Robert Mugabe lives in a huge, new, Chinese-built mansion in Borrowdale Brooke Road, northern Harare, next to a white-owned farm that was seized, plundered and abandoned some years back.

Armed soldiers patrol the high-walled estate. Occupants of homes overlooking it were evicted when the President moved in.

Except when he leaves by helicopter, a bomb-proof Mercedes whisks Mr Mugabe out of the pagoda-style front gates, flanked by ornamental lions, for the 20-minute drive along one of the few well-maintained roads left in the capital to his office in an old colonial building in Samora Machel Avenue.

His motorcade includes two decoy Mercedes, truckloads of soldiers and an ambulance. Police clear the traffic and dawdlers are bludgeoned with the butts of AK47s. Any gesture at the President is prohibited by law.

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The journey takes him through one of the wealthier parts of Harare but even there he cannot miss the results of his calamitous misrule.

Sewage fills a ditch 50 yards from the walls of his mansion. Crowds hitch for rides at every junction, people till scraps of common land for maize and vendors hawk pathetic piles of three or four onions or tomatoes. Zwakwana, proclaims graffiti on the walls. “Enough”.

What does he think — this man who regards himself as the liberator of Zimbabwe but long ago became its oppressor? Does he know — or care — how much his people suffer? Is he burdened by a sense of failure? Never has a country collapsed so far, so fast, except in war.

One of the remarkable things about the man who has ruled Zimbabwe for 28 years is how little anyone knows about him. Mr Mugabe has no friends to explain him to the world. He occasionally gives hour-long harangues that pass for speeches but he never gives press conferences, never commits his thoughts to paper and seldom gives interviews.

The last, to the author Heidi Holland in 2007, was an exercise in denial in which he praised the agricultural endeavours of his starving country, boasted of its mineral riches and predicted an economic resurgence within two years. He claimed to have a charitable disposition.

Mr Mugabe was always aloof, likes to intimidate interlocutors with long silences and does not know the names of his Cabinet Ministers' wives. He has grown ever-more reclusive, however. He used to visit shops in Harare but that has not happened for years.

He used to attend the Roman Catholic cathedral but now his long-time spiritual adviser, the Jesuit Father Fidelis Mukonori, goes to him. He never eats out. Diplomats find his regime as opaque as North Korea's. All that is certain is that behind the cartoon tyrant lies a complex and conflicted man.

Flickers of humanity emerge in Dinner with Mugabe, the book written by Ms Holland. She writes of his love for his first wife, Sally, who died of kidney failure in 1992, and how he still takes flowers to her grave. He was inconsolable when told, in a Rhodesian prison, of the death of their three-year-old son Nhamo. He was not allowed to attend the funeral.

Mr Mugabe, who was a teacher, organised classes for his fellow political detainees and later — as President — gave lessons to his staff. He formed a surprising friendship with Lord Soames, the last Governor of Rhodesia, and astonished the peer's family by flying to England for his funeral in 1987.

He permitted Ian Smith, the Rhodesian Prime Minister who imprisoned him for 11 years, to remain in Zimbabwe after independence. He once sent the family of his gardener to a shop in Harare to buy themselves clothes for Christmas presents.

Though he constantly denounces Britain he adores the Royal Family, serves visitors tea in porcelain cups and reads The Economist. He used to love visiting London, wears Savile Row suits and has used the same tailor in Harare, Solly Parbhoo, for decades.

A stickler for protocol, he rebuked his first post-independence Cabinet for not dressing properly and arrives at Parliament in a Rolls-Royce. He craves legitimacy, which is why he maintains the facade of democracy.

Mr Mugabe has always kept the cult of personality within bounds. His portrait hangs in most business premises and every town has a street named after him, but there are no statues of him, he has no grandiose titles and his face does not appear on banknotes.

While he is surrounded by corrupt officials and has seized a cluster of white-owned farms near his traditional home in Kutama, he appears more interested in power than money and lives frugally. He rises before dawn, forgoes breakfast, favours simple African foods, eschews alcohol and — though 84 and slowing down — still works punishing hours.

He has three children by his second wife, Grace — a daughter, Bona, in her late teens who attended a convent school in Harare; a son, Robert, who had to leave one of the top private schools in Harare because he under-performed; and a son, Bellarmine, who is at a private primary school.

Bona was awarded the most-improved prize for scripture at one parents' day. Her parents applauded, their security men followed suit and finally the other parents felt obliged to join in.

When and why Mr Mugabe became the monster he is now is debated widely. Some say that it happened after the death of Sally and his marriage to Grace, the secretary by whom he had already had Bona.

Sally, a woman who showed some compassion for downtrodden Zimbabweans, was the closest friend and adviser of Mr Mugabe and coaxed some emotional warmth from him. Grace — 30 years his junior — does the opposite.

She appears infinitely avaricious and spends more on a single shopping trip abroad than 90 per cent of her compatriots earn in their lifetimes. Their wedding in 1996 was breathtakingly extravagant.

Others say that Mr Mugabe grew steadily more bitter and enraged when white Zimbabweans scorned his early efforts at reconciliation in the 1980s and when white farmers backed the fledgeling opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) in 2000. The former freedom fighter hated being eclipsed by Nelson Mandela after the leader of the ANC was released from prison in 1990.

In truth Mr Mugabe was always ruthless, cold and calculating. After independence in 1980 he ordered the slaughter of 20,000 civilians in Matabeleland who supported his rival, Joshua Nkomo.

Other potential rivals died in mysterious circumstances and he once boasted of having “degrees in violence” to go with his seven academic degrees. His anger and vengefulness grew increasingly pronounced when the rise of Morgan Tsvangirai and the MDC threatened his grip on power after 2000.

He ordered the seizures of white-owned land to destroy a reservoir of a million potential MDC votes among farm workers. In 2005 he unleashed Operation Clean Up Filth — destroying the homes and livelihoods of 700,000 township dwellers after another violent, rigged election. He has repeatedly withheld food aid from starving areas that support the MDC.

As the economy collapsed and his popularity plummeted Mr Mugabe has survived through ever-greater violence, repression and his mastery of the baser political arts.

He rents the loyalty of his lieutenants by allowing them to plunder the country. He endlessly plays off the feuding factions within Zanu (PF). He rallies Zimbabweans against fictitious enemies — Britain, America, white farmers and those Western sanctions, which are targeted solely at his inner circle.

Mr Mugabe has been written off many times but is infinitely cunning, which is why Mr Tsvangirai should be wary of entering a power-sharing government.

He learnt the skills of entrapment young. He lived in a village when he was a boy and his grandfather would send him out to catch birds to eat. He would build a cage of grass and sticks, put a few seeds inside and sit quietly reading a book until a bird entered the cage and was caught.

Mr Mugabe rose from the humblest beginnings to lead his country to independence. He was hailed, for a while, as one of the most enlightened leaders of post-colonial Africa, who co-opted whites and promoted education, health and agriculture. Had he stepped down after a decade he might have earned an honourable place in history despite the Matabeleland massacres.

Instead, he clings to the power that he believes is his by right — friendless, paranoid and increasingly out of touch with reality — as his legacy crumbles around him. “Zimbabwe is mine,” he declared defiantly last week. That said it all.

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