The Last Resort

by Douglas Rogers

  He showed Dad his ticket, which he said had cost Z$15 000. It had Drifters’ address, that day’s date, a lineup of speakers and bands, and the time: 3pm to late. It had even been advertised in the Manica Post.

  Dad was pleasantly surprised. Dawson had hit on a scheme to drum up some trade. Perhaps he wanted to keep the lease after all, give it another go, the old college try. My father loved an entrepreneur, anyone with an eye for business, and he thought all that Drifters needed to thrive again was a young man with a few innovative ideas. An AIDS party – that was just the ticket!

  They were about to direct the ticket holders to the camp entrance when Dawson himself appeared, scampering up from the camp through the tall grass and avocado trees, looking terrified, as if pursued by a pride of lions.

  ‘It’s crazy, Mr Rogers!’ he bellowed. ‘It’s crazy!’

  ‘What’s the matter, Dawson?’ Dad asked.

  ‘I have a hundred people at the camp saying they’ve bought tickets for a party here. There is no party! No music! No discussions on AIDS!’

  The man in the car produced his ticket and waved it in Dawson’s face.

  ‘I know – but it’s a trick! I didn’t write that. It’s a trick!’

  Which, of course, it was.

  Drifters had fallen prey to an elaborate con. Someone somewhere was running around with a lot of cash from selling fake tickets to an AIDS benefit. It was exactly the kind of publicity they didn’t need.

  But it wasn’t my parents’ problem. Dad locked the gate and left Dawson to sort it out. The ticket holders came close to burning down the joint that afternoon. Somehow Dawson managed to quell a riot.

  Now my parents were looking for a new tenant.

  At this point it might have been wise to lie low, to stay under the radar. For every farmer who thought it best to confront the regime, there were many more who deemed it wiser to keep a low profile; not draw attention to oneself.

  But it wasn’t in my father’s DNA to sit and wait. In the middle of that mortar attack on the chicken farm in 1978 he had run out onto the lawn with the FN rifle, shells pounding the earth around him, to try to shoot out the mine light that made our house so visible. So he decided to go back to work. He would become a lawyer again. Not for a client this time, but for himself. For thirty years he’d worked at solving other people’s legal problems; now he had to solve his own. He set himself the goal of either getting his title deed back or getting an offer letter for his own farm, and in so doing getting off the list.

  Mom thought this was about as likely as Hammy’s getting his farm back and Piet’s having his cattle returned. ‘It’ll never happen, darling. No one has ever got their deed back and no white person has ever received an offer letter.’

  In fact, she thought trying to do so would only make things worse. They argued about it up at the house for nights on end.

  ‘The more noise we make, the more attention we get,’ she protested.

  ‘Rosalind, we need to be prepared for them if they come.’

  ‘We didn’t own the property for the whole past year and no one came.’

  ‘But if they had come, we wouldn’t have been prepared.’

  ‘Maybe they haven’t come because they don’t know we exist. Doing this will alert them to our existence.’

  ‘But we do exist! I’m not going to sit back and take a chance we don’t.’

  They began to sound like African existentialists.

  And so, sixteen years after he had retired from the law, my father swung into action, an imaginary Rocky soundtrack in the background. It was what got him up in the morning, and in a strange way it invigorated him, made him feel more alive.

  He drew up a list of officials he needed to see and started to make calls. His argument was simple and legally accurate, even by the government’s own laws: Drifters was not suitable for resettlement and should not be on the list.

  He went to see Didymus Matongo, Margaret’s husband, their black neighbours. He knew Didymus was a friend of the provincial governor, and he asked him to arrange a meeting. But the governor said to see the provincial administrator. The provincial administrator referred him to the local land resettlement officer.

  Incredibly, the land resettlement officer agreed there had been a terrible mistake.

  ‘I can see the property was delisted,’ the man said, paging through a file. ‘And I don’t know why you had your title deed cancelled.’

  Dad was relieved, even excited. ‘So can you restore it?’

