The Jesuit Education of Robert Mugabe

Robert Mugabe

By Robert Wenzel

The tyrant and former president of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, is dead.

If there ever was an object lesson of why mental revolution must come before street revolution, it is Zimbabwe and the rise to power of  Mugabe.

In  1979, the black nationalist revolution ended white minority rule in what was then called Rhodesia. The old order was replaced the next year with a central power with the vicious Mugabe at the head.

“I have many degrees in violence,” Mugabe once boasted on a campaign trail, raising his fist. “You see this fist, it can smash your face.”

It is estimated that many thousands were tortured or killed under his rule of 37 years. The economy under the 5 foot 7 inch Mugabe was, indeed, a hell hole. At one point, Zimbabwe’s inflation rate under his watch reached 500 billion percent. Vast numbers of children are stunted by malnutrition. Life expectancy has been calculated to be as low as 37 for men and 34 for women, the shortest in the world but Mugabe lived in vast wealth to the age 95.

What is not well known is that Mugabe was highly educated and was exposed to much teaching by lefty Jesuit priests.

Foreign Affairs reports that as a pupil at Kutama Mission School in rural Rhodesia, then a British colony, he devoted much of his time to studying, "encouraged by Jesuit teachers who recognized his intellectual ability and his aptitude for self-discipline. His Jesuit upbringing instilled in him a self-confidence that he never lost."

The parish priest on the Kutama mission station, Jesuit Fr. Jerome O'Hea, "recognized little Robert as a clever boy and promoted him wherever he could," according to Jesuit Fr. Oskar Wermter.

According to National Catholic Reporter:

When Mugabe had completed his training as a teacher, he taught at Catholic schools in Zimbabwe before leaving for Ghana...During that time [in Ghana], Jesuit priests brought the man who eventually earned seven university degrees the materials he needed for his studies, Wermter said.

He was not brought the materials of Adam Smith, Mises, Hayek and Hazlitt.

He later claimed that it was in Ghana that he finally embraced Marxism though he was first introduced to the philosophy in 1949 while attending the University of Fort Hare where he became a member of the African National Congress and where he met a number of Jewish South African communists. Other graduates of Fort Hare included Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu.

Fr. Frederick Chiromba, secretary-general of the Zimbabwe Catholic Bishops' Conference, said the news of Mugabe's death "is met with much sadness."

There is an opposing view.

George Walden, one of the British negotiators at the Lancaster House Agreement in 1979 which ended white-minority rule, said Mugabe was a "true monster".

The agreement "turned out rather well... and looked good for a while", but Mugabe later became "a grossly corrupt, vicious dictator", he said.

Mugabe's Marxist thinking, no doubt fueled by lefty Jesuits, provided him with the justification for his evil use of central power. And the Marxist thinking of much of the population resulted in the support of his actions. A population, who if they understood the great ability of free markets to grow the standard of living of a country, would never have stood for one day of the thuggery of Robert Mugabe.

One has to wonder how much damage Jesuits have done throughout Africa and South America with their Marxist-leaning liberation theology that has confused the people.

  Robert Wenzel is Editor & Publisher of EconomicPolicyJournal.comand Target Liberty. He also writes EPJ Daily Alert and is author of The Fed Flunks: My Speech at the New York Federal Reserve Bankand most recently Foundations of Private Property Society Theory: Anarchism for the Civilized Person Follow him on twitter:@wenzeleconomics and on LinkedIn. His youtube series is here: Robert Wenzel Talks Economics. More about Wenzel here.