ABSTRACT
Robert Gabriel Mugabe was a superhuman and was constantly presented as a holy man through narratives about his life. Through document analysis of the narratives and popular stories of Mugabe’s life and politics, this chapter seeks to expose how such narratives transformed Mugabe from being an ordinary and mere mortal to a legend. Among the narratives to be considered is the “prophecy” by Father Jerome O’Hea, the Roman Catholic priest who is believed to have predicted Mugabe’s rise to power as early as 1934 when Mugabe was merely ten years old. The chapter considers the narratives and popular stories that were told in the formation and crystallization of the legend that Mugabe became. A legend that even Mugabe himself ended up believing that he even could not trust anyone to succeed him as president of Zimbabwe because he believed no one else had been divinely ordained like himself.
