Morgan Tsvangirai, Longtime Foe of Mugabe in Zimbabwe, Dies at 65

HARARE, Zimbabwe — Morgan Tsvangirai, a former labor leader and prime minister of Zimbabwe who once seemed on the cusp of defeating the country’s longtime president, Robert G. Mugabe, only to face bloody intimidation that thwarted his ambitions, died Wednesday night. He was 65.

Elias Mudzuri, the vice president of Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change, confirmed the death. The cause was colon cancer, for which Tsvangirai had been hospitalized in South Africa for months.

He died less than three months after his longtime nemesis, Mugabe, was ousted by the military last November as part of a struggle within the governing party, ZANU-PF.

For almost 20 years, Tsvangirai (pronounced CHAN-gih-ray) headed the Movement for Democratic Change, a party founded in 1999 to capitalize on the growing unpopularity of the autocratic Mugabe, who led Zimbabwe from its independence in 1980.

In 2002 and again in 2008, Tsvangirai stood against Mugabe in elections marred by growing levels of violence against opposition supporters by government followers.

The abuses peaked in 2008, when Tsvangirai won more votes than Mugabe in the election’s first round but withdrew from a runoff, saying he did not want anyone to be murdered for voting. About 200 of his supporters had already been killed.

Tsvangirai proved no match for Mugabe’s wily political maneuvering, which drew on his record as a leader in the struggle against white minority rule, his often violent intolerance of opposition, and his ability to marshal support from regional and broader African political forces.

Mugabe frequently inveighed against Britain, the former colonial power, and depicted his adversaries, including Tsvangirai, as puppets of the country’s former imperial overlords.

When Tsvangirai became prime minister in 2009 under a power-sharing agreement brokered by neighboring South Africa after the flawed vote of 2008, the pact and his new job diminished his ability to oppose the president.

Even as he accused Mugabe of flouting provisions of the unity government, many critics said Tsvangirai had been outwitted and co-opted by the president, his former sworn enemy. Indeed, Tsvangirai seemed to settle into a more comfortable relationship with him, built on the privileges of office.

In 2012, after Tsvangirai celebrated his second marriage with a glitzy party attended by guests arriving in Bentleys, Mercedes and BMWs, some of his followers were aghast at the ostentatiousness of the display and questioned who had paid for it.

By the time elections were held the following year, Tsvangirai was greatly weakened. He accused Mugabe of rigging the election and challenged him in the courts. But Mugabe claimed victory with 61 percent of the vote, compared with 34 percent for Tsvangirai, and it seemed that Tsvangirai’s brush with high office was over. That was certainly Mugabe’s view.

“We have thrown the enemy away like garbage,” Mugabe said. “We say to them: You are never going to rise again.”

For all that, Tsvangirai appeared in recent months to be attempting a comeback, even as he made frequent trips abroad for colon cancer treatment.

In 2017, he was part of a united front with other opposition groups, including the Zimbabwe People First movement, which is led by Joice Mujuru, a former vice president and onetime guerrilla fighter who was ousted by Mugabe in 2014.

“In 2013, we don’t know what hit us,” Tsvangirai said last year, finally conceding that he had been beaten in the polls that year. “We were defeated. But this time, we will refuse to be defeated.”

The intention behind the alliance with Mujuru was to challenge Mugabe in elections in 2018, but that strategy was eclipsed by the military-backed intervention last November that brought Emmerson Mnangagwa, a former ally of Mugabe’s, to power.

After Mugabe was overthrown, there was fevered speculation that Mnangagwa would seek a more inclusive form of rule than that of the leader he had just ousted. Instead, Mnangagwa lauded Mugabe and announced a government of his own supporters, including the military.

Even as he fell ill with cancer, however, Tsvangirai failed to groom a successor, and he left behind a fractured party with no obvious leader to challenge Mnangagwa in the elections expected this year.

The eldest in a family of nine, Tsvangirai was born on March 10, 1952, in the Gutu district of Masvingo province, in central Zimbabwe. The family was poor, and Tsvangirai abandoned formal schooling early to start work, first as a textile weaver and then as a plant foreman in a nickel mine. In 1978 he married Susan Mhundwa, with whom he had six children before her death in a car accident in 2009. (Tsvangirai was injured in the crash, with a truck near Harare, as was the car’s driver.) He married Elizabeth Macheka three years later.

His personal life at the time raised eyebrows. While he was planning to marry Macheka, another woman claimed to be his wife from a traditional ceremony in 2011. A court ruled in her favor.

A third woman also filed court papers claiming that she had been engaged to Tsvangirai. He eventually apologized publicly to his supporters.

“I had no intention to hurt anyone,” he said. “It was a genuine search” for a new wife.

Like Mugabe and Mnangagwa, Tsvangirai was a member of the dominant Shona ethnic group. But while they chose armed resistance from exile in the front-line states bordering what was then Rhodesia, Tsvangirai became a labor union leader, defending workers’ rights and rising through the ranks. He was elected secretary-general of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions in 1988.

His political roots in the labor movement set him apart from those like Mugabe and Mnangagwa, who drew their legitimacy from the seven-year war against white minority rule. Initially an ally, he became a thorn in the side of Mugabe and his ZANU-PF party.

But as the president’s intolerance became more evident, the gulf between the two men widened.

Famed for his vicious criticism of Mugabe’s government, Tsvangirai was twice detained during his time as a labor leader, the first time in 1989 after he voiced concern over rising state repression. Three years later, he was arrested for ignoring a ban on public protests ordered by Mugabe.

In 1999, he founded the Movement for Democratic Change as a challenger to Mugabe’s ZANU-PF Party. He soon discovered that opposition to Mugabe was a dangerous business.

In the late 1990s, he went on record in the local news media claiming that assailants had tried to throw him from his office window. In 2001, he narrowly escaped the hangman’s noose when he was tried on charges of plotting to kill Mugabe before the 2002 presidential election.

In 2003, Tsvangirai faced a treason charge for urging his party supporters to topple Mugabe’s government. The case was thrown out without going to trial.

Four years later, he was among many opposition supporters who were beaten as they tried to stage an anti-government rally. Tsvangirai suffered head injuries that drew broad international media attention.

“Yes, they brutalized my flesh,” he said in a message from his hospital bed. “But they will never break my spirit. I will soldier on until Zimbabwe is free.”

Tsvangirai’s party split in two in 2005, when a faction led by Welshman Ncube, the party’s former secretary-general, broke away.

The two sides disagreed on whether they should participate in planned Senate elections. Ncube thought the opposition should participate; Tsvangirai did not.

Then came the turmoil and bloodletting of 2008. Tsvangirai was initially optimistic about the future of the unity government, despite being denied an outright victory in the first round of voting, in which he had trounced Mugabe, his longtime rival.

“We will deliver a new Zimbabwe to the people,” he said while announcing his party’s decision to become part of a unity government.

But events offered a different course.