My brother, Duncan, arrived from the UK on Good Friday for a three week holiday. Originally he’d booked on Emirates the day before the Gulf war started but took up the offer of a full refund rather than take a chance. Asked what he thought of his flight on Rwandair he replied that it was just fine and the planes were relatively new. I am not sure how he justifies a holiday given that he’s retired. Maybe it’s our weather that’s so attractive – which it is when compared with the English weather. I was especially pleased to see him as he’d brought me a mixed pack of cheeses which can be found in Zimbabwe but are notoriously expensive. Oh, yes, we do get along well too. Our sibling rivalries of our teenage years are long past.
Left to right: my aunt Helen (97), brother Duncan (70), self (66).
The following day was my aunt, on my mother’s side, 97th birthday party. She’s doing well for her age and still lives by herself albeit with a carer. Unlike me she doesn’t need to use a wheelchair, just two walking sticks. I also walk with two sticks but on occasions such as this find a wheelchair easier. Most of her family were in attendance as nobody can be certain how much longer she’ll be around.
My mother’s side of the family seemed to either live a long time – brother Anthony to 94, Helen 97 so far – or not. My mother died of melanoma at 67 and her other brother Steven died at 72 from prostate cancer. Not much is known about my father’s family. He was an only child and no father is listed on his birth certificate. A scandal in our family – quelle horreur! Us siblings were delighted and my sister Diana, who died at 62 from breast cancer, noticed this and asked my mother about it but the curtains came down. The man whose surname my father inherited died on the Somme in 1918 and my father was born in 1925. It’s not that my mother was prudish but she was born in 1925 and some things were not up for discussion. She once asked me if I would consider marrying a woman who’d lived with someone else. I replied that I’d be seriously restricting my choice if I were to apply that criterion. She looked thoughtful for a moment then said: “Yes, I suppose so”.
She was a strong woman my mother. My father was murdered in 1978 and bled to death outside the front door within three metres of her (she was on the other side) and she could do nothing to help. It was near the peak of the Rhodesian bush war and civilians were fair targets for the combatants/terrorists of Robert Mugabe’s ZANLA and Joshua Nkomo’s ZIPRA. Understandably she didn’t talk much about it but did say that flying on the air force helicopter into Umtali (as Mutare was known then) she recalled that the countryside being beautiful by the light of the full moon.
The quintessential Zimbabwe bush scene – a sandy road, miombo bush.
We decided to take a trip to the Eastern Highlands of Zimbabwe. The district of Nyanga, where our parents had met in the early 1950s, was to be the first port-of-call, but Duncan wanted to call in and visit Kerry Stanger, near the small town of Rusape, who has a crowned eagle nesting in her garden. Some of her fantastic photos can be found here. Her husband John farms a variety of crops including tobacco and pecan nuts and is looking to put in chili peppers for export to China. Unusually for the area, he has managed to keep a fair proportion of his original farm and as a title deed holder is looking to invest in a solar farm with a Dutch company. He also has a dairy!
I couldn’t access the observation point where Kerry takes her photos of the chick that she calls JJ. He/she was not cooperating so they didn’t get a clear view anyway. We did enjoy the views of the unspoilt countryside of granite rock outcrops or “kopjes”, grasslands and bush-veld.
Straight on to Nyanga village, right to Troutbeck Hotel and up to World’s View.
The road from Rusape to Nyanga was quiet and all the potholes had been filled – with sand. It was a pleasant trip and we even saw a black mamba snake crossing the road. Fortunately it was close to a police roadblock and I was going slow enough to easily avoid it. This was a relatively small one at about 1.5m but they can often get to 3m or more. Duncan got out of the car to try and get a photo. He seemed to think that they would only attack if cornered. That maybe, but as Africa’s largest venomous snake I was pleased that it had quickly moved off.
The evening view from Venus Cottage where we stayed
The road from Troutbeck Hotel up to the Connemara lakes is in very poor shape. We arrived at Venus Cottage where we were staying just in time to capture the setting sun reflecting in the clouds covering Mt Nyangani, Zimbabwe’s highest peak. It was getting cold enough for a fleece (for me at least) and the fire was lit.
The World’s View range: background – Nyangui, middle ground – Rukotsu, right – World’s View
After my mother died in 1992 I moved back from the Chinhoyi (central west) area of Zimbabwe, where I was working on a flower farm, to her cottage in the mining village of Penhalonga on the Mozambique border about an hour south of Nyanga. I was keen to try to earn a living doing freelance programming for the agricultural sector. After a couple of years and merely subsisting I closed shop and moved to formal employment near Harare. I did however get hooked on paragliding whilst in Penhalonga.
