Obituary, The Telegraph.

Joseph Msika, who died on August 4 aged 85, was vice-president of Zimbabwe and a central figure in his country’s headlong rush to ruin.

A foul-mouthed, embittered man, much given to swearing in public and delivering foam-flecked speeches, Msika was perhaps the only Zimbabwean who could outdo President Robert Mugabe when it came to verbal vitriol. The targets of his bile included journalists, farmers, all young Zimbabweans – who had allegedly failed to match his standards of patriotism and devotion – and white people in general.

During a rally in Bulawayo in August 2001, Msika took racist rhetoric to a new level. Mugabe would routinely refer to white Zimbabweans as “greedy exploiters”. But Msika bluntly declared: “Whites are not human beings.” Even his audience from the hardened rank-and-file of Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party was taken aback.

Msika’s outpourings sometimes amounted to straightforward incitement. In November 2001 he encouraged a Zanu-PF mob to burn down the Bulawayo headquarters of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), supposedly in retaliation for the murder of a member of the ruling party.

In this speech, Msika called the opposition “terrorists”, compared the regime’s brutal repression of the MDC to America’s “war on terrorism”, and declared that if Mugabe’s critics “wanted a bloodbath, they would certainly get one”.

Earlier Msika had helped intimidate the journalists of the Daily News, then Zimbabwe’s only independent daily newspaper, which was later forced to close by a draconian press law. A Zanu-PF mob massed outside the News’s office in Harare, shouting abuse and beating up its news editor, Julius Zava, in the street.

Afterwards the gang marched to Msika’s office, where the vice-president appeared on the steps and thanked them for their efforts. He then promised “action” against the paper. Just what Msika may have had in mind became clear a few months later when a bomb destroyed the newspaper’s printing press.

In February 2000, shortly after Mugabe had lost a referendum on a new constitution, Msika became so abusive during a meeting with Peter Longworth, then Britain’s high commissioner in Harare, that the shocked diplomat concluded that London’s relations with Zimbabwe had entered a new era of acrimony…