‘Zimbabwe is like a flipped coin in the air’

It’s summer and the purple flowers on the jacaranda trees have begun to bloom, but they’re little comfort to Zimbabweans in the middle of a dire economic crisis. You can tell it’s bad here because even the death of Ian Smith last month did not arouse much hostile comment. The domestic consensus is that Mugabe has managed both to follow in Smith’s tyrannical footsteps and to wreck the formal economy at the same time.

This is Africa’s breadbasket turned basket-case and though the first EU-Africa summit in seven years starts this week and there are presidential elections in March next year, no one sees much prospect for change. It’s true that Gordon Brown has done some macho posturing over Zimbabwe — chest-thumping over human rights abuses — but that has achieved precisely nothing for ordinary Zimbabweans and provided Mugabe with a treasure trove of propaganda material with which to lambast Britain and its ‘colonial’ ambitions — much like Smithy before him.