Return to Zimbabwe (Part 1)

8 to 27 July
Editorial: Yes, another! This is an over long Journal piece; in part because, probably unnecessarily, we provide a broad brush summary of the recent events that shaped the country we were travelling through, but in the main because we felt that through our impressions recorded in the Journal, we were providing a window into a country that has not seen much tourism of late, particularly by British passport holders, and has been in the news for all the wrong reasons for the last decade or so. We hope you find our comments about this lovely country and its badly served people interesting.

Zimbabwe Part 1

Second Crossing
Entering Zimbabwe had not got any cheaper; joining a queue of lorry drivers it took nearly two hours to part with about £90. All payment recorded in biro on the sheet of a ledger fast becoming full and the biro borrowed with a smile, used and then, having been ‘accidentally’ pocketed, returned with a sheepish grin. After a final check of the contents of our fridge by yet another ‘official’ dressed, as all the border officials were, in scruffy civilian clothing, we were through and heading for the Nyanga National Park, deep in the nearby Eastern Highlands.
First Impressions
The tarred road was in surprisingly good condition, the BP and Total service stations we passed obviously had fuel and the people we saw were reasonably dressed and shod, unlike the Mozambicans we had seen hours earlier. Indeed by general comparison the Mozambicans looked the poorer, this surprised us as we had heard and read so much about the plight of the Zimbabwean people. Mutare, the first major town on our route, did little to change our initial impression; we knew from other travellers that the town’s supermarket shelves and those of shops in general were once again reasonably well stocked. We passed an immaculately maintained cricket ground, complete with stands and pavilion; nearby on rough, ankle high yellowing grass a group of children were playing a dusty game of cricket; dress was optional and there were sticks for stumps, however both batsmen were wearing pads and wielding mean looking cricket bats. It all brought a tear to the eye!
The Eastern Highlands
From Mutare a steep climb up the escarpment brought us onto the vast plateau that stretches for hundreds of miles across central and eastern Africa. Before us, their peaks piercing a sea of soft shades of yellow and green, were the mountains of the Eastern Highlands; what a dramatic and complete change from the coastal plain that was southern Mozambique. Huge grey glaciated granite domes, their light grey colour reminding us of those in California’s Yosemite National Park, punctuated the distant crags and mountains. Sun blessed valleys were dotted with trees and small settlements that were a mix of small, brick or breeze block built one story dwellings and rondavels, close around them a compact patchwork of small fields. With each rise in the road higher than the one before, we were still climbing and the temperature was dropping fast; soon a pleasant 21 degrees centigrade was a distinctly chilly 13 degrees, to make matters worse a sheet of low threatening grey cloud was moving over us and obscuring the sun.

 Glaciated domes, Eastern Highlands 

School’s Out
By now it was late afternoon and on the dusty paths beside the otherwise deserted mountain road, groups of school children were making their long way home on foot; a daily round trip that for many was invariably calculated in miles. Again in a surprising contrast with Mozambique, the children wore smart uniforms, most were well wrapped up against the winter chill in fleeces and coats and all seemed to have on shoes and ankle high white socks. A major investment by dirt poor parents in their children’s future; an investment which, having met an impoverished Zimbabwean teacher working as a hotel receptionist in Mozambique, the government appeared to be failing to match. 

Between areas of yellow grassed moorland, huge commercial plantations of alien pine and eucalyptus covered the hillsides; the mature trees pressed like a spiky, dark green tide up towards the crags and stood in dark unending ranks against the road. As we drew ever closer to Nyanga it was becoming a race against time; grey clouds had become black clouds, rain was threatening and the temperature now 10 degrees. Not cold by European standards, but for us ‘Africans’ these were near arctic conditions and we agreed camping was out of the question. 
Money MattersAs a result of serial criminal mismanagement over the last decade, the Zimbabwean currency effectively no longer existed; it had been replaced by the greenback. The only other currencies that could be tendered in exchange for goods and services were those of South Africa, Botswana and the UK. This was very much a ‘good news, bad news’ event for us.

