How to ruin a country

As Zimbabwe celebrated its independence in April 1980 President Nyerere of Tanzania had a piece of advice for Robert Mugabe: ‘You have inherited a jewel. Keep it that way.’ At first, it seemed that Mugabe would take his fellow socialist’s advice. His address to the nation on the eve of independence gave all Zimbabweans hope that, white and black, they could together rebuild the country after the miseries of the guerrilla war.

Guguletho Moyo and Mark Ashurst quote the speech in full at the beginning of their useful compendium, and Martin Meredith reminds us that, after an initial interview, Ian Smith himself reported that he had found Mugabe not ‘the apostle of Satan’ but ‘sober and responsible’.

These two books are timely and can be read together. Meredith chronicles Mugabe’s progress from guerrilla leader to power-obsessed paranoiac. Moyo and Ashurst look to the future by canvassing a broad range of opinion as to how to rebuild a country utterly destroyed by a man using yesterday’s rhetoric in an Africa that is changing rapidly.