Back to the Borderlands

I've already granted my “global best customer service award” for this year to the Zambians. What an amazingly welcoming, polite, courteous, helpful bunch of people they are. I love arriving at airports which are small enough for one to walk across the tarmac to immigrations…including Livingstone. I was greeted by a beaming official with Handel’s Messiah playing in the background. [Note that in the departure lounge, there’s a man who sells colourful Zambian postage stamps, including a recent set to commemorate Queen Elizabeth’s birthday (!), whilst at the Sesheke border post, the vehicle tax officials sit in the shade playing chess. Oh the postcolony.]

Through some strange coincidence – especially given Livingstone’s prolific herd of blue taxis – I ended up meeting one of the same drivers that I’d met previously. He took me to a café to wait for my Namibian NGO friend Friedrich. On that sweltering afternoon, the Inter Tropical Convergence Zone, well, converged, as my friend Carol puts it. Amidst the rain showers we explored Livingstone’s huge Maramba market, hopping between muddy puddles and amused looks to buy sumptuous mangoes and bananas, and beans from Tanzania. Although dinner at the lodge bordered on disappointing, the fact that we were sitting right on the banks of the mighty Zambezi certainly made up for it. It rained hard much of the night; twinned with some particularly raucous frogs in all directions, my tent was quite the auditorium.

From Livingstone we drove 2 hours to Namibia, first to Katima and then on to West Caprivi. One of the first friends I made in West Cap, and one of the most dynamic women in her community, is dying of HIV/AIDS. Her illness was one of the main reasons for my visit. It’s easy to forget just how small a human skeleton is, until you see someone rendered unrecognisable in the advanced stages of this awful disease. Her limbs are the width of my wrists. Some of my feelings have been those of frustration and anger: why didn’t she take her ARVs properly? Why isn’t the hospital doing more, and why is there no doctor in sight? As another friend noted, it is impossible for the likes of us to know what it is like to be HIV positive and poor.

Overall, returning to West Cap for the first time in some twenty months, and for the first rainy season since ’06, was really special. I crossed paths with lots of old colleagues and friends. Life there goes on with the same old politics as ever. Friedrich’s garden in Buffalo is overflowing with herbs and his rather larger ‘back yard’ is frequented by two hippo, two bushbuck and an unusually tame francolin called Paul. There is a profound sense of earth, space and sky. It’s curious to find peace in a place which is a centuries-old trading route, a former military base, the site of land contestations, and currently a diamond prospecting zone. Something about it has drawn people from all walks of life, it seems!

Back on the Katima Fish Farm, which has expanded its quota of horses and goats, I shared a drink on the Zambezi with some of the new set and their plus ones – including an Afrikaans optometrist. A few years ago in Katima there was only one supermarket and one pharmacy, let alone an optometrist. I spent the night at Carol’s place in her absence. It can safely be described as its own ecosystem, an insect specialist’s paradise, in fact. Fortunately the American WWF lodger seems to have adapted very well. She drove me across the Namibia/Zambia border early the next morning. Her discussions with the border gate guards were hilariously minimal (“I’m just taking this lady across and then coming back, ok?”), met with a slightly bored laissez faire nod. No passport, no vehicle papers, no nothing. I love it.

The Mazhandu Family Bus from Sesheke back to Livingstone, as always, provided entertainment. In contrast to my earlier ‘African time’ departures, the Mazhandu Family Bus left promptly on this occasion at 7.07am. I was allocated a seat in the front row which, I later realised, appeared to be reserved for “special” passengers: an Indian doctor; a tall gent with a very bling necklace; my white self; and the two very stylish and made-up girlfriends of the bus driver and his trusty ticket collector. The girlfriends definitely didn’t look they hung out in dusty Sesheke too often and, having rapidly transitioned back to NGO-worker-with-grubby-sandals mode, I felt positively underdressed in their company.

Back in Jozi, the city is deep green from the rain, my potplants have just survived my absence, and the Hillbrow Tower seems to have unsurprisingly acquired some kind of giant football attachment. Life continues in Lonehill, surrounded as I am by complexes with names like ‘Plaisance’ and ‘Manhattan’, though my rather loud Shona-speaking and Nigerian neighbours regularly remind me that at least I’m in the African version of Wisteria Lane. Roll on 2010.

A Southern African Christmas: Zimbabwe & Mozambique

How pleasant to fly only 1.5 hours home instead of ten and, for the first time in a decade, not to be heading back into the frosty urban wilds of England. Needless to say, I bumped into old friends on the flight. We went straight from the airport for tea with friends on one of the few remaining white-owned farms, about 20km out of town. The road beyond Westgate is horribly pitted and potholed; another rainy season and many of the roads will look like Beira’s did at the end of the civil war. On the positive side, Harare is green and full of beautiful trees, fragrant blossoms, and the occasional road-crossing tortoise who, like other Zimbabweans, enjoys living life on the edge.

My parents hadn’t had any electricity for a few days. At first we thought it was ZESA trying to extort a Christmas-time bribe, but it turned out to be our uncooperative neighbours whose trees overhang the electricity lines, and which they refuse to cut. Anyway, it was back to the no-power routine which, because we can’t run the borehole pump using the generator at the same time as using any electrical appliances, means that the toilet cisterns have to be filled with buckets from the swimming pool. And/or if water needs to be pumped at night, the house mains need to be turned off. The family have it down to a fine art now…I just sit and watch, torch in hand.

