Zimbabwe journal: 2005 part 8

This is a journal from my trip to Zimbabwe in 2005. I stayed with my friend Louis in Zimbabwe.

--------------------------

Sunday.

Today we drove out of Harare on the main road to Malawi, the road which the big trailers hauling cars and supplies go up. It is a two-lane highway with not much traffic. Thirty yards to the left and right of the road, past a v-shaped earthen depression which catches the excess rain and keeps it off the road, is a path where the constant stream of Africans walks, well off the road so they are not in danger from the traffic. The road is patched, with fewer potholes than usual.

Last night I heard the graduate of a fine boy’s school in a town two hours away from here tell of visiting the school recently, how it had fallen to pieces, and how depressing it was.

Today we went to the botanical garden outside of Harare where they have a display of aloes. The aloes are there, many varieties of them, unlabeled except fora few, with empty rectangular beds, or beds containing one or two straggly plants between the displays of plants which I could not identify. There was a thatched roof over a table where people could sit and look at the view. There was also a picnic area. And one other car there. At the entrance there was a nice display of flowering plants, and uniformed wardens to collect our money ($50,000 (about $4.50 US)) to get in, and to ask us to sign the guest book. “Ask” is perhaps not the correct word, the guest book was presented, and it was required that we fill it in, name, address, purpose of visit, number of visitors.

It is depressing to see these beautifully conceived places falling to wrack and ruin, unvisited, unappreciated, untended. There were a few workers with scythes cutting the high grass and one tractor mowing a large area. It’s strange to me that people don’t see the beauty and the value of a place like this. I mean, even if they aren’t interested in the scientific aspect of preserving the plants, etc., at least they should see the value of attracting tourists, even Zimbabwean tourists, to these places. It’s as if all over Africa European projects were started which add value and beauty to the place, and they just never took root. As soon as the Europeans left, they tumbled into ruin.

The figure 70% is bandied about as the percentage of unemployed in Zimbabwe, but I think this number is created just for the entertainment of western economists. The people streaming along the sides of the road are not “unemployed”. They are not sitting around waiting for the government to feed them. They have a little stash of clothes or food or staples or some kind, or they have some tools to fix bikes with, or a saw to cut wood with, and they keep sadza in their bellies, clothes on their backs and a roof over their head that way. Although I know none of the people I see at the side of the road selling or providing a service, I do know some Africans, and see that they are always scrambling to make a buck here or there. That goes for the white people too – setting up a side business, buying and selling things, figuring out a way around repressive rules, etc. Some go over the border into South Africa to buy something and resell in Zim. I am told that the women sometimes carry on a sex service on the side. Even in the central market, Mbari, there are hand painted signs next to a single room saying “Barber,” for example, where they earn enough for the sadza every day. While these people would undoubtedly love to have more money, they are not “unemployed.” They are unregistered, uncounted, unproductive in our sense of the word, but they are busy every day all day.

We drove to an area which was stunning for its lavish wealth – properties of many acres, behind walls and gate and fences, with horses standing in the fields, lovely gardens, multiple cars visible in the driveways through the lattice gates. We went to see the studio of a silversmith Louis knew but had not seen in years. Coming to his home/studio there were three uniformed guards standing by a guardhouse next to the gate. They looked intently at us as we pulled up, and one of them came to the driver’s side window. Another guard buzzed us in at the high sign from the first one, and we found in about 20 yards another gate with more uniformed guards. As the first gate clanged shut, we found ourselves in an open area between two locked gates, with a few armed guards at each. It was as if there was a small army protecting this silver studio. The guard at the second gate told us that the studio was closed on Sunday “Why didn’t you tell us that before?” Louis asked. The guard laughed and chatted for a few minutes, then we turned around and drove out.

We wanted tea, so drove past a row of estates and turned right to the “River Café” which Loui had heard was very beautiful. The road was atrocious, but we finally made it up there, got past the guard standing at the gate, past the boom which was raised at that moment, but I wondered if it might swing down on us, and parked next to one other car. A boy of about 8, blond, kind of dumb looking, came to the car and said, “The café is closed.”

Louis got out of the car and looked around. A man was sitting on the porch of one of the two buildings and he shouted up at him. “The cafe’s closed?”

“Yes,” he said without getting up. “Closed about a year ago.”

“So are you constantly harassed by people wanting tea?”

“I guess we ought to take down the signs,” the man said.

