Saving Zimbabwe is the gripping story of a group of extraordinary black and white Zimbabweans who lived together forming ‘The Community of Reconciliation’. They chose love over hate and integration over segregation. They believed in harmony over discord and that loving your former enemies was a higher way of life. Against all odds they succeeded in transforming a region of the nation in to a life-giving community. By example they demonstrated that the course of Zimbabwe could be changed, and provided a working model for the road ahead. Tragically on 25 November 1987, the sixteen white members of the Community made the ultimate sacrifice and were martyrd. Their killers thought they were ‘liberating’ their people but in fact drove the black community back under the oppressive forces of poverty. Why did they die? This book takes you on a journey to discover the answer to that haunting question and more. With the current political and economic uncertainty in Zimbabwe, the message of Saving Zimbabwe is more relevant than ever. The country needs transformation which should start in the heart of her people. The destiny of a nation and millions of lives are at stake.

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.

No one in 1980 could have guessed that Zimbabwe would become a failed state on such a monumental and tragic scale. In this incisive and revealing book, Richard Bourne shows how a country which had every prospect of success when it achieved a delayed independence in 1980 became a brutal police state with hyperinflation, collapsing life expectancy and abandonment by a third of its citizens less than thirty years later. Beginning with the British conquest of Zimbabwe and covering events up to the present precarious political situation, this is the most comprehensive, up-to-date and readable account of the ongoing crisis. Bourne shows that Zimbabwe's tragedy is not just about Mugabe's 'evil' but about history, Africa today and the world's attitudes towards them.

"What really went wrong in Zimbabwe? The promise of liberation, human rights, democracy, development, and prosperity have been shattered by greed, state-sponsored violence, and tyranny. Yet the discourse on Zimbabwe has been polarized along racial and poli"

How do people come to need products they never even knew they wanted? How, for example, did indigenous Zimbabweans of the 1940s begin to believe that they required Lifebuoy soap? Offering a glimpse into the intimate workings of modern colonialism and global capitalism, Timothy Burke takes up these questions in Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women, a study of post-World War II commodity culture in Zimbabwe. With particular attention to cosmetic products and the contrast between colonial and pre-colonial ideas of cleanliness, Burke examines the role played by commodity culture, changing patterns of consumption, and the spread of advertising in the making of modern Zimbabwe. His work combines history, anthropology, and political economy to show how the development of commodification in the region relates to the social history of hygiene. Within this framework, and drawing on a wide variety of historical sources, Burke explores dense interactions between commodity culture and embodied aspects of race, gender, sexuality, domesticity, health, and aesthetics in a colonial society. Rather than viewing the production of needs simply as an imposition from above, Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women shows what heterogeneous and complex processes, involving the aims and histories of both colonizers and colonized, produced these changes in Zimbabwean society. Integrating political economy, cultural studies, and a wide range of the social sciences, Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women will find readers among scholars of colonialism, African history, and ethnography as well those for whom the problem of commodification is a significant theoretical issue.

Mugabe's dictatorship had survived due to the vicious military oppression of the population and the ruthless suppression of opposition. The authors examine the background to Mugabe's accession to power through the black nationalist insurgencies against white rule and the civil war between the black Zimbabweans.

The first single-volume history of Zimbabwe with detailed coverage from pre-colonial times to the present, this book examines Zimbabwe's pre-colonial, colonial and postcolonial social, economic and political history and relates historical factors and trends to recent developments in the country. Zimbabwe is a country with a rich history, dating from the early San hunter-gatherer societies. The arrival of British imperial rule in 1890 impacted the country tremendously, as the European rulers exploited Zimbabwe's resources, giving rise to a movement of African nationalism and demands for independence. This culminated in the armed conflict of the 1960s and 1970s and independence in 1980. The 1990s were marked by economic decline and the rise of opposition politics. In 1999, Mugabe embarked on a violent land reform program that plunged the nation's economy into a downward spiral, with political violence and human rights violations making Zimbabwe an international pariah state. This book will be useful to those studying Zimbabwean history and those unfamiliar with the country's past.