That week, however, the inflation rate in Zimbabwe had officially reached eleven million per cent, the highest in the world; analysts later reckoned it to have been two hundred and thirty million per cent. Eighty per cent of Zimbabweans were out of work. Chronic malnutrition was prevalent, and starvation was spreading in the countryside. Close to two million Zimbabweans depended for survival on food handouts from international aid agencies. Twenty per cent of the population was infected with H.I.V./AIDS. Zimbabwe’s life expectancy is forty-four years for men, forty-three for women.
.. “No one is starving—they are driving nice cars! As a Christian, though, I think it is a challenge by God, and the attention being drawn to Zimbabwe is maybe to highlight that we are the new people of Israel, and that we have our own Moses.” I understood “Moses” to be his uncle.
.. He is, on one hand, the man who liberated our country from the white colonialists, and he is also this man who has murdered and repressed in a dictatorial manner,” Tsvangirai told me. “I say: he is the founding father of Zimbabwe, and the problem we have is to save the positive side of his contribution to this country, and to let history judge his negative contributions.” He added, “For me, I find it quite profound that he is quite an old man who has mismanaged his own succession.”
.. Some thirty thousand people are believed to have died in Rhodesia’s civil war, which black Zimbabweans refer to as the Liberation War, and which whites call the Bush War.
.. The land issue did not go away, however. It dated to the eighteen-nineties, when great swaths of land were granted to white settlers, while Africans were forcibly confined to designated “communal lands”; a century later, most blacks were still landless. In its first decade, Mugabe’s government purchased some six and a half million acres, about a third of the white-owned land, and settled some fifty thousand families on it. But there was little follow-through, and most of the black farmers did not thrive. In 1990, Mugabe secured a constitutional amendment that allowed his government to requisition land at will, and to set the purchase price.
.. In the late nineties, Tony Blair’s Labour government and other Western donors refused to continue subsidizing Zimbabwe’s “land reform.” In retaliation, Mugabe staged a constitutional referendum, in February of 2000, that would give him wider powers, including the authority to confiscate land without consultation. The M.D.C.—which, in those days, had close ties to Zimbabwe’s white farmers—campaigned forcefully against Mugabe’s bill, and it was defeated. A few weeks later, groups of machete-wielding so-called “war veterans” simultaneously invaded white-owned farms across the country. Mugabe made it plain that the land invasions had his blessing.