The Black Robespierre, as he became known, put white fears at rest - speaking
of reconciliation and joint enterprise.
"If yesterday I fought you as an enemy, today you have become a friend," he
told a relieved white population. "If yesterday you hated me, today you
cannot avoid the love that binds me to you."
Twenty years later, Mr Mugabe is known the world over as a political
demagogue, someone who, in a bid to cling to power, turned back on his
promises and drove his nation into the ground.
Born in 1924, Robert Mugabe was one of the six children of a Malawian father
and a Shona mother. He was educated in Roman Catholic missionary schools
before moving to South Africa's Fort Hare University for the first of his
seven degrees.
When he returned to Rhodesia in 1960, his political activism earned him a 10
year jail term for "subversive speech", after which he fled to neighbouring
Mozambique where he led a guerrilla forces in a protracted war against Ian
Smith's government.
The 1979 Lancaster House agreement brought independence to Zimbabwe and Mr
Mugabe returned home to a rapturous welcome.
He initially operated a coalition government with fellow freedom fighter
Joshua Nkomo's Zimbabwe African People's Union but the pair fell out.
Mugabe accused Mr Nkomo's supporters of plotting to overthrow him and in 1982,
sent in North Korean-trained troops to carry out massacres that left more
than 3,000 people dead.
In 2000, despite being a self-confessed Anglophile with a love of Savile Row
suits and the Royal family, Mr Mugabe, turned on the mainly English-origin
white settlers of Zimbabwe.
Self-styled war vets, many too young ever to have fought in the liberation
war, invaded white farms, forcing their owners off land many had bought from
the government during Mr Mugabe's tenure.
The subsequent food shortages and hyperinflation that followed plunged
Zimbabweans, black and white, into destitution.
After a successful challenge by Morgan Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic
Change in a bloody 2008 election, he now finds himself in a shaky coalition.
He is also dogged by rumours of ill-health, which last year prompted him to
tell an interviewer: "I don’t know how many times I die but nobody has ever
talked about my resurrection. Jesus died once, and resurrected only once,
and poor Mugabe several times,"
Mr Mugabe's first wife Sally died. He has three children with his second wife,
Grace, who is 41 years his junior.
