Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

The troubling truth about Zimbabwe

I’m not the first columnist and will not be the last to shrink from finding out too much. For this there are subtler reasons than laziness: a half-acknowledged fear that one’s argument will lose shape; that complexity may overwhelm understanding; that counterfactuals and shades of grey spoil a simple picture, and resolution sink beneath a mass of on-the-other-hands.

If that’s always true, then I should never have revisited Zimbabwe. I last crossed the border in 1968, heading north for Cambridge at the age of 18. Salisbury (now Harare) had been my home from the age of eight. My family left too, believing Ian Smith’s rebel regime had taken a fateful turning by trying to stop the gradual end to racial discrimination that his moderate (white-elected) predecessors had begun. Civil war was to come. Robert Mugabe won power by the sword and then the ballot box and, after a deceptively prosperous and peaceful interlude, has ruled by an uneasy combination of both.

And I have watched from the outside, yielding easily to the assumption that the whole place is a bloody mess, effective government collapsed, the economy wrecked, the people destitute and terrified, and that there’s no way the world outside can help short of invasion, which would not be a good idea. All we could do (I’ve thought) was condemn, and the louder we shouted at them the better.

After 44 years I returned last week. That picture is a distortion. The government has wrecked lives and much worse, there is a sense of vacuum and fear for the future, and everyone seems to be treading water. But neither the country nor its people are on their knees and the institutions of public administration are still, more or less, in place. The crisis brought on by rampant inflation is over. I saw no evidence of starvation.

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