Response: Zimbabwe is a landscape, with guns. Robert Mugabe has descended from paragon, to pariah; the nation, instead of looking to the future, is in thrall to the violence of memory. Zimbabwe’s precipitous fall from grace, which began in 1997 and was accelerated by the controversial land redistribution programme and simultaneous political violence post- 2000, has yet to end. For many, particularly in the... more

Response: Robert Mugabe continues to belly-crawl beneath the rat-a-tat-tat of fierce criticism being fired at him on a multifronted battlefield, always dusting himself off the other side unscathed, if not victorious.

The Zimbabwean president is a master at outwitting his opponents. Right from the start—while exiled in Mozambique during the 1970s liberation war—he nimbly vaulted over the heads of the fo... more

Response: There is no doubt that Zimbabwe is in the midst of an economic and political meltdown. With the highest inflation rate in the world, crippling poverty, non-existent political freedoms, and ongoing land and property disputes, frustration is mounting both internally and externally. And Mugabe’s recent signing of protocols with labor and businesses as an attempt to quell discontent and reduce soari... more

Response: Since 2000, the Robert Mugabe government has made a sustained attempt to depict human rights as Western and a form of moral imperialism no different from past pretexts, such as the white man’s burden, for Western Europe’s colonial machinations. This has been done through the construction and propagation of a narrative called Patriotic history. In Africa, sovereignty is ‘an inversion of colonialism... more