In which I Reveal my Next Project: A Book About Mugabe

I am writing a book about Mugabe. Yes, you heard it here first. I am writing a book about my encounters with Mugabe. It is going to make my name, it is, because Mugabe is the World’s Worst Dictator, and History’s Second Worst Man, Second Only to Hitler. Was there a poll, I hear you ask? Does it matter? If Mugabe did not exist, the Western media would have to make him up.

Now, about my book. I have decided to make myself white because then it will DEFINITELY be turned into a movie. If you are an African mass-murderer and or dictator, they will make a movie about you if you kill enough people but they need a white foil who comes to Africa to discover himself through meeting you and gazing with angst at the African landscape. The book will have a great big lolloping picture of him on the cover. It will be called Cocktails with Mugabe because cocktails sound so very glam and decadent, and if you then add with Mugabe you heighten the decandence by a factor of the square root of infinite, and, as a bonus, you get a little frisson of dark African glamour with olives on the side. Black olives.

My book is based on reality - nothing says authentic more than the words “based on a true story”. I once went to a cocktail party where Mugabe stood in the corner, surrounded by bodyguards. I tried to get close enough to talk to him, but his bodyguards approached menacingly and I went the other way. But that was not the only time I met him. I had talked to him a few years before, when I graduated, or, rather, he had talked to me. I knelt on a padded footstool in my graduation gown. He tapped me on the head with a little black board and said “Congratulations”.

Is that all, I hear you say.

I tell you, I can make a whole book out those encounters. Was that loneliness that I saw in his eyes as his bodyguards moved from him, or a crazed self-satisfied look? Was that a genocidal snarl I heard in his voice when he said “Congratulations” ? And what to make of the fact that he said “Congratulations” and not “Makorokoto” or “Amhlope?” Does this say anything at all about his love of the Queen and his later anger at Britain’s great betrayal? Was that the falling light in the Great Hall of the University of Zimbabwe on his face or the merest shadow of a Hitler moustache, foreshadowing the terror and the fear that was to come? Was it the light? Or was it a murderous glint from a murderous mind ?

Yes, I am writing a book on Mugabe.

It is going to be huge.