AP

An armed soldier patrols a street in Harare, Zimbabwe, Wednesday, Nov. 15, 2017. Zimbabweans say they are shaken but cautiously hopeful after the military placed the nation's President Robert Mugabe under house arrest and seized control of government offices.

When troops placed Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe under house arrest Wednesday in what appeared to be a military coup, it wasn’t just the possible unseating of the country’s long-time president. It was the political unraveling of a man who had, in many ways, often seemed to be Zimbabwe personified – in both its brightest days and its most troubled.

By the time tanks rolled into Harare the day before, Mr. Mugabe had presided over nearly four tumultuous decades of Zimbabwean history. His time in office stretched from the country’s early years as the international poster-child for the hopeful possibilities of African independence to its slow-motion economic collapse at the turn of the 21st century. That longevity earned him a dubious distinction – the last remaining independence-era president still in power in Africa.

But on Wednesday, Mugabe’s legacy was suddenly thrown against a stark new backdrop. As the military patrolled the streets of the capital, Zimbabwean Army officer Maj. Gen. Sibusiso Moyo assured citizens that the military was not staging a coup, simply “targeting criminals.” But semantics aside, the set up was a familiar one: Mr. Moyo had made his announcement after seizing control of the state broadcaster, and tanks idled near important government buildings.

However the military takeover ultimately plays out, it marks an abrupt chapter break in the history of a country where, until two days ago, the president’s 37-year rule seemed almost entirely unshakable. 

For Mugabe’s supporters, after all, he was a living icon, a man “who stood for the economic empowerment of the Zimbabwean people, [giving] land to the black majority who had lost it to colonialists,” says Fortune Mloyi, a supporter of Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front (ZANU–PF) who asked to be identified by a pseudonym because of the current political uncertainty. “It is a legacy that many other African countries are still trying to follow.”

'The greatest leader'

Mugabe’s rule, indeed, began with almost unimaginable promise.

Just after midnight on April 18, 1980, at a soccer stadium in Harare, Mugabe and thousands of other onlookers watched as a cadre of white soldiers dressed in the scarlet uniforms of the colonial government marched lockstep with the camouflage-clad guerrilla fighters they had spent more than a decade locked in a brutal civil war against. Then the two groups stopped, pivoted, and in unison saluted the flag of their newly independent black nation.

“If yesterday you hated me, today you cannot avoid the love that binds you to me and me to you,” promised Mugabe, a bespectacled intellectual and former guerrilla leader – and now the prime minister of the minutes-old country. “Oppression and racism are inequities that must never again find scope in our political and social system.”

It seemed to many the beginning of a new era, a remarkable rewrite of an earlier generation of African independence struggles, which had seen white settlers flee en masse the day a black government took the reins. And few doubted that the man at the podium was the right person for the job. 

Mugabe’s “intellect and vision has no obvious equal among the continent’s leaders,” effused The New York Times at the time, and his country was “the linchpin of peace and the model of racial harmony” for the region.

“The way he transformed the country’s education by providing free and compulsory primary education to all, the way he led an agricultural revolution, and the way he negotiated peace around the world made us believe we had the greatest leader we could ever get,” says Simba Makoni, who in the years after independence was a rising star in ZANU–PF.

During, the first decade of Zimbabwe’s independence, the country’s rates of infant mortality and malnutrition plummeted, while literacy and life expectancy shot up. In the 1980s, Mugabe’s government resettled about half a million people on land it bought from willing white farmers, a project The Economist would later call “perhaps the most successful aid programme in Africa.”

But even then, the cracks were beginning to show.  

An unimaginable departure

As Zimbabwe found itself celebrated around the world for its progress in health, development, and racial reconciliation, the country’s Army was carrying out a brutal campaign against the president’s political rivals. Between 1983 and 1987, as many as 20,000 people – many connected only loosely, if at all, to the Zimbabwe African People's Union opposition party – were murdered across southern Zimbabwe by Mugabe’s notorious North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade in an operation that became known as Gukurahundi, or “the rain that washes away the chaff.”

“He carried some wartime grudges for the rest of his life,” says Mr. Makoni, who later became finance minister. “He thought he was surrounded by enemies, especially among fellow liberation war fighters.” And so, he says, it became increasingly difficult for him to imagine anyone else taking over his party and his country – and increasingly it became difficult for other Zimbabweans to imagine it, either.

