As political commentator Stephen Grootes noted after the recent ANC Youth League conference, however, “Until now our view has been that we are different from that Place across the Limpopo because there will always be a strong tempering voice, a civil society, a business lobby, a middle-class to keep the extremists at  bay. This congress makes us wonder if that mechanism is still working in the case of Julius Malema.”

Indeed, it’s not surprising that Malema’s fiery rhetoric about nationalisation of resources and expropriation of land has brought the figure of Robert Mugabe and his ZANU-PF party into the forefront of the collective South African consciousness once again. Serendipitously, works by filmmakers and writers trying to make sense of developments in Zimbabwe have washed up on our shores at precisely this moment.

Robert Mugabe ... What Happened?

It’s a question asked over and over in recent years; it’s now the title of a documentary film in which director Simon Bright presents a narrative that, as he describes it, “mirrors my own changing perception of Mugabe”. Bright, whose family had been strongly opposed to Ian Smith’s vision of a white-ruled ‘independent’ Rhodesia, candidly admits that he spent the early part of his career applying his talents as a propagandist for the Zimbabwean agriculture ministry in the 1980s. His films Corridors of Freedom (1987) and Limpopo Line (1990) both recounted and contributed to the combined resistance of southern African countries to the apartheid state.

A slow process of disillusionment can be tracked through Bright’s role as co-producer in Ingrid Sinclair’s Flame (1996), which reveals abuses against the women who fought for Zimbabwe’s freedom, to his imprisonment by Mugabe’s henchmen in 2003. So the film is, he says, “a journey for my own understanding, unpicking my Mugabe hero-worship.” In doing so, Bright has compiled some remarkable footage in addition to reconfiguring his own material: “In some ways, the film is an archival tribute – a montage of southern African documentary cinema from the 1930s to 2010.”

There are rare images of Mugabe as a young man, as well as of the country in which he grew up – and which he left to study at various African universities in the 1950s. There are indicators of the broader context for Zimbabwe’s independence and civil war in the 1970s, including the pan-African influence of Zambian president Kenneth Kaunda, Mozambican Samora Machel and Julius Nyerere of Tanzania (none of whom, it should be mentioned, entirely trusted the young Mugabe).

The film also reminds viewers of the various alternatives to the absolute rule of Mugabe and ZANU-PF that have been successively and successfully quashed. Before Morgan Tsvangirai’s MDC there was Joshua Nkomo’s ZAPU – a threat suppressed by the gukurahundi, during which Mugabe’s notorious Fifth Brigade embarked on a campaign of genocide against Nkomo’s Ndebele supporters. The late Edgar Tekere, a critic of Mugabe from within the ZANU ranks, was also effectively sidelined; likewise, Simba Makoni.

Tekere and Makoni are amongst the wise ‘talking heads’ who provide insight into Mugabe’s rise and reign as tyrant. Bright also shares extensive interviews with newspaperman Trevor Ncube, as well as with ministers of Mugabe’s first cabinet in the halcyon days after the elections in 1980 and with other significant figures in subsequent Zimbabwean politics (including Michael Auret, whose son - with whom he shares a name - produced the film).

So where did it all go wrong? Were the seeds of hatred sown during Mugabe’s eleven-year incarceration in a Salisbury prison? Did his appetite for violence develop during the ‘bush war’? (“People are a product of their environment – that’s the problem with revolutionaries and liberators as leaders,” Bright tells me, “wars of liberation are never glamorous.”) What roles were played by the meddling of the apartheid government, the instruction-in-brutality of North Korea, or the failure of the British to keep to the Lancaster House agreement? What about the death in 1992 of Mugabe’s first wife, Ghanaian Sally Hayfron, who had been a strong (and beneficial) influence on Mugabe?

Or was it something much earlier in Mugabe’s life? Bright admits he’s often heard posited the theory that Mugabe’s pro-Shona ethnic bigotry stems from the childhood trauma of his father abandoning his mother and “running off with an Ndebele woman”. But he is reluctant to psychologise Mugabe too much. “I have a problem with the idea that Mugabe is essentially evil and cruel – that he pulled wings off flies as a boy.” We do, in the film, have an insight into his disciplinarian Jesuit schooling and glimpses of an antisocial, lonely child.  

Ultimately, of all the possibilities mooted in Robert Mugabe ... What Happened?, the most convincing answer is voiced by Wilfred Mhanda: nothing. “Mugabe hasn’t changed,” he tells the camera. “There is nobody in the world more consistent than Robert Mugabe. It’s just that the circumstances surrounding him have changed.” In other words, Mugabe’s desire for power has manifested itself in different ways over the years, and the post-2000 madness of election-rigging and farm invasions and citizen brutalisation has merely been a continuation of this.

“As my knowledge of Mugabe deepens,” Bright acknowledges, “that is more and more my opinion.” It is also the opinion of Daniel Compagnon, author of new book A Predictable Tragedy: Robert Mugabe and the Collapse of Zimbabwe. Compagnon, a professor of Political Science at the University of Bordeaux, is unambiguous in his denunciation: in 1980 the world swallowed the “myth” of Mugabe as an “urbane educated politician” who, a “bright and magnanimous statesman”, extended pardons to his opponents within both the liberation movement and the Rhodesian forces.

The international community and Zimbabweans alike “wanted desperately to believe that Mugabe was nothing but good news”. Yet he was not a Mandela (Bright’s film makes it clear that Mugabe knew this, and would come to resent his inferiority to South Africa’s saviour). He had manipulated the internecine ZANU-ZAPU conflict to his advantage, and he has remained a canny self-preserver ever since.

The effect of all this on Zimbabwe’s population is often rendered in bland statistics of unemployment, food shortages and forced migration that cannot convey the nation’s “tragedy”. For this reason, Peter Orner and Annie Holmes have edited Don’t Listen to What I’m About to Say: Narratives of Zimbabwean Lives, another new book on the torrid history of Zimbabwe – adding to what is already a substantial literary tradition in fiction and non-fiction. Don’t Listen is ‘history from the ground up’, a book in which individuals representing a cross-section of Zimbabwean nationals narrate their own experiences. It makes for harrowing but necessary reading.     

The inevitable question is, of course, quo vadis – where does Zimbabwe go from here? Bright is encouraged by “the stronger position taken by President Zuma and SADEC (which should have been taken years ago). Mugabe’s power has until now been backed by a so-called ‘critique’ of Western imperialism – one of the aims of the film is to burst that balloon – and he will now be increasingly isolated. When he dies ZANU-PF will, I expect, implode; dictators can’t have heirs apparent.”

South Africans, meanwhile, are left to ponder the paradox of a man whose bearing, tastes and mannerisms are more English than the Queen herself – yet who professes utter detestation of Britain. Still, perhaps that’s not entirely dissimilar to a man who claims to be opposed to capitalist exploitation but lives a life of conspicuous brand-oriented consumption ... and we’ve swallowed that myth without even blinking.