Sure, many did in 1980-83. But by 1984 any close observer would have found the massacres in Matabeleland worthy of condemnation. And of course the character of the 1979-80 transition itself was so flawed that it was easy to recognise imperialism's (and SA subimperialism's) fingerprints.
It's a fairly clear top-down story, in terms of shifting political alliances. Having forgiven the most racist whiteys, Mugabe then did business deal after deal with them, in the process ditching his own povo (masses). But by the early 1990s he had ditched the white manufacturing class to do neoliberal deals with the World Bank and IMF which benefited local white financiers and farmers inordinately. When those deals didn't pay off, in 1998, he quickly went back to his army, his liberation war veterans and some peasant groups to reconfigure his power base, and he defaulted on WB/IMF/bank loans, and by 2000 began redistributing white-owned farmland. And he zigzagged all over on economic policies, with his cronies plundering the Treasury to the extent that a year ago they gave up on the currency, as it had deflated by about the fastest amount ever recorded.
All the while, Mugabe never stopped screwing the urban working class and poor. And never forgot how to 'talk left, walk right'.
A great deal of this was predetermined by the character of Rhodesian settler-accumulation (and 1970s over-accumulation), which left no space for the development of a genuine black bourgeoisie. A couple of books lay out the tale: http://www.ukzn.ac.za/ccs/files/Bond%20ManyanyaZimbabwesPlunge2ndEdn.pdf and http://www.ukzn.ac.za/ccs/files/BondUnevenZimbabwe.pdf