Against The Grain

Geoff Nyarota was the editor of the Daily News, Zimbabwe's only independent newspaper, for four years. In this time, he chronicled the decline of the country under Robert Mugabe's Zanu-PF-controlled regime, and was subjected to extreme harassment by the state. As a young man, Nyarota fervently believed that his children would know the freedom of democracy that he himself had been denied under colonial rule. But after the war of liberation and Mugabe's accession to power in 1980, Nyarota discovered that the returned war heroes were more interested in enriching themselves than in uplifting the poverty-stricken millions, and he unflinchingly began to expose the wholesale corruption perpetrated by the Mugabe government. It took several arrests, torture and intimidation, costly legal fees and, finally, a contract on Nyarota's life before he fled his homeland at the end of 2004 to go into permanent exile.