Bob LeChevalier wrote:
> Now what were the numbers before independence? Probably 95% below the
> poverty line.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/africa/article2935507.ece
"Smith’s image improved inversely as Mugabe’s plummeted. Paul Themba
Nyathi,
a leader of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, who had fought
Smith’s regime tooth and nail, told me that in retrospect Smith’s
Rhodesia
had been “a paradise”.
In material terms that was certainly true: everything then was better for
Africans than it is now – education, healthcare, standard of living,
life
expectancy and employment. But as people saw Mugabe cloistered behind high
walls and Kalashnik-ov-toting guards, venturing out only in armoured cars
and vast militarised motorcades, they also remembered how Smith had lived
a
simple, unguarded life."
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