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 that had every prospect of success when it achieved independence became a brutal police state less than thirty years later, plagued by hyperinflation and collapsing life expectancy and abandoned by a third of its citizens. Beginning with the British conquest 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 in Zimbabwe. Bourne shows that Zimbabwe's tragedy is not just about Mugabe's "evil" but about history, Africa today and the world's attitudes towards it.