The good news was that the demise of their currency and its rampant hyper-inflation had brought stability and goods to the high streets of Zimbabwe and had been instrumental in allowing us to include Zimbabwe in our East African route home. The bad news was that we were short on dollars and long on South African rand and we discovered that for all transactions involving a government agency .. such as when we crossed the border or visited a national park.. the rand was pegged to an extortionate official exchange rate for the dollar. Unsurprisingly this official fixed rate had become the high street benchmark too; another piece of bad news to leaven the good! In effect we were about to be ripped off to the tune of fifteen percent every time we used our rand and Nyanga National Park would be no exception.

 Valley near Nyanga NP, Eastern Highlands 

Nyanga National Park
The small, one storey, brick and stone national park headquarters appeared out of the gloom at the end of what had once been a graded gravel track and was now more of a pot holed and very uneven piste. The entrance barrier had long since gone and the small gravel covered car park was fighting a battle with nature that was all but lost. To one side of the headquarters office stood a sad line of park vehicles, all rusting, on blocks and wheel-less. Inside, the office showed all the signs of ten or more years of lack of investment and the desperate attempts of the staff to ‘make do’. Everything looked dated and ‘tired’ ; the fading black and white photos that could have been taken by Ian Smith; the diorama, badly in need of restoration, with flaking paint and missing place name cards; and the framed list of animals to be seen in the park, yellowed and some of the pictures so faded as to be almost invisible.

The two smiling park rangers manning the desk were immaculately turned out and so very helpful and considerate and so desperately apologetic. As soon as we began to book into a chalet, one rushed off to light the log fire (you see ... it was cold!) and ensure that ‘his guests’ would be warm and comfortable. Documentation and payment completed, he then escorted us to our chalet, built in the same style as the headquarters office, and explained how everything worked. Or didn’t in the case of the electricity supply; with the supply ‘on-off’ at night and none all day on Tuesdays and Thursdays. But, as he pointed out with a beaming smile, today was Wednesday and there were candles in the kitchen!
Decision Makers
With a pressing need to get to Harare before the weekend to visit a bank, to change euros into dollars, and to get extended car insurance, our exploration of the park on 9 July (Happy Birthday, Nick!) was restricted to a morning during which we completely failed to reach either of the viewpoints we had planned to visit. We had only added Zimbabwe to our itinerary some four weeks earlier, after meeting Peter and Bronwen Biles, a charming English couple who were camping beside us at Hazyview. Based in Johannesburg, Peter worked for the BBC and Bronwen spent time in Zimbabwe working for a charity there. As a result both had considerable knowledge and understanding of Zimbabwe, the country and its people. It happened that they were on their way back from a holiday combined with charity work in Zimbabwe and so were able to give us an update on the situation there. Peter and Bronwen helped remove any residual doubts we had about the safety and morality of a visit with their infectious enthusiasm for the country and its hard pressed people. Thank you for your advice, without it our experience of Southern Africa would have been much the poorer.
No Views is Bad News
As a result we were doing everything a bit off the back of a fag packet (cigarette packet, Americans please note!). We had no guide book, only a very old and torn map of Zimbabwe given to us by the owner of one of the South African Backpacker places we had stayed in. On the map were highlighted ten or so points of interest for tourists. One, called World’s View, was in Nyanga and where, from the edge of the escarpment overlooking the plain running to Harare, was a ‘panoramic view so wide and a horizon so distant’ that allegedly we could see ‘the curvature of the earth’. When we arrived in the general area, there was no track, no sign and no view; just an expanse of windswept moorland. We drew another blank with a waterfall and viewpoint miles from World’s View and looking in the opposite direction, back into Mozambique. This time the park staff had given us the route, but just as we could catch tantalising glimpses between the trees of the lip of the escarpment a couple of miles away, a fallen tree completely blocked the unmaintained track .. so near, yet so far!

Frustrated ..yes, but not disappointed; the fantastic scenery, a seemingly infinite and sun clad African version of the best areas of the Brecon Beacons in Wales, more than compensated for the failures. We did have one success; a visit to the summer residence of Cecil Rhodes about 500 yards from our chalet! What superb views Rhodesia’s founding father must have had from the veranda over the landscaped slopes below to the mountains beyond; views that, despite the encroaching forestry plantations, are a draw for those who stay at what is now a lovely, rambling, one storey Victorian hotel.

