Emmerson Mnangagwa

Emmerson Dambudzo Mnangagwa (born 15 September 1942) is a Zimbabwean politician who has served as the president of Zimbabwe since 2017. His rule has been described as a dictatorship. A member of ZANU–PF and a longtime ally of former president Robert Mugabe, he held a series of cabinet portfolios and he was Mugabe's first vice-president from 2014 until 2017, when he was dismissed before coming to power in a coup d'état. He secured his first full term as president in the disputed 2018 general election. Mnangagwa was re-elected in the 2023 Zimbabwean general election with 52.6% of the vote.

Mnangagwa was born in 1942 in Shabani, Southern Rhodesia, to a large Shona family. His parents were farmers, and in the 1950s he and his family were forced to move to Northern Rhodesia because of his father's political activism. There he became active in anti-colonial politics, and in 1963 he joined the newly formed Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army, the militant wing of the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU). He returned to Rhodesia in 1964 as leader of the "Crocodile Gang", a group that attacked white-owned farms in the Eastern Highlands. In 1965, he bombed a train near Fort Victoria...