A couple of nights ago we watched “Songcatcher” on tv. It’s the story of a musicologist who goes into Appalachia to collect songs, and this scene reminded me for all the world of Appalachia, without the banjo.

We drove back down the potholed road, and decided to take tea at a fancy hotel in the neighbhorhood, the ‘House of Stone’ Imba Magobo(??). We drove up to the gate which had brick pillars on either side and a steel door in the middle, with a guardhouse on each side. Two guards came down, asked us to sign the guest book, asked us our purpose for going to the hotel, wrote down our license number, and then opened the gate. We parked next to the only other car in the parking lot and walked to the restaurant.

“What may I do for you?” asked the hostess.

“We’d just like to have a drink, maybe some tea,” Louis said.

“I’m afraid we only serve lunch, not tea,” she said.

So we walked out, past the deserted glistening swimming pool, past the thatched hut which had some exercise machines inside but nobody in it, with a sign “Gym,” saw the uniformed maids laughing and talking to each other sitting on a low stone wall behind the obviously unoccupied bungalows which in times past had been filled with guests, and drove out.

“I’m kind of used to this kind of security,” I said, “coming from New York, but what are they protecting against here? In New York it’s terrorists with bombs. Here is it thieves who would rob the guests, of which there aren’t any?”

So it was back to tea and toast at home instead of supporting the Zimbabwean economy.

We drove past huge farms in the most gorgeous valley, Enterprise Valley, lined with formerly productive farms. Now some of them were producing crops, especially we saw maize seed crops which was encouraging, some soya beans, but the tobacco drying houses were empty and falling down, the greenhouses careening right and left with their coverings ripped and flapping in the breeze. The grass at the side of the road was unmowed so you couldn’t even see the fields in many places. The grass was 6 feet tall in many fallow fields. As the agricultural situation has become so dire in Zim, some of the white farmers have struck a deal with a black politician so that they can keep on working their farms, but there are not many of them.

I learned about one farm in particular. This farm was fairly recently awarded to someone as a political favor. Most of its fields are now empty of crops, the row after row of greenhouses tipping over, the large lakes for irrigation are still there, but there are only a few sprinklers irrigating crops.

This farm used to produce flowers for Europe – a container truck would pull up every day and take a load of flowers to the airport. It had a private game park, and cooperated with the World Wild Fowl Foundation (correct name?) by sheltering endangered species of birds, collecting their eggs and sending them to central breeding places where the species would be propagated. It had 80-90 houses built on the property for the farm workers, and these workers were provided with produce from the greenhouses and milk from the dairy cows (which have now been eaten). It produced vegetables, avocados, milk, soya beans, corn, wheat, flowers, and multiple other crops.

This farm was what we would call an agribusiness, exporting vast amounts of produce, and feeding Zimbabwe. We rail against agribusinesses in the U.S., and I guess it is this kind of farm we are talking about. Of course the person who owns it wields power. He is, or perhaps I should say was, a rich man who employed hundreds of people and brings, or brought, large amounts of foreign currency into the country.

What has been achieved by undoing his economy of scale, by destroying the productive ability of this beautiful land? It’s hard to see any improvement. The Africans are still walking slowly along the side of the road carrying heavy loads on their heads. The workers’ houses are empty.

“They think their freedom is worth it,” one person remarked.

“The enterprise zone of these Africans is bounded by the amount they can carry in their hands or on their heads, and by the distance they can walk or cycle in a day,” I observed.

Going back to subsistence farming does not appear to be benefitting anybody. Even the person who was awarded the beautiful big farm described above is only getting a fraction of the former earnings, because he does not know how to farm the place. He is not a farmer. He’s a judge in league with politicians.

T he banks are getting screwed because, while this particular farm did not carry long-term debt, it had financed several projects which now are not being repaid. In a strange twist, the original owner still has the title documents to the land, perhaps in an effort to make him personally responsible for repaying the debt which now is not producing any income. The bank in fact tried to enforce the personal guaranty of the owner in an effort to get its money back, but the high court in Zimbabwe ruled that the former owner (well, still the owner in that he holds the title, though he is not allowed on the property) is not required to repay the money, that the present owners have to, but how to enforce that when they don’t technically own the land?

In this chaotic atmosphere of waste and ruin, the tourism industry is totally dead, the lights are going out all over Zimbabwe as one European venture after another (farms, supermarket chains, industries, research institutes, educational initiatives, etc.) are being denuded of expertise as the people who formerly ran them leave. Anybody, black or white, who has access to foreign exchange leaves. The supermarket where I go every morning has many older Afrikaner type farmers hobbling along after their shopping carts. They can’t afford to leave Zim. They have no foreign exchange and no entree to England or South Africa or some other country.

