Robert Mugabe during an election rally in Harare, March 2008

History has been unkind to Lord Louis Mountbatten, the last viceroy of British India. Arguably the most glamorous and image- conscious of the Men Who Ruled India — the “superior” Lord Curzon comes a close second — Mountbatten has been berated for abdicating his responsibilities and forcing the pace of the transfer of power on August 14-15, 1947. Many historians have suggested that had the original timetable of June 1948 been adhered to, the violence which accompanied Partition could well have been contained, if not averted altogether.

The unseemly haste with which Mountbatten dismantled a 190-year-old inheritance has been dissected in great detail because it was the beginning of what a Whitehall mandarin described as the “stampede from Empire”. Less publicized, not least because some of them were also less consequential, were the shambolic abdication of “imperial responsibilities” in Burma, Palestine, Sudan, Aden, Kenya and, of course, Rhodesia. Compared to the devastation that the Colonial Office left behind in diverse corners of Asia and Africa, Mountbatten’s imperious callousness seems the epitome of shrewd calculation.

In retrospect, India, along with the self-governing Dominions of the Old Commonwealth, has been the great success story of an Empire that practised insidious racism, but simultaneously maintained the pretence of trusteeship. Never mind the different aesthetic trajectory of post-Independence development, India is seen to be something that the British Empire got right. For the past 60 years, India has adhered to Westminster-style democracy, professed the rule of law and, with many hiccups along the way, made the transition from extreme backwardness to patchy modernity. The old Orientalist love affair with India, which was initially in danger of being perverted into quasi-spiritual escapades of flower children, has, mercifully, found a new meaning in modern capitalism. Even the English language, which was initially threatened by post-colonial nativism, has endured and given India a competitive advantage over a relatively insular Middle Kingdom.

There have been other success stories too. The entrepreneurial legacy of Sir Thomas Raffles persists in Singapore, Hong Kong has survived China, Sri Lanka’s democracy has not been overturned by a damaging civil war, Mauritius remains an off-shore paradise of a different kind, and Peter Ustinov playing Hercule Poirot wouldn’t feel out of place in some of the “rocks and islands” of the Caribbean. And, of course, there is Ireland, a fractured island which has brushed off centuries of disdain and mockery to emerge as one of the most vibrant and prosperous countries of the European Union.

Unfortunately, these celebrated successes have been overshadowed by the unending spate of bad news from Africa. Post-War Britain’s exhausted withdrawal from Empire led to the transfer of power to African leaders who had such impeccable credentials that both Lord Macaulay, Benjamin Jowett (the legendary Master of Balliol College, Oxford) and, at a pinch, Cecil Rhodes would have approved. There was the imposing Jomo Kenyatta in Kenya — an accomplished social anthropologist and student of Bronislaw Malinowski, part-time actor in an Alexander Korda film, and a ladies’ man; there was Hastings Banda of Malawi, a doctor and a puritanical Christian who, like Mohammed Ali Jinnah, knew no language other than English; there was Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, the US-educated lay preacher who sought to blend Christianity, Marxism and Gandhian thought. Individual idiosyncrasies apart, the African nationalists who took over from pompous, plumed colonial governors were qualitatively no different from, say, Jawaharlal Nehru and Tunku Abdul Rehman, the first prime ministers of independent India and Malaya.

The tragedy of Africa is that far from using their considerable goodwill among their own peoples to build and strengthen democratic institutions, most of them squandered whatever had been bequeathed to them by the departing colonial administration. Every one of those charismatic individuals began with the assurance of multi-party democracy, but soon transformed their countries into one-party states with no room for dissent and opposition. Kenyatta, Banda and Nkrumah all promoted personality cults of the Nicolae Ceausescu and Enver Hoxha variety and specialized in economic mismanagement. Except Banda, they also spouted radical platitudes, which endeared them to Moscow and Nehru. Unfortunately, radicalism was a veneer for naked self-aggrandizement and, before long, Africa became a continent of impoverished people and rich politicians.

Ian Smith, the man who was prime minister of Rhodesia during its 24 years of international isolation, was a devout Presbyterian who divided the world into neat compartments — good chaps (usually sportsmen and gentleman farmers), terrorists, communists and traitors. He took Robert Mugabe’s claim of being a Marxist-Leninist at face value. However, as he confessed in his remarkably candid autobiography, The Great Betrayal, the translation of ideology into the local idiom left him stumped: “I remember… speaking to one of [Mugabe’s]… ministers who had a university degree and was clearly no fool. ‘You are an intelligent person,’ I said. ‘How can you support a failed policy like Communism?’ After thinking for a few moments he replied: ‘It has nothing to do with the philosophy of Communism, which is foreign to us Black people. What appealed to us most… was the firm instruction that: Once you become the government, you remain the government for ever.”

Logically, Rhodesia or Zimbabwe, as it is now known, should have been different. Although scarred by some six decades of white minority rule, it had lots going for it. When the jolly Lord Soames bequeathed the country to Mugabe in 1980, Zimbabwe was fortunate in possessing a thriving but predominantly white-owned agricultural sector, a stable currency, a professional army, a streamlined administration, a black middle-class and tribal communities where indigenous institutions were broadly intact.

In 28 years of autocratic rule, Mugabe transformed Zimbabwe into what the Bush administration once called “an outpost of tyranny”. The economy is in a shambles and inflation has touched the dizzying heights of 400,000 per cent! The price of a decent house in Harare five years ago is today the price of a can of Coke. Agriculture is in crisis following the forcible takeover of many white-owned farms by cronies of the ruling Zanu-PF — the appropriated land has, in most cases, been left fallow. Opposition supporters have been intimidated, driven into exile or simply killed. On three separate elections, Mugabe simply rigged his way to victory.

On March 29 this year, an overconfident Mugabe took too much for granted and was astonished when the parliamentary elections produced a narrow victory for the Opposition, Movement for Democratic Change. Panic-stricken, he refused to allow the counting of votes for the presidential election. His fear was justified since the unofficial tally suggested a clear victory for the MDC’s Morgan Tsvangirai. As of today, the Zanu-PF has sought a run-off election without the votes of the March 29 poll having been counted. Mugabe has made it quite clear that he will not give up power.

What is happening in Zimbabwe is a variant of the irregularities that marred the elections in Kenya earlier this year and in Nigeria in April 2007. In the case of Kenya, widespread violence and the death of 1,200 people forced a power-sharing compromise that is unlikely to endure. In the case of Zimbabwe, Mugabe’s intransigence may well force the international community to take some punitive measures.

The issue goes beyond the fate of one freedom-fighter-turned-despot. The larger question that must be addressed without inhibitions is: why is responsible governance missing from the agenda of large tracts of Africa? It will no longer suffice to apportion all the blame on a colonial past because the same legacy hasn’t jeopardized India, Ireland and, for that matter, South Africa. It is time Africa stopped blaming others for its own misfortunes.