  ‘I can give you a guarantee you will not be moved,’ he said.

  ‘So give me a guarantee.’

  ‘I just did.’

  ‘Not a verbal guarantee – I want something in writing.’

  There was a long silence.

  ‘Sorry, I can’t do that.’

  No one wanted to put anything in writing.

  Dad wrote to the provincial land resettlement officer and his predecessor, the district administrator, and got no replies. He then met members of the Provincial Land Resettlement Committee that Chief Mutasa sat on – or, rather, used to sit on. He was shocked to discover that Chief Mutasa had had his own farm listed. Black farmers who didn’t belong to the ruling party were losing their homes, too. If a legitimate chief wasn’t safe, what chance did he have? Several weeks later a committee member finally told him that he would have to go to the Registrar of Deeds or the Ministry of Lands in Harare. Lands was the Top Man’s department. Dad called their respective offices. The lines rarely worked, and when he did get through, his calls were never returned.

  Where was the Top Man when he actually needed him?

  Then, at Mom’s suggestion, they changed tack and tried the tourism route. Zimbabwe has one of the biggest civil services in the world, and there are three tourism departments: the Tourism Ministry, the Tourist Authority and the Tourism Council. There were far more tourism officials than tourists.

  Drifters wasn’t suitable for farming, which is why it had originally been delisted, but it was also a tourist business, and hotels and guesthouses were supposed to be exempt, too. He set up a meeting at the annual Travel Expo in Harare with the top honcho of the Zimbabwe Tourist Authority (ZTA), who was due to speak there. The official was a no-show.

  ‘This wasn’t such a surprise,’ he wrote to me, ‘because everyone in the country knows the head of the ZTA is a famous fucking asshole.’

  It wasn’t hard to meet people, my father discovered, but it was hard to meet the top people. You had to earn the right to meet the chefs.

  He described the process as being ‘like entering a tall building’.

  ‘You start at the ground floor and are told to see the person on the first floor. Sometimes he’s in, sometimes he’s not. It’s best to arrive soon after the start of work, before they can start running around. At each floor, if you are lucky, you see the person you want to see, only to be told that you should speak to the person on the floor above. And so on, until you get to the top floor, when you are told to see the person on the floor below. And down you go again. It is a race against time – except you can’t see the person you are racing against. Is he in front of you or behind? Is he in the race at all? You don’t know.’

  The Mutare stand at the Travel Expo was vacant, but my parents were surprised to find a pile of Drifters brochures they had printed out in its 1990s heyday. They stole a bunch of them since it would make them look more official.

  Dad then contacted the Tourism Ministry. Weeks later he got to speak to a friendly-sounding woman, a Mrs Masinga, who said she was fourth in charge.

  ‘I feel I’m clutching at straws with the ZTA,’ Dad told her.

  ‘Mr Rogers. Why are you clutching at a straw that has already sunk? Come and see us – we are a straw that is still floating!’

  At last, he thought, a human being. Mom and Dad drove together to Harare again and met her at the ministry. Mom described the meeting to me in a long e-mail.

  ‘It’s a run-down Lubyanka in the centre o
f town, badly in need of paint or demolition. The power was off when we entered the lobby, but it came on as we approached the lift, which was just as well, since the lady’s office is on the twelfth floor. We waited at reception for half an hour while a very sweet secretary painted her nails and read the Herald behind an empty desk. Then we were summoned into a plush office filled with carpets and sumptuous leather armchairs and with a magnificent view of the streets and jacaranda trees below. If this was her office, I wondered what the minister’s office must look like. You can see where all our tourism levy money goes.’

  This time Mom did the talking, explaining their predicament. They had decided on the drive up that since she would likely start crying when she spoke, it might elicit more sympathy from Mrs Masinga.

