Author who chronicled rise of Mugabe is found dead at home

Lieutenant Colonel Katlego Mogale said a gardener found Ms Holland’s body in her home in Melville, a suburb of Johannesburg, dead from an apparent suicide. Lt Col Mogale said there were no signs of foul play, nor any items missing from her home to suggest a burglary.

Ms Holland grew up in Zimbabwe, then white-controlled Rhodesia, but described in her 2008 book Dinner With Mugabe her sympathy for the future president and others fighting to wrest control of the nation back to black Africans. She recounted first meeting Mugabe in 1975 at a dinner, and having to leave her toddler son at home alone to drive him to a train he was about to miss.

Ms Holland interviewed Mugabe in November 2007, after he ordered white-owned farms seized, which saw hundreds of thousands of black farm labourers lose their jobs, fertile lands wasted and nearly a third of the population flee.

Though Zimbabwe is now run by a unity government, it remains fragile and there are few signs that Mr Mugabe, who has ruled the nation since 1980, will give up power willingly.

Ms Holland said in 2008. “I think he’s in denial, I think he can’t face what he’s done in Zimbabwe because that isn’t what he intended to do. He did genuinely, I think, want to be the saviour of his people, the liberator of an oppressed nation.”

Ms Holland recently published 100 Years of Struggle: Mandela’s ANC, a book about South Africa’s governing African National Congress.