Mugabe: Power, Plunder, and the Struggle for Zimbabwe's Future

by Martin Meredith (Author)

• New

  Paperback
  2007

  $23.40

  Robert Mugabe came to power in Zimbabwe in 1980 after a long civil war in Rhodesia. The white minority government had become an international outcast in refusing to give in to the inevitability of black majority rule. Finally the defiant white prime minister Ian Smith was forced to step down and Mugabe was elected president. Initially he promised reconciliation between white and blacks, encouraged Zimbabwe's economic and social development, and was admired throughout the world as one of the leaders of the emerging nations and as a model for a transition from colonial leadership. But as Martin Meredith shows in this history of Mugabe's rule, Mugabe from the beginning was sacrificing his purported ideals,and Zimbabwe's potential,to the goal of extending and cementing his autocratic leadership. Over time, Mugabe has become ever more dictatorial, and seemingly less and less interested in the welfare of his people, treating Zimbabwe's wealth and resources as spoils of war for his inner circle. In recent years he has unleashed a reign of terror and corruption in his country. Like the Congo, Angola, Rwanda, Sierra Leone and Liberia, Zimbabwe has been on a steady slide to disaster. Now for the first time the whole story is told in detail by an expert. It is a riveting and tragic political story, a morality tale, and an essential text for understanding today's Africa.

• Used

  Hardcover
  2002

  $3.25

  Robert Mugabe came to power after a long civil war in Rhodesia, becoming president of the country now called Zimbabwe. Initially praised for leading Zimbabwe's social and economic development, it was discovered that the honeymoon was not to last long. Determined to gain total power through a one-party system, Mugabe unleased a campaign of mass murder and terror against his political opponents in Matabeleland. Year by year, he acquired huge personal power, ruling the country through a vast system of patronage, favouring loyal aides and cronies with government positions and contracts and ignoring the spreading blight of corruption. One by one, state corporations and funding organizations were plundered. Today Zimbabwe is a country beset by violence and lawlessness, regarded by the international community as a pariah state. Its economy is in tatters. Determined to stay in power, Mugabe has used armed gangs to crush political opposition, subverted the rule of law, undermined the judiciary, harassed the independent press and vilified the small white community. What happened in Zimbabwe? What turned an idealistic political visionary into a brutal aristocrat? Martin Meredith here attempts to understand the increasingly autocratic and corrupt policies pursued by Mugabe.