The parents who struggled to set up one enterprise or another in Zim, only to see it taken over by others without any compensation, see their children leave to study and to live elsewhere, leaving families scattered all over the world.

There is a basic incompatibility of between the European ways of doing things and the African way of life. Africanization of everything in Zimbabwe is inevitable and the European inventions – the game parks, the botanical gardens, the schools and universities, the farms and industries, will wither and become ghost towns, with clowns dressed up in uniforms guarding the gates. Guarding nothing and noone. Protecting against what?

I’m not a defender of colonialism, and would be willing to agree that if this part of Africa had been left alone, it might have made its way in a more healthy manner into the 20^th, now the 21^st century. But you cannot change the way history has unfolded.

At a party the other night one person remarked that the government’s aim is not only to chase out the whites, but also to chase out the black middle class, because they are troublemakers. There are plenty of black people driving fancy cars, there are black men and women at the gym where I exercise every weekday. But according to that informant, they are going to be in the same sort of trouble that the white entrepreneurs were in before.

Even in South Africa, the most successful economy in sub-Saharan Africa, where so many Zimbabweans aspire to go, is separating like oil and water into two increasingly disparate layers, protected by layers of razor wire and high walls. The Europeans know that without separating themselves from the African sea around them, they will drown. And if the Africans invade the European territory, taking over what was created, running the businesses, holding the shares, living in the houses, they have incorporated so little of what these things mean into their culture that these things wither

I can only observe in the most superficial way how the African society functions, but it seems to me that far more important than making a profit is maintaining human contact. Sitting all alone at a desk would be unwelcome, no matter how much money was made. At the first moment of contact, the Africans are warm and responsive and laughing, enjoying thoroughly the human contact, no matter how light. At every entrance to a game park or botanical garden or silversmith studio, there is a bit of banter with the guards.

Even the young men in Mbari who had an exchange in Shona with Louis were soon laughing. They were not miserable and surly standing around on the corner poor and without prospects. Or perhaps I should say that even standing around on a corner poor and without prospects, they still were not surly and miserable.

I know from my conversations with random Africans on the street, which I have recounted to you, that they are all concerned about having enough to eat, about the elections and the government, but this concern is not embedded in bitterness and resentment, it is wreathed in smiles and banter. This is counter-intuitive, to me. I would be worried sick, wasting away from concern, if I didn’t know where my next sadza was coming from. I would be short-tempered and anti-social. Not these people. Of course, they have wondered since the beginning of time where their next meal was coming from, and so concern and worry embroider every aspect of their culture.

There are so few old people about. When the young men called Louis ‘Old man” I said, “You really ARE an old man here. I see so few old people.”

Seeing the waste, the destruction, the chaos is depressing and baffling. The Europeans who built such a thriving economy here feel the same, and feel helpless to change the course of events. They realize, I think, that their way of resolving the issues here is not the way that is going to work in the long run. Africans don’t think, act, or desire the way Europeans do. Driving past the fields which used to be lush with crops, Louis made remarks that I don’t think any African would make, “Any farmer would be ashamed to have a maize crop that looked like that.” Or “We used to mow the grass along the road just to make it look well kept.” Or “They used to export ____ tons of maize from this farm. Just look at it now.” Or “He has as stud farm here. Must have made a deal with somebody to keep it.” We passed farms that used to be owned by a single owner that stretched to the far hills. The owners were thrown off, now living god knows where. The heartbreak is almost palpable, though there is no crying in their beer for these white people who lost so much. They are stoic and have moved on, as far as I can see. But they can’t help noticing, driving by after years of absence, that there is nobody at the country club where hundreds of people would gather for lunch and cricket every weekend, there is nobody at the hotel where they used to go for tea, there is nobody at the botanical garden donated by Mr. And Mrs. Somebodyorother, the game park is empty, the irrigation systems non-functioning, the grass overgrown, the houses falling down, the place gone to wrack and ruin.

And the Africans stream by on the roads, carrying their loads on their heads, selling their pyramids of tomatoes or mangoes or oranges, or their rugs, or their services. This is their country and this is how they want it. It is beautiful, hypnotic, underutilized, inefficient, unproductive, poor, simple, dangerous, smiling, warm.