Against The Grain

Geoffrey Nyarota was the editor of the Daily News, Zimbabwe’s only independent newspaper, for four years. In this time, he chronicled the decline of the country under Robert Mugabe’s ZANU-PF-controlled regime. As a young man, Nyarota fervently believed that his children would know the freedom of democracy that he himself had been denied in colonial Rhodesia before Mugabe became independent Zimbabwe’s first head of state in 1980. But when he discovered that the returned war heroes were more interested in enriching themselves than in uplifting the poverty-stricken millions, he unflinchingly began to expose the wholesale corruption and greed, nepotism and fraud perpetrated by the Mugabe government. It took state-planted bombs, torture and intimidation, costly legal fees and, finally, a contract on Nyarota’s life before he fled his homeland at the beginning of 2003 to go into exile.