My thoughts on Mugabe can be summed up by responding to these two points.
Robert Mugabe was initially a good revolutionary and leader but he eventually became corrupted by power.
I don't know the full details of what led up to the revolution in the late 70s but from what I'm aware of I'd say it was probably a good and necessary thing (with no comment on the actual conduct of it). I'd guess Mugabe was probably always a bad guy though, and his dictatorial tendencies are what would have got him to the leadership of the independence movement. This seems like a common problem, you need a strongman to lead your resistance, but then once the goal is achieved they aren't the kind of people to just step aside and let those with more collaborative tendencies take over.
I firmly believe in the redistribution of land to the indigenous Africans, however, that task must be done with visionary thinking skills, and justice at its foundation.
This (also in South Africa) is a really complicated issue. I think Mugabe's rhetoric was basically that "white people should go home to Europe". But some of their ancestors have been in Africa for hundreds of years, and their culture and language (if they speak Afrikaans) are native to Africa. Having said that, their wealth was achieved by brutally exploiting the black population, and some redistribution and selective preferment seem fair and necessary to re-establish a more equal society.
Southern Africa is particularly interesting, because the current black population had colonised the area (displacing the earlier population) up to around only 600 years before the white population arrived, and in the Cape region the black and white people both arrived at about the same time and squeezed the original population from two sides. See
this wiki page for some information. I don't mention this to support a disgusting justification of the "you did it before us, so we can do it to you" kind. But when people make arguments like "they've been there for thousands of years and you just turned up and stole their land", that is just not true. (Actually, you often see people say "millions of years" on the basis that humans evolved in Africa and are still living there, as if any human culture or genetic population anywhere has never moved from their original homeland. Israel and Ireland are other countries where the same kind of comments are made.) It's interesting to compare to the country I know best, i.e. New Zealand, where the population that Europeans interacted with really were the only people to ever have lived there. Ultimately I'm against any kind of argument saying this is their land for their people, which is all a bit too much like "blood and soil" for my liking. You have to acknowledge past injustices and work to achieve a fairer society, especially for any groups that are particularly disadvantaged, but you also have to recognise the current population as a whole has a right to be there and prosper no matter when their ancestors arrived.
Two personal anecdotes. My ancestors arrived in NZ only about 18 months before I was born, but if you tried to take my New Zealand identity away you'd get a pretty short two-word reply. I was in Namibia earlier this year, which has some pretty horrific events in its colonial era history, and found it a really fascinating mix of cultures: English, Afrikaans, German, 2 or 3 Bantu, and 2 or 3 pre-Bantu all in the same place.
