A Letter from Zimbabwe

Independent Zimbabwe was born in 1980 on the ruins of Rhodesia. For some fifteen years the guerrillas of Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African National Union–Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) and Joshua Nkomo’s Zimbabwe African People’s Union (PF-ZAPU) fought Ian Smith’s white government, and their triumph raised hopes that colonialism was finally to be banished from Africa. The last remaining task was to destroy the apartheid system of South Africa and to end Pretoria’s illegal occupation of Namibia.

Mugabe’s ZANU-PF swept the country’s first elections in 1980, and as prime minister he introduced a policy of reconciliation. Blacks and whites who had been locked in battle for so many years were urged...