Heidi Holland’s Dinner With Mugabe

I will admit that I started reading Dinner With Mugabe expecting the kind of “African stories” some non-Africans write. Those stories where Africa is such a dark continent that you wonder how we manage to find the tip of our own noses. But Heidi Holland shamed my prejudice because this book is not just a collection of her thoughts on Zimbabwe’s president but rather a reflection on the man many have described as a tyrant.

Not to say that Holland does not infuse her opinion of Mugabe in the book, it is her book after all, but she achieves it in such a way that you understand why she feels the way she does. When she talks to his brother, you see the studious boy and understand why the man sometimes seems to be withdrawn into his own little world, even when he is surrounded by many people at a public event.

You understand why Mugabe believes he is still the best man for Zimbabwe’s top job, even at 90. His mother always made it clear that he was a special boy, something that caused his siblings to tease him. So what are a few admonitions from people, some of who, he has never seen? Mother knows best, are we not always told?

Different accounts
Whether you admire Mugabe or not, are passionate about politics or indifferent to it, reading about Mugabe through a woman who feels affection for her “Uncle Bob” or the one who will always remember his compassion at the time she was widowed and then through the eyes of a man who blames Mugabe for mass killings and another who believes the president has diverted from the ideals for which he took office, you see different visages of the man who always manages to attract controversy like fire does a moth.