The editor of Zimbabwe’s main daily newspaper, a nephew of President Robert Mugabe, collapsed in his office and died of a heart attack on Tuesday.
Charles Chikerema (59) an avowed Stalinist who criticised white Zimbabweans through the state-controlled press, died after serving only nine weeks as the editor of the Herald newspaper.
It was the shortest editorship in the 107- year-old newspaper’s history. He was appointed by Mugabe in February.
In a tribute, Mugabe said Chikerema’s life “charts a path of a consistent anti-settler colonialist cadre of a lofty socialist persuasion, with principled behaviour and rigid consistency of character”.
He began working for the Herald in 1982, and became editor of its sister newspaper, The Sunday Mail, in 1989.
The newspaper adopted a militant left-wing stance critical of white Zimbabweans. Chikerema once wrote in an editorial he was “a Stalinist and proud of it”.
In 1995 the newspaper’s management had to publish an apology for Chikerema’s “promotion of racial and ethnic disharmony”.
A year later the newspaper was successfully sued for ZD85000 for writing of a prominent Jewish economist that he was “a liberal who, if scratched, will reveal a racist.”
Last year he was suspended by the newspaper’s management for accusations of racism against an exclusive private church school, but the government reacted by reinstating Chikerema and sacking the executive who censured him.