Gary and his family lived at the top of the Penhalonga valley, close to the Mozambique border. One day he called past the cottage and said “I am going paragliding, come along, you might be interested”. On the local training hill I watched him lay out his wing, inflate it and step off the slope into the air. I was entranced. “I just have to do that!” I thought. I duly did a course and bought my own wing.
We had three flying sites in the area; Penhalonga, the Honde Valley to the north and then World’s View further north again. The World’s View takeoff, to the right of the picture above, faces west and when the wind blows from that direction can deliver extraordinary flying.
Not long after I learnt to fly I went with Barry, who’d taught me to fly, and others to World’s View. It looked good so we launched into what we found out later was convergence* and conditions were extraordinary. We didn’t have to look for thermals – the lift was everywhere, smooth and strong. We were carrying variometers (an instrument with audio and visual rate-of-climb and sink indicators and an altimeter) so we knew both how fast we were climbing and how high we were. At 1,000m above takeoff the terrain below looked completely flat. Barry had to go back to Harare so we landed and I went home to Penhalonga. We had many good flights at this site but none that quite matched that day. My love of paragliding never dimmed and I went on to fly in South Africa, France and the USA where I famously had to be rescued by a US Navy marines helicopter! *Convergence in meteorological terms is when two airmasses converge and the air is forced up. Conditions can be fantastic for soaring in dry weather but in summer storms often develop along the convergence line.
The view from the plot that my mother bought in the early 1950s. The mountains in the distance are in Mozambique.
The following day we took a trip to the plot that my mother had bought not long after my parents were married. The intention was that one day they’d retire there and relax and enjoy the view, which is fantastic. It was not to be. My father was murdered as a result of the bush war in 1978 and my mother died in 1992. She left the plot to both myself and Bridget Galloway (Hamilton) whose parents mine befriended in the area in the 1950s. I realized that I was never going to develop the land so sold my share to Bridget some years ago. She has built a very rustic cottage and lives there by herself with no apparent need for any sort of security – not even a fence around the cottage.
The road to the plot was awful. It took us an hour to cover the 13km and in two places we used four-wheel-drive. It probably wasn’t necessary but it made life easier. Bridget had told me earlier when I’d asked about the condition of it (she was working elsewhere when we arrived) that in March heavy rains had made the road impassable for three weeks. When at school in Mutare we used to make monthly trips to the plot and even then the road wasn’t great but still passable to any vehicle with reasonable clearance.
A bit of rudimentary transport taking a breather whilst we were blocked by a truck loaded poles. No doubt it could have negotiated the road when other transport found it impassable. The oxen looked in good condition.
On the way back from the plot we had to wait twenty minutes for a logging truck to finish loading with poles. Duncan, being an ex truck driver in the UK went to speak to the driver. He marveled how the truck managed to negotiate some of the tighter corners on the road and even had turned around.
Sometimes it’s easier to negotiate the tight bends with something more appropriate even if it doesn’t carry much.
We called in at the Troutbeck Resort on the way to see Barry (the one who taught me to paraglide) who was working there helping refurbish a conference room – he’s a professional carpenter. We reminisced about our paragliding days over tea and beers and came to the conclusion that our paragliding days were over – neither of us could afford a bad landing – but hell, we’d had a lot of fun. I still fly a paramotor on occasion but it doesn’t really compare with the thrill of catching a thermal and feeling the glider pitch into the lift and the variometer start to squeal. So far as I know there is nobody flying paragliders in the country. The World’s View takeoff is overgrown as is the Honde valley takeoff to the south. There is another site on the Zambezi Valley north of Harare and I had amazing cross country flights there but access was problematic even then.
Venus Cottage where we stayed, looking west. It’s comfortable and has been refurbished since we last stayed there.
The next day we left the cottage and headed back south to Mutare. On the way there we stopped off to see Sue in the Imbeza valley where she lives on a smallholding. Together with my mother, she was one of the founder teachers of Hillcrest Primary School closer to Mutare. She also lost her husband in the war in the Cashel valley south of Mutare where they were farming. Farmers were especially vulnerable and Tim was ambushed near the farm apparently in a case of mistaken identity. One of his sons found out many years later that the target was another farmer following behind him.
