The Last Resort

by Douglas Rogers

  ‘Can you take me up there?’ I said as we descended into Mutare.

  The hill was framed through the back window of the bakkie. The Commissar considered my request as we pulled up outside ZANU-PF headquarters.

  ‘Yes,’ he finally said, ‘but first we need to ask permission from the spirits. Come and see me at my house at two o’clock on Sunday.’

  ‘Which house would that be?’ Dad said, ‘your town house or your farmhouse?’

  My father had got in a late dig, but even so, their duel was a draw.

  And so it was that the following Sunday, half an hour into the 2006 Federer-versus-Nadal French Open tennis final, I drove across the road to attend a spiritual ceremony. Up on the hill my parents would be watching the world’s greatest tennis players on satellite TV; down in the valley I would be throwing bones.

  ‘Have fun,’ said Mom. ‘Tell him we say hello.’

  ‘Yes, good luck,’ Dad grinned. ‘Wish we could go with you.’

  I took a tape recorder and notebook. I was suddenly nervous. The Commissar had seemed amiable enough in the car, but he was a powerful ZANU-PF official. I was entering his realm. Some of his settlers could have been the invaders who assaulted Frank in 2001; they were certain to be the poachers who’d cut down my father’s game fence and killed his zebra and antelope. How would they react to me, the son of the white farmer across the road who shot at their dogs and had chased them from the eland? I hoped Saddam and Becks would be there. I was at least on nodding terms with them.

  I had never seen Frank’s farmhouse when he lived in it, so I could make no comparison, but it was a hovel now. The windows were broken. Chickens were shitting in a doorway. A snotty-nosed baby cried in the backyard. A mongrel tied to a fence post howled and then yawned. I wondered if it was one of the dogs the settlers used to hunt.

  I found the Commissar addressing nine settlers seated in a circle on the ground in front of a mud hut erected in Frank’s garden. He was instructing them to go to the other occupied farms in the valley to get the settlers to choose headmen who would now report to him, their new leader. I hadn’t expected agricultural college, but this was a Soviet-style lecture, all about war, peasant struggle and the Commissar’s power.

  ‘Only those who are committed should be chosen,’ he was saying. ‘Bring names of people who are troublesome to me. Then I will know if they came here for land reform or not. If they did not, I will deal with them. If they are not members of the party, then I will know. I will deal with them.’

  As for the settlers, they were a sad, listless, defeated bunch, hardly the fearsome war veterans I had half expected. Five were youths in their early twenties, as bored as the yawning dog. Saddam was there, eyes down, fiddling with a stick. There was no sign of Beckham. Perhaps he’d found his way to a TV and was watching the French Open. I caught myself wondering what the score was.

  An old man in a tweed cap and tweed jacket next to the Commissar was the spryest of the lot. He smiled at me. He cut a dapper top half, huntsman to hounds, but his bottom half let him down: ripped trousers and muddy, laceless brown shoes. Three old women, skirts emblazoned with the president’s face, sat off to the side on reed mats. One of them was fast asleep.

  The Commissar nodded at me and carried on talking.

  After half an hour the meeting broke up and the younger settlers ambled off drowsily to their scrubby plots marked out by stick fences at various points on the land. Tweed Jacket and the three old women stayed behind.

  The Commissar said: ‘Some formalities. Before we ask permission from the spirits to go up the mountain, we need to approach the elder. We will go see him and then we will return for the ceremony.’

  ‘The elder?’

  ‘The elder is the most senior man in the valley.’

  ‘How far away?’

  ‘It is short. Eight kilometres. We can drive.’

  He instructed Tweed Jacket and the women to wait, and we jumped in Dad’s bakkie.