“We have lived with this guy for all of our lives,” says Mavuso Tshabalala, who was 3 years old when Mugabe came to power and remembers no other president.

That has meant that even as Zimbabwe has slid into startling economic collapse in recent years, few could imagine it would mean regime change. In late 2008, hyperinflation in the country reached a darkly comical 79.6 billion percent as the country scrambled to print enough one hundred trillion notes. Between 2000 and 2015, the economy halved, and emigration escalated. Today, estimates place the number of Zimbabweans living abroad as high as 3 million in a population of 14 million.

Civil servants frequently go unpaid, currency values are sharply different on the black and legal markets, and there are so few formal jobs that as much as 95 percent of the working population does so informally.

“Whether educated or not, we all have been reduced to [street] vendors, that is if you chose the route of staying in the country,” says Jackie Manemo, who is trained as a scientist but now sells clothing she buys from South African shops at a markup in the central Zimbabwean city of Kwekwe.

Uncertain hope

Still, few in Zimbabwe expected the events of recent days. Even last week, when the president abruptly fired his vice president, Emmerson Mnangagwa, a longtime ally and fellow liberation fighter, few predicted Mugabe was on his way out. Instead, it looked like he had simply cleared the way for a dynastic succession – the most likely new vice president being his own wife.

“We knew that the military had sympathies towards [Mr. Mnangagwa] and that they wouldn’t take too kindly to his ouster, however, the manner and speed with which this was all undertaken took us by surprise,” says Maggie Mzumara, a Harare-based political analyst.

And that surprise, she says, brought with it hope, but also profound uncertainty. There has, after all, never been a Zimbabwe without Robert Mugabe. 

“It is good news that he is finally leaving us, but my worry is on who is next and what his stance will be towards the people of Zimbabwe,” says Mr. Tshabalala. “People have suffered enough.”

J. Scott Applewhite/AP

House Speaker Paul Ryan points to boxes of petitions supporting the Republican tax reform bill that is set for a vote in the House Thursday.

The latest plot twist in Republican efforts to overhaul the US tax code amplifies what may be the most fundamental debate surrounding the legislation: Who is this really for?

Senate Republicans are moving to add a major new element to their bill: a repeal of Obamacare’s “individual mandate” – the requirement that people have health insurance or pay a tax penalty.

That is certain to please rank-and-file GOP voters who are frustrated by Congress’s failure to repeal the Affordable Care Act. But it’s raising the volume of criticism from Democrats, who are now attacking the bill not only for showering tax breaks on the wealthy but also for an expected decline in the number of Americans with health insurance.

And there’s more: The new version of the Senate tax bill, unveiled late Tuesday, says the planned tax cuts for ordinary households will sunset after 2025, while corporate tax cuts will be permanent. This helps the bill hit the budgetary target required to allow passage by a simple majority of the Senate.

But to say the politics of selling the tax legislation just got more complicated may be quite an understatement.

Republicans are trying to stay on message, with their pitch being that cutting tax rates and streamlining the tax code will boost economic growth and provide an income boost for households across the spectrum. Many finance experts, however, say the bill carries outsize benefits for business owners and the rich  – and much less that looks constructive for average Americans or the overall economy.

“This is really tiny tinkering for individuals, [while] on the business side this is a major reduction of business taxes,” says Richard Kaplan, a tax policy expert at the University of Illinois, referring to the House and Senate plans. “That seems to be the real focus.”

It’s not that Republicans are without arguments in their quiver. They really have tried to craft a plan in which most Americans, not just the rich, see their tax burden decline. And their assumption may be that those tax cuts would prove popular enough that, ultimately, Congress would keep them in place beyond 2025.

Skewed toward the rich?

On the corporate side of the equation, many economists support the idea of trying to lower business tax rates, and modernizing the corporate tax code, to help America in the global competition for high-end jobs.

And, on Obamacare, the bill would leave most of the Affordable Care Act untouched. Republicans say the individual mandate is unpopular, and that the solution on health care isn’t to force people to buy a product they don’t want or can’t afford. “Just to maintain some perspective, nothing in our bill would keep eligible individuals from receiving premium tax credits to pay for coverage. Nothing would require those who are eligible for Medicaid to opt out of receiving free health care,” said Sen. Orrin Hatch (R) of Utah, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, in remarks about the latest version of the bill. 

