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(CNN) - Robert Mugabe, the founding father of Zimbabwe, who ruled the country with an iron fist for more than three decades, passed away at age 95, President Emmerson Mnangagwa reported.
There had been rumors about the health of the former president, who spent months in a hospital in Singapore earlier this year. The details of the evil that afflicted him were a very well kept secret.
Mugabe was deposed in a coup in 2017, when members of his own party turned against him after he fired the then vice president, Emmerson Mnangagwa, to give way to his wife, Grace.
Mnangagwa would become the next president of Zimbabwe.
"It is with the greatest sadness that I announce the death of the founding father and former president of Zimbabwe, comrade Robert Mugabe," Mnangagwa tweeted on Friday.
“Comrade Mugabe was an icon of liberation, a Pan-Africanist who dedicated his life to the emancipation and empowerment of his people. Your contribution to the history of our nation and continent will never be forgotten. May his soul rest in eternal peace. ”
Once known internationally as the hope of his nation, Mugabe left office with a bleak legacy, after embarking on a campaign of oppression and violence to maintain power and lead to poverty in a country known as the granary of southern Africa.
He began his political career as a leader in the quest for independence from Zimbabwe, then known as Rhodesia, and was regularly compared to the revered freedom fighter of South Africa, Nelson Mandela.
As a revolutionary guerrilla leader, he fought against the white minority government and spent years in jail as a political prisoner.
After 10 years in prison, he obtained university degrees in education, economics and law BY the University of London. In the mid-1970s, he assumed the leadership of the political wing of the African National Union of Zimbabwe (ZANU), a militant liberation movement based in Mozambique.
From there, he helped orchestrate an armed resistance against the white government, emerging as a war hero both at home and abroad when the conflict ended in 1979.
He became the first prime minister of the newly independent Zimbabwe after the February 1980 elections.
Articulated and elegantly dressed, Mugabe came to power demanding the respect of a nation. It had a strong advantage, inheriting a country with a stable economy, solid infrastructure and vast natural resources.
But the descent into tyranny did not take long.
"This is a man who had a lot to offer Zimbabweans, but he didn't, he focused on himself," said Trevor Ncube, one of the most powerful publishers in the country.
By 1983, it became clear that Mugabe's administration would be ruthless with anyone who opposed his government. He presided over forces that carried out a series of massacres in the opposition's fortresses, and it is believed that the country's Fifth Brigade killed up to 20,000 people, mostly supporters of Mugabe's main political rival.
Robert MugabeZimbabwe