9781422277690

By 1978, more than 40,000 residents of Southern Rhodesia had become refugees, flee- ing the civil war in the country. This photo shows a refugee camp in Mozambique. The heavy toll taken by the war led to a cease-fire agreement in 1979 and independence for the country, now called Zimbabwe, in April 1980. In the first national election, Robert Mugabe’s ZANU party won control of the new country’s government.

Those elections, held in February 1980, resulted in a land- slide victory for the ZANU party. Robert Mugabe thus became the first prime minister of the newly independent country of Zimbabwe. Many white Zimbabweans worried that the black majority would seek retribution after decades of oppression. The new prime minister sought to allay these fears. He promised that the rights of all citizens would be respected. “The wrongs of the past must now stand forgiven and forgotten,” Mugabe said on the day of his inauguration. “If yesterday I fought you as an

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Dictatorship: Authoritarian Rule