He got stuck in-between a rock and a hard place, and while he was a fantastic rebel leader and anti-colonialist, transitioning into partisan politics was a struggle for him (because he was afraid of tribal leaders selling out the country, because historically they had sold out the country), he was never able to successfully get Zimbabwe to find economic footing, and him experimenting with MMT lead to massive inflation. Ultimately he and his government were better for the people than Rhodesia, which would have been a genocidal apartheid state otherwise, but to claim that he ‘did a great job’ is overselling him.

Incidentally, the first bad grade I ever got was a paper on him, where I essentially said the above. I was told that ‘Wikipedia is not a good source.’ when I pointed out that I had read his biography and the history of Rhodesia, while also citing Wikipedia and that it was from those that I drew my conclusions, I was told I needed to ‘think more critically’.

This of course came from a teacher who said that the published CIA database is a good place to find a countries statistics and the Freedom Index. It was my first real brush with ‘liberal politics’ as a kid and made me completely lose faith with the idea that my social studies teachers knew what they were talking about.

I remember in 2002 there were some “election irregularities” and he was like “who are the Americans to tell me how to hold an election? Remember Florida?”

Anti-colonial hero. I think post-liberation things got more complicated.