Review by Choice Review
This book is about political misrule and economic impoverishment in Zimbabwe under the decades-long brutally authoritarian leadership of Robert Mugabe, backed up by his Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front Party, formerly an African liberation movement in the territory. Bourne (senior research fellow, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, London Univ.) also examines the era of European conquest that gave rise to minority-white supremacy in a relatively prosperous settler state (initially named Southern Rhodesia, then Rhodesia), highlighting both the harsh inequities of that racialist system and the implications for what ensued under black-majority rule in Zimbabwe. Nor is British (and Portuguese) imperialism in Southern Africa spared the author's rod: its racialism is underlined along with a foolish assumption that European imperialism in the region would endure indefinitely. Those factors together are seen as having inspired African liberation movements ruling over newly-sovereign black states, their authoritarian political leaders animated far less by principles of good governance and economic progress than by an interest in retaining political power and kleptocratic perks. The book is well written and reads well. It will appeal mostly to those keyed to African affairs. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate, research, and professional collections. A. Magid emeritus, SUNY at Albany
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