  We drove sixteen kilometres west and turned left onto a rough dirt road. The bakkie lurched over rocks and anthills; there was barely space for an ox-cart. We came to a clearing outside a brick shack and a circle of huts where an old man sat alone under the shade of a giant knobthorn tree. He wore tortoiseshell glasses, the bridge held together with a Band-Aid. One of the lenses was shattered. He was blind in one eye. His bad eye had the good lens. He looked up as we approached, and nodded. I didn’t know how he could possibly see us. He was thin as a rail, over six foot five inches tall if he stood, and as ancient as the branches of the tree above him.

  The Commissar knelt in front of him and clapped three times.

  ‘I am with the son of our neighbour, Mr Rogers, and we want to visit the burial ground of the ancestors,’ the Commissar said.

  The old man smiled. He had a mouth like a rusty can, with six jagged teeth. They spoke in Shona for a while. I could make out the name Rogers several times.

  ‘What did he say?’ I asked when I heard it the fifth time.

  The Commissar looked at me quizzically.

  ‘He asked if your father is Mr Rogers the lawyer.’

  My heart jumped. What did this guy know about my father?

  ‘Yes, he is. What did he say about him?’

  He spoke to the man in Shona again. The quizzical look returned to the Commissar’s face. He seemed surprised at what the old man was telling him.

  ‘He says your father represented him once. In court. A legal issue.’

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. This old black man had been a client of my father’s?

  It must have been for a liquor licence. My father began specialising in liquor licensing in the 1970s. Back then, few white lawyers represented black clients, but my dad did, and he soon built up a base: licences had to be renewed every year. By 1990 he was processing so many that he couldn’t walk down the main street in Mutare without some black tavern owner or buxom shebeen queen coming up to shake his hand, ask him how he was. The very first manager at Drifters had been a former client: a formidable Shona woman named Maude Magondweni who was built like a late-period Aretha Franklin. When her husband divorced her and stole her bottle store, Dad offered her the job at Drifters, a task she performed with fierce distinction, terrifying most of the black male workers. In 1998 Maude left to care for her daughter, who had AIDS. She died soon thereafter of a heart attack.

  ‘Was it about a liquor licence?’ I said. ‘Did this old man own a beer hall?’

  The Commissar shrugged.

  ‘No. He said your father represented him during the war.’

  ‘Over what?’

  ‘Some court issue with the gandangas.’

  My heart pumped faster.

  Gandanga is Shona for ‘guerrilla’ – a ZANLA soldier.

  ‘What about the gandangas?’

  The Commissar smiled at me for the first time. He seemed suddenly impressed.

  ‘It appears this old man was accused of supporting the guerrillas during the war. He said your father defended him. He said you have permission to go up the mountain.’

  I recalled the words of my mother: They have long memories. They know who did what in the war, and they know who is doing what now, and a thought occurred to me. If this elder, whom even the Commissar had to respect, remembered that my father had defended him many years ago during the war, then perhaps he had some say in whether the land invaders would take Drifters. Was he protecting my father? I walked over to the old man and shook his hand. He smiled that tin-can grin and looked away, cackling loudly. Then the Commissar and I drove back to Frank’s place to get in touch with the ancestral spirits.

  The ceremony was held in the hut in the yard. It was cool and dark inside, with a smooth mud floor and a clay ledge around its walls. I sat on the ledge next to the Commissar. The three women sat on reed mats in the gloom opposite. I was introduced to Tweed Jacket, who sat cross-legged in the middle of the floor.

  ‘This is my nephew,’ said the Commissar. ‘I s
ummoned him from Mozambique when I became headman. He is older than me, but in our culture he is still my junior.’

  The nephew was tasked with summoning the spirits. He pulled a leopard skin over the shoulders of his tweed jacket. On the floor behind him, leaning against the wall, was a pangolin skin. In front of him was a small pile of pebbles, bones and bits of dried maize. He closed his eyes, threw the bones and pebbles on the floor, as if rolling dice, and started chanting in Shona in a slow, sonorous voice as the three old women began to clap their hands, slowly, in time.

  The hut suddenly seemed to get cold. In the darkness, one of the old women began to burp loudly over the chanting. The spirit was appearing through her.

