Africa has known many tragic histories. But Zimbabwe’s is especially rich and quixotic. First it was Southern Rhodesia, an eponymous land created by a visionary buccaneer to help to spread British (read English) values and capitalistic exploitive methods beyond territories controlled by Afrikaners and Portugal. Consequently, Africans lost their land, their patrimony, and their freedom to continue time-honored patterns of life and work.
Colonial rule followed, but it was a colonialism controlled almost exclusively by segregationist-minded local settlers, many of whom were British via the Cape Colony, others from the mother country, and a minority from the Afrikaner republics of what is now South Africa. Indigenous Africans were pushed off their ancestral lands, compelled by taxation policies to labor for whites on plantations and in mines, and educated and cared for only at the margin.
About the same time (1948) as the colonial Gold Coast was being transformed into modern...