Robert Mugabe’s Lost Jewel of Africa

This is the story of Southern Rhodesia, from a time of its earliest known inhabitants, the Bushmen, to their displacement by the Bantu; the invasion by the Matabele under King Mzilikaze; the advent of the white missionaries; and the arrival of Cecil Rhodes and his Pioneer Column of early settlers, up to the time of independence in 1980. This is the romantic land of the high veld; of teeming game; of the great river Zambezi and the mighty Victoria Falls, and of enormous mineral wealth. This was the country that Robert Mugabe—its future leader—referred to as ‘the jewel of Africa’.

And yet in this land of plenty, tensions in the mid-twentieth century were mounting between its black inhabitants and the whites, including those of British and Afrikaner stock: tensions which would one day boil over into a civil war in which Southern Rhodesia’s neighbours would also become involved.

The author has first-hand knowledge of the country, having arrived there with his parents in 1956. He describes what it was like to arrive in a British colony, in the last decades of the colonial era; the wonders of Wankie Game Reserve (now Hwange National Park); a schoolboy expedition to the Eastern Districts in search of the elusive ‘stone door ruin’; and a personal friendship which developed between himself and his family’s black servant Timot, at a time of racial segregation.