  The Commissar said: ‘The spirits require a token to proceed.’

  ‘Do they accept US dollars?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, that’ll be fine.’

  ‘I thought it might,’ I said.

  I handed him a five-dollar note and he passed it on to the nephew. The nephew put it in a chipped enamel bowl next to him and resumed his chanting. The three women clapped in unison, and the burping lady burped ever louder.

  The Commissar spoke again.

  ‘Our forefathers, we have a visitor, Mr Rogers, the son of our neighbour Rogers, who wants to know about our history. We are asking permission to see the burial ground.’

  In the darkness of the hut, the burping woman suddenly ceased burping.

  ‘Mr Rogers?’ she said, her voice high-pitched, incredulous.

  ‘Er, yes,’ I replied, trying to make out her face in the gloom.

  ‘Douglas?’

  I almost fell off the ledge. Tweed Jacket opened one eye, then the other. The dull, blank face of the Commissar slowly turned to stare at me, then at the old woman.

  ‘Do you remember me?’ she squeaked, her teeth gleaming in the dark.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I can hardly even see you.’

  ‘I am Gracie Basket,’ she said. ‘I was looking after you when you were seven years old.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I was looking after you when you were seven years old,’ she repeated. ‘Don’t you remember?’

  ‘No, Gracie, I don’t.’

  ‘I was taking you from your home Friday to Mrs Russell’s house, and on Monday we make breakfast for you and Michael and then take you down to the road and Mrs Rogers collect you to take you to school.’

  I realised that I did remember some of that. The Russells had been our neighbours down the hill from the chicken farm. Michael, their son, was my best friend. They had a television. I used to love staying weekends at the Russells’ house. I could watch TV: Lassie, Batman, Hawaii Five-O…

  ‘How is Helen?’ she asked.

  Christ, she knew my sister, too!

  ‘She’s fine, Gracie. She lives in London. My wife is called Grace.’

  ‘You were seven years old, I was fourteen,’ she said mournfully.

  She was only seven years older than me. She looked ancient.

  ‘So what are you doing here, Gracie?’

  ‘I am a settler,’ she said. ‘A new farmer. Now that I have land, I don’t have to work for white people anymore.’

  I gulped.

  The Commissar turned to me and smiled.

  Douglas,’ he said, ‘this is good. You two have a history together.’

  He had called me by my given name for the first time.

  ‘This woman,’ he said, ‘I had to fight tooth and neck to make sure she was allocated a piece of land here. Lo and behold, she is my best farmer. She is better than all the others. You should see her field. She has good maize. But these others …’

  He waved his hand dismissively, as he had in the car with Dad when complaining about his settlers. Tweed Jacket gazed sheepishly at the floor. Perhaps he wasn’t producing the goods. The ceremony had lost its impetus. Everything appeared to be fine with the spirits. We made a date to go up the mountain in a week’s time. Gracie and Tweed Jacket would come with us.

  The Commissar walked me back to the car. I was still in a state of shock. He seemed pleased at how things had turned out, and smiled again.

  ‘So tell me, do you have farming activities in America like we have here?’ he asked.

  I stifled a snigger. ‘Um, I wouldn’t say it works exactly like it does here.’

  He shrugged. ‘I agree. There have been mistakes. Believe you me, there are advantages and disadvantages. But please understand. Us Zimbabweans are a good people. A kind people. Only when pushed …’

  He paused, then redirected his thought. ‘So tell me,’ he said, ‘what did you think of the ceremony?’

  We had reached the car. I still had no idea what to make of the Commissar. He was clearly a bright man, but he was also a manipulator, if not an out-and-out con artist. I thought of his diatribe at the settlers: If they are not members of the party, I will deal with them. I thought of the dismissive manner in which he spoke of his nephew: He’s older than me, but he is still my junior. But most of all I thought of my five bucks in the enamel bowl. I knew he would be getting it.

  Then it hit me – what I had to do.