To skeptics, though, the GOP effort looks skewed toward favoring the rich – and now toward undercutting Obamacare.

The measure that House Republicans are aiming to vote on Thursday, for example, would bestow most of its largesse (for individual taxpayers) on the top 20 percent of earners. They’d reap more than half the tax-cut gains in 2018 and three-fourths of the gains by 2027, according to analysis by the Tax Policy Center in Washington. The top 1 percent of earners alone would reap nearly half the gains in 2027, the study found.

It's true that those high-earning taxpayers are the same people who currently pay a disproportionate share of federal taxes. But at a time of chronic federal deficits, many economists are skeptical that cutting those taxes will generate much in the way of new economic growth. And in polls, Americans widely say they don’t want more tax cuts for the rich.

Americans also say they don’t want tax cuts for big business – yet that’s another central element of the House and Senate tax plans.

Provisions that would help corporations and the rich extend beyond rate cuts. Examples include ending the estate tax (or applying it to fewer estates in the Senate version) and preserving the preferential tax rate given to capital gains and hedge fund “carried interest.”

'Get it done'

For Republican lawmakers, the plan reflects what GOP voters and campaign funders are asking for.

"My donors are basically saying, 'Get it done or don’t ever call me again,' " Rep. Chris Collins (R) of New York said recently of the tax bill.

“Class warfare is the word for this,” says Daniel Shaviro, a New York University tax law expert. As he sees it, the House and Senate plans are oriented especially toward certain favored taxpayers, including notably those who have businesses that file taxes as “pass-through” entities under the individual side of the code.

The GOP calculations are also about process. By Senate rules, the tax measure can’t be passed by simple majority if it adds to deficits after 10 years. And Republicans control the Senate by only a slim margin: They can lose two votes from among their own caucus – but no more – and still rely on Vice President Mike Pence to break a tie.

Repealing the Obamacare mandate would officially save about $300 billion for the US Treasury over 10 years. (The Treasury would lose tax-penalty payments, but that would be more than offset by savings as fewer people tap Obamacare subsidies or enroll in Medicaid due to the mandate.)

The extra money from Obamacare allows the newest Senate plan to sweeten the pot of tax breaks and helps the math of making corporate tax cuts permanent beyond 2027.

And as for the individual-taxpayer rate cuts, the idea of passing temporary ones with the hope they’ll become permanent isn’t new. It happened under President George W. Bush. And the gambit largely succeeded when President Barack Obama kept reduced tax rates in place for all but the highest earners.

The Obamacare twist

But fiscal watchdogs say that doesn't make for sound budget planning.

And Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer of New York signaled the pressure Republicans now face to show how their plan would help average Americans. "I say to my colleagues, particularly the deficit hawks, you can't have it both ways. You cannot say we’re going to protect the middle class after 2025, and we’re going to reduce the deficit," he said on the Senate floor Wednesday. "This bill is a deficit budget buster."

Senator Schumer also cited Congressional Budget Office estimates to question the idea of repealing the Obamacare mandate: "So we’re kicking 13 million people off health insurance to give tax cuts to the wealthy. Also, according to CBO, it would lead to a 10 percent increase in premiums; each year they’d be 10 percent higher than they otherwise would be."

In fact, the idea of repealing the mandate was at the core of legislation – a so-called skinny repeal of Obamacare – that narrowly failed to pass the Senate earlier this year.

So, after Democrats just won a Virginia governor's race where health care played a major role, it remains to be seen if the Obamacare provision will remain in the GOP bill.

One sign of the tests that remain: Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin (R) came out against the Senate bill Wednesday, arguing it favored corporations too much over pass-through entities. Tax breaks for the latter would expire under the Senate plan.

Republicans know the political consequences are big if they fail to pass a tax bill at all. But that doesn't mean 50 votes are sure to materialize.

The items on display are as varied as they are sinister – Mussolini busts, Mussolini keyrings, statues of “Il Duce” on a rearing stallion, and Mussolini propaganda posters. There are even Mussolini-themed babies’ bibs and pasta in the shape of Mussolini’s helmeted head.

The bizarre objects are crammed into a shop on the main street of Predappio, a town in northern Italy where Benito Mussolini was born in 1883.

In the past few decades it has become a place of pilgrimage for Italy’s unrepentant neo-Fascists: unabashed admirers of a man who led Italy into disastrous colonial adventures and an alliance with Adolf Hitler which brought Italy to its knees.

