Nigel and Aqui's stories are told in alternating chapters, their own words, rendered in italics, merging with the flow of Lamb's hurried prose. But there is a problem: too often one struggles to differentiate Aqui's voice (her English would surely be Shona-inflected) from Hough's. In their flatly modulated diction they both sound like Christina Lamb.
Although Lamb is a courageous and excellent reporter, she can be a careless writer. She thanks her editor "who somehow turned round her manuscript in record time" in her acknowledgements. But her editor failed to prevent her worst excesses: repetition, overstatement and a serious absence of attribution. One section, on the Selous Scouts, reads as if hastily paraphrased from a Web site dedicated to the Scouts. If this site was indeed one of her sources, as it must have been, why isn't it cited? Why wasn't she advised to include a bibliography or source notes, in what is, after all, not only reportage but a semi-scholarly history of Zimbabwe?
The final section of the book, the best, sees Lamb back in
Zimbabwe, illegally. The farms have been destroyed. The shanty settlements of the blacks in the cities who dared to vote against Mugabe in the last election have been demolished as part of Operation Clean Up the Filth. Most of the whites who can have emigrated, and the prevailing mood is one of menace and fear -- a geriatric tyrant holding on to power at any cost. The Houghs remain in the country, though they have lost their farm, and Aqui is still working for them in a subordinate role. Nigel and Aqui now live without dreams, illusions or hope. Yet they have mutual respect -- and a greater understanding of what it means to be black, and indeed white, in southern Africa. But, oh, the pain, and the regret.
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