The Fear: The Last Days of Robert Mugabe

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This is a moving personal account of Zimbabwe under Mugabe's terror. In mid-2008, after thirty years of increasingly tyrannical rule, Robert Mugabe, the eighty-four-year-old ruler of Zimbabwe, met his politburo. He had just lost an election. But instead of conceding power, he was persuaded to launch a brutal campaign of terror to cower his citizens. Journalist and author Peter Godwin was one of the few observers to slip into the country and bear witness to the terrifying period that Zimbabweans call, simply, the Fear. Following on from his compelling and moving memoirs, "Mukiwa" and "When a Crocodile Eats the Sun", this is a personal journey through the country Peter Godwin grew up in and knows so well - a landscape and a people, grotesquely altered, laid waste by a raging despot. At considerable risk, he travels widely to see the torture bases, the burned villages, the death squads, the opposition leaders in hiding, the last white farmers, the churchmen and the diplomats putting their own lives on the line to stop the carnage. Told with Godwin's brilliant eye for character and natural storytelling gifts, this dark story of Africa's corruption and violence is populated by extraordinary characters whose lives have been shaped by the Fear.

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Peter Godwin is the author of Mukiwa and When a Crocodile Eats the Sun, both published by Picador. He writes for various publications including the New York Times magazine, National Geographic and Vanity Fair. He lives in Manhattan.