For more than five hours on the afternoon of April 4 the man who sees himself as synonymous with the destiny of Zimbabwe, and who has made himself the country’s dictator to ensure it, remained locked in a meeting in Harare, the capital, with his four-dozen-member politburo. The man was Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s president, and the session was taking place in the upper reaches of the ruling party’s headquarters, Jongwe House. Everyone in Harare knew that Mugabe had to be up there; the soldiers of his presidential guard were still lolling around outside, in their distinctive gold berets.

Mugabe was chairing the meeting himself, in a dark suit and polka-dotted tie. On Mugabe’s flanks were the men and women who fought victoriously with him 28 years ago to transform white-ruled Rhodesia into black-ruled Zimbabwe. Now, six days after elections for parliament and president, this group was facing certain defeat. Although the government had not yet officially announced the results, and despite strenuous efforts to rig the election, it was clear that Mugabe’s zanu-P.F. party had lost not only its parliamentary majority but the presidency as well. The purpose of the meeting was to decide whether to accept the loss gracefully and relinquish power to Mugabe’s bitter rival, the Movement for Democratic Change (M.D.C.), led by Morgan Tsvangirai (pronounced Chahn-gur-eye), or to fight on, manipulating the results so as to force a second round of voting for the presidency.

Mugabe’s party is divided now between hawks and doves, between hard-liners and conciliators, and it is riven as well by rival succession candidates. Mugabe’s clan totem is Gushungo—meaning “crocodile” in Shona, the language of most Zimbabweans—and on the occasion of his 83rd birthday, last year, a giant stuffed crocodile was presented to him as a symbol of his “majestic authority.” But even the wiliest crocodiles eventually tire and die, and the word on the street was that he had been stung by the extent of his defeat, and that his young wife, Grace, had urged him to step down and enjoy his last years with their three children in his 25-bedroom mansion. The mood in Harare was expectant, even giddy.

I grew up and was educated in Zimbabwe, served as a conscript, and maintain close ties to the country. Because of these roots I have been able to live and travel there even at times, such as the present, when other foreign journalists have been expelled. In Harare that afternoon I spent time with friends as the hours wore on. Finally an old school chum called to say that “the General”—his uncle, a politburo member and a former guerrilla commander—had at last emerged from Jongwe House, and that the meeting was over.

The General, Solomon Mujuru, is now considered a “moderate,” but he was not ever thus. Twenty-five years ago, not long after the end of the war of liberation, the General had once put a gun to my heart and threatened to kill me. The gun was a Russian-made Tokarev with a mother-of-pearl handle. Odd how you remember such details. The General had been working his way through a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red Label at the time, but his grip was steady.

This was in 1984, during the Matabeleland massacres, when Mugabe unleashed his fearsome North Korea–trained Fifth Brigade into that southern province to crush the opposition. I had written about the massacres for a British newspaper, which is what prompted the General to draw his gun when our paths crossed.

But now, on April 4, the General had bad news to report. In the end Mugabe had decided that he intended to do everything necessary to retain his powers. Behind the scenes the presidential ballot boxes would be effectively stuffed to indicate that Morgan Tsvangirai, though still winning more votes than Mugabe, had not achieved the 50 percent threshold necessary for election. (This was possible because there had been a third candidate in the race.) Further, in the weeks leading up to the runoff, Mugabe would wage a campaign of bloody intimidation to ensure that Zimbabwe’s voters understood where their self-interest lay. Indeed, a secret battle plan was actually drawn up, in detail. A leaked copy dated April 9 was shown to me; the key section carried the heading “Covert Operations to Decompose the Opposition.”

For all the talk of doves and hawks within the politburo, it was clear that hawks remained ascendant. On the government television station, ZTV, I watched the official news reports of the politburo meeting. You could see Mugabe moving slowly around the horseshoe table, shaking hands with each member. They seemed to revere him, lowering their heads when he came near. A few of the women rose to curtsy, as though to a monarch.

The Crocodile

If you were casting the role of “homicidal African dictator who stays in power against all odds,” Robert Gabriel Mugabe wouldn’t even rate a callback. To look at him and hear him talk, he’s still the prissy schoolmaster he once was—a slight, rather effeminate figure, with small, manicured hands given to birdlike gestures. The huge banners that span Zimbabwe’s streets do their best to make this 84-year-old into something more heroic—he is seen shaking an arm at the heavens, above the words “The Fist of Empowerment.” The image is marred somewhat by the little white handkerchief often held in Mugabe’s fist, and by the outsize gold spectacles that dominate his face, and that seem to be wearing him.

Mugabe is no swaggering Idi Amin, the onetime heavyweight boxing champion of Uganda. He remains profoundly enigmatic. Godfrey Chanetsa, his former secretary, described to me how Mugabe has always stayed aloof even from his Cabinet, rarely seeing them outside the scheduled Tuesday-afternoon meetings. “He listens a lot. He just blinks and listens. He lets you talk. He leans back with his head cocked to one side, resting on his hands.” Throughout his life Mugabe has been essentially friendless. Abandoned by his carpenter father, he was brought up largely by his mother and his maternal grandparents and by Catholic priests. A shy, bookish, unathletic boy, he reacted querulously to criticism, and worshipped the Anglo-Irish Jesuit principal of his mission school. He went on to earn a degree at the black University of Fort Hare, in apartheid South Africa—Nelson Mandela’s alma mater—and became a schoolteacher.

Mugabe was politicized during a stint in Ghana in the late 1950s, just as that colony became the first in sub-Saharan Africa to gain independence from Britain. There he also met and married Sally Hayfron, a fellow teacher. In late 1963 he returned to Rhodesia. The following year, Ian Smith, the incoming white prime minister, ordered Mugabe’s arrest and detention for subversion. In 1965 Smith unilaterally declared the colony’s independence from Britain and kept Mugabe in detention. He remained there for the next 10 years, during which time he acquired another six college degrees, taking correspondence courses mostly from the University of London. Ian Smith released him in 1975, and Mugabe slipped across the border into Mozambique to join the nationalist movement, the Zimbabwe African National Union, or zanu. He quickly clawed his way to the top.

Mugabe’s most potent personal influences are mainly white ones. The repressive apparatus of his enemy Ian Smith became a model for his own. A more important influence is the former colonial power itself, Great Britain, with which he has long been besotted. Mugabe was in fact awarded an honorary knighthood in 1994 for his “important contribution to relations between Zimbabwe and Britain.” The evidence of his Anglophilia is everywhere: his Savile Row suits, his love of cricket and tea, his penchant for Graham Greene novels, and his continuing reverence for the Queen, even though she stripped him of his knighthood in June. Mugabe did not blame the Queen for this disgrace; no, it was those “demons” at No. 10 Downing Street.

The love of Britain is matched in Mugabe by a deep resentment. “You can never ever convince an Englishman that you are equal to him, never, never,” Mugabe has said. In Mugabe’s recent election campaign, he often appeared to be running against Britain as much as against Morgan Tsvangirai, employing slogans such as “Zimbabwe will never be a colony again!”