  ‘The ceremony was great,’ I told him, ‘really great. I tell you what – if you did it for tourists, you could make a lot of money. A lot of money. Do you know that my parents’ place is a tourist business? There are none now, but if things get better here the tourists will one day return and then you can charge them a lot of money for a ceremony like that. Usas. American dollars.’

  A tiny ember burned in the back of the Commissar’s brain.

  ‘Say hello to your parents, Dougie,’ he said after a while, but his mind had wandered off to a bright and prosperous future.

  ELEVEN

  Miss Moneypenny

  THE ANCESTRAL SPIRITS had taken the last of my money, and I needed more. A few days after the ceremony my father took me to meet his money dealer in town.

  The condition of Mutare shocked me now, its decay a pitiful reflection of the country as a whole. The main street, Herbert Chitepo Road, ran tired and ragged through the centre of town, its asphalt potholed and yawning, the untamed roots of blazing flamboyant trees and pastel-flowering jacarandas buckling its pavement. The tops of the parking meters had all been beheaded, stolen long ago not for the worthless coins inside them but to smelt down the metal and sell to traders in Mozambique and on to China. Metals were a prized commodity: the aluminium street signs had all been ripped away, too. They made for good coffin handles. The city was eating itself. Once-elegant shop fronts looked on in vacant resignation, their shelves mostly empty, the display windows deserted.

  Commercial activity had moved from the shops into the streets and parking lots, where young men, crafty urban hustlers, whispered like drug dealers as you walked by: ‘Bread’, ‘Oil’, ‘Sugar’, ‘Soap’. They had to keep their eyes peeled for the police, who regularly beat and arrested them, but then the police and the ruling party ran much of this illicit trade anyway, and took bribes from those they didn’t control. An entirely informal economy had sprung up; the black market ran the show.

  ‘But where do people get any money to buy these goods?’ I asked Dad. We were driving through the Indian quarter now, toward the industrial estates on the southern outskirts. ‘Eighty percent of the country is unemployed. Aren’t they all broke?’

  ‘Remittances,’ said Dad. ‘There are now three million Zimbabweans living outside the country. Everyone needs a relative outside sending back foreign currency. That’s how they survive. They can transfer it through the banks, in which case the government takes a big cut, or they can exchange it on the black market and get a much better rate.’

  The world would soon come to know all about Zimbabwe’s hyper-inflation. The figures were flabbergasting. Companies had to use smaller fonts to fit budget calculations onto a balance sheet; people walked around with bulging rucksacks and suitcases full of cash – Zimbabwean wallets. Shop clerks wandered the aisles of their stores changing the prices of goods twice a day,
while customers, carrying pocket calculators to add up their costs, tried to stay one step ahead of them.

  Inflation had spun out of control as a direct result of the land invasions. In breaking its own laws and dispossessing its own citizens, the state not only destroyed the sector of the economy that provided fifty percent of its foreign revenue, but it also frightened away foreign investors. Without foreign currency to pay its bills, the government simply started printing money. Then more money. And still more. Once they started, they couldn’t stop; it became an addiction.

  In turn, the currency black market had boomed because the Reserve Bank set the local currency at a fixed rate against the US dollar. It was currently Z$101 000 to US$1 – ridiculously low. Only the chefs, the fat cats – ministers, bankers, senior ruling party officials – could buy US dollars at this rate. The black-market rate was a more realistic gauge of the strength of local currency: Z$300 000 to US$1, three times the official rate. In two years it would rise to two thousand times the official rate – which, incredibly, was how the government wanted it. Conventional wisdom said that inflation and the collapse of the Zimbabwe dollar would finally bring down the government and cripple the leaders. The opposite was true: the worse it got, the better it became for the chefs.

  Dad explained why.

  ‘The chefs buy US dollars at the cheap official rate. They take that money and exchange it at the black-market rate. Then they take that money back to the bank and buy US dollars at the cheap rate again. And so on. Within a few dozen transactions they can become millionaires – in US dollars. And they don’t have to do any work!’