Zimbabwe August 2008

4th August 2008

It's a Sunday afternoon back in London, where I landed this morning, and I wanted to jot down a few more reflections on Zim before the big city sweeps me up.

 My first incongruous tale regards chocolate. Did you know that Cadbury's Zimbabwe still *exports* chocolate?  I kid you not.  It exports to Namibia, Democractic Republic of Congo…and…wait for it…Switzerland.  Yes, Cadbury's Zimbabwe is the only Cadbury in the world that makes Crunchettes – mini versions of Crunchies. It's also the only Cadbury's where Flakes are still hand-made.

My three weeks in Zim, as ever, provided so many insights.  Overheard conversations and glimpses of daily life in Harare were windows into socio-political change, trauma, resilience and humour.  People there live in a wartime economy even though the conflicts and violence are not described as war.   Since my last email, I visited TM supermarkets in Newlands and Kamfinsa; I was properly shocked by row after row of bare shelves which stocked only a handful of longlife products like soap powder, Dettol and Doom.  But in true Zimbabwean fashion, as a Joburg friend pointed out on seeing the photos that I furtively took with my phone, the shelves and floors are spotlessly clean – gleaming, even - and the staff neatly dressed and all standing behind their counters as usual.    Just afterwards, I went into a nearby art shop, where an artist was telling the proprietor how she was now exchanging paintings for fuel coupons.  Another woman was complaining bitterly about her friend's experience of immigrations officials at Heathrow:  'They asked her why she'd lived in Cape Town for 2 years. None of their bloody business!  What's she going to say?  Because the weather's better?!'  I mentioned that I'd just been into TM supermarket, and they retorted, 'Oh, didn't you know, it's not called TM anymore…it's called MT (emp-ty).'

 People's economic strategies are innovative and rich in their diversity.  I listened to urban housewives co-arranging the butchering of a mombe (cow) they'd managed to procure through someone who knows someone; the butcher was identified in a similar fashion.  These days it's all about having a wide network of contacts who fill gaps and seize opportunities in the informal market.  A friend of my brother's, formerly a world-class triathlete, currently trades diesel from Harare for kapenta fish in Binga, which he then brings back to the city.  This trip, for the first time, I saw wealthy white women stopping on corners in their 4x4s to buy a handful of vegetables from the street vendors whom they've overlooked for years.   They also look further afield, of course, and there are a number of traders who now bring in goods from South Africa and re-sell them at anything between a 10% and 90% mark-up.

In the midst of economic collapse, my second top incongruous tale involves postcolonial etiquette. The Royal Harare Golf Club, neighbouring the  presidential residence, was opened in 1898 and remains an elite hang-out, including for the political chefs. It maintains a stringent dress code.  A family friend visited the club for lunch recently in business-casual attire.  Having already ordered his meal in the Club's restaurant, he and his partner were asked to leave because he wasn't wearing socks under his long trousers.  Indeed, the dress code, in some bizarre colonial fashion, trumped all else – including the need to retain customers in one of the most desperate economies in the
world.

People still pay taxes in Harare, but are now often subsidizing state services, sometimes dramatically.  In a neighbouring northern suburb, the residents were so fed up with the chronic electricity problems that they approached ZESA to ask what could be done.  In the end, this same group gathered together USD 4000 to pay for spare parts that ZESA could not afford.  Similar stories are heard from the high density suburbs, though I imagine the amounts of money involved would have been significantly less. In the same vein, last week a friend of our domestic worker was  admitted to Parirenyatwa hospital, in the last stages of terminal breast cancer.  She was in hospital for 4 days before her death, during which time she was not given even a single painkiller.  Her relatives had to pool together to buy her a drip, in a last effort to ease her suffering.

Last weekend we traveled to Rukomechi, in the Mana Pools National Park area, a journey of about 7 hours.  Leaving the city early in the morning, I was struck by the image of 3 women in Apostolic robes, praying in the direction of the rising sun as they knelt in the white winter grass near some crossroads.  Between Harare and the Dyke, every village or homestead sported a Zanu PF poster visible from the road, tied high onto tree trunks, almost as if charms to fend off bad luck.  Driving the road through Chinhoyi and Karoi, formerly some of the most productive agricultural land in the country, we saw hundreds of acres of waist-high weeds.  Zanu PF T-shirts and headscarves were also quite a common sight in this area (in contrast to the Domboshawa side of town, where I saw not a single poster or handout).  Near Banket, ironically the only form of livelihood activity seen from the road were craftsmen selling wooden toy replicas of John Deere tractors.  Watching ZTV the same week, discussion panels informed viewers that agricultural failure was the outcome of Western sanctions (coincidentally, I nearly
fell of my chair laughing when I came across a white news presenter on ZTV – yet another one of Zimbabwe's many little incongruities).

Rukomechi, our destination on the banks of the Zambezi, with the Zambian escarpment as a backdrop, was absolutely stunning.  We and the elephants had the entire river to ourselves, minus a little noise pollution one afternoon from Rautenbach (one of Mugabe's business partners for his DRC dealings) in his black helicopter.  Bee-eaters and water birds, hippo s galore, enormous crocodiles lazing in the afternoon sun, waterbuck on the plains...and the most sublime African colours. Elsewhere in the country, illegal poaching is rife, but this part of Mana seems to have retained its character as a safe wildlife haven.

 The weekend's close brought my third most incongruous tale.  This one concerns tsetse fly control.   Some institutions never die - and it seems that the tsetse doesn't either.  The poor old tsetse fly, the carrier of sleeping sickness, has been subject to state interventions for decades and decades.  I was impressed by the tsetse fly control man who appeared to inspect our vehicle as we passed out of the National Park vicinity, equipped with a small net and a virtually-empty spray can, with which he carefully eliminated 1 of the 3 tsetse flies inside our car.  The lives of the other 2 were spared, it seems, due to unspoken spray rationing.  Like the Royal Harare club, only much more remote, I thought this little incident spoke volumes about how certain institutions survive despite massive upheavals, and how people still carry out their jobs as best they can under adverse conditions.

