Robert Mugabe led Zimbabwe’s independence struggle, was celebrated as an African liberation hero, and governed for thirty-seven years — during which he transformed one of the continent’s most promising economies into a hyperinflationary catastrophe, ordered massacres of political opponents, and held power until his own party finally removed him at ninety-three. The arc from liberator to destroyer is one of the most complete in modern African history.

This episode traces Mugabe from his mission-school education through the independence war, the early years of reconciliation, the Gukurahundi massacres, the land seizures, and the hyperinflation that reduced a breadbasket to a basket case.

• Mugabe’s education, his imprisonment, and the guerrilla war that won Zimbabwean independence
• The early reconciliation policy and the international praise it earned
• The Gukurahundi massacres in Matabeleland — the atrocity the world chose to ignore
• The farm seizures, the hyperinflation, and the 2017 coup that finally removed him at ninety-three