The Last Resort

by Douglas Rogers

  The political fugitives Misheck Kagurabadza and the two Ps, Prosper Mutseyami and Pishai Muchauraya, have finally taken their seats in Parliament. A year ago they were on the run for their lives; today they represent their districts in a Parliament in which the MDC holds a narrow majority. Another remarkable event.

  Miss Moneypenny is still in Mutare, but no longer in the money-dealing game. Legalisation of the US dollar put an end to that. To those who know her, however, her legend is greater than ever. During the aborted election re-run she threw caution to the wind and became a financial facilitator for the MDC’s campaign in the east, risking her life to change foreign currency into trunkloads of Zimbabwe dollars for the MDC to use for food, vehicles, fuel and campaign funds. The risk of reprisals were considerable, and in the end it came to nothing. But Moneypenny is a dynamo, and I suspect she’ll find a new game. She still has her balloon-making factory and her golf.

  Of the tenants at Drifters, Piet and Mienkie de Klerk are still there, as is Hammy Hamilton, who remarried in early 2009. Dawson and Patricia also remain; their baby daughter Natalie, born in a Mutare hospital, will be one in November. Dawson is working for the same NGO, and Patricia is still teaching, now at the Dominican Convent in Mutare. Since the formation of the Gnu, teachers and civil servants are being paid once more, schools are re-opening and she no longer considers herself a ‘social worker’.

  Stephen, Tsitsi and Donelle Matongo are there, too, but, tragically, Trevor Matongo, Margaret’s oldest son, is no longer. Trevor was killed in a car accident in February 2009. His wife, Zondile, and son Romeo remain in the same cottage, though, and Zondile now assists Margaret in running the Matongo butchery, named ‘Romeos’, after her son. A few months after Trevor died, Zondile produced another baby, a girl.

  As I write this, Tendai Simbabure continues to run Drifters, although for how much longer I cannot say. He took a lease on the chalets in early 2009, but with dollarisation prices are high, and business poor. Few people can afford a trip out of town, a drink in the bar or a session on a mattress with a small house. And, of course, since the military crackdown on Marange, there are no more diamond dealers like Fatso to rely on.

  When I got word that Tendai was struggling, I sent him a note. I told him that my book about my parents and the farm was almost finished, and that it would come out in South Africa by the end of the year. I told him that people there might read about him one day, read about what he did here, and maybe they would want to come visit, meet him and stay at the camp. I reminded him of his dreams for the 2010 World Cup, of importing a big-screen TV to show games on the lawns of the lodge, just as they did in Germany in 2006. I said I would even help him import the big screen. But it is three months since I sent that note, and I have not heard back. I hope he manages to get the business going again.

  As for the two Johns and Naomi, they’re still there, too. But they have new jobs now. They are employed as coffee roasters for a growing family concern in the valley that sells medium-roast Arabica beans to restaurants and hotels in Harare. With the legalising of foreign currency, the owners of the business get paid in American dollars and the Johns earn good money by local standards. I hear that a gleam has returned to Agoneka’s smile. He has a new child now, too: a baby brother for Tariro and Confidence named Divine.

  And so, what of my parents? Did they come out of darkness, into the light?

  Well, hard as it is for me to believe, as I write this, they are indeed still there, still in their home and on their land, holding on as, it seems to me, they’ve been doing forever.

  Their telephone only takes incoming calls these days, but I speak to them regularly, and once a month Grace (now pregnant with our second child), Madeline and I Skype them and get to see them on our computer screen. I sent a laptop computer out to my Dad last year, and he drives around Mutare in his truck, screen open on his lap, looking for an unsecured wireless signal. Usually he gets one in a parking lot opposite an office block on Herbert Chitepo Road, a few blocks north of the Dairy Den.

  We last spoke during the nerve-shredding rugby series between the Springboks and the British and Irish Lions. Dad watched the games with Oom Piet, of course. ‘Christ,’ he told me after the Second Test, ‘I haven’t shat myself so much since the bloody war vets were here. Piet nearly had a heart attack. Do those players know what they’re doing to us?’

  My parents don’t get to see the two Ps, Pishai and Prosper, much any more, but they receive regular phone and e-mail updates from them on their progress in Parliament, and they remain, according to my mother, heroic optimists.

  My father did buy Pishai his first suit in the end, which he now wears to Parliament. Well, Dad didn’t really buy it. He couldn’t afford to buy Pishai a suit. But he knew a man at Drifters who he might be able to barter one off: Hammy Hamilton. Hammy was a committee man, after all – all those Commercial Farmers Union meetings he used to attend. Dad went to see him in Cottage 8, and it turned out Hammy did indeed have a new suit: a sober, charcoal grey pinstripe that he was prepared to trade.

  ‘What you want for it?’ Dad asked.

  Hammy thought about it for a while. ‘A six-pack of Windhoek, Lyn.’

  ‘Sounds reasonable, Hammy. You’ll have your beer next week.’

  And so a black MDC MP attends Parliament in the suit of a white Zimbabwean farmer who lost his land. ‘I don’t know what that means,’ says Dad, ‘but I like the sound of it.’

