Zimbabwe is so heavy with missed chances that it is hard not to be sceptical of the prospects for renewal
Robert Mugabe may be out of office, but the country for now remains firmly in the hands of Zanu-PF and the Zimbabwean army
My father had experience of his own of the heavy hand of the Rhodesian government many years ago when he was a lecturer at the University College of Rhodesia in Salisbury, as the capital Harare was then known. In July 1966, about eight months after the country’s white settlers made their Unilateral Declaration of Independence from Britain, he was briefly imprisoned and then deported, along with eight other lecturers, to the UK. With the renegade regime of Ian Smith preparing to entrench apartheid-style policies in Rhodesia, the lecturers and some students had protested against the police presence on the multiracial campus. The irony is that one of my father’s most bitter disappointments was seeing how Zimbabwe’s leaders at the country’s true independence in 1980 — many of them well-educated lawyers and economists with whom my father felt he shared much common ground in the 1960s — ended up guilty of many of the vices of Smith’s white nationalists. True, there was no shortage of reas...
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