Should British tourists now consider going back to Zimbabwe?

Source: The Daily Telegraph Author: Graham Boynton Within hours of landing in Zimbabwe I found myself standing round the back of the Bulawayo Museum next to Cecil John Rhodes. Well, actually the John Tweed statue of Rhodes that for nearly 80 years stood on a plinth in the centre of Bulawayo proudly surveying the pretty, civilised city he was instrumental in founding. These days colonialism is a dirty word. Indeed, the minute Robert Mugabe was sworn in in 1980 and Rhodesia became Zimbabwe, that statue was torn off the plinth and dumped out of sight – and so to show any attachment to Rhodes, his vision or indeed his statue is dramatically politically incorrect. But that is just what I was doing. Pioneers such as Rhodes, Selous and Coghlan carved these cities out of raw bushveld. Within four years of its founding in 1894 Bulawayo had a railway, a civil administration, postal and telegraph services, reticulated water and electricity supplies, shops, churches and even a public library, the last being the recipient of many books from Rudyard Kipling as well as advice from the great man on how to protect them against white ants and dust. Now, the colonial yolk has been lifted, the indigenous people have been freed from white rule... and Bulawayo looks a little shabbier than it did when I grew up there in the colonial heyday. I looked across from the Rhodes statue and there was another one, covered in a black shroud: the statue of Joshua Nkomo, porcine father of the Matabele people and Robert Mugabe’s opposite number in the early years of Zimbabwe. This statue was intended to replace the one of Rhodes on the plinth on Eighth Avenue. However, the government commissioned Koreans to do the work, and when the statue was unveiled assembled dignitaries and family members were mortified to see that the representation, far from being large and portly and African as it should have been, was Korean-slim, not very tall and had narrow Asian eyes. So it was whipped off the plinth and dumped round the back of the museum with the other unsavoury statues. I left the grounds of the museum, with the ghosts of its complicated past, mildly amused but also bewildered that so much time and executive energy had been spent on these trivial, symbolic matters when the country and this city really require some inspired economic and political leadership. This was the first time I’d been back to Zimbabwe since the bloody and brutal election campaign of 2008. In the