They descend on Predappio, in the Emilia-Romagna region, three times a year – on the anniversaries of Mussolini’s birth, death, and his March on Rome, the 1922 putsch which brought him to power. They gather at Mussolini’s resting place, a softly-lit stone tomb in an underground crypt on the outskirts of town, leaving tributes in a visitors’ book and admiring a collection of his personal possessions, including a pair of leather jackboots and a black shirt.

But the shops that sell Fascist memorabilia, as well as Nazi objects such as SS daggers, swastikas, and coffee cups bearing portraits of the Führer, may not be around very much longer.

A new law which outlaws the glorification of Fascism and Nazism and the selling of related souvenirs was passed by Italy’s lower house of parliament in September. This month it will be debated by the Senate, the upper house.

If approved, the shops that sell Mussolini posters, sweatshirts, and Zippo lighters will have to close down for good. And if the town mayor has his way, a tandem initiative will set Predappio on a new course, away from its dark past – by turning it into a home for academic study of Italy’s Fascist past.

“We want to change Predappio’s image and we also think that [the project] will be of value for the rest of Europe, a place to understand what happened during the 20th century,” says Giorgio Frassineti, the town mayor.

Antonio Pisacreta/Ropi/ZUMA/Newscom

Mussolini and Fascism trinkets for sale in a souvenir shop. If Italy's parliament votes to outlaw Fascist propaganda, the law would bar production and sale of souvenirs and other products seen as celebrating Fascism or Nazism.

Telling Italians what really happened

Pier Luigi Pompignoli, the owner of one of the Mussolini shops, is open in his admiration for Il Duce. His business card proudly proclaims: “Duce, sei sempre nel mio cuore” – “you are always in my heart.” He claims that the Fascist dictator achieved many good things – including building new towns such as Predappio.

“Am I worried? Of course I am,” Mr. Pompignoli says. “But I’ve been selling these things for 35 years – how come the politicians have suddenly woken up now and said they should be banned?”

Predappio was constructed from scratch in the 1920s and 1930s around a crumbling stone farmhouse in which Mussolini was born.

The little town stands as an architectural paean to Italy’s two-decade Fascist era, an open-air museum of sleek modernist buildings grouped around an expansive central piazza.

One of the most imposing is called the Casa del Fascio and was built as a sort of rest and recuperation day center for Italians who visited the new town in the heyday of Fascist rule.

But Mayor Frassineti, from the center-left Democratic Party which governs Italy at the national level, wants to convert the building into a museum and a study center where scholars from around the world can debate the origins of 20th century totalitarianism.

He symbolizes the contradiction at the heart of Predappio – while the town attracts a hardcore of Fascist sympathizers from across Italy, most of its 6,000 inhabitants are far more liberal in outlook and have voted in center-left administrations for decades.

The battle over Predappio’s identity is reminiscent of the debate in the United States over Confederate statues and raises questions about how the past should be preserved and reinterpreted.

In Italy, one is never far away from reminders of the Fascist era – in Rome there is a towering stone obelisk that still bears the words “Mussolini Dux” and many other cities retain monuments erected in honor of Il Duce.

In Predappio, the mayor’s office is in Mussolini’s former bedroom in a 19th century town hall that was revamped on his orders in the 1920s.

The room is full of original furniture that was commissioned by Il Duce himself – including a chest of drawers in which the original fasces, the bundled rods that were a symbol of Fascism, were scratched off after the war by anti-Fascists.

“It’s fundamental to tell Italians what really happened – that Fascism was an enormous tragedy for us,” says Frassineti, a former high school teacher.

He would welcome the closure of the Fascist souvenir shops but thinks it is more important to “change people’s mentality” – to remind them that Fascism resulted in the extermination of Italian Jews in concentration camps and the catastrophe of Italy’s Axis alliance with Japan and Germany.

'History should not be hidden away'

Most local people appear to be behind him.

Sitting in a bar and reading the latest news about the proposed museum in a newspaper, Claudio Ceccaroni, a dentist, says, “I think it’s important to be able to tell future generations about this period of history and this museum will have exactly that role. Those who have left their mark on history should not be forgotten. History is history and should not be hidden away.”

