While Zimbabweans starve, Grace shops

WHEN Grace Mugabe needed a new pair of shoes she did what any wife of a dictator would do — she borrowed an airliner from the country’s national fleet, flew to Europe, and picked up a pair of Ferragamo’s.

For years Grace existed in the shadows as Robert Mugabe's secret mistress. Since their hasty, but lavish, wedding in 1996 however, the 38-year-old Grace, 40 years younger than her husband, has stepped into the public eye and shows no signs of wanting to return to the obscurity she endured as a junior secretary in Mugabe's office administration.

Over the last few years Zimbabwe's first lady has gained a reputation in Southern Africa for her famously extravagant shopping expeditions.

Bodyguards in tow, she would cruise the aisles of Harrods in London, piling up mounds of goods. Afterwards she'd be transported off by waiting cavalcade to Heathrow airport, where an airliner from Air Zimbabwe would be on standby to whisk her, and her shopping, back home.

When she appears in public it is in designer clothes with a diamond-encrusted Rolex on her wrist, pearls around her neck and Christian Dior accessories.

When asked recently by a journalist from South Africa's Style magazine to explain how she could justify spending thousands of dollars on shoes while more than half her countrymen starved, she said: "I have very narrow feet, so I only wear Ferragamo."

In January she was photographed, along with her husband and half a dozen minders, in the first class lounge at Singapore international airport.

The Mugabe's had 15 trolley-loads of electronic goods and exotic foods with them at a time when the World Food Programme says 7.2 million Zimbabweans are on the point of starving to death.

Grace's acquisitiveness is also expressed at home. Last year she arrived with her bodyguards at one of the largest farms in the Mazowe district, northwest of the capital Harare.

She evicted the elderly owners, Eva and John Matthews, and ordered their black employees to leave. "Go and live by the river," she reportedly told the farm workers she dismissed.

The farm came with a 29-room mansion, swimming pool, oak-lined library and pewter door handles.

Reacting to public outrage at her self-enrichment from a programme her husband says was supposed to benefit poor, landless blacks, Grace responded defiantly. "People don't know the truth. I intend to build a school for under-privileged children on that farm."

In the meantime, Grace's influence over her aging husband remains enigmatic. They first began courting in the late 1980s, while Mugabe was still married to his spouse of 30 years, Sally.

For years the affair was treated as a state secret. Even after Sally died in 1992, and Grace moved into Mugabe's home and began to accompany him on international trips, her true

position was kept hidden from the Zimbabwean public.

Zimbabwean newspapers began to remove images of the mysterious woman who frequently appeared in the background of news shots of Mugabe. If they did not, state security agents would stop by the newsroom and make it very clear that she was not to be seen again.

But, she could not remain a secret forever and in 1996 her role was finally disclosed.

The conservative-Christian Mugabe hastily moved to legitimise Grace in a wedding ceremony of unrestrained excess. But the Zimbabwean public have not exactly embraced her.