Where did Robert Mugabe grow up and live?

📍Kutama, Zvimba, Zimbabwe

1924 – 2019

“I was born Robert Gabriel Mugabe on the 21st of February 1924 in Kutama, a Jesuit mission in Zvimba district, Southern Rhodesia. I was educated by Jesuit missionaries and became a teacher, then a nationalist politician, then a prisoner — I spent ten years in Rhodesian prisons, refusing to accept amnesty. I led the ZANU-PF party and the guerrilla war that ended white minority rule, and I became Prime Minister of independent Zimbabwe in 1980. The world celebrated. I governed for thirty-seven years. The land reform programme I launched in 2000 was violent and chaotic and collapsed the agricultural economy. Inflation reached five hundred billion percent. I was removed in a military coup in 2017 at ninety-three. The liberation hero and the tyrant were the same person. Kutama was the beginning of a story that did not end well.”

👍 LovedThe liberation struggle and the independence of Zimbabwe in 1980. The early years of genuinely inclusive governance. The Kutama Jesuit education that gave me my intellectual formation.

👎 DislikedThe land reform that destroyed the economy. The political violence against the opposition. The thirty-seven years that transformed a liberation hero into what I became.

Map showing where Robert Mugabe lived — Kutama, Zvimba, Zimbabwe

🗺️ Approximate location today

📷 Location image · via Wikimedia Commons

Sources: Holland, H. Dinner with Mugabe (2008), Penguin; Meredith, M. Mugabe: Power, Plunder, and the Struggle for Zimbabwe (2002), PublicAffairs