On our return to Harare, we heard that Zanu PF was distributing free food to its supporters, a few blocks away from home.  My dad and I went for a drive to check it out – and yes, there it was:  a rally taking place in the grounds of a nearby primary school, a few hundred metres from the party's local 'headquarters' where people were taken to be beaten in the run-up to the elections.

Before I departed, I treated myself to a copy of the government mouthpiece, The Herald.  There are advertisements for generators and water pumps.  The second page proclaims, 'Victoria Falls opens multi-quadrillion dollar truck-inn'. Last but not least, there is a quarter-page colour ad placed by the National Social Security Authority, featuring and congratulating (I quote) "His Excellency Cde Robert Gabriel Mugabe on being elected as the President of Zimbabwe". This week our dollar is losing 10 zeros.  Many of us didn't even get a chance to see the 100 billion dollar notes that are being sold on Ebay for as much as USD 100.  Like many other banknotes, the 100 billions came and went rather fast.

That's it folks - Thanks for reading.

Zimbabwe July 2008

July 2008

This is a quick recap without much editing for those keen to hear what returning to Zimbabwe has been like…Before getting onto the depressing stuff, some light entertainment anecdotes from my pre-Zim trip:

Zambian taxi driver at the one-room Sesheke border post: Do you speak Norwegian?
Me: Er, no…(Do I look like I speak Norwegian?  Well, maybe). Why, do you?
Zambian taxi driver:  Oh yes.  I have 3 siblings in Norway.

Zambian teacher through a bus window:  Hello, er, I'm wondering if you can help me?
Me through a bus window: Uh, maybe…what is it you need help with?
Zambian teacher:  I need a metal detector.
Me:  Uh, I'm not sure I can help with that.

Me, watching beer being smuggled onto Zambian bus (beyond the gaze of customs officials):  So, did this beer come across the  Zambezi river on a boat?
Zambian passenger:  No no, that would be illegal.

Zimbabwean airport security official, scanning my hand luggage:  Do you have any metal items in this bag?
Me:  Yes, I have a lot of metal items in that bag…(including razor blades, cables, adaptor plugs, camera, etc etc)
Airport official, looking at images:  Oh, ok.  Proceed.

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I crossed the border into Zimbabwe at Victoria Falls very early last Friday morning, having taken a beer-smuggling bus the previous day through Zambia from Namibia.   I paid my Zambian taxi driver in a combination of kwacha, rand and US dollars, and set off across the potholes with all my bags.  Hard to know what to expect, but it was a relief to be home.  I went straight to the Falls for an extraordinary sunrise through the mist.

The sense of disillusionment in the air was palpable, and my taxi driver unusually quiet. He didn't have enough fuel to get to the Vic Falls airport (a journey of 20 mins), and there is no such thing as going to a service station nowadays, so we had to drive around the
backstreets of town, haul some guy out of bed, and then wait for 5 litres of petrol in a plastic bottle to appear.  I had to give the driver an advance in US dollars to pay the fuel dealer.  On the way to the airport he told me that civil servants were now earning 100
billion Z$ a month – and that a loaf of bread that day cost 80 billion.  There was a power cut at the airport, but somehow I managed to get a boarding pass, and passed the time with a golf caddy-turned-teak dealer who was taking a heavy boxful of groceries
from Zambia back to his family in Harare.

The Chinese plane miraculously arrived on time and landed successfully at Harare airport, where we caught a glimpse of Phillip Chiyangwa zooming off in his black Mercedes.  So, I am back in Harare where things have quietened down quite considerably since our leader reinstated himself.  In fact we've even heard reports of police arresting those responsible for some of the horrific recent violence. There are also other reports of retributive violence by communities themselves against youth who terrorised people in their home areas.

We have electricity today at home but it's only the second day we've had power this week.  We usually get a few hours in the evening, but during daylight the northern suburbs of Harare are humming with the sound of generators – for those who can afford them.  Our generator at home is strong enough to power lights and computers, but not the
kettle, stove or the borehole pump.  So we use water in buckets drawn from the 

swimming pool as necessary. (We always knew our swimming pools would come in handy one day).  And during the power cuts we cook using a combination of the solar cooker and a wood fire in the garden.  Gas is difficult to come by.  When the power comes on, then we go wild with the washing machine ;)

 All the lampposts in our area are smothered in Zanu-PF posters, proclaiming 'This is the Final Battle for Total Control'.  My personal favourite, however, is the slogan 'Behind the Fist'.  Unbelievably apt.  I wonder which information ministry guru came up with it – it will make a brilliant book title one day.  Apparently putting up posters was a post-assault duty of those rounded up and beaten by the youth militia in the nearby Lewisham vlei during the second elections.

I have been phoning various family friends to catch up.  The phone networks are completely overloaded, so sometimes it can take 20-30 attempts to get through. Nowadays when I ask how people are, they tend to pause and say, 'well, we're…ok'.   Amidst the fear and the trauma that most people are trying to shield themselves from, daily life here is incredibly time-consuming.  Our dollar devalues every hour (about 60% per week) and paying for things is always complicated.   Last
weekend I had lunch with 4 friends and it cost us about 1.4 trillion Zim dollars.  Yes, people here are adept at doing calculations in billions and trillions. I don't even bother to try and keep up with them.  We settled the bill in rands – by far the easiest method.  US
dollars and rands are common currency now in shops and restaurants – but still officially illegal.

