Twilight in Paradise: The ‘Left Behind’ Rhodesians

$33.70
by Duncan Clarke

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Twilight in Paradise is a powerful, elegiac examination of a people disappearing in plain sight, the “Left Behind” Rhodesians still living as a tiny minority in modern Zimbabwe. It examines their trials and tribulations as encountered over the last four decades-plus, through the acts imposed by revolutionary regimes, first of Robert Mugabe, 1980-2017, and then the Second Republic to date. In this wide ranging, detailed and personally witnessed transition, Duncan Clarke chronicles the fate of the “Left Behind” who remained and survived an ethnocide in Zimbabwe after independence in 1980, as their society, culture, and numbers steadily eroded over the years. Neither a conventional history nor a memoir, Twilight in Paradise is an exploration of society, identity, survival, and cultural exclusion, even one on the road towards potential future extinction. It traces how a once-dominant ethnic minority became marginalised through exodus and exile, hostile state and party policy, radical and adverse political ideology, land and asset confiscation, with economic exclusion—in an incremental process that fits with an episodic and systemic, yet classic ethnocide. Drawing on history, demography, economics, literature and direct experience, Twilight documents the transition from Pax Rhodesiana to the arrival of revolutionary Zimbabwe, and the profound social, political, and material consequences to follow for those who stayed when most others sought or were forced into safe harbour elsewhere in exile on five continents. Across themes of exile and endurance, culture and memory, history and survival, tragedy and security, wealth and income, and ageing, this unique work examines the story of Rhodesians left ‘at home’ through changes in their locus, across suburbia, on farms, in institutions, and social enclaves, revealing how their old traditions persisted even as this tiny minority shrank dramatically in numbers and significance with each passing decade. Deeply insightful and reflective, Twilight in Paradise exposes this much-neglected story within southern Africa’s history, with its impacts wrought in private and social loss, cultural resilience and belonging portrayed, and of what might in future remain when this mini-society meets the inevitable advent of its long dusk—at a time before memory itself begins to fade.

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