Robert Mugabe dominated so much of my own life and the life of Zimbabwe, the country where I was born and raised, and still, in some deep, alchemical way, consider home. Like most dictators he managed to be both ubiquitous and remote. For decades his brooding portrait stared balefully down from every office and shop in the country, hung there by law.

For years, I witnessed firsthand how the gears of his repressive regime ground, first as a lawyer helping to defend rival leaders, then as a journalist cataloguing the appalling human cost of Gukurahundi massacres in the southern Zimbabwe province of Matabeleland. For that, he had me accused of spying and declared an enemy of the state.

Twenty-five years later I witnessed the crackdown on opposition supporters in what his henchmen called Operation Ngatipedzenavo: Let us finish them off.

It was a torture on an industrial scale, committed on a catch-and-release basis, with the victims carried back to their home villages, there to act as human billboards advertising their political stigmata, the consequences of opposing his tyranny.