Abstract
Robert Mugabe is a difficult subject to define and understand. This is largely because Mugabe is a colonial subject that played a pivotal part in the decolonization struggles but continues to manifest multiple contradictions as a postcolonial actor. Since the dawn of the twenty-first century, Mugabe’s signification became locked in the form of two registers—of liberal and nationalist signification. The liberal signification holds that Mugabe is a villain, despot, tyrant, human rights violator, and the figure of evil. This liberal signification with its hegemonic form and content creates a liberal consensus where the world without Mugabe will be a just world. This even goes to the extent of having a one-dimensional narrative of who Mugabe is, and this is the signification that has even assumed the level of common sense. Mugabe is all things gone badly—a leader who degenerated from a liberation hero to the typical postcolonial tyrant—thus, the cause of Zimbabwean crisis.
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© 2015 Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni
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Sithole, T. (2015). A Fanonian Reading of Robert Gabriel Mugabe as Colonial Subject. In: Ndlovu-Gatsheni, S.J. (eds) Mugabeism?. African Histories and Modernities. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137543462_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137543462_13
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-56713-3
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-54346-2
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