  ‘Mrs Masinga,’ Mom began, ‘Drifters was a thriving tourist business and a great boon for the region and in fact all the country. It was made famous around the world in the pages of Lonely Planet. Here – have one of the brochures we’ve printed up for our new season.’ She handed her one of the 1998 flyers they had nicked. ‘Yet now we’ve discovered we are on the verge of losing it because our title deed has been cancelled. This is a terrible mistake, because as a tourist business we are supposed to be –’

  Then the tears came. She couldn’t help it. They ran down her face like rain and she choked up. ‘We are supposed to be exempt. And besides, isn’t it the policy of the country to attract people for the World Cup?’

  South Africa had been awarded the 2010 World Cup. The biggest sports event on earth was going to be held to the south of them, and tourist officials in Zimbabwe saw this as a potential cash cow. Mom and Dad thought it would help their case, too. Soccer fans might visit Drifters, bring in some cash.

  Mrs Masinga looked at Mom with sad brown eyes. It appeared she might cry, too. ‘Mrs Rogers,’ she said, ‘we are not all cruel and greedy people.’

  Mom suddenly felt terrible for making a scene. ‘So can you get our deed back?’ she sobbed.

  Mrs Masinga sighed. ‘For that you are going to have to see the Ministry of Lands.’

  ‘But they don’t answer calls and don’t write anything down!’ said Dad.

  ‘No, they don’t,’ she agreed.

  ‘What – you are aware of this?’ he blurted out.

  ‘Oh, yes. It’s their policy. They only have “conversations”. No minutes or notes. Please understand. They don’t want any written evidence of their deliberations during the land reform process to ever come out afterward.’

  It was a startling admission; they were stunned by her candour. Mrs Masinga said she would try to help.

  ‘Mr and Mrs Rogers, I will investigate this matter and write to the Ministry of Lands about your problem. I do not want you to lose your livelihood. But please understand, there is very little I can do with them.’

  They thanked her profusely and invited her to come and stay at Drifters, free of charge.

  As they were entering the lift Mom said: ‘Christ, I hope she doesn’t come. She’ll find out our livelihood comes from prostitution.’

  None of the officials my father met took minutes of their meetings, but he did. When he got home, and after every phone call, he meticulously wrote down in letter form everything that had been discussed, made a copy for himself, and then posted the letter to the person he had met.

  ‘This becomes a minute,’ he explained to me. ‘A record of what has been said and agreed. As they do not reply and dispute any of the facts, this letter becomes the agreed record. If our problem ever has to get to court, I will produce my letters as proof of what they said and agreed to.’

  Six months after he began his quest, he had a file as thick as a telephone directory. It would be his legal case for the future. It didn’t help him in the present, though. And so they waited.

  They had been paying so much attention to their legal situation at this point that they had lost track of all the comings and goings in the cottages. The demographics were changing fast.

  What had been an all-white enclave six years ago was now filled with black Zimbabweans. The only whites left were the De Klerks, the Hammies and a new refugee, a tiny eighty-two-year-old widow named Joy Wolf whose husband had died soon after they’d been assaulted and tied up in their home one night by war vets in the north of the valley. Dad said there were only six white farms left in the valley and only 350 left in the country, from a high of 4 500.

  The four engineers and technicians from ZESA had arrived to join Mr Mhlanga. They needed them. Power cuts were so frequent now that my father found he was writing up his minutes late at night on his desktop computer since it was the only time the electricity worked. That was when he would e-mail me, too. I would wake up in Brooklyn to long essays sent from the front lines of another world, detailing his daily struggle, his meetings, the impossible tedium of it all. Dad wanted a record for himself, but I also came to realise he wanted me to have a record in case anything happened to them. He had his file, and I had hundreds of e-mails he had sent me about what was going on.

  And yet my parents were rather pleased with their new community. The new tenants brought down the average age and added a certain vigour.

  Florence and Ernest Muzorewa had moved back to their farm across the road, but their twenty-four-year-old family friend, Macdonald, moved into number 4. Soon, two of Margaret Matongo’s sons, Trevor and Stephen, cool young hipsters in baggy jeans and sneakers, iPods permanently playing hip-hop, moved in with their partners, Zondile and Tsitsi. ‘Steve and Trevor remind me a bit of you at that age,’ Mom wrote. ‘They work on the farm for Margaret, and I suspect they can’t wait to get away. I told them you live in Brooklyn and they are excited to meet you. They want to know if you know someone called Jay-Z who lives there and another person called Mos Def. Funny names.’