  Remarkably, my mother has a passport now, too, and for that she can thank her new Member of Parliament, Misheck Kagurabadza. She told Misheck her problem and he paid a visit with her to the passport office one morning and cracked some heads.

  ‘It was quite impressive,’ she recalls. ‘He marched in there and asked them who was in charge. Of course, no-one was. They were all just sitting around doing nothing. Well, he told them that if they expected the Gnu to continue paying their fancy salaries, they had better start jumping around and do some work.’

  A month later my mother had her document. She is, once again, a Zimbabwean citizen.

  Now it is my father who has passport troubles. Not Zimbabwean ones – South African ones. Soon after the Citizenship Act came in, he opted to let go of his Zimbabwe passport and keep his South African one, in case they needed that as a bolt-hole. But now the South African government had declared him a nonresident alien, and when his document expires in November, he will be stateless. ‘It never rains it pours,’ groans Mom.

  They are, however, healthy, busy and, in the scheme of things, lucky to be alive. They also have a new game now which is bringing them a little money at last: coffee roasting, the same business that the two Johns are employed in. In 2006, my father bought a second-hand, charcoal-heated coffee roaster and installed it in the outhouse where he had once stashed his marijuana supply. He made a few modifications to the machine, and it can now produce 150 kilos of medium-roast coffee beans a day. Coffee, it turned out, was a much better bet for them than dagga. In fact, according to Mom: ‘It’s a much better bet than chickens, wine, tourism and every other hairbrained scheme your father has come up with over the years.’

  They buy green Arabica beans from friends of theirs in the Vumba Mountains who somehow managed to keep hold of a section of their coffee farm. The Two Johns roast and pack the beans in the outhouse, and Mom and Dad deliver them to Harare twice a month. Incredibly, they are getting new orders all the time. Who could have known when they bought that machine that they would one day have one of only four functioning coffee roasters in the country? In fact, visit a hotel or restaurant in Zimbabwe today, and it’s likely the coffee you order has been roasted by the two Johns at Drifters, and supplied by my parents. Even my sister Stephanie has a coffee shop in Harare now, not far from my old school, Prince Edward, selling their Vumba roast.

  And yet my parents are under no illusions. They’ve seen too much in their lives to believe that this is the end of the nightmare, or that what will follow will be paradise.

 
‘What do you reckon, Rosalind,’ Dad asks my mother when they walk through the hills on the back of the land and gaze down on the camp, the cottages and the valley. ‘Is this place on the way up or down?’

  My mother smiles to herself, but she says nothing.

  She had a depressing reminder of the unpredictability of it all when she walked into the kitchen a few months ago and found her albino frog spread-eagled on the kitchen floor, perfectly dead, as if he had taken a dive off the egg rack. ‘I keep looking out for a relative or his reincarnation to turn up,’ she told me, ‘but so far, nothing.’

  And, for all they’ve been through together, they still have very different views on tactics, on staying alive and on facing the future. Just the other night the telephone rang and my mother answered it.

  ‘Hello,’ said the voice. ‘I’m calling from Cape Town. Is that Drifters?’ ‘What’s left of it,’ Mom said.

  ‘Do you have a room?’

  ‘It’s not what it used to be,’ she warned.

  ‘I’m coming up on business next week. Can I make a reservation?’

  ‘Well, as I say, it’s a little bit run down…’

  Dad heard her from the kitchen.

  ‘Come on, Rosalind!’ he bellowed. ‘Have some faith here. It’s open. Tell him to come.’

  Mom rolled her eyes. Then she took the man’s booking and gave him directions.

  ‘Drifters … the Harare Road … 19 kilometres outside Mutare … Hopefully we’ll still be here.’

  GLOSSARY

  bakkie: a small pick-up truck or van

  chef: chief (slang)

  chimurenga: revolutionary struggle

  CID: Criminal Investigation Department

  CIO: Central Intelligence Organisation

  gandanga: guerrilla or soldier (slang)

  Green Bombers: youth militia

  gweja: diamond digger (slang)

  kanjani: hello

  mahure: prostitutes

  MDC: Movement for Democratic Change

  mujiba: young collaborator

  ngoda: diamond, diamond dealer (slang)

  pungwe: late-night political rally

  sadza: maize porridge

  sekuru: grandfather

  shamwari: friend

  UANC: United African National Congress

  UDI: Unilateral Declaration of Independence

  ZANLA: Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army

  ZANU: Zimbabwe African National Union

  ZANU-PF: Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front

  ZAPU: Zimbabwe African People’s Union

  ZESA: Zimbabwe Electricity Supply Authority

  zhula: gem diamond (slang)

  ZIPRA: Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  This book would not have been possible without the cooperation of my parents and all of the staff and tenants at Drifters over the years. This is their book, their story, and while I don’t expect them to agree with everything in it, I hope I have done them justice.

