The Fear

Robert Mugabe and the Martyrdom of Zimbabwe

By Peter Godwin (Trade Paperback, 2011)

In 2008, memoirist and journalist Peter Godwin secretly returned to his native Zimbabwe after its notoriously tyrannical leader, Robert Mugabe, lost an election. The decision was severely risky--foreign journalists had been banned to prevent the world from seeing a corrupt leader's refusal to cede power. Zimbabweans have named this period, simply, The Fear.

Godwin bears witness to the torture bases, the burning villages, the opposition leaders in hiding, the last white farmers, and the churchmen and diplomats putting their own lives on the line to stop the carnage. Told with a brilliant eye for detail, THE FEAR is a stunning personal account of a people laid waste by a despot and, armed with nothing but a desire to be free, their astonishing courage and resilience.

Full Description

Buy This Book

- Format: Trade Paperback
- Price: $15.99 US/$17.50 CAN
- ISBN-13: 9780316051873
- On Sale Date: 10/12/2011
- Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Full Details
Formats Available: Trade Paperback, Electronic Book
Newsletter

Don't miss updates about our authors, including book tour info and new book releases.

Sign Up

Peter Godwin is the award-winning author of When a Crocodile Eats the Sun and Mukiwa. Born and raised in Zimbabwe, he was educated at Cambridge and Oxford and became a foreign correspondent, reporting from more than 60 countries. Since moving to Manhattan, he has written for National Geographic, the New York Times Magazine, and Vanity Fair. He has taught at Princeton and Columbia, and in 2010 received a Guggenheim fellowship.

"In the savage gangster world of Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe, Peter Godwin was able to go where other reporters cannot and tell us what others could not. You don't know whether to be more shocked by the monstrousness of the regime's thugs or the luminous humanity of its opponents." (James Traub, author of The Best Intentions: Kofi Annan and the UN in the Era of American World Power).