  The last person they expected to find living in the cottages however, was a relative of the Top Man.

  They were doing their ritual walk one afternoon when they passed Cottage 12A. (My father, always superstitious, didn’t want a Cottage 13.) There, sitting on the veranda, shaping an elephant from a plaster moulding – a technique used in bronze sculpting – was a tall, slim black man in his early thirties. The green lawn of the cottage was filled with beautiful bronze sculptures of twisted baobab trees, antelopes and hippos.

  They introduced themselves.

  ‘Hi, I am Simbarashe ___. I am the new tenant.’

  Mom was delighted. An artist! She loved bronze work. She far preferred it to the generic soapstone carvings churned out by so many local artists, and she had a number of bronze pieces she had collected over the years. She asked if he wouldn’t mind coming up to the house one afternoon to show her his work.

  But my father, permanently on guard, noticed something else.

  ‘What did you say your name was again?’

  ‘Simbarashe. Simbarashe ___’

  He recognised the surname.

  ‘Where are you from, Simbarashe?’

  ‘Rusape.’

  His heart skipped a beat.

  ‘You’re not related to the minister, are you?’

  The sculptor smiled.

  ‘Yes, he is my uncle.’

  Dad steadied himself against a fence post.

  He had the distinct feeling the world was closing in on them again.

  But what could he say except ‘Welcome’?

  At this point, unable to make headway, he decided to try acting. Mom was the actress, of course, but Dad practised a set piece, channelling all the cheesy Hollywood cop movies and TV shows he so loved – Beverly Hills Cop, Starsky & Hutch, low-budget police and legal dramas he liked to watch on satellite TV. He acted out what he would say to the suited upstart he was sure would one day drive up to the house in a fancy car and present him with his offer letter.

  He rehearsed it so often Mom saw him talking to himself in the shed and thought he was going crazy. In the end, though, he had it down quite well.

  He told me how it would go.

/>   ‘“Gosh, what a surprise,” I’ll say. “So you have a letter, too! My goodness. Someone was here a week ago with the exact same kind of letter! This is very strange. What did you say your name was? Okay, Mr __, I will have to speak to the minister and ask him how this mistake came about. Which minister, you ask? Oh, the Top Man, of course. Tell me, where is your letter? Here – give it to me. As you probably already know, I am a lawyer. I will have to make a copy of it and show the minister when I see him. I think you should come back next month and then we can talk again.”’

  He knew he would tell any A2 who arrived at Drifters he was a lawyer. That was paramount.

  It was something he had come to learn: people were afraid of lawyers. The reason no one in any ministry wanted to put anything in writing was because they didn’t want a paper trail leading to them. This meant that either they knew they were breaking a law or perhaps they were guilty of something else. He reckoned that if he told the A2 he was a lawyer, this would make them even more wary. A lawyer was as good as a shaman out here. A lawyer might know the law better than any of them, and it might come back to haunt them one day.

  On 11 September 2006, two days before my father turned seventy, he received a surprise gift, a bolt from the blue. Actually, he got two gifts.

  Grace and I phoned to wish him a happy birthday and to give my parents our news: Grace was pregnant. The baby was due in April.

  The second gift, however, was more pressing. It came in the towering form of Oom Piet, who strode up to the house that morning looking younger than he had in years, eating up the metres in giant strides, as if he was still tearing for the goal line, fifteen All Blacks on his heels.

  ‘Lyn,’ he said excitedly, ‘Lyn – I got my cattle back!’

  Dad was writing up minutes in his study. He wasn’t sure he had heard correctly.

  ‘What’s that, Piet?’

  ‘I got my cattle back, Lyn!’

  Dad was stunned.

  They moved onto the veranda.

  ‘Jeez, Piet, well done. What, all of them?’