When was this country prosperous and called Zimbabwe at the same time?
If memory serves, it was the first day after they changed from "Rhodesia". From then on it was all downhill :-)
Zimbabwe was relatively prosperous for the first couple of years of the 80s. Then once Mugabe consolidated his power, it began going downhill. I was working there in 1985, and the Rhodies were seeing the handwriting on the wall and the smart ones were already moving their assets out of the country. Many planned on returning to their ancestral home, Britain, or to Australia. Relocating to South Africa turned out to be not so good of an idea.