My family can only draw the Z$ equivalent of USD 1.50 each per day from the bank.  Cash is in extremely short supply and hence expensive to obtain, even in exchange for foreign currency on the parallel/black market.  Quite a lot of grocery shops only take cash or cheques – but our bank, for example, will only allow the use of 1-2 cheques per dayvalued at USD 5-10 each.  Keeping track of exchange rates is a full time job, given the dynamism of devaluation, and subsequently most people are happy to round off numbers or approximate their dealings in ways which you'd never see in other parts of the world.

The city is full of harrowing stories, but most people try to avoid talking too much about politics – it's simply too depressing.   My parents' domestic worker has been badly affected over the past few months.  After the February elections, a gang visited his elderly mother's rural homestead in Murehwa.  They assaulted her and other elderly women, demanding to know why Mugabe had lost in that area, and what their children were doing in the cities. The family's homestead was set on fire – even their grain store was destroyed.  Their radio and television – supposed sources of opposition propaganda – were hacked to pieces with axes.  Their oxen cart was also hacked to pieces.  These items were pretty much their sum possessions.  His mother has been staying with a relative since the incident and has not yet returned home.  Meanwhile, in one of the townships in Harare, he had to move his 18 year old daughter to yet another relative during the second elections to safeguard her from rape.

Food staples are in very short supply and very expensive.  Most in the townshipws are living on potatoes and cabbage.  Meat is now an incredible luxury that very few can afford.  On the other end of the spectrum, there are quite a few popular restaurants in the city which charge USD20-30 per person, and they are certainly not short of
clientele.  (For an ordinary person, in London terms this would equate to something like spending several hundred, if not thousand, pounds on a meal).  The discrepancies and inequalities here are massive and growing.  There is an increased police presence everywhere (and friends report frequent extortion for petty or made-up offences), but
I have been driving around and even walking around the neighbourhood virtually as normal, albeit having to see Bob on every lamppost.

The shops are bare, though, and usually ensconced in darkness.  Our local pharmacy spreads its products out along the shelves at a distance of about 30 cm in between each shampoo bottle.  The informal economy has flourished – we buy vegetables regularly from the back of a truck which parks at the end of our road; and if I want to have a
hair cut, a massage (that's right, available even here) or attend a yoga class, I go to people's homes for the service and pay them in foreign currency.

Amidst all this, last weekend I went to a craft fair.  The sun shone, music blared from loudspeakers, meat was barbequed, and lots of white people wandered around stalls as if everything was completely normal. t was surreal.  In the fields next door, Apostolic church services continued, perhaps even more fervently.  Meanwhile, Ben Freeth still
could not see, one week after his brutal attack in the Chegutu area which left him with a skull so badly fractured that surgeons had to drill into it to release the pressure around his brain.  Such are the juxtapositions of life here.  At least among those with any economic
security, people seem to take the view that life has to go on, and are determined to live the best that they can under the circumstances.

School sports fixtures run as normal, and I've watched hockey and rugby matches this past week, as well as attended a (rather dire) karaoke night in Borrowdale Village.   As my brother says, staying at home and reading/watching the news everyday is a one-way road to depression.  And so people block stuff out as part of their coping strategies.

Those are a few of my observations from the past week – admittedly among a sub-section of the population with better buffer capacity than most, but at the same time, nor are these people among the super-elite who mark their status with incredibly expensive cars and the like.

Many of my friends think I'm crazy to be here, but it comes to me almost as a relief.  Watching the news from a distance is far more distressing .

Ngamiland to Algiers Sept-Dec 2006

31 December 2006

Happy Christmas and all that jazz.  I am back in Harare after a really interesting trip to Algeria.  The weather is glorious, the main roads along which our dear President travels have been re-tarred, and lots of the diaspora, including black Zimbabweans with Australian accents, are home for Christmas.  Amidst the crisis, cars and cell phones are the status symbols par excellence, and rest assured that posh cars here would be just as posh in London or New York.  My brother informs me that there are no less than 5 Hummers in Harare now, each in a different colour.  Yes, that's right, the type that 50 Cent and John Travolta drive.  The black elite are reaching new heights of opulence.  Yesterday morning a man known only as a 'fuel baron' paid 5,7 million US Dollars for a prime 5-year hunting concession in the north.  Meanwhile, lecturers who have worked at the University for more than 30 years receive the equivalent of 40 US Dollars per month.  Farm workers at a small farm down the road get some free produce, but their monthly salary is enough to buy 11 loaves of bread.  Racial divides appear to be operating as normal, with continued white insularity, and well-educated black parents who forbid their children from marrying the white partners that they find overseas.  Oh, and I was offered diamonds this afternoon in the parking lot of my local gym.  Illegal diamond and gold trading is the latest fashion.

Anyway, the main purpose of this email was to describe Algiers, not Harare, where I recently enjoyed a few days on my own ahead of the conference I was working at.  Algeria is an ENORMOUS country, five times the size of France.  Its capital Algiers is a fabulous hybrid of Nice and Hyderabad: blue-and-white French colonial architecture, a busy industrial port, Byzantine churches, stunning ocean views, liberation struggle memorials, and the regular calls of the muezzin echoing across the city.  Photographs to follow!   Unbeknown to me, Algeria also has hundreds of amazing Roman ruins…so if you don't fancy fighting off the hordes of tourists in Europe, that's the place for you.

I was forced to resurrect my rather dire French, and was amazed at how friendly, welcoming and tolerant the Algerians were.  The reception I received was no doubt influenced by the repeated astonishment that my Zimbabwean passport induced ("mais vous etes blanc!"). It was my first time sightseeing alone in a Muslim country, and was a very gendered and non-touristy experience.  Public space is incredibly masculine.  Although there are no restrictions on female tourists, being out in the city on the holy day, Friday, was very strange, given that there were only about 5 other women on the streets. I also felt like I must be the only woman in the entire country with short hair.  Likewise, restaurants, hotels, and the airport produced only a sprinkling of females. Women's employment is apparently at about 13% and they are not supposed to leave the house without a male relative after 5pm.

