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Founder and leader of Zimbabwe’s Movement for Democratic Change party who battled Mugabe for years With the death of Morgan Tsvangirai at the age of 65 from cancer, Zimbabwe has lost a man of conspicuous courage. He took the country’s political scene by storm, becoming president Robert Mugabe’s only serious rival for the better part of two decades, and campaigned until the end for a better country with greater democracy and transparency.

Tsvangirai became prime minister of Zimbabwe in September 2008 as part of a power-sharing agreement with Mugabe. He was sworn in the following year, and remained in office till 2013, but the path to get there had been long and vexed.

Tsvangirai’s decision to help found, then lead, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) in 1999 decisively tilted the political struggle in Zimbabwe from one between civil society and government to one that was based on a contest between political parties. He was arrested in both 2000 and 2003 on unsuccessful treason charges and, in 2007, was badly beaten while in custody. Even his bitterest enemies and detractors acknowledged his courage and determination.

Born in Gutu, Masvingo in the south-east of the country, Tsvangirai grew up in a poor family, one of nine children of Chibwe, a bricklayer, and his wife, Lydia, and never attained the educational qualifications required for university study. Much later, when already in political life, he attended Harvard’s Kennedy school programme for executive leadership, and tried to make up for his lack of extended education by assiduous reading. He had a liking for political biographies, and his hero was Nelson Mandela.

Mugabe had been a hero too, but when Tsvangirai began his career as a union official, first as vice president of the Associated Mine Workers Union in the late 1980s, and particularly as secretary-general of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions from 1988 to 2000, he began disputing Mugabe’s decision to implement economic structural adjustment programmes that badly affected his members. He was beaten by Mugabe’s thugs at this time, most spectacularly in 1997 when assailants tried to throw him out of a skyscraper window. However, they failed to intimidate him and, by the second half of the 1990s, he had become a formidable opponent of Mugabe and his Zanu-PF government.
Morgan Tsvangirai addresses an election rally in 2005