Keywords: Wikileaks, Africa

The stash of diplomatic cables that Wikileaks just leaked contains all kinds of relevant things: a cursory news search brings up a bunch of crazy missives from the great Libyan, and the Mugabe files which were of course in the news.

As an idea, though a time-consuming one: how about recreating some choice cables as an art project? As facsimiles of official documentation, and perhaps with slightly altered text. We could even make this a competition: we choose some cables, and put them out for anyone to edit, and we choose the best edits.

The section they would go in would be Foreign Correspondence?

Dinner with Mugabe

Heidi Holland

This penetrating, timely portrait of Robert Mugabe is the psychobiography of a man whose once-brilliant career has ruined Zimbabwe and cast shame on the African continent. Heidi Holland’s tireless investigation begins with her having dinner with Mugabe, the freedom fighter, and ends in a searching interview with Zimbabwe’s president more than 30 years later. The author charts Mugabe’s gradual self-destruction, and uncovers the complicity of some of the most respectable international players in the Zimbabwe tragedy. Probing the mystery of Africa’s loyalty to one of its worst dictators, Holland explores the contradictions that cloud the life of a man who had embodied the continent’s promise.

Hardcover, 250 pages, April 2008
Published by Penguin Books South Africa
ISBN-13: 978-0-14-302557-3