The local economy is now fully converted to US Dollars and things are expensive – apparently it’s the only country in the world without its own currency. We didn’t spend much time mulling over politics. There are still lots of problems, and Mugabe lives on. I heard two first-hand accounts about him this trip, one hilarious and one shocking. That’s always the mix in Zim.

Anecdote 1: A white friend of my brother’s constructs carports. He received a call-out one day to take measurements for a carport in the Crowhill area. The woman on the other end told him to look for the blue gate on xyz road. Off he went, and drove up and down the road, but couldn’t find the place. He phoned the woman, saying, ‘I’ve driven up and down, but the only place with a blue gate is Bob’s [Mugabe’s] place’. She said casually, ‘Oh yes, that’s the one’. So off he went to Bob’s place, removing his shoes as instructed by the front door guards, only for Grace to enquire why he was barefoot.

Anecdote 2: Much less savoury. A black friend of mine who studies in the UK was driving in the same area a year ago, and failed to hear the president’s motorcade approaching a T-junction. The golden rule is that all plebs have to move completely off the road. The outriders had already driven past when she pulled into the road. The armed soldiers at the back of the entourage stopped, forced her out of her car and beat her before letting her go. She was due at a wedding two hours later as a bridesmaid.

Our departure for Mozambique turned out to be rather dramatic: we left at 4 in the morning, only to hit a huge rock on Harare Drive. Given the unlikelihood of a rock that size coincidentally appearing right in the middle of the road, and given that a car pulled out of a nearby road as soon as we stopped, we suspect it was some kind of near-hijack, but that they were discouraged by the fact that four of us then stepped out our vehicle. After a rocky start (no pun intended) we were able to borrow another vehicle and left a few hours later to navigate the Christmas kumusha traffic, with everyone returning to their rural homes for the holiday.

My brother smoothly negotiated our way across the Mutare borders with a good mix of Shona and Portuguese. We had expected a lot more bribe-seeking, but a friendly sandwich here and a packet of smokes there seemed to be the extent of it. In general all the officials were incredibly pleasant to deal with. The last time I crossed that border was in the opposite direction in 2002. There was no food in Zim and I was bringing in a big sack of maize meal for people at home, convinced that it was going to be confiscated. In those days the border searches were quite intense, but I just lay (literally) tight on my sack and grinned and it was all fine.

Mozambique’s roads now make Zimbabwe’s look run down…what a fast switching of circumstances. It was extremely hot. The bush there is lush and thick, with villagers on the roadsides selling cashews and pineapples in their multitude, plus a few trussed-up live chickens to add variety to the mix. And of course there are a few enormous lorries carrying loads of valuable indigenous hardwood – a pattern that is sadly now well established.

Our road journey to the tiny coastal town of Inhassoro took ten hours, and we arrived just in time for sunset. The coast is beautiful: mile after mile of blue water against terracotta cliffs, and then the Bazaruto Archipelago not far offshore, featuring brightly painted starfish, glittery reef fish and giant turtles. The next ten days were spent with some of the large number of white Zimbabweans who all flocked to Inhassoro for the holidays. [Apparently the Rhodesians used to do the same before Mozambique’s war]. All of them drive 4x4s of the nicest kind; in fact, too many Christmasses in Inhassoro and you would come to assume that a Toyota Landcruiser GX is a basic essential of daily life. I have to say the wealth-poverty mix (or, lack of mix) was all rather bizarre, though nothing new in Africa, and I doubt that tourism has established a good name there. That said, the local market was quite popular with visitors, and I indulged there in print fabrics and bagfulls of fresh coconut and pineapple.

We spent lazy hours in the 30+ degree heat sitting by the ocean with drinks in hand, children running and shrieking in the sand and tea-temperature waves. It was all so idyllic and yet from time to time I’d overhear disquieting words from the other end of the table: “Eight weeks in the intensive care unit”… “wounds to the head”… “brain damage”… “arm with wire”. There amidst the drinks and sound of the surf, Zimbabwe’s violent crisis continues for, amongst others, the Chegutu farmers who in my opinion have been foolhardy enough to stay on their land. It has now been ten years – whoever would have thought.

New Year’s Eve was also spent on the beach in the sultry night time air under a full moon and with a rising tide. How glorious it is to lead an outdoors life again. As for the white Zimbos, they were there en masse with more cooler boxes than ever before witnessed, some of which were inevitably acquired by the incoming tide whilst their distracted owners socialised. On leaving at 3am, our bakkie got stuck in beach sand, at which point those who were still standing all disembarked and, in true Zim fashion as if it were the most normal thing in the world, pushed the vehicle a hundred metres to the next exit road. In our inebriated state we failed to notice one of our crew fall flat on her face in the sand during this little endeavour. It was much funnier during the re-telling over breakfast the next morning. Finally, there was a fair bit of spilled vodka and coke sloshing around in the back of the bakkie which I unsuspectingly wallowed in all the way home -- in my white beach dress, naturally. A pre-dawn solo moonlight swim avec dress sorted out that little problem in no time.

Reading back through this post feels strange– the themes being decay, violence, inequality and alcohol, combined with exquisite natural beauty. Nevertheless, a window into the motherland and, in some ways, into the dying and insular gasps of white Zimbabwe…although history seems to show that they won’t ever actually disappear.