 Main verandah,Rhodes' summer residence Nyanga NP 

To Harare
After a late picnic beneath a monolith, looking for all the world like a Henry Moore sculpture perched precariously on a rocky plinth, we passed a pleasant afternoon dawdling ..to extend the life of our cheap Mozambican fuel as much as possible.. along pot hole free, tarred roads that were deserted of all but pedestrian traffic; a never ending succession of people walking, perhaps for days, pushing this, or carrying that under an arm or perched on their head.

By 3pm we began looking for somewhere to camp, either in the grounds of a lodge or hotel, or in one of the infrequent areas of unpopulated bush. One potential bush camp site seemed worth investigating only for it to turn out to be ‘no good’ on closer inspection; after which we left the main road and followed a rough sandy track to an Anglican mission. St Faith’s Mission was not quite what we had expected; unlike the Catholic missions in West Africa it was really a collection of schools with accommodation for borders; not somewhere for a quiet and trouble free night!

We stayed on the track looking for another site. We found none, just a maze of small farmsteads and settlements, eventually, and to our horror, we were brought back to the main road close to where the ‘no good’ bush camp site was. By now it was heading towards five o’clock and so we decided to take a second look; going further from the road we found a perfect, secluded spot in a glade amongst the trees and covered in a spread of four foot high yellow thatching grass. Now, why couldn’t we have done this the first time, Peter!

It was a clear and very cold night and in the morning the dew sat on the tent reluctant to evaporate under the early morning sun. A damp tent securely stowed, we began the morning’s journey to Harare. Once again the combination of a perfect road and little or no traffic was very noticeable; years of government ineptitude had created a combination of poverty and fuel shortages that led to a near car free society, allowing a surface that probably dated from the days of UDI in the mid 1960’s to survive in near perfect condition.

Reminders of that period of troubled and undemocratic white rule lined the roadside; vast uncultivated fields, now peppered with rondavel settlements and patches of subsistence agriculture, were still enclosed by the rusting remains of fencing that once marked white settlers’ ownership of African land. Lines of telephone wire running between posts made of iron to thwart the destructive appetite of termites, harked back to an England of 40 years ago, and were in stark contrast to an Africa and its Africans elsewhere, now linked by an explosion in cell phone ownership and technology that had yet fully to reach Zimbabwe.

There was also a series of police check points to negotiate; with British passports we expected the worst but without exception, if they didn’t just wave us through, the police were polite and correct and just checked our car insurance and Peter’s driving licence. At many of the road junctions were groups of people attempting to hitch a lift, to travel. In every other African country the ubiquitous minibus taxi augmented any public transport system that existed; here, in an indictment of the government and its policies, taxis were few and far between and the public transport service very sketchy to say the least. A report in a Zimbabwean paper highlighted the plight of those in the countryside, particularly the more remote areas; after walking for miles to a main road, they quite literally had to wait for days before getting a lift, so bad was public transport and so few were private vehicles.

 A rare sight on an otherwise empty road,enroute Harare 

Harare
As we drew closer to Harare the uncultivated fields, covered in encroaching savannah and small acacia trees as nature reclaimed the land, gave way to an untidy sprawl of commercial and industrial development; most premises decrepit, with hand painted signs; others, belying the years of a country in freefall, modern and imposing.

We booked into a self catering complex in the Harare suburb of Avondale and, after a quick picnic outside our ‘apartment’, drove into the centre of the city. It was not large and really quite compact, with few of the tall buildings normally associated with a nation’s commercial heartland. The low traffic density made navigating to the main Barclays bank relatively simple and by the end of the afternoon we had dollars in our vehicle safe and a new vehicle insurance document in our folder. The yellow six inch square document or ‘Yellow Card’ as it is known, would provide us with third party vehicle insurance cover for all the countries that were members of COMESA, an acronym for the commercial union of most of the states in East Africa, in effect insuring us up to the Egyptian border; an absolute boon for the overland traveller and a disaster for the car insurance hawkers inhabiting border crossings.

