Recent Books.

Foreign Affairs, September, 2002

Recent Books on International Relations

AFRICA

GAIL M. GERHART

Our Votes, Our Guns: Robert Mugabe and the Tragedy of Zimbabwe. by MARTIN MEREDITH. New York: PublicAffairs, 2002, 243 pp. $26.00.

This unvarnished account of Mugabe's political career explains why there was no way to unseat him by electoral means in March 2002, when Zimbabwe held its presidential election. Meredith, a veteran Africa observer, retraces the dictator's record from his entry into liberation politics through his creation of a one-party state in the late 1980s and his campaign of violent land seizures in the 1990s. Sheltered behind a haze of socialist rhetoric and oblivious to the price of lost opportunities for national development, Mugabe's constant aim, says...