My brother Duncan and Sue. She’s a spry 80 year-old, still living by herself.
Then it was on to Mutare to meet up with Gary (the one who introduced me to paragliding) and his family. After a pleasant afternoon chatting and catching up (they don’t often come up to Harare) we headed into the nearby Bvumba mountains to the White Horse Inn for the night. On the way we passed through the centre of the city and I was pleasantly surprised at how clean it was.
Approaching the White Horse Inn in the Bvumba mountains close to MutareSorry no tie – me flouting the dress code. Marianne (my wife) recounted how many years ago the then manager, David Graham, had given her partner a tie to wear for the dining room as he wasn’t carrying one. They are much more relaxed now – we did ask – even shorts are permitted!
The decor of the inn is still very much as it was 50 years ago. Duncan sent photos to an old school mate who’d lived in the area and said it hadn’t changed since his youth. The staff were very pleasant, the food good even if the service was a little slow and the rooms comfortable. It scores a well-deserved 4.3 stars on Trip Advisor.
The next morning the mist was down as befitting the name Bvumba which refers to the “misty mountains” so we had a relaxed breakfast and started down the hill to Mutare.
“No one and no place left behind” says the slogan on the banner on the sports ground fence in Mutare. That’s Zimbabwe’s president. E.D. Mnangagwa on the left. The slogan is more than a bit ironic considering that a third of the population faces food insecurity but the ruling party (ZANU-PF) wants to increase the president’s term beyond the stipulated two of five years each. There’s a referendum coming up on this issue so the slogans abound as does the intimidation. Everyone expects the result to be fixed in favour of changing the constitution.
The drive back to Harare was uneventful with none of the heavy trucks forming nearly impossible to overtake informal convoys. Duncan drove like a good Zimbabwean driver – overtaking on solid white lines, pushing into small gaps in the left lane and cutting in front of a car in oncoming traffic in Harare. He needs to work on the speeding bit though. He kept to the 120 km/h limit all the way and even used cruise control so he only qualifies for a provisional licence! It was a good trip with plenty of time to reminisce about our distant youth and catch up with old friends.
The unstabilized power is frequently unusable. Just after this photo it spiked to 260 volts.
It became evident soon after we installed the solar panels and inverter that we were going to have to do something about the terrible power quality. Most of Zimbabwe has erratic power supplies. Called “load shedding” it’s really just a statement about the government’s ineptitude in supplying power to the nation. The national supplier, ZETDC (Zimbabwe Electricity Transmission and Distribution Company) is a subsidiary of Zimbabwe Electricity Supply Authority (ZESA) and is the sole distributor of power. Other subsidiaries, also government companies, are responsible for sourcing power. It’s a mess and a major driver of the private sector embracing solar power. We have a friend who works for a company that installs industrial sized solar systems and she tells us that they cannot keep up.
Our problem is not power supply per se, but a wildly fluctuating voltage. We have been told that we are on the same part of the power grid as a “person of influence”, i.e. a political fat cat, so we don’t often get intentional power cuts though faults are not uncommon especially during the rainy season.
We installed the voltage protection unit (VPU) pictured above to protect the solar inverter from the voltage which we have seen anywhere from 280 volts down to 160 volts. It simply disconnects the supply outside of the safe range of 190 volts to 240 volts. During the day the supply is often above this range and at night it falls below. We can hear the VPU switching on and off in the evening and the lights flicking as the inverter takes over. Most of the time it is merely tedious but on occasion the voltage goes low for so long that the solar battery goes flat and the lights go off. Especially in cloudy weather when the solar battery never fully charges.
Over the years I have acquired a reasonable collection of woodworking and other power tools. These are in the spare garage next to the cottage in the garden and most can run off the cottage solar system. The planer/thicknesser and it’s accompanying dust collector cannot as they draw too much power so must run off the mains supply and the voltage fluctuations would destroy the motors very quickly. The planer is a very useful machine and because I am so dependent on it very little happens in the woodworking sphere these days.
Whilst I knew that voltage regulation units (VRUs) that supply a constant voltage existed, I had researched them on the internet and found that they tended to be large and very expensive. I asked my friend Barry, who is a professional carpenter, what his solution would be. He has liquidated his company he has no large machines but I thought he might know someone who did. It turned out that he and his partner had just installed a relatively small VRU in a flat that they’d bought and were available locally for less than US$1,000. So I got hold of the company and started asking questions, lots of them.
