“Make your subjects fight one another and this will make it easier for you to rule over them”.

Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe election victory was a ‘masterclass in electoral fraud’

With banter and blankets, Zimbabweans make their choice.

Hunting in Harare: Zimbabwe’s elusive voters’ roll

The only problem with this is that ’empires’ tend to be remembered mostly by the loudness of the ‘bang’ they produced while crumbling:

How many of us remember when Rome was founded? The legend has it that its birthday was on the  21st of April 753 BC…Yet most of us remember it was a long list of marauding barbarians that conquered Colina Capitolina before the final touch-down was scored by Odoacer: 476

How many of you remember how Ceausescu rose to absolute power in 1965? Yet his demise made the first pages of most newspapers during the 1989 Christmas…