Enrico Grilli, a retired army officer who served in a parachute regiment, says, “I think the idea of having a museum in the Casa del Fascio is a good one.

“Some say the Fascists committed crimes, but so did the Romans in the Colosseum. Does that mean we should demolish it and not consider Roman history?”

For now, the owners of the town’s Fascist emporia are watching and waiting to see whether the Senate passes the law.

In another shop on the main street, where Mussolini’s bull neck and jutting chin loom down from every shelf, the woman behind the counter was glum.

“We will do whatever the law tells us to do,” said the owner, who declined to give her name. “If they tell us to close, then we’ll have to close.”

Brynn Anderson/AP

Former Alabama Chief Justice and US Senate candidate Roy Moore shakes hands after he speaks at a church revival, Tuesday, Nov. 14, 2017, in Jackson, Ala.

When some of Roy Moore’s defenders seemed to justify the idea of older Christian men dating teenage girls, a number of conservative Evangelical Christians, like a number of Americans, were both outraged and appalled.

The embattled Republican nominee for Alabama’s US Senate seat conceded Friday that he “dated a lot of young ladies” 40 years or so ago when he was in his 30s. He added, however, that he doesn’t “remember ever dating any girl without the permission of her mother.”

One of Mr. Moore's defenders compared a grown man dating a teen as akin to the biblical Mary and Joseph. While their ages are not given in the Bible, in some evangelical circles they are believed to be an adult male carpenter and young teenage girl. “There’s just nothing immoral or illegal here,” said Alabama State Auditor Jim Zeigler, defending the notorious former state chief justice’s alleged dates and assault of girls as young as 14. “Maybe just a little unusual.”

The accusations, and the justifications coming from some quarters, have roiled the ranks of many Evangelicals, and the condemnations have been in most cases unequivocal.  

Yet such relationships, in fact, may not be as unusual among a certain subsection of American Evangelicalism as people think, a number of scholars and child abuse advocates say. Today, for some supporters of Moore, that deeply ingrained culture of Christian masculinity – or “biblical manhood” – can even justify the idea that adult-teen relationships are not immoral. (Legality is another question: Alabama's age of consent is 16.)

“I think these moments, both around [President] Trump and Roy Moore, are so revealing,” says Kristin Kobes Du Mez, a professor of history at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Mich., referencing the 11 women who accused Mr. Trump of sexual harassment before the 2016 election. On Friday, when asked for an official White House position on the matter, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters that all the women are lying.

Most of the evangelical critics of Moore, on the one hand, have been well-known Never-Trumpers. Nevertheless, the president’s most ardent supporters still come from white Evangelical quarters.

“So a larger swath than I think most people expected don’t seem to want to condemn Moore’s past relationships, or critique that,” continues Professor Du Mez, a professor of religion and gender who has traced evangelical ideas of masculinity. “That’s what is really fascinating to me.”

On Wednesday, an attorney for Moore vigorously denied the allegations against him in a press conference.

Child marriage remains more common in the US than many people think. About 5 in every 1,000 15 to 17 year olds in the United States are married, according to the Pew Research Center, with child marriage more common in the South.

Over the past few days, dozens of men and women have recounted a dynamic in which older Evangelical men have often pursued, or have even been pursued, by young teenage girls.

And many described, too, a vision of gender roles in which young girls are at their most malleable and vulnerable, while older Christian men are understood to be their protectors and providers. 

“Roy Moore is a symptom of a larger problem in conservative fundamentalist and evangelical circles,” tweeted Kathryn Brightbill, legislative policy analyst at the Coalition for Responsible Home Education, which advocates for home-schooled children. “It's not a Southern problem, it's a fundamentalist problem. Girls who are 14 are seen as potential relationship material.”

The reasons for this are complex, scholars say, but over the past few decades, many Evangelicals have asserted a more muscular understanding of Christian masculinity, one that affirmed traditional '50s-era gender roles – but in a much more militant and aggressive way.

And in many ways, masculinity and male potency is understood as a kind of God-given and difficult to control force. “This is what makes men, there’s a kind of wildness to masculinity,” says Du Mez, citing her research. “You cannot tame masculinity. Testosterone is God’s gift to men – and to women as well, they would say – but you can’t really control it.”

Conversely, women are seen as naturally seductive. Young girls are taught that it is a sin, in fact, to cause a man to sin by dressing provocatively or inciting male lust.

