Lands, Agriculture, Water and Rural Resettlement Minister, Air Marshal Perence Shiri was born on 11 January 1955 in Gweru.

Born Bigboy Samson Chikerema, the name Perrance Shiri seems to have been his nom de guerre.

He died Wednesday aged 65.

Shiri joined ZANLA in 1973 and rose through the ranks to become member of the High Command in 1977.

He then joined the Zimbabwe National Army in 1980, attained Brigadier rank in 1982 before he was transferred to Airforce as Air Commodore in 1984 and became a Commander from 1992 -2017.

Became Minister of Lands, Agriculture and Rural Resettlement from November 2017 to date.

During his tenure as the commander of the Air Force of Zimbabwe, Shiri was also a member of the Joint Operations Command which exerted the day by day control over Zimbabwe’s government.

Shiri was a cousin to the late President Robert Mugabe.

It is reported that he called himself Black Jesus, because according to an anonymous claim on BBC Panorama documentary “The Price of Silence”, he “could determine your life like Jesus Christ. He could heal, raise the dead, whatever. So he claimed to be like that because he could say if you live or not.”

A liberation war veteran, Shiri’s chequered past saw him commanding the army’s Fifth Brigade unit that carried out the 1980s massacres of thousands of civilians in western Zimbabwe as the government sought to quell an insurgency.

From 1983 to 1984, the Zimbabwean Fifth Brigade, under Shiri’s command, was responsible for a reign of terror in Matabeleland known as Gukurahundi.

Over 20k people lost their lives during Gukurahundi while thousands more were tortured.

Despite this, in 1986, Shiri was granted a place at the Royal College of Defence Studies in London.

In 1992, Shiri was appointed as the commander of the Air Force of Zimbabwe, taking over from Air Chief Marshal Josiah Tungamirai.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Shiri was reported to have organised farm invasions by war veterans. However, these claims were not corroborated neither were they denied by Shiri, who was a very reserved individual who never disclosed much about his personal or political life.

When Zimbabwe was hit by food shortages in 2002, Mugabe dispatched Shiri to South Africa to purchase maize in a move that was backed by a credit note for the equivalent of £17 million from the Libyan leader, Colonel Gaddafi.

With the Mugabe government facing increasing problems, the Zimbabwean media reported in February 2007 that Shiri was regularly attending General Solomon Mujuru’s unofficial meetings with other senior military commanders and some political leaders. These meetings had discussed forcing Mugabe to the polls in 2008 with a view to his replacement as president.

Zimbabwean lawyers and opposition politicians in 2008 accused Shiri of being the man behind the military assaults on illegal diggers in the diamond mines in the east of Zimbabwe.

Shortly before the disputed 2008 harmonised presidential election Shiri, along with other Zimbabwean Defence chiefs, held a press conference where they stated that defence and security forces had been deployed across the country to maintain peace and order in a remark aimed against the Movement for Democratic Change.

In 2002 the European Union barred Shiri from entering the EU and on 6 March 2003, George W. Bush ordered the blocking of any of Shiri’s property in the United States.

There was on Shiri’s life on 13 December 2008, when he was accosted by unknown people who shot at his car while he was on his way to his farm in Marondera.

The police reported that Shiri got out of his car thinking that one of his car tyres had burst and he was shot in the arm.

It has been speculated that the assassination attempt may have been a response to Shiri’s attacks on illegal diamond miners in 2008 or because of his role in Gukurahundi in Matabeleland in the 1980s.

In October 2013, Shiri’s only son, Titus Takudzwa Chikerema, died aged 21. Nothing is known about his mother’s identity or her whereabouts.

Shiri, allegedly helped plot the ouster of Robert Mugabe in the 2017 coup.

Two government sources said he died in the early hours of Wednesday.

Shiri was said to have gone into isolation then at some point he ended up being admitted in hospital where he met his demise.

While Shiri was certainly a commanding figure because of his expansive liberation war credentials, top government posts and his far reaching influence, little was known about his personal life.

No-one has ever seen Shiri’s spouse in the media or during public appearances. Shiri always rocked up solo prompting speculation that he was a divorcee but whose wife no-one knows about.