Spending most of the weekend in Soprano’s, a dear little cafe-cum-restaurant, making use of the wifi to contact family and send Journal items to The Web Master, we saw little of Harare. By late morning on 12 July (Happy Birthday, Carlo!), after a final visit to Soprano’s, stocking up at a supermarket in the King George shopping centre and then at some roadside fruit and veg stalls, we were leaving Harare behind and on our way north to the banks of the Zambezi River and Mana Pools National Park.
Of Relics, Ruin and Revenge
At the risk of boring repetition ..and when did that ever stop us!.. the tarred road was in good condition and virtually traffic free. And ..once again.. we were passing the relics of an era of large scale, seemingly almost country wide, highly productive farming; mile after mile of rusting angle iron fence posts, the fencing wire that linked them long since gone, lined both sides of the road; road signs, rusting and faded, warned of non-existent cattle and farm machinery crossing the road ahead; and both grain silos, their lines of huge grey concrete tubes now empty, and tobacco drying sheds, surrounded by the rusting remains of security fencing and the red brick buildings becoming dilapidated, incongruously still dominated the landscape that they were once an intimate part of.

 Roadsign,no longer relevant,enroute Mana Pools

Black Zimbabweans had returned to the land. There were collections of thatched roofed rondavels at intervals along the road; some set back in what were once fields, others set along long jacaranda avenues, leading from the gateless entrances, where a sign once proudly proclaimed white ownership, to distant and now dilapidated farmsteads. Sometimes, close by would be some cattle or a few goats and always the settlements would be surrounded by a small area of land cleared for subsistence farming.

It also became apparent that there was little if any farm machinery, from tractors through combine harvesters to irrigation systems, that was not in anything other than a sorry state of disrepair. Those who had come by the farm through state sponsored theft were untrained and unprepared for the demands of industrial farming, if interested at all; sometimes the departing white farmer was able to leave the machinery for his trained farm workers to take on, only for them in their turn to be evicted by occupiers untainted by white association. The lack of working farm machinery was another indictment of the policy makers who, with scant regard for those of their fellow countrymen who were trying to maintain some limited form of productive farming, signally failed to provide any support or credit scheme that would allow people with little or no capital or experience to keep the machinery in working order.

 The only tractors we saw enroute Mana Pools 

We were saddened by what we saw, not by a desire to turn the clock back, far from it, but by the palpable and criminal failure to create a viable solution to the problem of land ownership. With victory in the struggle for independence and democracy and the end of the inherent exploitation and institutionalised racial inequality that characterises any colonial or neo-colonial period, there should have come a recognition of the need to balance on the one hand the justified claims of Zimbabweans to the vast tracts of tribal land they believed had been stolen from them, against on the other, the need to continue, in some form or other, the hugely profitable agricultural industry white tenure of the land had created.

In black Africa and with some justification, white farmers with roots in the colonial era were always in danger of being on a hiding to nothing. Zimbabwe was no exception. To the victorious majority these farmers were thieves who had stolen their land; seen as its supporters and main benefactors, they were inextricably part of the despised period of white rule; and, as a defeated minority, an imperialist fifth column. The white farmers thus lacked political clout and were easy political prey. Added to this was the fact that returning the land to the people had been a rallying cry in the struggle to overthrow the Smith regime; those fighting against the regime, including those now in positions of authority, had been promised, and now expected, land in return for their ‘sacrifice’.

To the cost of all Zimbabweans, there was no black leader of Nelson Mandela’s stature and the land ownership problem was solved by those endowed with a complete lack of foresight and statesmanship. The better white farmers should have been encouraged to stay for the medium to long term under some form of stewardship scheme; instead greed, corruption, violence .. sometimes lethal.. and ‘pay-back time’ were the order of the day. Agricultural production imploded; the rural economy, no longer primed by the trickle-down wealth of white farming, began to collapse and a net food exporter became dependent upon food aid as those in the country, particularly the rural poor, starved, some to death.

Despite this, the issue of land ownership still resonates for some of those in power in Zimbabwe. We watched on state run television part of an address by a surprisingly eloquent President Mugabe at the state funeral of a military leader of the struggle for independence. A large part of what we heard was a well crafted diatribe on the continuing threat of the imperialist nations, linking this to their historic support for ‘kith and kin’ over farm and land ownership. His conclusion, which showed a complete lack of any sympathy for the remaining white farmers, reaffirmed the need for the land of Zimbabwe to be in black Zimbabwean hands. He really gave the impression of a man caught in a time warp, fighting yesterday’s battles under the banner ‘forward into the past’, at the expense of Zimbabwe’s future. Here endeth the lesson!