 My first hotel was an enormous and mostly empty affair overlooking the seafront and port, with corridors big enough to drive a Landrover down.    Algiers sees virtually no tourists thanks to its conflict (crudely characterised as govt vs. Islamic fundamentalist group) which started in 1993 and saw 20 000 people die in its first year.  The situation seems to be much improved (Lufthansa recently opened a new flight route there), but people are still very wary of travelling long-distance by car.  Quite a few tourists do trips into the Sahara in the south though, and having seen a few photos of this area, I have been unexpectedly smitten by the romance of the desert and am thinking of planning a trip.  Any takers?

The conference (appropriately on Desertification) was very hard work, but the Algerian government made life easier by spoiling the delegates and reporters with an all-expenses-paid stay at the best 5-star hotel in the city, which is entertainingly located between the Che Guevara and Franz Fanon Boulevards.  The government also takes the security of its visitors quite seriously, as evidenced by the fact that all the delegates had a police escort when driving to the venue and, on occasion, a private chaffeur/security guy.

Besides acquiring some random business cards (eg 'traditional desert well rehabilitation service provider in eastern Algeria') the highlight of the conference was an incredibly surreal show of indigenous 'desert peoples'.  It was a bizarre moment when I realised that all these 'traditionally-clad' performers were not just Algerians dressed up.  No, no.  They had been shipped in for a Deserts Festival and they included aboriginal groups from Australia (cowboy hats, beards and boomerangs) and Latin America (facepaint and absolutely flamboyant feathers) and numerous others.  Somehow the Arab Emirates found their way into this combo, together with their bagpipe players.  My personal favourite, however, which admittedly is purely based on my anthropological fascination with the Exotic Other ;) was a Tuareg group from some 2000km away in southern Algeria.  They're the society where the men wear the veils, showing only their eyes, and I have to say they are a rather mesmerising sight in their black and indigo robes (Halloqueen 2007?). Nevertheless they had been shunted to the back of the performance queue, so I snuck backstage to find them slouched on the floor of the hotel lobby, bored out of their minds, and with barely enough enthusiasm to cover their faces for my much-lusted-after photograph.  Before long these 'desert nomads' and I were exchanging email addresses.  So I now have contacts in Tamanrasset: roll on my Sahara safari!

Leaving the country was more stressful than being inside it – there were numerous security checks at the airport, and on arrival in Frankfurt every single passenger was hand-searched, which took forever.  I finally made it back to Zimbabwe amidst the Heathrow weather chaos and after 3 days of being awake.  The only entertainment was a completely psychotic cat which careered at top speed around the Algiers departure lounge, repeatedly launching itself onto the only potted tree in the building.  Too many times through the X-ray machine perhaps?

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Botswana September 2006

23 September 2006

My time in Botswana is nearing an end:  I have interview fatigue and am happy to be wrapping things up, though I will miss the cabin on the river's edge, along with the hippos, donkeys and crocodile researchers.

 Being highly mobile for research purposes is draining – last week I spent nights in 5 different places.  This included a short visit to Maun– a dusty little town with the busiest airport in southern Africa. Unsurprisingly, it is filled with khaki-clad tourists en route to the Delta, and with bush pilots wearing Ray Bans. From my perspective, it's 2 supermarkets were the main attraction, given that Shakawe is basically a village that stocks only long-life goods. Oh, and swimming. I went swimming, which was a real treat.

This week I made a trip to interview some of Botswana's 'Remote Area Dwellers' – a term akin to India's 'Other Backward Castes'.  All I have to say is that 'remote' is a highly appropriate term.  On Wednesday we took nearly 5 hours to drive less than 190km, to conduct one group interview. The roads are bad, and there are sections of the thickest Kalahari sand that I've ever seen, which launched me completely in the deep-end (no pun intended) in terms of my 4x4 driving qualifications.  The idea of getting stuck and having to wait 3 days for someone to pull us out was enough to inspire a good degree of terror.   Anyway, as it happened, we did get stuck, but in someone's yard, luckily.  Even with heaps of people to help it still took us 40 minutes to free the vehicle.  I think I'm done with thick sand for the meanwhile.

One of the young women who travelled with us is HIV positive and, because she is registered in remote Gudigwa, she has to travel all the way there every month if she wants to collect the 3 tins of baby formula that the government distributes to mothers with HIV.  So basically she spent 2 days on very rough roads, with the baby, to get less than 2 weeks' supply of formula for her child. Pretty unbelievable.

What else?  The combinations of things that I take to the NGO office some mornings becomes more and more peculiar.  Yesterday's collection included: laptop, large mouse trap, solar oven, unbaked banana bread, and 20 litres of diesel.  And yes, the banana bread baked perfectly.

Today I am going camping at Tsodilo Hills.  Tsodilo is a world heritage site, comprising 3 amazing hills which rise out of hundreds of miles of flat scrubland. It is a sacred place for many local people, central to many origin myths, and is home to some 4000 ancient rock paintings.  Very exciting.

I'll end there.  I head back to the UK on the 13th of October – looking forward to seeing at least some of you!

5th Sept 2006

 

Dedicated readers:

 

Last week was stressful, to put it mildly.  Sunday night saw my name on national radio – I still haven't heard the full transcript, but it was something to do with me promoting tribalism and tribal divisions in West Caprivi. Indeed, a suitable crime for an anthropologist.  As you can imagine, I was pretty furious. Being misrepresented to the public is just not fun at all, especially given that I've spent months and months trying to build relations of trust with people.  I have yet to call up the NBC reporter who was involved – but believe me it's on my to-do list. (Ironically, however, he turned out to be the older brother of my translator – small world at the worst of times). There is still no explanation for what happened last weekend, nor for why my NGO is being targeted yet again by the intelligence.  The only thing I know is that the plot is so incredibly thick, it's probably way beyond anything that we've imagined.

