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.