Robert Mugabe’s claim that his vice president tried to kill him through witchcraft involving tadpoles reminded me of the novel by Henri Lopes, The Laughing Cry.

In the novel, Lopes fictionalises the tragedy and absurdity of the post-colonial African polity. Daddy, the dictator of an imaginary African country, lords it over his country with actions that are so tragic and absurd that the citizens do not know whether to laugh or cry.

As a work of art, the novel suffers from the weaknesses characteristic of early African writing. As commentary-cum-fiction, it captures the tragic and comedic character of post-colonial rule.

Daddy’s antics recall the buffoonery of Amin or Bokassa and his whimsical pronouncements mirror those of Daniel arap Moi or Yahya Jammeh, and his monumental tyranny is a fictional representation of those all Africans have suffered.

The book has yet another distinctive feature. With the exception of Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not yet Born, the novel, more than any other African political fiction, exposes the hypocrisy of the African intelligentsia and the limitations of cultural nationalism as an ideology of change.

In the face of Daddy’s growing tyranny, the country’s intelligentsia is fixated on criticising Western society, just as intellectuals in Kwei Armah’s novel regurgitate socialist and Afrocentric theories while ignoring Nkrumah’s tyranny.

No regime today fits Henri Lopes’s characterisation as much as that of Robert Mugabe. His decades-old rule is a study in political tragedy and comedy. Soon after Independence, his North Korean-trained special forces left thousands dead in Matabeleland. In every election, Zanu-PF militias, much like the Jeshi la Mzee in Moi’s era, go on rampages that leave many members of the opposition injured or dead.

In true Machiavellian fashion, Mugabe has used genuine land grievances to advance his own megalomaniacal ambitions. His birthdays are national affairs. The wedding of his daughter resembled a royal wedding, with Zanu-PF’s erstwhile socialists following the example of their leader, lavishing on the couple monetary and other gifts worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Then, there are the truly absurd moments. Like Mugabe’s obsession with Tony Blair, long after the British prime minister had left office; the sleeping — not dozing — at important international conferences; his exhortation to Zimbabwean women to give birth to offset deaths from Aids; his manoeuvring to have his wife assume an important party post; and, most bizarrely, his tadpole conspiracy theory. Do we laugh or cry?

Completing the resemblance to the fictional world of The Laughing Cry is the attitude of Africa’s intelligentsia to the Mugabe regime.

Because Mugabe spewed socialist and cultural nationalist rhetoric, African intellectuals viewed him as an important representative of their ideology, Plato’s “philosopher king” who would restore pre-colonial African democracy and egalitarianism.

Of course, the notion of an equitable and democratic pre-colonial tradition is a myth. But even were such a tradition an historical reality, to argue, as the intellectuals did, that the Mugabe regime was its modern reincarnation was akin to mistaking, as a local saying goes, “goat droppings for beans.”

Thus many writers spoke of Mugabe’s “revolution” as a bulwark against Western imperialism and neo-colonialism. His violence against opponents was seen as justifiable defence against traitors. His violent land evictions, carried out when his political chips were down, became the stuff of academic papers at pan-Africanist conferences.

Even more sadly, many African intellectuals presented Mugabe’s regime as a counterpoint to what they regarded as Nelson Mandela’s capitulation to imperialism and neo-colonialism.

Today still, many African intellectuals still view the tyrannical Nkrumah regime as the epitome of the African freedom struggle. At the Nkrumah memorial in Accra, Ghana, there is a huge statue of Nkrumah, a shrine to many African and diaspora intellectuals.

The memorial propagates a false history. A more befitting memorial to the African struggle would have been one depicting the betrayal of Africa by leaders like Nkrumah and Mugabe.

All this leads to an issue that African intellectual discourse has failed to engage: The extent to which African intellectual expression has contributed to and justified the monumental tyrannies that have plagued our continent.