 

Anyway, after a multiplicity of phonecalls between Namibia, Zimbabwe and Botswana, and after considering 900 different ways of crossing the border into Botswana, given my fear of driving through West Cap in the highly-conspicuous yellow bakkie, a solution was found.  A colleague who is a saviour, including of anthropologists in trouble, drove with me in convoy the 400km from Katima.  And for those who have enquired, no, he's not single.

 

I spent a day at Buffalo in his new clay house, powering my laptop off a solar panel, which was a rather unique experience, while he attended a community meeting.  We left the next morning for Botswana, and not a moment too soon, since an hour or two after we left the police came asking questions about the meeting that had taken place the day before.  Besides nearly hitting a kudu on the road, and being struck with paranoia about the Namibian Defence Force following us, the border crossing went just fine.  Most amusing was trying to get a signal on my phone at the border office, and being assisted by 3 officials to find exactly the right spot to stand in the flower bed…

 

I am now safely ensconsed in the quiet country village of Shakawe, northern Botswana.  I am renting THE most lovely canvas-and-reed house on stilts, on the banks of the Okavango Delta, surrounded by riverine forest, and with an enormous ancient Jackalberry tree dropping fruit at my feet every morning. There is an outdoor bathroom with twin-showers. There are hippos and drums at night and fishing boats by day. It is absolutely the most perfect spot to be a researcher – and such a relief to have my own space for the first time in 2 months. 

 

The owners of the property are Afrikaaner missionaries-turned-development-workers.   I am allowed to pick freely from the vegetable garden and, if I like, to attend their church service, at which both God and brownies feature.  The Batswana (no tribal divisions allowed here, note) are confident and friendly, and the road to Shakawe is lined with braying donkeys.  And no one recognises the yellow bakkie and its 3700 km of mileage since July.  Not yet.

 

Today I used my solar oven for the first time to cook lentils and sweet potato – and it worked!  So, life is looking up, though there is still much work to be done, sadly.

I have a new mobile phone number – as always, texts are welcomed.  I have to go to the field behind the veggie garden to receive them ;)  

 

Well, I hope you are all being both naughty and nice. 

Write soon...

Caprivi August 2006 -- Part II

27 August 2006

 

Dear friends

 

There is much to report.  The top news items are as follows:

I am in trouble with the intelligence, again.  Maybe I really am a spy.

I had a 'Number 2' haircut.  Maybe that was why they came after me.

M&Ms have arrived in Katima – manufactured in Singapore, I think.

 

The last 10 days have been the toughest part of the fieldwork thus far.   Yesterday I was once again hounded out of West Caprivi by a combination of intimidation by intelligence officers, being stopped by the police, being caught on film (without my permission) by a so-called broadcasting crew, and being shouted at for 40 minutes by an influential headman, accusing me of taking sides, ignoring his ethnic group, bypassing local leaders, dividing people and so on.  I decided enough was enough, packed up my camp in 20 minutes and drove back to Katima in the shortest time yet recorded.  It's a long story, but basically my attempts to interview the 'other' ethnic group in the West Caprivi was met with huge amounts of suspicion and distrust.

 

In addition to all this, the separatist Muyongo, who lead the secession attempt in 1999, is allegedly due to return to Namibia after fleeing for several years to Denmark.  The government is taking this all very seriously, it seems.  There is no official news, but West Caprivi is crawling with police, military, and unlicenced vehicles.  As if all those things weren't enough, the President was in Katima this weekend for Heroes Day, so 99 additional security measures were added to what was already in place.  And of course, all the other local politics going on in the area about leadership, chieftaincies, safari hunting revenues and NGOs just contribute to poor old me being misconstrued yet again.  Or whatever.  Maybe I'm just an easy target.

 

The good news is that they only cut short my work by a day or two (given that I'm due to leave this week for Botswana), and robbed me of only about 3 interviews.  I may have had to run away, which pisses me off entirely, but I got done 99% of what I needed to. 

 

So that's the serious news.  Currently lying low, gathering intelligence of my own, and wanting to spray paint my car and change its number plate!  And hoping my supervisor doesn't have a heart attack when she reads the email I just sent her.

 

On the positive side, I've learnt heaps, AND I know that I could be a better intelligence officer than any of those numbskulls who didn't even have a decent alias when I asked them who they were, and apparently were surprised when I didn't immediately hand over my phone number to them. Dddduuuuuuuhhhh.

 

What else? I've met lots of nice people in between the irritants, shared an outdoor bathroom with a nesting chicken, had my car stuck in the sand at least twice, woken up to hyenas and elephants at night, and learnt how to use my gas stove 'indoors' without igniting my entire tent.  I went to an amazing Khwe healing ceremony about 2 weeks ago, which was a once-in-a-lifetime experience.  It included drumming and singing for 10 hours non-stop throughout the night and into the early morning.

 

I've also learned how to thresh millet like the rural women which, just to remind me what I don't miss about rowing, induced raw skin patches and blisters.  As for the haircut, it's great for camping, and I've wanted to do it for years.  It does however emphasise my pixie ears and chicken neck.  As for the M&Ms, I haven't had chocolate for about 11 days, and I'm on my way to the supermarket shortly.  The hot weather has arrived, but being August there's still a great breeze. 

 

Well, dearies, enough entertainment from me.  On the intelligence issue, you can either a) feel sorry for me and lavish me accordingly with emails, gifts, etc OR b) treat me like a film star – which I may soon be once I appear on Namibian national television.

