Sources — Rhodesia · Lost Lands

General works

Meredith, Martin. The Past Is Another Country: Rhodesia, UDI to Zimbabwe. London: André Deutsch, 1979; rev. 1980. Written as it ended, by a correspondent who was there throughout. Still the best narrative of 1965–1980.
Blake, Robert. A History of Rhodesia. London: Eyre Methuen, 1977. Conservative, elegant and thorough to 1976; the standard single-volume account of the settler state.
Alexander, Jocelyn, JoAnn McGregor and Terence Ranger. Violence and Memory: One Hundred Years in the “Dark Forests” of Matabeleland. Oxford: James Currey, 2000. A century of one region, from conquest through the war to Gukurahundi. The finest book on this list.
Ranger, Terence. Revolt in Southern Rhodesia, 1896–7. London: Heinemann, 1967. The book that made the risings intelligible as politics rather than savagery, and founded the modern historiography.
Ranger, Terence. Voices from the Rocks: Nature, Culture and History in the Matopos Hills. Oxford: James Currey, 1999. Read before visiting the Matobo. It changes what you see there.
Mlambo, Alois S. A History of Zimbabwe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. The best modern single-volume history by a Zimbabwean historian, and the natural counterweight to Blake.

Chapters I–III

Rotberg, Robert I. The Founder: Cecil Rhodes and the Pursuit of Power. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. The standard life, and unsparing without being polemical.
Keppel-Jones, Arthur. Rhodes and Rhodesia: The White Conquest of Zimbabwe, 1884–1902. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1983. The definitive account of how the territory was actually taken.
Palmer, Robin. Land and Racial Domination in Rhodesia. London: Heinemann, 1977. The essential study of the Land Apportionment Act and what it did. Everything about the land question starts here.
Phimister, Ian. An Economic and Social History of Zimbabwe, 1890–1948. London: Longman, 1988.
van Onselen, Charles. Chibaro: African Mine Labour in Southern Rhodesia, 1900–1933. London: Pluto Press, 1976. On the compound system and the making of a migrant labour force. A classic.
Hyam, Ronald. “The Geopolitical Origins of the Central African Federation.” Historical Journal 30, no. 1 (1987): 145–72.

Chapters IV–VII

Windrich, Elaine. Britain and the Politics of Rhodesian Independence. London: Croom Helm, 1978.
Good, Robert C. UDI: The International Politics of the Rhodesian Rebellion. London: Faber, 1973. By a former American ambassador to Zambia; the best account of the diplomacy.
Bingham, Thomas, and S. M. Gray. Report on the Supply of Petroleum and Petroleum Products to Rhodesia. London: HMSO, 1978. The official British inquiry into sanctions-busting by oil companies. A primary document and an uncomfortable one.
Cilliers, J. K. Counter-Insurgency in Rhodesia. London: Croom Helm, 1985. The most serious military study, by a South African analyst with access to participants.
Moorcraft, Paul, and Peter McLaughlin. The Rhodesian War: A Military History. Barnsley: Pen & Sword, 2008. Sympathetic to the security forces and factually careful; the standard operational account.
Kriger, Norma J. Zimbabwe's Guerrilla War: Peasant Voices. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Interviews in the rural areas about coercion as well as support. The necessary corrective to heroic accounts from either side.
Martin, David, and Phyllis Johnson. The Struggle for Zimbabwe: The Chimurenga War. London: Faber, 1981. Close to ZANU and invaluable for that; use alongside Kriger rather than instead of her.
Bhebe, Ngwabi, and Terence Ranger, eds. Soldiers in Zimbabwe's Liberation War. Oxford: James Currey, 1995.

Chapter VIII

Charlton, Michael. The Last Colony in Africa: Diplomacy and the Independence of Rhodesia. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990. Built from interviews with the participants at Lancaster House.
Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace in Zimbabwe and Legal Resources Foundation. Breaking the Silence, Building True Peace: A Report on the Disturbances in Matabeleland and the Midlands, 1980–1988. Harare, 1997. The foundational documentation of Gukurahundi, compiled in Zimbabwe at real risk. Essential and harrowing.
Meredith, Martin. Mugabe: Power, Plunder and the Struggle for Zimbabwe. New York: PublicAffairs, 2002; rev. 2007.
Scarnecchia, Timothy. The Urban Roots of Democracy and Political Violence in Zimbabwe. Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2008.
Scoones, Ian, et al. Zimbabwe's Land Reform: Myths and Realities. Oxford: James Currey, 2010. Fieldwork on what actually happened on the resettled land after 2000. Contested, empirical, and much better than the slogans on either side.
Tendi, Blessing-Miles. The Army and Politics in Zimbabwe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.

Memoir

Smith, Ian Douglas. The Great Betrayal. London: Blake, 1997; repr. as Bitter Harvest, 2001. The case for the defence, unrepentant. Read it; it is the clearest available statement of what these men believed.
Nkomo, Joshua. The Story of My Life. London: Methuen, 1984. The ZAPU leader, written in exile after fleeing Zimbabwe during Gukurahundi.
Todd, Judith Garfield. Through the Darkness: A Life in Zimbabwe. Cape Town: Zebra Press, 2007. By the daughter of the liberal prime minister deposed in 1958; a white Zimbabwean who supported the liberation and then documented what followed.
Flower, Ken. Serving Secretly: An Intelligence Chief on Record. London: John Murray, 1987. Head of the Central Intelligence Organisation under Smith and then under Mugabe. The single most revealing Rhodesian memoir, including on the creation of RENAMO.
Godwin, Peter. Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africa. London: Picador, 1996. The best-written account of growing up inside it.
Fuller, Alexandra. Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight. New York: Random House, 2001.

Before 1890

Garlake, Peter. Great Zimbabwe. London: Thames & Hudson, 1973. By the government archaeologist who published the truth about the site and had to leave the country for it.
Garlake, Peter. The Painted Caves: An Introduction to the Prehistoric Art of Zimbabwe. Harare: Modus, 1987.
Beach, David N. The Shona and Zimbabwe, 900–1850. London: Heinemann, 1980. The standard account of the pre-colonial states.
Pikirayi, Innocent. The Zimbabwe Culture: Origins and Decline of Southern Zambezian States. Walnut Creek: AltaMira, 2001.
Cobbing, Julian. “The Mfecane as Alibi.” Journal of African History 29, no. 3 (1988): 487–519. On how a story about African violence was used to justify European settlement across the region.