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quarter of his country’s national revenue. After his overthrow two years later, he was convicted, among other things, of murdering members of his army, poisoning his grandchild, and taking part in the killing of at least fifty children who had refused to wear school uniforms to school. At Bokassa’s trial in 1987, the prosecutor said there was not enough evidence to convict the former emperor of cannibalism. One of Bokassa’s former cooks, however, testified that his boss kept corpses in a walk-in refrigerator and that Bokassa had once asked him to serve one for supper.
    Rumors of cannibalism and chaos in independent Africa were, of course, rich fodder for Rhodesia’s propaganda machine. White Rhodesians, the government argued, had only to look north to see what was in store for them if they allowed the blacks to run the country. Pointing to examples of brutal and inept dictators north of the Zambezi, Ian Smith felt justified in calling black Rhodesians the “happiest blacks in Africa.”
    The black guerrillas were fighting for their freedom—the freedom to vote, to own land, to receive a good and equitable education, and to walk the streets of their own country without fear. The liberation forces were regaled by their leaders with a picture of Rhodesia as it had been in precolonial times: an era of prosperity and pride, of great architecture and stunning art. It had been a time of self-sufficiency, freedom, and fairness. It had been, above all, a time when the great Mashona farmers had been allowed to cultivate their own land and when the brave Matabele warriors and cattlemen had been allowed to defend their own livestock against lions and theft.
    Both sides claimed to be morally right.
    Acts of stunning bravery and of spectacular cowardice were committed on both sides. Neither side was exempt from atrocities. Both sides were brutalized by the experience. The guerrillas terrorized villagers, raped civilian women, killed alleged “sellouts,” murdered innocent families, and desecrated churches; the Rhodesian Security Forces tortured and murdered their prisoners, burned villages, raped civilian women “sympathizers.” And at the end of it all, soldiers of all colors and political persuasions were left washed up and anchorless in some profound way—like the guilty survivors of a natural disaster. War is not the fault of soldiers, but it becomes their life’s burden.
    Anyone who has existed on the soil on which a war is fought knows the look of the returned soldier—the haunted look of someone who has seen more than his fair share of horror. People who have inflicted pain, who have destroyed, who have been in pain and been destroyed. People whose words for killing reflect the casualness with which they have learned to view the act: “scribbled,” “culled,” “plugged,” “slotted,” “taken out,” “drilled,” “wasted,” “stonked,” “hammered,” “wiped out,” “snuffed.”
    By the late seventies, the Rhodesian government was finding it more and more difficult to finance its efforts and to persuade the increasingly weary population that this gruesome war was a viable alternative to black majority rule. In December 1979, the United States and Britain brokered a cease-fire, which led to all-party elections in 1980.
    It is a measure of how brainwashed white Rhodesians were that they were stunned to hear, on March 4, 1980, that Robert Mugabe, a leader of one of the guerrilla factions and a Marxist terrorist—a man whom many of them had never even heard of—had won an absolute majority in the parliamentary elections. As blacks celebrated in the streets of newly independent Zimbabwe, the white residents who had just fought, and lost, a long and bitter war stood by in appalled silence.
    In their book, Rhodesians Never Die, Peter Godwin and Ian Hancock wrote that the Rhodesian authorities estimated that there were 20,350 war-related deaths in Rhodesia between December 1972 and December 1979. Fewer