 

Caprivi lovin'

Caprivi August 2006

10th August 2006

 

Dear all

 

I've been in Namibia for a month already and haven't been able to keep up the joint emails as well as last time…I hope you are all doing well, wherever you are.  I miss your lovely company.

 

Things here are going well – it's good to be back, and nice to no longer have to worry about camping in daily thunderstorms etc.  In exchange, however, it's freezing cold, and even when I'm not camping, all the houses are half-open-air, which means they're like, about 5 degrees inside in the evenings and mornings.  That said, daytime temperatures are wonderful.  Research stuff is going fine, though there is still a lot to do, and sometimes it feels like the more I know, the less I know, as I try to complete my enormous socio-political-historical jigsaw puzzle.

 

In between rural village life, my second home the Fish Farm is as usual – actually more of a farm these days, since they're actually producing stuff now, and I feast off home-grown vegetables, salad and eggs.  Domestic animals of all varieties still abound, including the dog which got shot in the head at point-blank range and survived. The proprietors have a family of barn owls living inside their roof which make incredible noises, somewhere between deep breathing and hissing.  I have one or two yoga companions here, which is always good.  And when I come home up to my eyeballs in interviews, I make my education more rounded by watching 6 Feet Under, Desperate Housewives, and Sex and the City.

 

Last week I made the long trek of 1300km to Windhoek, and had a good week catching up with a friend there, going to restaurants, having interviews and going to the archives.  The archives proved to be a lot more interesting than I would have guessed, but I was quite pressed for time.  My supervisor probably wouldn't have been impressed at the speed I went through all those files!  The colonial reports were hilarious:  the topics covered in one report range from Locusts to Witchcraft to Tribal Chiefs to Child Prostitution. 

 

I am now the proud owner of a solar oven, thanks to inspiration from my enviro-friend F.  There won't be much point in bringing it back to England, given the lack of sunshine, as well as its size (!), but my parents will no doubt make good use of it in Harare. 

 

Well, gotta run kids!

You better send me some text messages or emails – it gets a bit lonely sometimes ;)

Caprivi January-April 2006

2nd April 2006

I am finally back in Harare after doing the 1100km journey from Katima with my parents, which builds on the 4000+km I have driven since January .  I have a sandal tan which is beyond repair, and I'm watching TV (and the news) for the first time in 3 months.  It is kind of strange to be out of the grasp of mosquitoes and no longer having to dig holes in the bush to go to the toilet – but of course great to be at home, despite the usual 'transit' feel that most of my visits have.  This week will be the first time in over a month that I'll spend more than 4 consecutive nights in one place.

Five days after I was visited by the Namibian intelligence, one of my NGO colleagues - coincidentally the only other white person working regularly in West Caprivi – was visited by the same 3 men, plus about 10 armed Field Forces and police.  After failing to find his camp late at night the previous day, they arrived early in the morning and conducted a full search of his house (without a search warrant), asking for 'firearms and marijuana'.  I was already on the road back to West Cap when I heard about it, which made for a rather uneasy final 10 days of fieldwork.  I now have to 'check in' at the nearest police station whenever I arrive in a village, which feels ridiculous.  But the main thing is to be ahead of them in their own game.

Despite follow-up meetings with the intel guys, we still do not know what we or the NGO stands accused of.  The rumours, however, are lavish: for exmple, that the NGO has set up a military training camp on the Angolan border and is helping the Khwe to rid the area of Hambukushu people.  Our hunch is that the impetus behind the investigations comes from a Hambukushu chief  who feels threatened by recent developments in the area which are empowering the Khwe.  He has a reputation for being anti-Khwe, anti-white and anti-NGOs.  It makes for fascinating research material – and it is certainly an interesting experience to now be part of local politics as opposed to being an observer.  Less nice is the fact that all sorts of incredibly random people seem to know everything about me and my movements, and it is difficult knowing whom to trust with certain information.

Besides all that 'excitement', the last bits of fieldwork contain the usual kind of anecdotes, for example, getting stuck in the yellow bakkie on the Fish Farm in about 3 feet of thick mud and having to be towed out, whilst the English PhD student who I was showing around looked on in horror as I waded around up to my knees.  Namibian Independence Day brought the biggest and best-organised event I've ever seen in West Cap – a 2-day inter-village soccer tournament.  This proved to be a considerable distraction to both my interpreter and my interviewees but I managed to wangle at least a short interview with everyone I needed to see, including an old man who has an amazing tattoo of a lion on his chest, inscribed when he worked on the Johannesburg mines decades ago.

 I met my parents at the (one-room) border-post last weekend, and took them out for a night's camping at Susuwe with eco-friendly F, where we sat under an extraordinary skyful of stars and ate solar-cooked beans and fresh greens all the way from Harare.  Back in Katima we did a cleaning blitz on all the camping equipment, and took my parents to the supermarket to buy stuff that isn't available in Harare.  I also persuaded my dad to buy an ENORMOUS pumpkin in the local market which made for some hilarious photographs.

So, these emails have come to an end, at least for a few months.  Thanks for reading them!  I am now officially back on email, so you can even look forward to PERSONALISED messages – wow. I fly back on the 5th and am looking forward to much socialising and gossip.

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14 March 2006

It feels like ages since I last wrote.  My latest claim to fame is being tracked down by the Namibian Intelligence whilst camping in Chetto village.  I surmise that my presence in West Caprivi has touched some political nerve-ends that are sensitive to any apparent investigation into relations between the two different ethnic groups in the area.  During two meetings with the officers, they made out that their interest in me was for my own safety and security, which is nonsense…Anyway, it's been a little unnerving, but all my official documents are in order, so there is nothing that they can 'get me' on.  I will return to West Cap later this week.

