Judith Todd, the daughter of Sir Garfield Todd, erstwhile prime minister of colonial Southern Rhodesia, spent eight years in exile in Britain as an opponent of white minority rule in Ian Smith's Rhodesia. She returned to Zimbabwe shortly before independence in 1980, and soon realised that, far from being the solution to Zimbabwe's ills, Robert Mugabe and his ruling Zanu (PF) party were increasingly becoming the problem. As the country slid into economic and social decline, Todd had a front-row view from her position as director of a local development agency. Over the first 25 years of Mugabe's rule, she kept journals, notes and copies of letters and documents from which she has compiled an intensely personal account of life in Zimbabwe.