Robert Mugabe

interviewed by Dali Tambo

on People of the South.

Veteran cultural affairs television host and presenter Dali Tambo is back on local screens in South Africa with his iconic and widely watched television program People of the South. 

In one of his latest segments, Tambo sat down with a man people either love to hate, or hate to love, the ever outspoken freedom fighter turned president (for over 30 years), Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe.

The mild conversational tone of the interview, which some accuse of being a ‘PR exercise’ for Mugabe’s electoral campaign, and that the interview served as a platform to glorify President Mugabe’s image, has caused a bit of controversy for Tambo who recently came out to defend the format of his program by saying, “If you’ve watched any of the shows you will know that we are ‘people’ of the south, not ‘politics’ of the south. We deal in people”.

In this 45 minute segment, Tambo begins with a lengthy and in-depth and the two go on to discuss Robert Mugabe’s childhood and upbringing, the politicization of Mugabe as a young intellectual at the legendary For Hare University, the Lancaster House agreement and the subsequent Land Reform executed by Mugabe’s government, as well as more personal and intimate issues such as his marriage to the late Sally Mugabe, and his romance to his now wife and first lady Grace Mugabe.

President Mugabe, in discussing how his political track record with the Western world differs from that of Nelson Mandela, where the two of them once shared similar forms of appraisals from Western media and governments, by saying, “they will praise you only if you are doing things that please them…Mandela has gone a bit too far in doing good to the non-black communities…really in some cases at the expense of them…he has been too good, too much of a saint”.

>via: http://dynamicafrica.tumblr.com/post/72130304900/best-posts-of-2013-99-robert-mugabe-on-people-of