Mugabe leaves legacy of economic ruin, upheaval in Zimbabwe

From widely acclaimed liberator of his nation to despotic dictator, Robert Mugabe's 37-year rule of Zimbabwe has been one of Africa's most controversial and influential.

Wily and ruthless, the 93-year-old Mugabe outmaneuvered his opponents for decades but was undone by his own miscalculation in his final weeks in power. He blundered when he sidelined his right-hand man in order to position his wife, Grace, as his successor. He didn't anticipate that the fired vice president, Emmerson Mnangagwa, would swiftly and skillfully depose him.

Mugabe's often violent seizure of Zimbabwe's white-owned farms was his signature action—and devastated the country's agricultural production, transforming what had been known as Africa's breadbasket into a land of barren fields and hungry people. Mugabe cloaked the land grabs in ringing rhetoric, shaking his fist and shouting that Africa's land should be held by Africans. It didn't matter that the farms, which had been pledged to go to poor blacks, instead went to his generals, Cabinet ministers, cronies and his wife—or that many of the fields lay fallow years later. Even now Mugabe is widely revered by many Africans as the continent's most radical de-colonizer.