Having ascertained that I would need a 15kVA regulator and that the warranty would be valid for a year they couldn’t give me a clear answer as to whether it would be valid, or what would happen to the unit, if the voltage went outside the maximum rated supply of 250 volts. Asking around led me to another hardware outlet but they were only interested in selling the VRU and had little backup and simply wouldn’t answer the voltage range issue. A chance conversation with one of my cousins and with an electrician that he knows led me to call Richard of ElectroTronics and he answered all my questions.
ElectroTronics is based in the Southerton industrial area of Harare. Once a bustling hub of industry it’s a lot quieter than I remembered (I had no reason to go there for quite a few years) but was surprisingly clean. The roads were mostly good though the one past ElectroTronics was in very poor shape.
Richard, owner of ElectroTronics in his warehouse
Richard is a very trim man, not looking at all like his 70 years and he assured us that he’d been in the business nearly 50 years. His small warehouse was impressively well stocked, indicating an active business, and he happily gave of his time explaining the principles of VRUs. The one we’d opted for was essentially a variable transformer. “Of course they are made in China” he responded to my inevitable question. “I could sell you that Italian-made one for 18 times the price but these work just fine” he added (we paid $900). He has sold VRUs to all manner of customers including hospitals, laboratories and factories. The biggest was 1,000 kVA. “I back up and repair everything I sell and if it’s a genuine part failure I will honour it outside the warranty”.
Richard showing off the finer details of a servo driven AVR – yes it was being repaired.
Having got the AVR home my brother Duncan noticed some cosmetic damage to the case. I sent in pictures to Richard and asked if it would jeopardize the warranty. He apologized, said no, and the machine was replaced that afternoon. I was VERY impressed!
The AVR is installed in our kitchen (the only place where it can be easily placed to supply regulated/stabilized power to the whole property) and my woodworking machines work just fine! However, a VRU can obviously only work when there’s power and the next day there was none. Fortunately a WhatsApp message to the local faults department led to a prompt replacement of the problem fuse in the nearby sub-station. We’re back in business!
Smoke. Everywhere smoke from incessant bush fires started to clear lands or smoke out bees or just plain carelessness. Every year Zimbabwe burns as does the rest of southern Africa – 760,000 sq. km in 2023.
Glowing ember sunsets and reluctant red sunrises. The latter so dull that one can, with binoculars, safely see the sunspots. Lots of photo opportunities to be had.
Dust. Everywhere dust. A patina of dust on my desk every morning. The dashboard of my truck covered in dust. Motes of dust in my home office – drifting lazily down in an afternoon sunbeam.
Wind. September is the month of wind. Driving leaves, bending trees and driving the dust. Leaves and ash swirling on the garage floor. When I sailed we always used to look forward to September for the excitement of the gusty weather. In my paragliding days we’d think of other things to do though the calmer days gave good thermic conditions.
Colours. The blazing colours of the new growth on the musasa (Brachystegia speciformis) trees. If one is lucky and catches a day of relatively little smoke it is possible to photo the spectacle. I never have. One has to drive up to the Eastern Districts to get the best displays.
Our Dendrobium orchid has been particularly impressive this year.
Cool nights and warm days. Yesterday morning on ART farm it was 5°C at 6 o’clock and 29°C by midday. My fleece jacket has been washed and hung up in the cupboard until April. I am still sleeping in the bed but October will just be hot and I’ll sleep on top.
New growth. Our roses are a blaze of colour (admittedly we have been getting professional help). Everything is growing fast in the nursery. A customer for whom we are growing cherry peppers commented that he’d never seen such good seedlings. I’ll take the credit…
Our roses are looking good this spring. Marianne has commented that we need a few more yellow ones.
Bees. It’s bee swarming season. A swarm has been in one of the catch boxes hanging under the eves of the second garage for a few weeks now. It will be collected by the Mike the bee man (he runs a commercial pollination service) and we’ll be given another jar of honey that we don’t eat. In the meantime they’ll forage in the garden and elsewhere before being taken off to work. We don’t mind being a bit of a bee holiday camp.
The Erythrina lysistemon (coral tree) trees has showy flowers too. This one was dripping nectar – literally!
Dry. Of course it’s dry and it will be desperately dry by the time the rains arrive in November. Our lawn is crisp. The flowers and vegetables get water but there isn’t enough for the lawn so it just has to wait. It will green-up soon enough when the rains start. It will get a little fertilizer help too and then it will need mowing weekly.
