The Bleeding Wound: Zimbabwe’s Slow Suicide

Zimbabwe was known as the “jewel of Africa,” as Samora Machel, the Marxist president of Mozambique, told Robert Mugabe when the new nation won its independence in 1980. As the second-most-industrialized country on the continent, the former Southern Rhodesia already had a decent infrastructure, including roads and railways (“You were lucky to have had the British,” another Mozambican leader told Mugabe, no doubt wistfully); an energetic, talented, book-hungry populace; and democratic institutions such as a relatively free press and a functioning judiciary. The problems, of course, were immense: there was the need to recover—economically, psychically, spiritually—from over a decade of brutal civil war; and there were vast disparities between whites and blacks in wealth, education, skills, and land ownership. But in addition to having had some historic, manmade luck, Zimbabwe was naturally lucky, too: beautiful, mineral-rich, and astoundingly fertile. Zimbabwe’s vast, sophisticated commercial farms were ingeniously irrigated and passionately tended; they produced, and often exported, fruits, flowers, peanuts, grains, tobacco, cotton, coffee, poultry, pigs, and some of the best beef in the world. Doris Lessing, who was raised in Southern Rhodesia, called the country “paradise,” and she is among the least sentimental of writers.

This year, Zimbabwe ranks number four—perched between Somalia and Chad—on the Failed Stat...