Besides that little turn of events, life remains as interesting and adventurous as ever.  For those with enough land and cattle, the rains have brought good harvests, and the villages are full of people munching on fresh maize and sugarcane.  In other poorer areas, and where people have struggled to plough without cattle, they are complaining bitterly about crop-raiding elephants, and the nights in Chetto were filled with the sound of men beating metal in futile efforts to keep these giants away. Some people have already lost this year's harvest entirely.  Back on the Fish Farm, no elephants of course, but passion fruit and lemons are dropping off the trees like nobody's business – home-made sorbet may become a staple…

At the beginning of the month I spent a surreal evening at the German-run Catholic Mission in Omega with a British NGO guy and two French-speakers.  The Germans ate rye bread and spoke very loudly in German at one end of the table, whilst we ate spaghetti at the other end, talking in French about San development issues and Indonesian rituals.  Well, they spoke French and I followed about half of it.  The two middle-aged German ladies who volunteer at the mission continue to completely ignore me, which has been the case ever since I appeared with the hedgehog hairstyle a few weeks back!

From there I went on to a Hambukushu village called Shamakwi, a place which is wealthier than most of the Khwe settlements.  The women and girls work from dawn till after dark, and even at sunrise the ground is already vibrating with the rhythms of millet being pounded by hand in wooden pestles.  Meanwhile, the men sit playing the equivalent of card games with stones in the sand…  Overall I had a really enjoyable time there – the people were easy to get along and joke with, despite language barriers, and I was treated to fresh mielies (maize), pumpkin leaves and green squash straight from the fields.  On the Saturday night they invited me to their late-night church service, which was fascinating.  Drums, singing and spinning-dancing which went on for hours by the light of a single candle. The church space is divided into male and female –I was amusingly instructed to sit on the boundary line…

From there I went on to Chetto where I camped for 5 nights at the homestead of a woman whom I know from previous trips.   In the evenings we exchanged stories over the fire – they wanted to hear about The Phantom of the Opera (a favourite from 2003!) but instead I read Hindu tales about the tumultuous birth and escape of Krishna (ok, so Anokhi is really laughing now).  In return they treated me to Khwe parables about how Hyena and Lion tried to trick each other into killing their own mothers and eating them.  Great stuff – JM Coetzee would love it!

 I spent two days out in the Park with the community game rangers, locating and recording water pans with a GPS for the West Caprivi maps.  As before, I was bowled over by the speed at which these men can move through the bush, and at their outstanding orientation skills.  The one morning, in addition to about 2-3 hours of driving on no roads through the bush, we marched 15km to find 2 pans.  I might as well have jogged to keep up with these guys.  In the absence of any significant landmarks, and even in the absence of #o-daos (animal paths), they were able to lead us to the pans and back to the vehicle without a moment's hesitation about direction.

Other entertainment in Chetto (besides my interviews and nosey police) included a lot of walking, visiting people's fields and helping to pick and process maize, listening to ndingo (finger piano) music, and paying visits to various village residents.  We also drove up to Bwabwata, a temporary settlement on the Angolan border, which used to be a major village, where people migrate to for short periods in order to collect bushfoods.  I had wanted to walk there (it's about 20km one way), as the villagers do, much to everyone's disbelief.  However, the weekend brought so much rain amongst other things, that we decided to drive instead. After the intelligence investigation, Sunday night saw me back on the Fish Farm attending a "Middle Eastern evening" where a hookah was created on site from scratch, with the help of mechanical Dick of course.

I'll leave it there.  Only 2 more weeks left here, and then back to Zim for a few days before flying to the UK – I can't believe the time has gone so quickly.  I shall be a bit sad to leave, I think!
Hugs and Stay wells...

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20 January 2006

Friday afternoon and I'm back in my pre-fab 'trailer' on the Fish Farm after a really busy two weeks.  It is great to be back in Namibia, and it makes such a difference already having a network in place from previous research trips.  It's hot, but there's been a lot of rain, and the bush is full of the scents and sounds of my childhood.  It is delicious-mango season (they cost about 8 pence each), and I have 3 baby chameleons living on my verandah. 

The Fish Farm, like before, is adorned with variety of expatriate environmentalist mostly-singles, several horses, numerous dogs, domestic guinea fowl, and a goat.  There is also a vet who lives on a floating raft on the Zambezi river at the edge of the farm.   All these residents are into wildlife, and they even go on 'frogging' expeditions by night in the local puddles and pools. It's not just about wildlife: they also produce their own version of Britain's 'Heat' magazine, called 'Sweat'.  I hope to feature in the next issue ;) 

As for DPhil research, things have been busy, and I haven't had a day off yet. I've already attended numerous meetings, and done a week's worth of camping/interviewing in West Caprivi in the rain.  I remain the only lone-woman-driver that I've seen on the long trans-Caprivi drives -  though I'm usually happy to give people lifts in exchange for Khwedam vocabulary.    Currently I'm hiring a bright yellow 'bakkie' from the Fish Farm proprietor and notorious handyman whose expertise includes fridges, landrovers, boreholes and killing the spitting cobras which frequent the farm.  It only has 2-wheel drive, so I got stuck in sand/mud twice last week, but nothing serious, and both times there were people around to help push me out… 

The NGO person I'll be working closest with is a German Namibian whose mother was a traditional herbalist and who spent 5 years tracking rhinos in Tanzania.  He follows a vegetarian Ayurvedic diet, buys only local produce, boycotts the Katima supermarket, uses solar ovens, and knows the location of virtually every papaya tree in Caprivi.  Last but not least, he has a picture of Sai Baba in his car.  So all of that makes for some entertainment. 

