Blessing-Miles Tendi’s The Overthrow of Robert Mugabe is an important contribution to the growing literature on Zimbabwe’s November 2017 ‘military-assisted transition’. Drawing on extensive research and interviews with key participants and witnesses, Tendi revisits the fall of Mugabe by foregrounding two dimensions often underexposed in earlier accounts: the role of gender in succession politics and the influence of the diplomatic community. He also offers a detailed reconstruction of its triggers.
Tendi distinguishes between the long-term motives behind ‘Operation Restore Legacy’ and the immediate trigger for the operation. The motives are familiar: growing military dissatisfaction with its marginalisation inside ZANU-PF, fear among senior officers of losing privileges or being pushed into retirement, and personal ambitions. Emmerson Mnangagwa’s dismissal as vice-president on 6 November was not, by itself, the decisive spark. He had already been progressively weakened for months. The real turning point came when the commander of the Zimbabwe National Army, Constantino Chiwenga, returning from China, narrowly avoided arrest and Mugabe then refused to meet the military leadership on 13 November to address their grievances. Chiwenga’s subsequent press conference, flanked by senior officers, made the threat of intervention explicit. The following day, unusual troop movements were observed, but it took until late that evening before Western diplomats in Harare started suspecting ‘something’ was underway.
This chronology matters because it shows how central Chiwenga was to the coup. Mnangagwa’s comeback was possible only because the military selected him as the most credible successor in the eyes of parts of the international community. This arrangement rested on an understanding that Chiwenga would play a decisive role during the transition and eventually inherit power. This helps explain the factional tensions that have intensified since the 2023 elections and current attempts to extend Mnangagwa’s presidential tenure.
Tendi argues that gender was not incidental to the 2017 crisis. Grace Mugabe’s rise, together with the post-liberation war G40 faction, destabilised a ruling party that Mugabe had long managed through patronage, division and repression. As his health declined, decision-making increasingly shifted to a smaller inner circle in which Grace became more prominent. Tendi illustrates how political commentary about her was saturated with sexist assumptions and how the military operation was framed as a restoration of male political authority in a deeply patriarchal system.
Yet, Tendi may somewhat overstate the explanatory power of gender. Grace was certainly criticised more harshly than many male counterparts for greed, vulgarity and a lack of liberation-war credentials, but that does not erase the fact that her growing influence helped sharpen factional conflict inside ZANU-PF. Her increasingly aggressive behaviour, and Mugabe’s apparent indulgence of it, fed the sense that his authority was weakening and that the outcome of the planned December ZANU-PF congress had become dangerously unpredictable. A ‘bedroom-coup’ could no longer be excluded. While gender did not trigger the coup, Tendi is right that it shaped how actors interpreted and justified the struggle for succession.
Mnangagwa was presented by some external actors as a ‘safe pair of hands’ and an economic reformer who would be ‘open for business’. Tendi carefully reconstructs the diplomatic reactions, the weak posture of the African Union, South Africa’s hesitations and the influence of the DRC ambassador and dean of the diplomatic corps – reputedly close to the military linked to Zimbabwe’s plunder during the Congo-war of its natural resources – on the African group of ambassadors in Harare. Within SADC, many preferred continuity under a liberation-war veteran to the uncertainty of an unprepared succession. Tendi is also convincing in rejecting claims that China was involved in the coup; Beijing appears instead to have stuck to its habitual opportunistic neutrality.
The coup’s success also depended on the extraordinary public relief that greeted Mugabe’s departure. For a brief moment, opposition groups, civil society and ordinary citizens were united by hope that the end of Mugabe might open a path to reform. This made it politically difficult for Western governments to adopt a firmer line. As a result, many external actors avoided explicitly calling events by their proper name: a coup.
One reason why the Western diplomats were reluctant to call it a coup was their belief that Mnangagwa might deliver economic reform. The UK ambassador, Catriona Laing, invested considerable diplomatic capital in this possibility, but the EU as a whole was less naïve than Tendi suggests. Before Mugabe’s fall, the EU member states had already been discussing scenarios for transition and agreed that any new government would need to demonstrate democratic credentials before meaningful economic re-engagement could occur. That position shaped what we came to call ‘strategic patience’. Political legitimacy had to be demonstrated rather than assumed. At a tense breakfast meeting of Western diplomats at UK’s residence in the presence of Rory Stewart – then UK Secretary of State for International Development – the day of Mnangagwa’s inauguration, I took the floor first to expose the EU’s strategic patience strategy, which was endorsed and presented by Rory Stewart to Mnangagwa during a bilateral meeting that same day, to the regret of Ambassador Laing.
The key test was whether the military-backed transition would lead to genuinely free and fair elections. The EU, therefore, pushed for a long-term electoral observation mission and calibrated its engagement accordingly.
The result is known. The 2018 elections did not legitimise ZANU-PF rule. The EU observation mission’s report was clear and hopes that Mnangagwa represented a decisive break with the past quickly faded. Tendi underlines how much wishful thinking surrounded the early months of the transition. The danger was not simply analytical error; it was that external optimism might itself become part of the mechanism through which continuity was re-legitimised.
In retrospect, I share Tendi’s central conclusion: the refusal to name the coup a coup blurred political accountability and may have encouraged the military to believe that procedural gestures and diplomatic charm would suffice for international acceptance.
The broader lesson extends beyond Zimbabwe. Military, constitutional, and electoral coups should be recognised as such and should trigger the consequences envisaged in African and international norms. The same applies today to efforts to prolong presidential power through dubious constitutional revision.
Tendi’s painful conclusion is that authoritarian systems rarely democratise through elite reshuffling alone. Genuine change requires accountability, institutional restraint, and sustained support for civil society rather than misplaced faith in ‘reformers’ who emerge from within the old order.
