It's a Little Inconvenient

When asked by the BBC's David Dimbleby in June 2000 about his government's failure to uphold the law, Robert Mugabe, President of Zimbabwe said that, compared with the injustices his people had endured during the colonial era, those farmers whose farms had been violently and illegally occupied, were suffering "a little inconvenience". Mugabe himself, his wealthy relatives (including his wife Grace) and the ZANU-PF hierarchy, not landless blacks, are the new owners of Zimbabwe's once productive commercial farms.

Hyperinflation, economic collapse and starvation are the consequences of his land-grab. In Bulawayo, Zimbabwe's second city, the members of a book club continue to meet once a month as they've been doing for more than 20 years.

Some of them are politically active. Others have no wish to get involved. As the situation continues to deteriorate, those who are entitled to citizenship elsewhere have to decide whether to stay or whether to leave. Rhodesia (and then Zimbabwe) had been the author's home for 57 years.

When the hostile economic conditions began to strangle their business, she and her husband were forced to sell both their company and their home. They left Zimbabwe in March 2007 and now live in Ireland.