Rise of 'biblical manhood'

As Evangelicals came into their own politically in the 1970s, “they did so in a way that really set them apart from the rest of the country,” says Du Mez. “They really set out in a different direction.”

With the sexual revolution of the 1960s, the rise of feminism, and the legalization of abortion, many conservative Evangelicals began to emphasize a particular theology of “biblical manhood” and “male headship.”

The Vietnam War, too, only amplified Evangelical calls for an almost militaristic Christianity, even as they emerged as one of the most potent political forces in the Republican Party.

Popular evangelical books on family values, written and promoted by “Focus on the Family” founder James Dobson, became bestsellers. Couching arguments for traditional gender roles as determined “biochemically, anatomically, and emotionally,” Mr. Dobson wrote in his 1980 book, “Straight Talk to Men and their Wives,” he claimed that feminism was altering the “time-honored roles of protector and protected.” 

In the 2001 book "Wild at Heart," still one of the most influential and popular Evangelical books on family values, the author John Eldredge famously wrote that God created men to long for “a battle to fight, an adventure to live, and a beauty to rescue.”

The role of women was conversely passive: they yearned to be fought for. And while they, too, possessed something “wild at heart,” it was “feminine to the core, more seductive than fierce.” 

“Patriarchal authority is much easier to come by if there’s a big age difference,” says Du Mez. “Men have the obligation to provide and to protect, and with two 20-year-olds, it’s hard to achieve that differential.

“Whereas, if you have a 35-year-old-man and a 16-year-old girl, he’s probably already able to provide, and to assert that headship authority – it’s easier ... according the rhetoric I’ve been seeing within this particular Evangelical subculture.”

Echoes of this view of masculinity can be seen in other instances, such as “Duck Dynasty,” one of whose stars advocated dating teens. Last December, Edgar Welch, the gunman who was charged with firing a gun inside a Washington-area pizzeria that was the subject of an online conspiracy theory claiming it was a child sex ring, told investigators that “Wild at Heart” was one of his favorite books, even as he saw himself as a kind of protector hero for young women.

It’s a masculinity, too, that many prominent Evangelicals have cited in their support for Trump. “I want the meanest, toughest, son-of-a-you-know-what I can find in that role, and I think that’s where many evangelicals are,” explained the Rev. Robert Jeffress, pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas and outspoken Trump supporter.

A shift in thought on personal immorality in politicians

The acceptance of leaders like Trump and Moore also reflects a startling shift in attitudes among many Evangelicals. In a recent study by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), Americans in general have become more tolerant of elected officials who commit an immoral act in their private life, but are able to still behave ethically in public. 

This has been especially the case among Evangelicals. In 2011, only 30 percent believed that personal immorality did not interfere with governing ethically. In 2016, 72 percent of white evangelicals reported that immoral leaders could still govern ethically.

Ms. Brightbill, the advocate at the Coalition for Responsible Home Education, and many others describe how ideas of “early courtship” allowed men to take over from the headship of a young girl’s father, shaping and molding a young girl’s role as a “helpmate.”

“The evangelical world is overdue for a reckoning. Women raised in evangelicalism and fundamentalism have for years discussed the normalization of child sexual abuse,” she wrote in a column in the Los Angeles Times. “We’ve told our stories on social media and on our blogs and various online platforms, but until the Roy Moore story broke, mainstream American society barely paid attention. Everyone assumed this was an isolated, fringe issue. It isn’t.”

Reshmi Chakraborty

Sharad Godse, the lead volunteer of the nonprofit Vidnyanvahini, explains an experiment to students in Mahude, India.

The 10th-grade girls are acing it when it comes to verifying Ohm’s law in this remote village school. The boys are close behind, but the groups of girls seem to have done their math right and paid more attention in class. Ohm’s law, a fundamental part of physics, states that voltage and current are proportional. The students are trying to verify the law by conducting experiments on a resistance board.

Sharad Godse, the equally enthusiastic 77-year-old who is supervising the action, explained the law earlier in the day and is rather happy with the progress. “It shows their math skills are not bad,” he says, smiling, before proceeding to show students the various applications of Ohm’s law in household objects.

The 10th-graders are from Mahude Madhyamik School, some 50 miles from the city of Pune, which is in the Indian state of Maharashtra. Mr. Godse is the lead volunteer and guiding light of Vidnyanvahini. With a name that aptly means “knowledge on wheels,” it is a nonprofit organization that teaches science to rural schoolchildren through experiments in its Mobile Science Lab.

