In the News

The worsening crisis in Zimbabwe is the shame of southern Africa and of concern to the world. In a 2002 essay from Granta 80, ‘Two Farms: One White, One Black’, Lindsey Hilsum reported on the state of Zimbabwe before and after the 2000 election. Hilsum’s essay is prescient and probing. She writes, ‘As parliamentary elections approached in 2000, the TV news grew hateful. Mugabe’s equation was simple: to vote for ZANU-PF was to be patriotic and loyal to your racial group, while to vote for the MDC was to be a stooge of the white man – worse, of the white farmer, the most hated kind of white man. White farmers, like black opposition activists, were now being killed by Mugabe’s thugs. “You are now our enemies because you really have behaved as enemies of Zimbabwe, and we are full of anger,” he told white farmers in April of that year.’ These days any Zimbabwean who dare dream of democracy is deemed an enemy of the state. And many have been killed. What will it take to overthrow Robert Mugabe’s regime?

Read Hilsum’s essay here.