How to respond to mUgabe's death?

Way back--make that way, way back--in 2003, Samantha Power "profiled" rObert mUgabe in her essay with an arresting title: How to kill a country.

How could the breadbasket of Africa have deteriorated so quickly into the continent's basket case? The answer is Robert Mugabe

Marx--Karl, that is, not Groucho--said that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce, which is what we now see happening in Venezuela. But, that is a post for another day.

Today, it is all about the hero turned horror, mUgabe.

How awful was he?  There has been so much written, and a lot more will be written.  Consider this alone, for instance:

One statistic sums up what Robert Mugabe did for his people: At independence in 1980, the average life expectancy for a Zimbabwean was about 60 years old; by 2006, that had dropped to 37 for men and 34 for women, the shortest in the world.

I am not the only one who is trying to figure out how to respond to the death of this sociopath:

Some hailed Mugabe as a liberation hero. Others dismissed him as a “monster”. This suggests that Mugabe will be as divisive a figure in death as he was in life.

Many in Zimbabwe are left to live in the disaster that he made out of the breadbasket:

Nomarn Makoto, 33, a school teacher from the poor outlying neighbourhood of Epworth, said he felt little sympathy for Mugabe
“He has just died like everyone else. He left us in this mess and we are still suffering. The Bible says your deeds, good or bad, will follow you. His will surely haunt him on the other side,” Makoto said.

Makoto is like most people who do not seem to believe in my approach to life--there is no forget nor forgive!

Robin Wright, who lived in Africa and interviewed mUgabe the day after he was first elected in 1980, adds a comparison between him and tRump:

The two men were wildly different in many ways, yet I was struck by how much they were alike when I heard that Mugabe had died on Friday. Both came to power with a fiercely populist dogma defined by victimhood and the righteousness of their truths, the facts be damned and their critics publicly shamed. Both men relied on political bases that hero-worshipped, often to the disbelief of the outside world. Both men had economic theories that defied global trends. Both men displayed demagogic narcissism. And each reflected wider global political challenges—Trump among Western nations, Mugabe in Africa.

Here's to hoping that we, too, will not be turned into a disaster by tRump and his 63 million toadies!