Today in 2017, Robert Mugabe resigned after 37 years as Zimbabwe leader.  Mugabe was one of the leaders of the resistance against white minority rule in Rhodesia, eventually leading the ZANU-PF to victory and becoming the President of Zimbabwe in 1980 after the Lancaster House Agreement that ended the Rhodesian Bush War.  Despite initially calling for racial reconciliation, Mugabe crushed opposition, particularly the ZAPU-linked opposition in Matabeleland during the Gukurahundi.  In 2000 he instituted a series of land reform policies which redistributed white-owned farmland to native Africans.  This caused economic disaster, international condemnation and, in 2008 and 2009, an episode of hyperinflation that completely wiped out the value of the Zimbabwean dollar.  Under Mugabe's leadership Zimbabwe had become one of the most desperately poor countries in the world and he was widely criticised for widespread human rights violations.  He was succeeded in 2017 by Emmerson Mnangagwa, whom he had sacked weeks previously.  He died in 2019, aged 95.