We grow our seedlings in compartmentalized expanded polystyrene trays. The cells are filled with a growing medium, in this case coir pith, and a seed is placed in each cell and grown out to maturity. This can take as little as four weeks in summer for tomato seed or up to four months in the case of gum tree seedlings as seen above. A seedling is deemed mature when it can be pulled from the cell and the roots hold the medium in a plug which will remain intact until it can be planted into the field. It also needs to be tall enough to be planted easily and not so tall that the leaf area will tax the roots ability to take up enough water in what, for the plant, is a stressful transition. There are other criteria that need to be met such as hardness of the leaves but that’s getting boring.
Being made of polystyrene the trays are light and rigid, which makes them easy to handle. It also makes it easy for the plant to grow its roots into the polystyrene which makes the seedling difficult to pull out of the tray. New trays have a smooth surface which is difficult for the roots to penetrate but as the trays age their surface becomes pitted and the plants’ roots can penetrate the polystyrene. To reduce this effect we dip the trays in a solution of copper oxychloride and water soluble glue. This creates a localized toxicity in the tips of the roots which stops them growing into the polystyrene and serves to sterilize the tray. Mostly it’s effective but as the tray ages and the surface becomes rough the roots grow into it anyway. The buildup of copper over many uses of the tray also causes a more general toxicity in the plant which can manifest itself as leaf discolouration and poor growth.
This general toxicity is most evident in gum seedlings as discoloured leaves and poor tip growth though in other seedlings it manifests as a general lack of vigour. I have noticed this for some years and when new trays are bought there was a noticeable “new tray effect” which I couldn’t really nail down to anything specific.
The coir pith we use is a by-product of the coir industry in India and other Asian countries. It’s the cork material that’s left over when the fiber has been extracted for ropes and mats. It has no nutrients in it so all must be added in the form of various chemical fertilizers. Organic we are not. This means that there’s little space for error and small changes in the formula can have major effects. Fortunately most of the work in this type of horticulture has been done long ago, albeit on other media, so it’s not as hit-and-miss as it may sound. Unfortunately I have a tendency to fiddle to try and get just that little bit of extra performance out of the system.
So when the gum seedlings started to become discoloured some years ago I put it down to something I’d done to the fertilizer formula. Thinking that it was a phosphate toxicity I designed a simple experiment. I bought several new trays, made sure they weren’t dipped in copper, then mixed differing quantities of single superphosphate that we normally use into the coir pith and grew out the gum seedlings. They were all good seedlings including those that should have had toxicity symptoms and those that had no single superphosphate added at all. It was that “new tray effect” and I knew it had to be the copper dip.
In Zimbabwe trash recycling is not a vibrant industry. There is a large municipal dump that I drive past on the way to work with a large warehouse building on it with “RECYCLING PLANT” painted on the front. Whether any recycling actually happens there is unknown. It’s part owned by one of the President’s sons but that’s a topic for another blog post. The old polystyrene trays we use end up on this dump site and add to the general pollution. It bothers me but the alternative is to import plastic trays from South Africa and they are very expensive and would likely not be recycled either. So I buy more of the local trays when I have to.
The gum seedling in the above photo is a good one. Though still young it has good root development, good leaf colour and good growth. It’s a product of a new tray – part of a batch that I bought earlier this year to replace older trays that were causing the copper toxicity symptoms. I have been seeing a general malaise in the tomato seedlings we are growing in old trays and should really replace them too. But there’s a problem.
I lease part of a property that supports my landlady’s ornamental nursery, another tenant’s rose nursery and the landlady’s son’s container rental business. The remainder of the property, some 10ha, is not utilized largely because we are in a bad area for sub-surface water and the three boreholes would not support irrigated cropping of any sort.
The 400ha of land on the boundary of “our” land is owned by a politically connected person whom I will call G. She acquired the land some time ago and set about building a wall around it. This is not just any wall – 3m high it has, a reinforced concrete core, a course of bricks on either side, pillars every 4m and topped with cornicing. It’s 9km long (measured on Google Earth) and is estimated to have cost US$500 – US$600 per metre. At a minimum $45 million G has clout and access to capital. So it was not without concern that we waited to see if the wall would include “our” property. It stopped either side.
