Nothing ever new out of Africa

When I was a young doctor working in what was still Rhodesia, I read a book by a nun who was also a political economist. She demonstrated that land reform was not only a requirement of social justice but would lead to greatly increased agricultural output, since African peasant farmers cultivated their land more intensively than commercial farmers. Her argument was positively Euclidean in its precision and I accepted it in its entirety.

The only thing that she omitted to mention, and that did not occur to me at the time, was that the land reform would have to be carried out by men; and not just men in general, but by particular men, with all their passions, weaknesses and prejudices. Political geometry is non-Euclidean.

The man who eventually carried out, or at least presided over, the land reform in Zimbabwe was Robert Mugabe, who by common consent has led his nation to the very brink of ruin, turning a breadbasket into a basket case The author of this book, a liberal journalist who has long supported African nationalist causes, sets out to try to understand why Mugabe turned out the way he did.