Word: nationalism
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...past decade, Zimbabwe has become a repository of stories of the nightmarish and grotesque. The southern African nation is (or should be) a place of plenty, a former food exporter that was ruined, beaten and starved by the ineptitude, corruption and paranoia of its aging dictator, a liberation hero who led Zimbabwe to independence but - in a familiar African refrain - came to personify all the tragedy and broken promise of a continent. I'd had my own brief disaster there in April 2007, when, the day after I arrived, the subject of my very first interview asked me to wait...
...Worse for Tsvangirai's supporters was the sight of their leader smiling and shaking hands with a man whose forces had repeatedly tried to kill him - and them. For years, Tsvangirai had told them that a new era awaited one thing: Mugabe's departure. If Zimbabwe really was a nation in transition, as Tsvangirai insisted, how come the old tyrant was still in charge...
...Tsvangirai was giving a speech the following day in Gweru, three hours southwest of Harare, and I drove down. A priest began the event with a prayer: "Visit this place, O Lord, and drive far from it all the snares of the enemy and rescue our nation from all the humongous problems we are facing." Tsvangirai was more upbeat. He acknowledged that Zimbabwe's transition was "not an easy one" and said the country was in a "period of uncertainty and anxiety, exacerbated by hard-liners who respect no rule of law and care nothing for the national good, putting...
Even now, most Zimbabweans seem to find it hard to admit that their emperor - the man who Tsvangirai acknowledges was a "national hero" once - might be naked. But for how long? As I drive back to the airport, Mugabe's voice comes on the radio. He is speaking at the funeral of yet another hero of the fight for independence. "I have delivered to my nation, my people, a Zimbabwe that is free," he says. "We call ourselves Zimbabweans now, and we never called ourselves Zimbabweans before. We never had a flag before, did we? No. We never...
...devout and stoic Roman Catholic widow became the incarnation of a pious nation that had itself suffered silently through more than a decade of autocratic rule. Millions lined the funeral route and repeated her nickname as if saying the rosary: "Cory, Cory, Cory." If she had agreed to let the massive demonstrations of outrage pass in front of Malacañang Palace, said Vicente Paterno, a Marcos official who would later be her ally, "that could have toppled Marcos." But it would be nearly three years before she would learn to take advantage of her power. Instead, she concentrated...