Kingdom, power, glory

The early years of Zimbabwe’s independence were blighted by conflict and bloodshed, culminating in the Gukurahundi massacres of 1983 and 1984. Historian Stuart Doran explores these events in unprecedented detail, drawing on thousands of previously unpublished documents, including classified records from Mugabe’s Central Intelligence Organisation, apartheid South Africa, the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia and Canada. This groundbreaking book charts the development of an intense rivalry between two nationalist parties—Robert Mugabe’s Zanu and Joshua Nkomo’s Zapu—and reveals how Zanu’s victory in the elections of 1980 was followed by a carefully orchestrated five-year plan, driven by Mugabe, which sought to smash all forms of political opposition and impose a one-party state. ? Doran shows not only what happened during Zimbabwe’s darkest chapter, but why—and why it still matters. In an expansive narrative saturated with new findings, he documents a culture of political intolerance in which domination and subjugation became the only options, and traces the rise of the key proponents of this supremacist ideology.

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