We return home, where my mother has been doing some dramatic re-landscaping of the back garden. The flat-topped acacia that they planted over 15 years ago looms enormous and statuesque, with a full orange September moon rising softly behind it. There too the Lonchocarpus capassa that I planted from seed when I left for India. I believed that it could grow in completely the wrong geo-ecological zone, and somehow it did. And my dad’s Erythrina, with its heart-shaped leaves and red-bead pods. My parents joke about the garden’s resident birds being totally disoriented by the changes. The next day I simply sit on the verandah to be.
My time was short but we managed to squeeze in some wilderness. We drove five hours to Kariba, and then another two down unmarked dirt roads to the unsignposted Gache Gache Lodge. Needless to say we were among the rare visitors who arrive by road rather than by boat and, given the signposting situation, ‘twas a surprise we arrived at all.
En route, the country’s agricultural heartland – Chinhoyi, Karoi, Banket and surrounds – lies empty and full of weeds. Of thousands of hectares of land that we pass, at the start of the farming season, only one field was being prepared for planting. Now that the party has figured out how to get-rich-quick through the country’s diamond wealth, it seems there is much less impetus to bother about agriculture. What lies beneath the soil is currently what beckons. On the positive side, fibre-optic cable is being laid down the Chinhoyi road. Yes, that’s right – fibre-optic cable – as in, the internet. This can only be a sign of an economy starting to tick again, like other small indications of confidence: shopping centres in Harare repainting their shopfronts and our local municipality collecting waste for the first time in years. We laze at the slightly run-down lodge on dusty furniture to take in the warm expanse of Lake Kariba and the start of the dry season. A group of black Zimbabweans is having an extended visit because, having stopped off for lunch, it seems that their houseboat has forgotten about them. Every sandbank markets a 12-foot-plus crocodile, and there is a pod of hippos yawning in the water not far away. Parked at the jetty is a houseboat that used to belong to the Rhodesian government -- named Janet after the wife of Ian Smith, former white minority prime minister. I sunbathe on its deck, marvel at the ironies of history, and earmark the moment for my postcolonial travelogue.
The following day we take a late afternoon drive through the surrounding bush and its groves of baobabs, some sedentary, some dancing, each ancient. There is not much game about but we have drinks on a cliff overlooking the Gache Gache river and its distant curves. Only if you care to look, in the dust beside and all around us are shards of broken pottery: all that is left from the forced relocation of tens of thousands of Tonga people in the early 1960s to make way for Africa’s then-largest hydroelectric dam and an accompanying string of national parks. No surprise that some lions – the creatures in which powerful ancestral spirits reside – take this opportunity to start calling from several kilometers away, making themselves known to us.
A few days later I return to London for the first time in nearly ten months. It is a little more foreign than last time, but the sensation soon passes. I savour the chance to walk long and freely through familiar streets and parks. Wearing a coat is an enjoyable novelty. The damp gathers round the bases of trees just like it always did; London is as it should be.
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