Such labs aren’t a new concept in India. But what makes Vidnyanvahini interesting is its volunteers. With an average age of 67 years among them, these retirees share a deep interest in education and a passion to make a difference using their skills and time. All of them majored in science subjects. Many were teachers, while others worked as researchers and engineers. One was a dentist.

Every year, Godse and the rest of the team board their bus and travel to nearly 150 schools in the villages of Maharashtra to make science concepts fun and comprehensible for high-schoolers.

In Vidnyanvahini’s 20-plus years, in fact, the team has reached more than 300,000 students and visited more than 2,600 schools, either in Maharashtra or in other Indian states. And the bus has traveled in excess of 200,000 miles. Indeed, there’s such a demand for Vidnyanvahini’s programs that the team has more school visit requests than it can manage.

“Our mission is simple,” says Godse, “to help rural students learn science with practical applications. If taught this way, science concepts stay ingrained in the student’s mind.”

Low-quality science education is a common problem in schools in rural India. Many eighth-, ninth-, and 10th-graders have never seen a microscope or any other laboratory equipment, yet they’re expected to take practical examinations in high school that involve experiments.

This is the problem that Vidnyanvahini is trying to solve. The nonprofit was started in 1995 by Dr. Madhukar Deshpande and his wife, Pushpa, who had been academics in the United States. Ms. Deshpande came up with the idea after she watched a documentary on mobile science labs and thought of replicating them in Pune, where she is from. The couple’s team, built largely through word of mouth, has grown from seven volunteers to more than 25 now.

Godse joined Vidnyanvahini two years after it was formed, after he retired from his industrial engineering business. He is the secretary of the group and has applied his organizational skills and thinking to run the nonprofit with great efficiency.

‘Every team needs a leader like him’

Although Vidnyanvahini is very much a team effort, Godse has taken the venture up a few notches.

“It was always a novel initiative, but after Godse sir joined, it has spread by leaps and bounds,” says Urmila Parchure, who teaches chemistry as a member of Vidnyanvahini. “He’s a good organizer and a wonderful narrator when he is explaining to the students. Moreover, every team needs a leader like him to take it forward.”

The Vidnyanvahini team visits each school twice a year, once in the first term and once in the second, before examinations take place. Bharati Khatate, the science and math teacher at Mahude Madhyamik School, is familiar with Vidnyanvahini’s work and thinks the science workshops are beneficial not just for the students, but also as a refresher course for the teachers.

“Experiments in chemistry and biology are particularly helpful for students who are appearing for higher examinations,” Ms. Khatate notes.

The students are asked to take a test after a month to determine their retention level. Based on student test data from 1996 onward, there is a 35 percent increase in student comprehension on average.

Godse, who teaches physics, coordinates the group’s activities with clockwork precision. Every April, he and the others make a timetable for the next six months, scheduling school visits, number of volunteers, the route, and other details. Once the timetable is set, the volunteers are each given a copy, and they discuss lesson plans and experiments according to the syllabus of the Maharashtra State Board of Secondary & Higher Secondary Education.

The team preps all the equipment for experiments at the start of the school year in June, after which it is sorted, labeled, packed neatly, and kept ready for school visits. When the team reaches a school, materials such as test tubes, beakers, microscopes, acids, and solutions are deftly set up to create a makeshift lab. What is usually a boring lecture in class, often not sinking in, finally comes alive for the students.

Not taking the credit

Godse is very reluctant to acknowledge his effort and believes it’s not just himself, but the entire team, that has taken Vidnyanvahini forward. “It’s a team effort, and no one person is better or more important than the other. We all work together.” That’s all he will say about his significant contribution, and he even shies away from being photographed alone.

To be fair, it is of course the team that makes Vidnyanvahini what it is. Starting from home in the early morning, the volunteers spend at least two hours traveling to the rural schools and then over the next five hours conduct experiments, talk about their subjects, and explain concepts to students.

Many older people might feel they’re ready to take it easy and wouldn’t be interested in putting in the work the program requires. But as Ms. Parchure puts it, the volunteers do not see this as work but as an enjoyable activity that has a social cause.

