A human rights lawyer, Doug Coltart, said the late former President Robert Mugabe was highly suspicion of David Coltart when he was appointed Education Minister by the late MDC President Morgan Tsvangirai during the Government of National Unity.
Mugabe reportedly had reservations on how a white man would fit in the cabinet. Doug, who is son to David Coltart revealed this in an op-ed published in News 24 this past weekend. He wrote:
The day I met Mugabe in Tsholostho, he delivered a speech telling the crowd that when my father had first joined the Government of National Unity as education minister he had been highly suspicious of him and how he would fit in as a white person.
But that, over time, he’d seen my father’s commitment to the education of all Zimbabwean children and they’d grown to work together well.
Coltart also disclosed that he met Mugabe only once and that was in 2012. Said Coltart:
I only met Robert Mugabe once. It was 2012, at a school in Tsholotsho. As I shook his hand, I was struck by how soft and delicate it was.
It was the hand of a fragile old man. This was the man responsible for the death, rape and torture of thousands of my fellow Zimbabweans.
This was the man who had declared my father an enemy of the state, sought to have him assassinated, and disrupted my childhood and education as we were forced to go into hiding.
And yet at that moment, as I held his hand, what I saw was his humanity. An old man who would one day die and go to meet his Maker.