  I’m particularly grateful to my parents, who answered several hundred e-mail, telephone and taped interview questions over the years, and then helped research and edit the book. My beautiful sisters Stephanie, Sandra and Helen were also always there for me. Thanks to Stuart, Holly and Michael Ingram, Marion Cundall, Melanie Hillebrand and Karen and Roland Rogers for family information that still surprises me.

  My agent, Heather Schroder, who phoned me within minutes of my daughter, Madeline, being born to say she wanted to represent the book, never let me down. Neither did John Glus-man, my editor at Crown, who took a leap of faith in buying it at a time when Zimbabwe was a little-known story. In the UK I would like to thank Vanessa Webb and Rebecca Nicolson, my editor and publishers at Short Books, and Elizabeth Sheinkman and Felicity Blunt, agents at Curtis Brown.

  I’m grateful to the gracious Dennis Pinto of Micato Safaris, who arranged a stay for me at Singita Grumeti Reserves in Tanzania, where I honed the idea for the book. Several friends helped me shape the proposal that followed. Thanks to Melanie Thernstrom, David Evanier, Andrew McCarthy, Julie Merson, Vanessa Mobley and Tom Downey.

  When the writing began, Karen and Damian Chmelar lent me their home on Shelter Island, New York, where the first chapters slowly came to life. Later, through my sister-in-law, Alison Rice, in Cape Cod, Didi and Mike McKimmey lent me their house in Barnstable Village, where I completed the final third of the book. In between, my desk at the Writers Room in Manhattan was my second home.

  In mining precious details for the story, Jacob Ginsburg of Bard College transcribed some twenty hours of taped interviews – a thankless task that he performed with great dedication. Sydney Saize in Zimbabwe, and Terence Mukupe, Simba Mhungu and Chris Showalter in New York, assisted with Shona translations. Andrew and Gary Pattenden, Eric Cross, John Wors-wick and Sandawana gave me valuable insight into Zimbabwe’s voodoo land and economic policies, as did Geoff Hill, author of What Happens After Mugabe, and Professor Ian Taylor. Alistair Ford in London advised me on the illegal diamond trade. And thanks – and zhulas – to Farai T.

  For those who assigned me stories in Africa that allowed me to travel back to Zimbabwe, I am eternally grateful. In London, Tessa Boase, Tim Jepson, Graham Boynton and Jessamy Calkin at the Telegraph; and Andy Pietrasik at the Guardian; in New York, the classy Heidi Mitchell at Travel & Leisure and then Town & Country, and the author Kate Sekules at Culture & Travel. Kate also commissioned Stefan Ruiz to take photographs. Stefan’s extraordinary portraits of the characters who appear in this book can be seen on my website douglasrogers.org, where this story continues. Thanks to the brilliant Karol Nielson at Epiphany for assigning me my first literary non-fiction story on my parents.

  Many friends contributed to the editing of various drafts. The author and journalist James Zug at times knew more what this book should be about than I did. I am indebted to him for his guidance and encouragement, and for the invaluable reading list he gave me, most importantly Laurie Lee’s As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning – for my money, the most beautiful travel memoir ever written. Gavin Heron spent valuable time he didn’t have editing the first draft of the manuscript. Judith Matloff, Rebecca Kenan, Jonny Steinberg, Michael Soussan and the inspirational Charlie Graeber all gave great advice along the way. Thanks also to two heroic Zimbabwean exiles, Gerry Jackson, of SW Radio Africa in London, and Annabel Hughes in Virginia, for their generosity and wry wit.

  At Short Books I would like to thank Emily Fox for her design for the cover.

  In New York my close friend and consigliere Tom Coleman was not only an early and consistent cheerleader for the book, but also enlisted the brilliant Ahmer Kalam who designed the frog cover concept for my website and blog. Alex Erasmus, Mike Long, Sandy Stokes, Deon Hug, Hermann Niebuhr, Michael and Kathy Kirvan gave invaluable support, and Sam Erickson took my mug shot.

  Finally, I owe my wife, Grace, an enormous debt. Having listened to me talk about writing a book for years, she then supported me all the way while doing it. She edited several drafts of the proposal and manuscript, too, and has, without doubt, the finest eye for the structure of a story I have ever seen. She has my respect, admiration and deepest love.

  As I write this in the summer of 2009, my parents are still on their land. Their situation remains precarious, however, as it does for all the other remaining white farmers and their workers in Zimbabwe. I would encourage anyone who reads this book to visit Zimbabwe and, if they can, visit Drifters. Pull up a stool, order a beer and tip handsomely.

  Douglas Rogers

  BROOKLYN

  AUGUST 2009

  About the Author

  Douglas Rogers is an award-winning journalist and

  travel writer. He was born and raised in Zimbabwe

  and now lives in Brooklyn, New York. Visit him at

  douglasrogers.org or email him at

  douglas@douglasrogers.org

  Copyright

  First publish
ed in 2010

  by Short Books

  3A Exmouth House

  Pine Street

  London EC1R 0JH

  This ebook edition first published in 2010

  All rights reserved

  © DOUGLAS ROGERS, 2010

  The right of Douglas Rogers to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

  ISBN 978–1–907595–11–0