Thirty-seven years after he brought independence to the last outpost of
the British Empire in Africa, Robert Gabriel Mugabe’s Zimbabwe is no
more. Mugabe’s resignation, announced in Harare on Tuesday, ushers in a
new era for his country, and his continent. At ninety-three, Mugabe was
the last of Africa’s generation of modern founding Presidents. His
resignation came after a tumultuous eight days in which the Zimbabwean
Army intervened in the political process for the first time in the
country’s history, thousands of Zimbabweans marched and danced in
delirium in the streets, and Mugabe addressed the nation to resign, only to
pull back in a final act of spectacular brinkmanship, before resigning
when Parliament threatened him with the ignominy of impeachment.

For the many Zimbabweans under the age of thirty-seven, the end of the
brutal Mugabe era is a vista-shifting, imagination-opening opportunity.
More cautious voices from civil society and opposition parties caution
against both euphoria and complacency: Mugabe, they warn, may be gone,
but his ZANU-P.F. party, so closely associated with both his failures
and cruel excesses, remains in power.

Zimbabweans will forever associate the Mugabe years with the
authoritarian repression that saw those who threatened the President’s
power either killed, jailed and beaten, intimidated with treason charges
that carried the death penalty, or, if they were fortunate, silenced and
co-opted through patronage. His final years have all but obliterated the
glorious promise of the period soon after Zimbabwe gained independence, in
1980. A vibrant economy collapsed, as his obsession with threats to his
rule from within his own party paralyzed government. Rising levels of
poverty went hand in hand with corruption and cronyism, meaning that,
just as in the classic abuser-victim cycle, the same government that had
destroyed livelihoods masqueraded as the benevolent provider of
everything from food to tractors, and in return demanded that the
recipients give the President their votes.

Among Mugabe’s most effective instruments, and one that he deployed
frequently, was his extraordinary voice. It may seem odd to outsiders,
but Mugabe’s speeches were one of the ways he held sway over his
country. They contained sweeping phrases invoking Zimbabwe’s
fifteen-year liberation struggle against the Rhodesian settler regime of
Ian Smith. He employed rhetorical devices that made his words weapons:
the amplification and over-enunciation; the deliberate, timed pauses
between words; the elongation of the second syllables of certain words, such as
“among,” ”indeed,” “comported”; and the evocation of emotion through
lilting inflection at unexpected moments. His is the most recognizable
voice in Zimbabwe not only because he was the only leader that
generations have known but also because he speaks like no one else.

In his thirty-seven years in power, Mugabe tyrannically centralized power
around his person, both at the national level and at the level of his
political party, to such a degree that he seemed invincible. With
longevity came decrepitude. Since he won a controversial election in
2013, his government has been battling an economy that, unlike his party, would not
bend to his will. As Tendai Biti, a government
critic and former finance minister, pithily retorted, you can rig
elections but you can’t rig the economy.

In a final act of hubris that proved politically fatal, Mugabe seemed
hell-bent on making his fifty-two-year-old wife, Grace Mugabe, his
preferred successor, ahead of Vice-President Emmerson Mnangagwa, his
seventy-five-year-old long-standing and loyal ally, a veteran of the
liberation struggle, and a popular succession candidate within ZANU-P.F. Grace Mugabe is a combative figure whose entry into
politics, three years ago, will be studied by historians as the
beginning of her husband’s downfall. Ambitious and polarizing, Grace
Mugabe worked with a coterie of advisers referred to as the G40, a
cabal made up almost entirely of men and women who did not fight in the
war for independence. Grace Mugabe was at the center of the “King
Lear”-like chain of events over the last two weeks that led to Mugabe’s
fall. On November 4th, the President and First Lady spoke at a rally in
Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second-largest city. In something of a Ceausescu
moment, the First Lady was loudly booed by the crowd as she took the
microphone, angering both her and the President. (The couple also
spoke in Shona, Zimbabwe’s most widely spoken language, in a
predominantly Ndebele-speaking city.) In his speech, Mugabe’s departed
from his prepared text to address the booing, and threatened to fire
Mnangagwa, whom he blamed for the crowd’s display of disrespect. The
following day, Mugabe, egged on by his G40 advisers, fired Mnangagwa.

A week later, the commander of the Zimbabwean Army, Major General
Constantino Chiwenga, issued a warning that the Army would intervene if
needed for the stability of the country. Three days later, Zimbabweans
awoke to an image they had only ever seen on television in other
nations: an Army general in fatigues appeared, announcing that the military was
acting to address “criminal elements” around the President, but that
Mugabe was safe. He fooled no one. It was an all-out bid by the Army’s
top leadership, war veterans, and the old guard of ZANU-P.F. for state
power, meant to strengthen Mnangagwa. The idea of power passing from
Mugabe to his wife and young advisers was inconceivable and
unconscionable to the Party, the Army, and war veterans. Together, they
acted to prevent it.

When Mugabe took to the airwaves to address the nation on Sunday, he was
widely expected to resign. In a sign of how deeply Mugabe and his wife
were loathed, people of different ethnic groups, races, ages, churches,
and political parties united in street demonstrations of the kind not
seen since celebratory rallies at independence. ZANU-P.F. had expelled
Mugabe as the Party President. His Cabinet members had either abandoned
him, were on the run, or were in hiding. At his private residence, a
Catholic priest mediated frantic negotiations to guarantee his family’s
safety. An unprecedented combination of military force, street protests,
procedural ploys, and backroom maneuvering, it seemed, had finally
pushed Mugabe out.

Yet, when he finally spoke, Mugabe’s speech was bizarre and disjointed.
He declared that Zimbabweans were “generally peaceably disposed people . . . with a givenness to resolving our differences ourselves, and with a
level of dignity, discipline, and restraint so rare to many other
nations.” He announced an entrepreneurial and business-development
program, and encouraged the nation to put “shoulder to the wheel” and
prepare for the agricultural season. In a rambling conclusion, he
promised he would preside over a meeting of the same ZANU-P.F. Party
that had fired him that day. It became clear that this was not Mugabe’s
last speech but, rather, his last stand.

The following day, deflated Zimbabweans traded rumors via text and
WhatsApp messages: Mugabe was hanging on, he did not even know that he
had been fired, he would serve out his full term. That afternoon,
Parliament placed a motion to impeach him on the grounds that ranged
from the comical to the serious: not only had he grown so infirm that he
fell asleep at international meetings to the “horror, consternation, and
shame of Zimbabweans,” he had also abetted corruption by his favored G40
ministers. Faced with the humiliation of his failures being dragged into
the open in Parliament, Mugabe finally resigned.

On Friday, Mnangagwa will be sworn in as President. Continued street
celebrations are expected, but uncertainty hangs over Zimbabwe. It is
unclear if the country’s economy can recover from the endemic poverty
brought on by years of international sanctions designed to isolate
Zimbabwe and force Mugabe from power. It is also uncertain whether the
military, the jack-in-the-box that pushed Mugabe out of office, will be
content to return to its box. And it is not clear what kind of leader
Mnangagwa will be. In his only statement since the crisis began,
Zimbabwe’s next President said that rebuilding the nation to its “full
glory is not a job for ZANU-P.F. alone.” Whether Mnangagwa plans to
govern inclusively and break with the Mugabe past remains to be seen.

What is undeniable is the widespread joy among Zimbabweans at the fall
of Mugabe. In the end, Zimbabwe’s founding father was a pathetic figure,
hounded out of office by his party, his legacy in ruins, undone by vanity
that blinded him from seeing that the nation he brought into being was,
finally, bigger than he was.