Given its troubled and contested past, its recent wild inflation, and President Robert Mugabe’s destruction of the country that he has led badly and autocratically since 1980, Zimbabwe needs a comprehensive history researched and written by someone closely attuned both to the precolonial rise and fall of the Rozwi or Zimbabwean Empire and to Mugabe’s postcolonial failures and triumphs. Making sense of the precolonial era demands an interdisciplinary approach; much of the evidence about critical periods in the country’s early history is unwritten and must be recovered by oral or archaeological historians. Equally, making sense of the Mugabean maelstrom demands the mastery of several cognate disciplines alongside the best empathic techniques of modern historians.
Mlambo has hardly begun to write such a history of Zimbabwe. His is a purely narrative treatment. Moreover, it mostly skims the surface, trying to use as few dots as possible to create a connected story....