‘The last great liberator’: Why Mandela made and stayed friends with dictators - The Washington Post: Mandela did finally condemn Mugabe and call for him to leave office in the 2000s, but he remained a friend of some of the world's most notorious dictatorships because of those shared liberation roots. “Mandela was profoundly loyal to those who supported the liberation struggle, even if it was in their narrow self-interest to do so and when it had little or nothing to do with nonracial democracy,” John Campbell, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, told my colleague Scott Wilson.
By the time Mandela became president in 1994, the Western world had embraced him and his movement, pulling post-apartheid South Africa closer to the United States and former colonial master Britain. But Mandela and his movement, the African National Congress, had suffered through its hardest decades despite Western opposition and with support from fellow liberation movements that, at the time, looked not so different from South Africa's.