Can’t be my fault, must be yours:
Zimbabwe is a complex subject, and the complexities have gotten a whole lot rougher on the inhabitants as time passes by. Europeans under Cecil Rhodes marched in in the ned of the 1800s and took control of the land from the local chiefs, and passed out all sorts of claims to white settlers, who set up solid and profitable ranches and farms all over the colony. (It was one of the areas of Africa that Europeans could deal with the local bug population, let alone the climate, Kenya and South Africa being others, to a point where they’d be interested in settling down there in numbers. )
Eventually, Britain wanted to join the two (Northern and Southern) Rhodesias with Nyasaland into One Big Colony in the 1950s to create a new colonial nation-state under a white-minority rule, but the African nationalist groups that were on the rise didn’t want that at all. (In most of Africa, the Europeans were the creators of national/colonial boundaries, and those had zero to do with ethnic and cultural groups that were present before The White Guys came.) Eventually, the ‘federation’ broke up, and the three states were all slated for black-majority rule statues in the early 1960s.
Southern Rhodesia, however, wasn’t interested. The number of white settlers there were MUCH higher than the other states, and more were rolling in all the time. In 1927, the white/black numbers were roughly 40k/920k; in 1947 80k/1640k, and then the white numbers really jumped, to around 330k at the highest, but never exceeded 6% of the total population.
The Whites ran the show, and had a good life with about 50% of the land of the colony in their hands, and the colony prospered - most especially the white colonists. Finally, they declared themselves Independent of Britain in 1965, and intended to run their semi-apartheid state by themselves forever.
Yes, there’s a lot of similarities with South Africa. There’s a reason. The blacks in the majority never were allowed to have any political power, and about at the same time, the black nationalists went to the bush as guerrillas to armed battle with the government. In Rhodesia, the battle was aimed at the settlers on the farms and the raids and international shunning finally led to the white-led government handing over power to a new black-majority government in 1980.
The problem since then can be cut down to have / have not problems with the economy, and political power issues. Simply put, the people who have held power in Zimbabwe since the early 1980s were the black guerrilla leaders of the past who originally had (at least on the surface) Marxist leanings and saw the whites as the Oppressor Class. Problem was that the whites also had the capital, the education and the know-how to keep the economy humming, and after Zimbabwe became a black-majority state, the external sanctions came down and the country boomed.
Land ownership in particular was a sore spot, and land reform started after 1980 to return white settler lands to black ownership - with an aim to get small landowners set up on their own to make a good go of it. The problem was that not that many whites wanted to sell out, and that even after the whites were politically forced (including at gunpoint) to start selling out, the land didn’t go to the poor farmers-in-waiting - most went to big shots in the Single Party Revolutionary Fighters government and army.
The result was that the remaining whites fled with whatever they could take with them, and the One Big Party under Robert Mugabe, the surviving guerilla leader, ran the country as a brutal kleptocracy. And the result was that the business and farming that kept the country going went to pieces - cutting open the golden goose doesn’t get you any golden eggs and all that. The value of the currency has gone to nothing. Nobody has money to buy food or keep up sanitation, or get clean water, and a cholera epidemic is running wild in Zimbabwe, and businesses, schools and hospitals have collapsed.
The situation has deteriorated to such a degree that soldiers - Mr. Mugabe’s enduring muscle - rioted last week on the streets of the capital, breaking windows and looting stores, after waiting days in bank lines without being able to withdraw their meager salaries from cash-short tellers. A midlevel officer who participated in the mayhem, but spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of prosecution, said troops were enraged that they could no longer afford to buy food or send their children to school.
The response to this is - more brutality, and statements about how either there is no cholera, or it’s really a British chemical bioweapon aimed at bringing the state to its knees, or it’s some other type of invasion plot by foreigners. And regardless of the beatings and the rhetoric, the people suffer and die.
