Once a friend of Robert Mugabe, journalist Wilf Mbanga ended up in jail after the Zimbabwean government closed his newspaper. Now living in England, he describes his fight for Press freedom under Mugabe's regime.

I WAS a keen reporter for the Argus Africa News Service in December 1974 when my editor suggested I should do a series of biographies on all the black nationalist leaders who had just been released from Rhodesian jails. These activists had been in detention for as long as 14 years and their names and faces had been forgotten.

I was 27 and Robert Mugabe was 50. I drove to his house in the section of Highfields known as Canaan - a sprawling black township on the outskirts of what was then Salisbury, now Harare. There was a little square of lawn, but we sat in the well-swept dirt backyard on dining room chairs beside a flourishing vegetable garden. Even though we had never met, I recognised him instantly having seen his photographs when I was a child. He had a firm handshake and looked younger than his years, fit and lean. But the tell-tale signs of a poor diet were evident in his dull skin tone, the thin line of white hair at his temples and the deep grooves beside his lips.

I was struck by the keenness of his gaze, his sharp, incisive mind and his beautiful use of the English language. The interview was conducted in English and he spoke eloquently of his vision for a future Zimbabwe - free from colonial oppression and racial prejudice.

One of the things that immediately made him stand out was the absence of bitterness. This attracted me to him because he had suffered. His only son had died in infancy while he was in jail and he had not been allowed out to bury him. I interviewed many others before and after him. They all wanted revenge. But not Robert Mugabe. His answer to racism was non-racism. He believed utterly that a non-racial society was the only answer to the evils of racial segregation.

Days later, we had tea together in my office and he charmed my (white) colleagues. He put me in touch with all the other nationalists and I invited him round to my house. We were all much younger than Mugabe and he seemed to relish being surrounded by lively young minds. My gramophone resounded with Elvis Presley, Pat Boone and Jim Reeves and I was amazed to learn that he knew the words and loved the music too. The talk was all of politics. The young crowd became more and more boisterous as the evening wore on. But Mugabe stuck to Fanta. He's always been teetotal.

After that, I used to pop in on him unannounced. We talked about everything - life, the future, religion, music, and politics, of course.

Years later, I followed Mugabe everywhere as I reported on Zanu's (Zimbabwe African National Union) election campaign. We renewed our friendship - but he was more dignified now.

The elections went off smoothly - a landslide victory for Zanu - and Mugabe became the first Prime Minister of Zimbabwe. In 1981 I was asked to start a national news agency - ZIANA. Now head of state, Mugabe came to open it and was understandably more aloof, but still warm and friendly. He was true to his non-racial principles. His independence speech - turning swords into ploughshares - was internationally acclaimed as a model of reconciliation. "If yesterday you were my enemy, today you are my friend," he declared to white Rhodesians. He became the world's beloved African statesman - long before Nelson Mandela.

Zimbabwe prospered. There was massive expansion in the health and education sectors. Boreholes were dug, roads built. The country was on the move.

But then the rumours began. Massacres in Matabeleland. I couldn't believe it. One of my reporters filed a story alleging a massacre. I telephoned for the government response. Immediately, a private meeting was arranged between myself, Mugabe, and Emmerson Mnangagwa, then minister of state for security.

Mugabe looked at me with his piercing gaze, leaned earnestly across his desk and gave me a thorough briefing. Matabeleland was in chaos, he said. Nkomo's dissidents were running amok - killing people with huge caches of arms hidden during the liberation struggle. He had deployed the army there to save lives and protect property. He was very convincing. I trusted him. I killed the story.

Mugabe became more remote after that. I saw him less and less. The 1995 elections were characterised by widespread violence. Corruption was rife. More repressive laws were passed.

In 1998, I formed Associated Newspapers of Zimbabwe and began to publish a number of regional weekly newspapers before launching The Daily News a year later. Soon afterwards, Zimbabwe saw the emergence of the opposition MDC (Movement for Democratic Change) and the blatant Zanu (PF) rigging of the 2000 and 2002 elections. I realised my friend had become a monster.

At a news conference after the referendum in 2000 he declared the white man was the enemy. I was sitting in the front row. He would not look at me. I could feel the hostility. We never spoke again.

Determined to eliminate all vestiges of opposition, Mugabe and his party instigated a massive land grab, characterised by state-sponsored invasions of white commercial farmland by black peasants, who were later kicked off the land to make way for the ruling and military elite, who now occupy the majority of those lands.

Journalism became a dangerous business. In the past three years, the government has banned five newspapers and arrested more than 100 journalists, some of them several times. Media houses and journalists have to be licenced by a government-appointed body. Foreign journalists are barred from entering the country. Foreign radio stations are jammed and the Internet and email are monitored. Zimbabwe's nine million inhabitants are constantly subjected to blatant lies and party jingles and slogans, disguised as 'news' and 'culture'.

I was arrested on a trumped up charge for fraud and jailed before my case was thrown out by the courts and I was released. In August 2003, I left the country of my birth after a vicious smear campaign against The Daily News. I was given a year in a City of Refuge in the Netherlands where I wrote a cutting, satirical weekly column tracing the ageing Mugabe's descent into tyrannical megalomania. This caught the attention of the Zimbabwean authorities in Brussels who sent a formal letter of protest saying that "people who write things like this are considered enemies of the people of Zimbabwe". I was advised not to return home as my life would be in jeopardy. My wife and I settled in the south-east of England. Time away from my country has been hard. Last month my mother died. I was unable to go home to her funeral which, as the eldest son, hurt terribly. We were very close.

In February last year, I began to produce and distribute internationally a serious weekly independent newspaper - The Zimbabwean - aimed at the four million Zimbabweans in exile as well as those at home who are denied access to any news except the crude state media. My wife and I produce the entire paper ourselves on two computers in our living room.

Today, 17,000 copies a week of the Zimbabwean are shipped into the country from Johannesburg and distributed by a courageous local entrepreneur. So far, despite constant personal vilification and threats, the newspaper has been neither banned, burned nor bombed by the authorities. (All three happened to The Daily News.) It continues to expose the human rights abuses of the Zanu (PF) government and to give a voice to the opposition. As I have learned, it is true that power corrupts.

* To sponsor a weekly subscription for The Zimbabwean, at a cost of £2.50 a month so it can be sent to a college, library, women's group etc inside the country, visit www.zimbabwean.co.uk.