East Baton Rouge Parish Library

Where we have hope, a memoir of Zimbabwe, Andrew Meldrum

eng

autobiography

no index present

non fiction

Where we have hope

57452643

Andrew Meldrum

a memoir of Zimbabwe

When American-born journalist Andrew Meldrum arrived in Harare in 1980, he planned to stay for only three years-but he quickly fell in love with the country and its people. Newly independent from Britain, Zimbabwe was infused with the optimism of new natio -building. But over the twenty years he lived there, Meldrum watched as President Robert Mugabe gradually consolidated power and the government slowly evolved into violent despotism. The last foreign journalist in Zimbabwe, Meldrum was seized and expelled in May 2003, forced to leave for writing "bad things" about Mugabe's regime. In Where We Have Hope, Meldrum describes what it meant to live through this period of hope and tragedy: how hundreds of people lined up to tell him of horrific massacres; how he once hid from Mugabe's thugs in a cupboard; how he was harassed, arrested, imprisoned, and tried. Ultimately, however, this is a story of the triumph of hope-of doctors, teachers, journalists, and lawyers who refuse to accept the abuses of Mugabe's rule. Where We Have Hope is a moving memoir that will join recent classics as landmark works on Africa in the postcolonial era"Journalist Meldrum was in Rhodesia to cover its 1980 decolonization for the Guardian and stayed on to watch the country's agonizing transformation into a horrific kleptocracy. The book opens with Meldrum's 2003 expulsion from the country that had become Zimbabwe; he'd butted heads with Mugabe's regime for 20-plus years, during which time he wrote a spate of articles exposing various facets of the president's murderous, corrupt regime. In this defiant, courageous memoir, Meldrum, an American, also details black aggression against the bigoted white minority, who treat the nation's "ordinary Zimbabweans" disgracefully. He examines Mugabe's ghastly massacres and all-too-familiar tactics of targeting gays, intellectuals, political foes and the press. He witnesses food riots, fuel shortages, poverty, inflation (at 350% and rising) as well as a family friend's son's death from AIDS a̮nd simply yet powerfully shows how these issues affected everyday people's lives. Despite all he has seen, Meldrum remains hopeful, and this frank account is the better for it." --From Publishers Weekly