met in Rome at the funeral of the Pope. I sat next to him. No, we haven’t lost our love for them. But, you know, the Blair government made even the prince and the Queen say something against Zimbabwe. That’s terrible! It’s sad.”

For a moment Mugabe seemed on the brink of tears. But when I raised the uncomfortable subject of Zimbabwe’s economic collapse, he swung back to resentment and anger.

Many people, I suggested, would say the country is light years away from restructuring agriculture to anything like the position it had occupied in the economy previously. His eyes flashed and his voice rose.

“Light years?” he repeated indignantly. “We don’t even have to go two years. Look at what we will do next year and you’ll be surprised. How could you miss the amount of farming that the people are doing? It’s on an even larger scale than was being done before. What is lacking now are goods on the shelves. That’s all. But the infra-structure is there. We have our mines, you see. We have our enterprises.”

Incredibly, Mugabe was saying that everything was fine, apart from the fact that the people didn’t have food on the shelves. Perhaps admitting that what he set out to do has completely failed would be unbearable.

As we spoke, the octogenarian president kept slipping down in his chair. His legs and arms were all over the place. I wanted to get up and go over to him, put my hands under his armpits and sit him up straight. His body language, if not his words, seemed to reflect his lack of grounding, the fact that his efforts had indeed all come to nothing.

Have you changed over the past 30 years? “I’ve grown old and bald. But the ideas and principles remain. I haven’t changed at all.”

What about all the people who have died, the beatings, the torture, the mass murder? He replied icily: “Who are those people; who are they? We want to know.”

Do you have any regrets, sir? “Of what?” Anything. “It would depend on what you have in mind.”

Politically? “No, no regrets. You go into a fight. It’s a fight against colonialism. You make sacrifices. And naturally, when people die, you regret the deaths of the people . . .”

How would you like to be remem-bered? “Just as the son of a peasant family who, alongside others, felt he had a responsibility to fight for his country.”

Another delusion. Another denial of reality from the bored, deprived boy who became a president and created his own internal realm: a parallel world where he could imagine that there was no injustice when it lay all around.

© Heidi Holland 2008

Extracted from Dinner with Mugabe by Heidi Holland, published by Penguin South Africa

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