Robert Mugabe died on Friday - and immediately contestation over his memory started afresh.
In the court of public opinion there is no middle ground: there are either those who revere him as the liberator of Zimbabwe and father of a freed nation - or those for whom he was the devil incarnate.
In the beginning, Mugabe was justifiably lauded both as heroic freedom fighter and the prototype Nelson Mandela for his reconciliatory agenda towards his former foes, the white settlers, as he took charge of a country once considered the jewel of Africa for its abundance of natural resources and infrastructure.
By the middle of his rule, he was known for his brutal persecution of the Matabele and his economic policies which had less to do with radical economic transformation and more to do with staying in power by rewarding allies, stripping the exchequer bare and then implementing a land grab programme which either starved Zimbabweans or forced them to become refugees.
Highly educated, perhaps one of the best educated presidents in the world, he became a caricature of a African despot, railing at the vagaries of the West, especially Tony Blair, and their banks for demanding their loans be paid back and resorting to populism to silence dissent while his wife became the embodiment of a modern-day Marie Antoinette.
Eventually overthrown in
a bloodless palace revolution,
when his end finally came it was
in a Singapore hospital for the simple reason that his country’s medical services had been ruined almost beyond repair - at his own hand.
As apt an epitaph as that might be, the truth is always more nuanced than either the fevered haters or chauvinists would have us believe.
In time, history will remember Robert Gabriel Mugabe as a man who promised much, but failed appallingly, both inextricable from systems and times that we have all long chosen to forget.