Includes bibliographical references (p. [288]-290) and index.

Glossary of acronyms, personalities, organisations -- Timeline -- Preface and acknowledgements -- Prologue: two birthdays -- Conquest -- White supremacy and the settler state -- From UDI to Lancaster House -- ZANU in power - the 1980s -- The 1990s - when the wheels began to fall off -- Disaster years, and the third chimurenga -- From Operation Murambatsvina to an inclusive government -- How did it go wrong? -- Select bibliography.

"No one in 1980 could have guessed that Zimbabwe would become a failed state on such a monumental and tragic scale. In this incisive and revealing book, Richard Bourne shows how a country which had every prospect of success when it achieved a delayed independence in 1980 became a brutal police state with hyperinflation, collapsing life expectancy and abandonment by a third of its citizens less than thirty years later. Beginning with the British conquest of Zimbabwe and covering events up to the present precarious political situation, Catastrophe is the most comprehensive, up-to-date and readable account of the ongoing crisis. Bourne shows that Zimbabwe's tragedy is not just about Mugabe's 'evil' but about history, Africa today and the world's attitudes towards them." --Publisher's website.