Dictator Style – Gaddafi & Others
26 August 2011 | Culture
◄ When I rewrote the intro to Bad Lands for a recent reprint I noted that nothing much had changed, Fidel in Cuba, Kim Jong-il in North Korea, a mess in Iraq, no driving licences for women in Saudi Arabia, the generals in Burma, everywhere you looked it was no change....
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In Search of Mengistu
15 April 2011 | Places
▲ Security in Gunhill is clearly a concern as this typical array of signs on a Gunhill villa shows. Before I left Zimbabwe I had a drive around the flash Harare suburb looking for one of the city’s most famous residents – Haile Mariam Mengistu.
◄ In his book Zanz...
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Zimbabwe Dollars, US Dollars
13 April 2011 | Living
Robert Mugabe’s economic incompetence has done enormous damage to Zimbabwe, leading to huge unemployment, a massive exodus of Zimbabweans (millions of black Zimbabweans, tens of thousands of white ones), a dramatic decline in life expectancy and the conversion of ‘the...
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Returning to Zimbabwe
7 April 2011 | Places
You can trash a reputation in a flash, it takes a long time to rebuild it. Robert Mugabe pretty much managed to destroy Zimbabwe’s economy and in the process chased away most of the country’s tourists. He did such a comprehensive job of wrecking things nobody has noti...
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The Last Resort
1 April 2011 | Media
I’m just back from a very interesting couple of weeks in Zimbabwe – visitors are starting to return, travel is easy and I had absolutely no problems there. Things may have got better in the last couple of years but as Douglas Rogers' alternately horrifying and hilario...
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