(NEWZIMBABWE, AP) Mugabe author found dead

Mugabe author found dead
11/08/2012 00:00:00
by AP

JOURNALIST and author Heidi Holland, who chronicled the rise of President Robert Mugabe from freedom fighter to what critics describe as a power-obsessed leader, died Saturday at her home in South Africa, police said.

Police spokesman Lt. Col. Katlego Mogale said a gardener found Holland's body Saturday in her home in Melville, a suburb of Johannesburg, dead from an apparent suicide. She was 64.

Mogale said there were no signs of foul play, nor any items missing from her home to suggest a burglary.

Holland grew up in Zimbabwe, then white-controlled Rhodesia, but described in her 2008 book "Dinner With Mugabe" her sympathy for the future president and others fighting to wrest control of the nation back to black Africans.

She recounted first meeting Mugabe in 1975 at a dinner, and having to leave her toddler son at home alone to drive him to a train he was about to miss.

Holland interviewed Mugabe in November 2007, after he ordered white-owned farms seized, which saw hundreds of thousands of black farm workers lose their jobs and nearly a third of the population flee.

[Total BS. - MrK]

Critics say later in his rule, Mugabe unleashed soldiers and ruling party members on opposition supporters in bid to retain power.

[Total BS. - MrK]

Though Zimbabwe is now run by a unity government, it remains fragile and there are few signs that Mugabe, who has ruled the nation since 1980, will give up power willingly.

"I think he's in denial, I think he can't face what he's done in Zimbabwe because that isn't what he intended to do," Holland told The Associated Press in 2008.
"He did genuinely, I think, want to be the savior of his people, the liberator of an oppressed nation."

Holland recently published "100 Years of Struggle: Mandela's ANC," a book about South Africa's governing African National Congress.

She has had articles published in a number of newspapers as a freelance journalist, and had an occasional column in Johannesburg newspaper The Star.
She is survived by sons Jonah Hull, a correspondent for satellite news channel Al-Jazeera English, and Niko Patrikios.