Who was Robert Mugabe, really?
Robert Mugabe: The Black Victorian, Percy Zvomuya’s definitive new biography of the man who shaped—and devastated—Zimbabwe, is out now from Jonathan Ball Publishers!
‘This is more than the story of just one man. It is a compassionate yet shocking portrait of the promising young country Zimbabwe and how, over time, she was hoodwinked and ultimately trashed by her beloved and brilliant son, Robert Mugabe’. —Judith Garfield Todd
About the book
Robert Mugabe: The Black Victorian
Percy Zvomuya
Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2026
Percy Zvomuya spent a decade researching and writing this definitive biography of Robert Gabriel Mugabe (1924—2019). Allowing the dust to settle after Mugabe’s decades of misrule, Zvomuya goes far beyond the easy stereotype of ‘African nationalist who went from liberator to dictator’, creating a complex portrait of a man who was always the outsider as a young man, a leader of a revolutionary movement and as president of his country. The curious figure of the black Victorian emerges as Mugabe’s fascinating contradictions are exposed.
The author is highly critical of Mugabe and how he oversaw the devastating decline of Zimbabwe, but the reader will come away with a far richer understanding of the country and its people.
Zvomuya has created a beautifully written and intimate portrait which is suffused with a deep cultural understanding of Mugabe and his times.
‘No book demonstrates that paradox like Percy Zvomuya’s new biography of the late revolutionary and dictator, Robert Mugabe. The book is written with an unrelenting graciousness and a lack of political piety, and with a feeling for the country’s colonial and postcolonial disorders that few historians have ever matched’. —Imraan Coovadia
About the author
Percy Zvomuya is a writer, reader, publisher, tree planter, editor and selecta. His writing has appeared in the Mail & Guardian, The Guardian, Chimurenga, Al Jazeera, the London Review of Books blog and the Johannesburg Review of Books.
