Quotes of the Day

Perhaps we should have realized something was amiss in 1980. In April of that year, Zimbabwe's newly elected Prime Minister, Robert Mugabe, was appalled at the choice of the dreadlocked Third World icon Bob Marley as the main musical act for the country's independence bash. Marley tunes like Zimbabwe had helped rally the world ("Africans a liberate Zimbabwe/ Every man got a right/ To decide his own destiny") but Mugabe would have preferred the squeaky-clean Brit Cliff Richard. For once he was overruled, and the reggae star spread a message of hope that the racial strife of Rhodesia would give way to color-blind harmony. The message was heard even in faraway America, where a young reporter named Andrew Meldrum quit his job, sold his car and bought a plane ticket to be part of this great experiment.

It didn't take Meldrum long to fall in love with Zimbabwe. Initially he idolized Mugabe as the hero of the liberation struggle, but that didn't last long. "I went into my first interview with Mugabe admiring him; I left with the suspicion that he was insincere," Meldrum told TIME. In Where We Have Hope (John Murray; 272 pages) he describes how he ultimately found Mugabe to be a strangely un-African leader, lacking in warmth and painfully formal in speech and demeanor. He concluded that Mugabe had not only taken over the dowdy office décor of Ian Smith, the Prime Minister of white-ruled Rhodesia; he also displayed the same aversion to political opposition and an independent media and judiciary. "Far from being polar opposites, I see Ian Smith and Robert Mugabe as two sides of the same coin," says Meldrum. "History is repeating itself in Zimbabwe." And he became a minor victim of that history; the last remaining foreign journalist, Meldrum was kicked out of Zimbabwe last year.

Even as Mugabe grew into the habits of a dictator, he retained the support of fellow African leaders, who see him as a champion of "the black cause." Meldrum makes it clear that it is blacks who have to bear the brunt of his tyranny. In the last four years his thugs have killed a dozen whites but more than 300 blacks. Meldrum describes one such victim in the book: "His backless hospital gown revealed two gaping craters where his buttocks should have been."

Yet to this day, South African President Thabo Mbeki plays defense lawyer to Mugabe, declaring that "President Mugabe can assist us to confront the problems we have in South Africa." Meldrum quotes the lone voice of Desmond Tutu, former Archbishop of Cape Town, on the ominous consequences of Mbeki's attitude. "If we are seemingly indifferent to human-rights violations happening in a neighboring country, what is to stop us one day being indifferent to that in our own?"

Where We Have Hope is not a political chronology but, as the subtitle suggests, A Memoir of Zimbabwe. It is the story of a country and of brave Zimbabweans like Beatrice Mtetwa, who had just been beaten up by the police when she made headline news as human-rights lawyer of the year. "Can you imagine, my one time on the front page and they show a photo of me looking my worst!" she quipped.

Meldrum's book speaks with the special devotion a convert feels for his new religion. "I am steeped in this country, it is in my pores," he writes. Yet, after 23 years in the country, he now regards himself as an exile, like an estimated 3 million others out of a population of 13 million; he currently lives in South Africa. Meldrum hopes to return to a truly democratic Zimbabwe one day. "I am absolutely sure that ... Zimbabwe will once again be a beacon for all of Africa," he writes. It is hard to see either Meldrum or democracy returning to Zimbabwe while the country is still ruled by a President so imperious and fearful of his own people that he travels with at least a dozen outriders, their sirens blazing. With a certain reggae star and his band in mind, people call his motorcade "Bob and the Wailers."

• GERD BEHRENS
• A memoir of Zimbabwe chronicles the sad descent of this troubled land, but radiates love — and even hope