After years of wrangling, President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe finally received an official invitation to attend the 2007 Africa-EU summit - with it, a place to the podium to address the delegates. . What was the reason for the delay? Did the EU give in to African leaders' boycott threats to let Uncle Bob sit with the "righteous"? What lessons can we learn from this in future negotiations and relations between Africa and the EU? There has been an ongoing debate in this forum about Mugabe and the crisis in Zimbabwe. Mugabe's legacy and the independence movement in Africa symbolize a continent's defiance of Western dictations and imposed standards of measurement. To understand Mugabe's current antagonism with the West, it is important to go back to its roots in the wars of liberation and Mugabe's rise to power. The ZANU-PF party that led Zimbabwe to independence was built on a program of liberation from white domination and economic empowerment of the masses. Their ideology was linked to socialism. The struggle against a white-led minority government and the threat of foreign interests moved Bob away from the central, conservative Western political aristocracy and closer to closer ties with the Kremlin and Cuba. His stance against power-sharing arrangements under the March 3, 1978 agreement at the Governor's Lodge in Salisbury endeared him to more nationalist heroes and intensified nationalist campaigns for total liberation. The central issue however, is the mining concessions granted to the British South African Company (under Cecil Rhodes) by Her Majesty's Government and the subsequent encroachment and expropriation of indigenous lands which are at the center of the current crisis. Many would argue that land redistribution was used as a pretext for further political gains... middle of paper. ..... with labor widely available within traditional black families, they now have two major factors of production that can help them produce goods (even just food crops) to improve their livelihoods . The current economic impasse in Zimbabwe is aimed at discrediting Mugabe. The goal is to perpetuate the racist doctrine that blacks are stupid, that when whites owned the land they could stimulate the economy, but when the land came into blacks' possession they were incapable of producing. Mugabe is the elected president of Zimbabwe. He enjoys the same legitimacy as all the other “elected dictators” in Africa supported by Britain, France and America. The South African political class sympathizes with Mugabe, not because they rejoice in the suffering of the Zimbabwean people, but because they understand the reasons for the hate campaign against Mugabe..