Sanjay Kashinath Salunkhe of the Automotive Research Association of India has been a supporter. He has words of praise for the Vidnyanvahini team, especially Godse. “We were impressed by their transparent and systematic approach to work and thought it was very methodical,” he says. He thinks Vidnyanvahini provides an out-of-the-box solution for some of the challenges facing rural schools in India.

Vidnyanvahini’s operating costs are the equivalent of about $15,000 per year, the main expenses being diesel for the bus and the salary of its long-serving driver. The equipment is provided at a very low cost by a supplier who likes what the group does. While contributions are welcome, Godse notes that the organization receives enough funds from several quarters, including individual donors, charitable giving from corporations, and trusts.

Although Vidnyanvahini’s programs have already had an effect, these tireless volunteer teachers believe they still have a long way to go. Godse puts it this way: “We will continue to work as much as we can to give rural school students the opportunity to learn science and inspire others to start similar efforts like Vidnyanvahini in several parts of rural India.”

• For more, visit vidnyanvahini.org.

How to take action

UniversalGiving helps people give to and volunteer for top-performing charitable organizations around the world. All the projects are vetted by UniversalGiving; 100 percent of each donation goes directly to the listed cause. Below are links to three groups promoting education:

Seeds of Learning fosters learning in developing communities of Central America while educating volunteers about the region. Take action: Support this organization’s Learning Resource Centers in Nicaragua.

Miracles in Action provides Guatemalans living in extreme poverty with opportunities to help themselves through sustainable development projects. Take action: Donate money so students can receive backpacks filled with school supplies.

GVN Foundation supports the charitable and educational work of community organizations in various countries. Take action: Join initiatives in teaching, child care, or medicine in the Philippines.

AP Photo

Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, left, and his wife Grace follow proceedings during a youth rally in Marondera, Zimbabwe, in June.

When he was elected the first leader of a newly democratic Zimbabwe in 1980, Robert Mugabe sought reconciliation with the country’s former rulers, the white minority. It was a recognition of the need for rule by equality and merit over rule by race and heritage. Over 37 years in power, however, Mr. Mugabe steadily forgot those kind of guiding principles in modern governance.

Finally, according to reports, he appeared to be leaning toward designating his much-younger wife, Grace, as his successor, and even removed his vice president, Emmerson Mnangagwa, a former comrade from the 1970s independence struggle.

Simply put, Mugabe chose dynastic lineage over democratic ideals.

Only days later, the Army displaced him, citing his wife’s lack of legitimacy and the alleged criminals around her “causing social and economic suffering."

This is the lesson from Zimbabwe as events continue to unfold there. Much of history involves the struggle to create societies based on equal liberty rather than ephemeral rule by family, clan, tribe, patriarchs, clerics, or monarchs. Or, in the case of China, dictatorial rule by a Communist Party that believes only it can define the people’s “dream.”

Most of all, history has shown the fallacy of hereditary rule, or a belief that bloodlines determine one’s destiny or that genes and kinship can ensure a righteous ruler. To govern well today requires rulers who understand the bright line between the public interest and private desires.

In South Africa, Zimbabwe’s close neighbor, that lesson is still being learned. Despite the post-apartheid legacy of Nelson Mandela in honoring all citizens equally, the current president, Jacob Zuma, recently took a step backward. In May, he endorsed his ex-wife, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, to lead the ruling African National Congress and eventually replace him. His move makes South Africa a suspect mediator in helping Zimbabwe during its transition.

And despite their sidelining of Mugabe, the Army generals in Zimbabwe also lack credentials for resolving the country’s future. To be sure, militaries are mostly run on merit. They can efficiently run a large organization. But by necessity to be battle ready, they are not run on equality and inherent rights, such as the right of dissent and a due regard for minority views.

Much of the world is still ruled along notions of inequality along social or economic roles, similar to Aristotle’s view that “some are free men, and others slaves by nature.” Yet today’s democracies reflect the Christian era’s ideals of individual conscience, equality before God, mutual respect and responsibility, and a love that includes one’s enemies. “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female,” stated the Apostle Paul.

For Zimbabweans, the succession question still remains despite the Army’s move against Mugabe. But at least his attempt at dynastic rule has ended, and perhaps with it, the idea in Zimbabwe that a society requires inequality between the ruled and their rulers.

[Editor's note: An earlier version of this editorial mischaracterized Mr. Mugabe's actions about choosing a successor.]