About 200 people attended the funeral service while family members witnessed the burial in a courtyard

The former leader of Zimbabwe Robert Mugabe has been buried in his rural home Zvimba in a low-key private burial after the family snubbed the hilltop National Heroes Acre burial this week.

About 200 people attended the funeral service while family members witnessed the burial in a courtyard.

The bands played but the funeral of Zimbabwe’s ex-president was a strange affair in a divided nation

At just before 11.30am, the thousands of mourners in the vast bowl of Zimbabwe’s national stadium stood and the casket carrying the mortal remains of Robert Gabriel Mugabe began its short journey across the green grass to the podium where it would lie during the long, hot hours of the funeral.

A military brass band led the procession. Then came the bereaved family and Mugabe’s successor, President Emmerson Mnangagwa, followed by foreign dignitaries, before a small crowd of ministers and officials from the ruling Zanu-PF party.

The man who brought freedom to Zimbabwe was once a hero to many – but he died a tyrant who will not be mourned

Robert Mugabe is dead, never to come back again, and so are millions of Zimbabweans who preceded him, dying from easily treatable diseases, and from the violence that visited anyone who attempted to resist his tyrannical rule.

The dreams of millions of young men and women – who, to this day, roam the streets of Zimbabwe with university degrees but without jobs or any decent income – were extinguished long before him.

The former Zimbabwean president will always be an African liberation icon, but his brutality will not be forgotten

“Wafa wanaka” – it is said that it is unAfrican to speak ill of the dead. But what choice does one have when the death of a once towering figure raises complex emotions, and not in a good way?

On 18 April 1980, Zimbabwe was born. In a colourful celebration that started the previous night at Rufaro stadium in Harare (then known as Salisbury), the independence flame was lit. Bob Marley sang Zimbabwe, a song he’d written at the invitation of the government. Hope filled the air as Robert Gabriel Mugabe, the nation’s first prime minister, took his oath of office and swore allegiance to the new nation. Julius Nyerere, the leader of Tanzania, prophetically cautioned Mugabe, saying: “You have inherited a jewel in Africa. Don’t tarnish it.”

Final years in power were characterised by financial collapse, violent intimidation and vicious power struggle

• How Mugabe became Africa’s fallen angel
• In pictures: from liberation fighter to deposed leader

Robert Mugabe, the deeply divisive former president of Zimbabwe, was declared a “national hero” by the ruling Zanu-PF party on Friday, as preparations for his funeral got under way in the nation he ruled with an iron first for almost 40 years.

The death of the former president on Thursday night in a clinic in Singapore marks the definitive end of an era in the former British colony.

Mugabe, who has died aged 95, took power in April 1980, when the country previously known as Rhodesia was renamed Zimbabwe. He was credited with freeing Zimbabwe from colonialism and white minority rule but faced years of criticism for building a dictatorship and mismanaging the economy