It's been good to catch up with Khwe friends in West Caprivi.  Food security is still a serious problem, and many families rely on government rice handouts and pensions.  Eating can be complicated and some days it's a long time between meals – but no different from being a lightweight rower, really! There are significant debates currently about land, local leadership, and illegal settlement by an Angolan timber-man, which is all good for my research.  The land mapping workshops are soon to begin, so I'm looking forward to that.  In the meanwhile, more camping, interviews, mosquitoes and just being the anthropologist. And of course practising my Khwedam clicks. There are days when I think that development is not for me, but for the moment things are interesting and enjoyable… 

I miss all of your delightful company, and hope you're doing well in the nasty British winter. Network coverage is temperamental, but would love to get your texts or emails.

Please attend some costume parties with vigour on my behalf...

Zimbabwe February 2003

February 2003

 

Dear friends

Some of you have asked for an update on Zim.  For the rest, I'm including you because it's hard for Zimbabwean politics to get a word in edgeways with the whole Iraq thing going on. Things are pretty dire on most fronts. Even our weather reports are now monitored by government officials, so that they can manipulate information about the drought.

 

 Mugabe continues, as successfully as ever, to 'divide and rule'.  The groups affected by his strategy range from white farming communities to the EU.  He arrived in France last week much to the disgust of many – for him it's a win-win situation, and yet again he has made international sanction policies fall flat on their face.  Tom Spicer, a 19 year old white MDC youth activist, has made headlines with the Paris protests that he arranged.  I met Tom on a plane to the UK about 2 years ago.  This was before he himself had been tortured, and I remember being stunned at how casually he spoke about how his friends had been tortured.  Now he is just on the same footing as the rest of them.

 

We've had the World Cup Cricket on recently, alongside Morgan Tsvangirai's treason trial.  The army helicopters have been out and about, as have the riot police.  The American and German ambassadors were manhandled by police after arriving to watch the first day of the trial at court – as you can imagine, this did not go down well.

 

The food crisis continues.  There is no bread or milk in supermarkets at all, although luxury bakeries still have produce at much higher prices.  If one wants basic commodities, one has to use 'the network'.  Then if you're lucky, your 'contact' might call you once a week, and in whispers over the phone tell you that there is something for you to pick up.  This week at home we are eating butter imported from Australia (!), at an horrendous price.  So much for those of us who can afford butter – driving out of town, there are children picking up single grains of maize off the road.  At the railway station, street kids are killing sparrows to eat.

 

Fuel shortages and 50-car queues continue, although the situation has eased up somewhat because of  the World Cup and the government's well-timed 'hide-it-from-the-journalists' strategy.  Apparently there has been a fuel loan made to the government by Anglo American, which is enough to buy about a month's worth of petrol and diesel.

 

Economically, things are pretty bizarre.  Our dollar has devalued so much (at the black market rates) that everyone walks around carrying huge quantities of cash notes. Even some of the banks are using the black market rates. Yesterday my parents paid for the car service with a plastic-bag full of money. It's quite common nowadays to see people in the bank with suitcases and cardboard boxes!   Our hairdresser has put up her prices by 100% in a month.  Numerous retailers are just taking advantage of inflation (said to be at 500% by the end of this year) and putting on another 20% to goods every fortnight because people won't know that they're being conned, and will pay all the same, because no one can keep track.  There is no foreign currency to be found except illegally.  This means that even if someone had the necessary financial means to leave the country, they cannot convert it into US dollars, simply because there aren't any.  The government has imposed numerous measures in the last few months to monitor the movement of forex in minute detail.  They have also imposed all sorts of new rules in order to acquire as much of it as they can.  For example, all tourists have to pay for all tourist services (including hotel accommodation) in US dollars, sterling or rands.  In November, British tourists had to pay 30 USD to enter the country. By December, this had increased to 50.

 

This week I have been entering data on a computer at work.  It concerns people suffering from HIV and AIDS.  About 60 times over, I've typed in stats about widowed women who are supporting 5 children and 2 other dependents on a salary of £2 a month, and whose relatives have taken away from them their only property, including children's clothes. Government nurses are only earning about £15 a month.  It's depressing to say the least.

 

Reading about all this stuff the past two years has been one thing.  More recently, the ongoing trauma that this society is experiencing has made itself known to some of my immediate friends.  Last month a (white) friend of mine was arrested unlawfully after a property deal went wrong, and after he discovered too late that the man he was dealing with had all sorts of ZANU-PF connections.  He spent 36 hours in jail, whilst the officer who had locked him up conveniently disappeared with the key.  There was no evidence whatsoever that he was being held, or that he had ever been arrested.  The rest of police officers at the station maintained that what had happened was completely illegal, but that there was not much they could do about it.

 

A week ago, a (black) friend of mine was seriously verbally harassed at a bar for sitting with a group of white friends.   He thinks that his harasser may have mistaken him for the cricketer Henry Olonga who, alongside Andy Flower, made a courageous speech about 'the death of democracy' at the opening of the Harare World Cup cricket.  Flower has since then received telephone threats at all times of the day and night, and may have to leave the country for a while.

 

The clamp-down is extending itself more now than ever.  Even people at church meetings have been arrested.  In general, it is starting to sound like Stalin's Russia, as I was reminded the other day when I taught a few O-level history classes at a nearby school!

 

So, all in all, we are fearful most of the time, especially being white.  But life still remains the same in many ways, and we continue to live well (at least in material terms) amid crisis.  What is going on in the emotional sphere is of course another question.  I have no doubt that the troubles of the last few years are responsible for the ongoing illness and (non-political) death that seems to be prevalent here, especially from cancer.

 

So that gives you a flavour of how things are – I think the negative side of things is really starting to become apparent now that my initial 3-month excitement at being home is over.  But there are still things, people and places that we love here, and always will.  And so, for now, we stay and do our best to stay positive.