Robert Mugabe and the Will to Power in an African Postcolony

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-ix

   PDF

2. The Birth of the Symptom in the Postcolony

   • William J. Mpofu

   Pages 1-52

3. The Will to Power in the Postcolony

   • William J. Mpofu

   Pages 53-112

4. The Inventions of Robert Mugabe

   • William J. Mpofu

   Pages 113-170

5. When the Monsters Go Marching In: Mugabe the Production and Its Spectacles

   • William J. Mpofu

   Pages 171-224

6. A Career of Madness: Performances of the Will to Power

   • William J. Mpofu

   Pages 225-304

7. The Return of the Symptom in the Postcolony

   • William J. Mpofu

   Pages 305-344

8. Back Matter

   Pages 345-402

   PDF

This book is a philosopher’s view into the chaotic postcolony of Zimbabwe, delving into Robert Mugabe’s Will to Power. The Will to Power refers to a spirited desire for power and overwhelming fear of powerlessness that Mugabe artfully concealed behind performances of invincibility. Nietzsche’s philosophical concept of the Will to Power is interpreted and expanded in this book to explain how a tyrant is produced and enabled, and how he performs his tyranny. Achille Mbembe’s novel concept of the African postcolony is mobilised to locate Zimbabwe under Mugabe as a domain of the madness of power. The book describes Mugabe’s development from a vulnerable youth who was intoxicated with delusions of divine commission to a monstrous tyrant of the postcolony who mistook himself for a political messiah. This account exposes how post-political euphoria about independence from colonialism and the heroism of one leader can easily lead to the degeneration of leadership. However, this book is as much about bad leadership as it is about bad followership. Away from Eurocentric stereotypes where tyranny is isolated to African despots, this book shows how Mugabe is part of an extended family of tyrants of the world. He fought settler colonialism but failed to avoid being infected by it, and eventually became a native coloniser to his own people. The book concludes that Zimbabwe faces not only a simple struggle for democracy and human rights, but a Himalayan struggle for liberation from genocidal native colonialism that endures even after Robert Mugabe’s dethronement and death.

• Mugabeism
• Postcolony
• Zimbabwean politics
• History of Zimbabwe
• Tyranny
• Anti-colonialism
• Nietzsche
• Machiavelli
• Will to Live

• Wits Centre for Diversity Studies, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa

  William J. Mpofu

William Mpofu is a researcher at the Wits Centre for Diversity Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. He is a founding member of the Africa Decolonial Research Network (ADERN), and recognised as a leading expert on the decolonisation of power, knowledge and being in the African university and polity.