In a photograph taken of me as an undergraduate in 1980, prominently in the background is a handmade poster of Robert Mugabe. Handmade because it was a photocopy of a plastic bag made for celebrations of the coming of majority rule to Zimbabwe.

The photograph surfaced as I was packing up my photo albums in 2001. My nephew, then 18, reacted with horror and astonishment that Mugabe could have had pride of place on my study wall.

I explained that those were different times. Then a left-leaning student who longed, along with most South Africans, for an end to apartheid, for me Mugabe was a symbol of triumph over racism and the vestiges of the colonial era. At the university I attended, which, it is worth an ironic note, was named Rhodes University in honour of the same mogul who had given his name to what had been called Rhodesia, there were many students from Zimbabwe. Some saw Mugabe as the herald of the apocalypse, got drunk and sang the old unofficial anthem “Rhodesians Never Die”. Others among the white new Zimbabweans, perhaps with relief that the overture to the new era had brought hope and not annihilation, described Mugabe as “pragmatic”. I suspect that this was said with the mindset of someone who had gone to the dentist expecting an extraction, and had been told that all was needed was a polish.

A constitution was in place, institutions such as parliament and the courts were functioning along lines recognisable from the British colonial past. A South African fellow student of mine, by no means a leftie, who went to Harare during the winter (mid-year) holidays enthused that the “vibe” was good. The streets throbbed to chimurenga songs, formerly anthems from the liberation struggle, now good pop with a nice beat, the soundtrack to a new future.

For those of us who opposed racism and colonialism and yearned to see an end to the brutality and evil of apartheid in South Africa, it seemed a vindication. Racists in our borders held that black people had brains smaller than whites and were capable only of violence, starting with the tearing up of constitutions. If it could work there, it could work with us. We chuckled at the stories of whites in Zimbabwe who discovered that their loyal and grinning “houseboys” had turned out to be moonlighting as liberation struggle leaders. Even though I had (and have) relatives and friends in Zimbabwe, of whom I was then and remain fond, my sympathies were with the new order. At the risk of bringing the God Squad down on my head, the perception among some who longed for the end of apartheid was that Mugabe would be the Forerunner, John the Baptist to Nelson Mandela’s Jesus. You know what I mean. In time, probably many hoped that Mugabe would at least share the fate of the Baptist.

The early to mid-1980s were a time of domestic preoccupation in South Africa as the state cracked down harder and harder in the face of popular resistance. Zimbabwe was edged out of the news agenda as the South African government sought to throttle all forms of resistance with increasingly Draconian state of emergency regulations.

Yet word began to filter out that all was not well with the state of Zimbabwe under then-prime minister Mugabe. Having fallen out with his old rival Joshua Nkomo, with whom he seemed till then to have found a modus vivendi, Mugabe used the military to ruthlessly wipe out people in disloyal areas of Matabeleland. As time passed, word emerged of the actions Mugabe’s Fifth Brigade, who had been taught their military arts by North Korea. The number of victims remains unclear, but is widely estimated at 20 000 deaths. This was not military action against die-hard whites, but against the politically inconvenient. It was to echo years later, when in the name of “land restitution” Mugabe moved to seize farmland not only from whites but in many recorded cases from black landowners who were not of his party political ilk or who were too defenceless to resist.

By the time things had descended to the farm seizures, for many who were prepared not to be politically blinkered (as, sadly, some in the anti-racism movement continued to be), Mugabe was, to put it very mildly, letting the side down.

By the time apartheid fell and Mandela emerged to lead us into the new South Africa as its first democratically-elected president, some of believed that Mugabe was not fit to be seen in his company. That, apparently for old time’s sake, the dominant people in the African National Congress in South Africa tolerated or were sympathetic to Mugabe is something that still requires explanation.

Ironically, partly out of self-preservation, the old South Africa helped to bring down the old regime in Rhodesia by withholding outright and large-scale military support, and it was said that South Africa had hinted that it would deny energy and other support to the then-Rhodesia to bring it to the negotiating table. The new South Africa, at a pinnacle of moral high ground, effectively allowed it neighbour to fester by doing nothing apart from ineffectual “quiet diplomacy” – “quiet” perhaps in the sense of “silent”, “mute” or “unspeaking”. The new-era Pretoria’s policy of quiet diplomacy seemed eerily and disappointingly reminiscent of the Reagan administration’s flaccid policy of “constructive engagement” towards apartheid Pretoria, which amounted to little more than some easy-to-evade sanctions and a vague message that shooting so many black folks was not really the done thing.

Mugabe rampaged on his way, lashing out with such memorable, if inaccurate, phrases as that describing Tony Blair and his cabinet as “gay gangsters” for their criticism of his bulldozing of human rights. Yes, apart from a universal policy of leading all Zimbabweans into the wasteland, Mugabe made homophobia state policy. The bulldozing, in turn, became literal with Operation Murambatsvina (“Drive Out the Rubbish”) in 2005, in which his forces brought down the homes and what little remained of the livelihoods of 10 000 people in Harare, whose only crime had been to be believed to be backing his political opponents.

As South Africa embarked on a new constitutional era, boasting one of the finest progressive constitutions of our times, skeptics pointed to Zimbabwe. When South Africa embarked on a sensible and sustainable land restitution process, scaremongers pointed to Zimbabwe. When it became popular to speak of the 21st century being the one that would see an African Renaissance, skeptics responded with Zimbabwe, asphyxiated in its infancy by Mugabe.

I am not an Afro-pessimist. Even living in Europe as I do now, and gritting my teeth when I hear the continent of my birth described still as the Dark Continent, annoyed when smirkingly asked if the end of white rule in South Africa has brought a downturn (the very opposite is true), I remain an Afro-optimist. My faith in the country of my birth remains.

Against that background, I check the news hour by hour in the hope that Robert Gabriel Mugabe will allow majority rule to come to Zimbabwe.

I still have the photograph somewhere. There is, after all, a story attached to it.