An account of Zimbabwe's collapse

The Fear: The Last Days of MugabeBy Peter Godwin,Picador, 353 pages, £12.99

Peter Godwin is a man on a mission: to trample on, in the pages of his book, the disgrace that is Robert Mugabe's regime in Zimbabwe. But the hugely talented journalist and author of such memorable memoirs as When the Crocodile Eats the Sun and Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africa, disappoints with the hatchet job that is The Fear: The Last Days of Mugabe.

The Fear is a numbing chronicle of imprisonment, torture, rape, death, disease and the near-total collapse of a once-prosperous nation. Godwin sure knows what he is talking about, having grown up in the old Rhodesia and been branded an "enemy of the state" in the new Zimbabwe. As such, it took tremendous courage on his part to return secretly to the country and record its dismantlement.

The book is set between mid-2008 and early 2009, the period the author claims Zimbabweans call "The Fear". Mugabe, by all accounts, has just lost an election but is in no mood to quit. He is persuaded by his henchmen — his former comrades in war — to end white minority rule, to stay on and launch a brutal crackdown against the opposition and its supporters.

For three months, Godwin traverses the land, interviewing tortured and brutalised survivors, rape victims and white farmers whose farms have been seized by Mugabe's "war veterans".

In his travels, the author, who now lives in New York, is accompanied by his sister Georgina, a broadcaster based in London. One of the more interesting bits in the book is when the siblings visit their childhood home and the grave of their sister, who was killed during the civil war. They call their mother, who lives in London, to ask her where she would like to be buried when she dies.

"At home," she says. "In Africa. Next to your father."

But Godwin does not even make an attempt to appear objective. He speaks like a member of Morgan Tsvangirai's opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) and glosses over Tsvangirai's own dodgy record — for instance, the serious allegations made against Tsvangirai in 2002 in an Australian television documentary that he was hatching a plot to assassinate Mugabe.

The documentary included a video in which Tsvangirai appears to be discussing the situation in Zimbabwe after "the head of state has been eliminated".

In another instance, Godwin seems to be calling for an armed insurrection in Zimbabwe, oblivious to the effects it may have: "Perhaps now that democratic avenues have been exhausted, the moment has come … for Zimbabwe's frustrated democrats to fight back, to follow Thomas Jefferson's exhortation that the tree of liberty must be watered from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. Tsvangirai continues to insist ‘I won't have the blood of our young men on my hands'. But it seems to me that in the last ten years, the body count has been higher without a full-fledged uprising."

Godwin's book is peopled by brave souls whose courage in the face of adversity is heartening. The most interesting character in the book is the formidable Roy Bennett, a white former policeman who is now a politician and a member of the MDC.

Godwin describes through Bennett's eyes the horror that is Mugabe's prison system. Bennett, who speaks fluent Shona and is affectionately known as "Pachedu" ("one of us") by his mostly black supporters, served eight months in prison, after he assaulted Mugabe's sidekick and justice minister Patrick Chinamasa in 2004 in the parliament.

Chinamasa had said: "Mr Bennett has not forgiven the government for acquiring his farm but he forgets that his forefathers were thieves and murderers."