Don’t you carry? 
R.W. Johnson
In Harare to watch Mugabe steal the election I quickly got some reminders I didn’t really need that I wasn’t too welcome. The state-owned media repeatedly declared that foreign spies posing as journalists were flooding into Zimbabwe and would be harshly dealt with. The Minister of Information, Jonathan Moyo, went on TV to say that such people had better be prepared to spend a very long time in Zimbabwe and we knew what he meant. Mr Moyo had several times made it clear that he regards me with particular loathing so I wasn’t too surprised to find myself watching a ZTV programme about myself as the evil genius of the whole Zimbabwe crisis. When I told the paper I was writing for they got quite excited: ‘We’ll send a photographer around,’ they said.
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R.W. Johnson is an emeritus fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. His new book, South Africa’s Brave New World, will be published by Penguin in the spring.
Other articles by this contributor:
Cads · Roosevelt’s Secret War: FDR and World War Two Espionage by Joseph Persico.
Rogue’s Paradise · The Russians and the Anglo-Boer War by Apollon Davidson and Irina Filatova
Mr Shepperd to you · Classes and Cultures: England 1918-51 by Ross McKibbin
Burning Blankets · Robert Mugabe’s latest tidy-up
Where do we go from here? · Zimbabwe
Her Boy · Mark Thatcher
Nerds, Rabbits and a General Lack of Testosterone · Major and Lamont
How Mugabe came to power · R.W. Johnson talks to Wilfred Mhanda
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