My landlady’s son decided that the best way to make the property less attractive to acquisition by G and her ilk would be to develop it. Half the property was duly sold to a development company for construction of high density housing on condition that they changed the title deed to “development” rather than “agricultural” which is less attractive to the likes of G.
This development means that I will lose about a third of my current capacity and access to two boreholes that provide the bulk of my water. Remaining viable in a business that relies on large turnover on low value items/seedlings is going to be a challenge. So do I invest in new trays?
I was initially told that I would have about two years use out of the current two boreholes and that was six months ago. My landlady has had another two drilled on the remaining property but they are not very prolific. Uncertain times but to throw in the towel now on the premise that my business will fail would be defeatist. Tomorrow I will place an order for 2,000 new trays.
Replacing a borehole motor in a borehole that ran dry
That the borehole motor was burnt was obvious. The metal casing was blue, there was oil in the water and it wasn’t pumping water. But the reason? The borehole in question has given me endless trouble. It has gone through more than a few motors over the years. We thought we’d finally got it solved last year when it became evident that the old steel borehole casing had rusted away and was collapsing and dumping mud into the pump. It was re-lined with a PVC liner, the pump and motor replaced and I thought our worries were over for the foreseeable future. I was wrong.
Marianne suggested I try contacting Allan, listed on my phone as “Borehole Repair Recommended”. When I described the problem he was straight forward – “Is the pump protected against running dry?” When I answered in the negative he said “That’s your problem. The pump controller you have installed does recognize when the pump is dry but it doesn’t work that well and the pump inevitably cooks. At this time of year (it’s winter and the dry season) the water levels drop and the pumps inevitably run dry. Get yourself a smart controller with liquid level detection and your problems will be over”.
There’s a irrigation equipment supplier close to my business so I paid them a visit to get a new motor and whilst there asked if they had an intelligent controller. Whilst perusing the manual I noticed Nathan, a plumber, who’d done the plumbing on our new on-suite bathroom, was also there. When he heard what I was looking for he recommended going to a nearby hardware store for the controller – “I have personal experience with them and I know they work” he added. I took his advice and installed the new pump and controller and, after decoding the bad Chinese English in the manual, managed to get everything working.
A mere two weeks later Fabian (one of the foremen who does the maintenance amongst other tasks) came to me with a long face and reported that another borehole had stopped working. I told him to get the pump and motor up and sure enough, the motor had all of the characteristics of being burnt. Another trip to the supplier, more cash changed hands, and this time I came away with a replacement motor and two intelligent controllers – including one for the third borehole that I was hoping to preempt the motor burning out.
It all seemed straight forward at first – after all we’ve had plenty of practice at getting borehole pumps and motors up and changed. This one was no different but the intelligent controller just wouldn’t cooperate. The motor drew current like it was working but nothing else happened. Allan was mystified – “I’ve never had a problem like that” so I just had to take a deep breath and book one of his teams to come out this Friday and have a look.
Driving back from work at lunch time I took a more scenic route than usual past the old Mount Pleasant golf course. It hasn’t been used for that purpose for many years now and is largely over grown. It’s not prime development land being low lying and very wet in the rainy season so is untouched – for now. Houses adjoining the area seem to have good ground water and sprinklers were merrily whirring over verdant verges oblivious to (or ignoring) the Harare City Council’s directive that it’s illegal to do so for, make no mistake, Harare is running dry.
Harare’s main water supply is Lake Chivero to the south-west of the city. It is downstream and it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to grasp the scale of the pollution. It’s nothing new, as an eight year-old child I attended a sailing school on the reservoir and can remember a deep revulsion of the state of the water. It recently made headlines when four rhino and various other animals at a lakeside national park were killed by the polluted water. Very little of the available water in the lake now makes it’s way into the Harare water supply. It requires pumping and there’s seldom power to do that and the water purification works have long ago fallen into disrepair. So in true Zimbabwean fashion we’ve had to “make a plan” – usually in the form of having a borehole drilled. That of course is no guarantee that it will not be dry (and most are) but for those of us lucky enough it can be a massive relief and money saver. The unlucky majority have to rely on the burgeoning water supply business and at US$50 for 5,000 litres it isn’t cheap. Water tankers are ubiquitous on the streets and come in all shapes and sizes. Some are made for the purpose but most are just plastic tanks strapped onto disheveled trucks. They source their water from outside the city limits.
Nathan is succinct – “Harare will run dry in five years at the most”. We are luckier than most in having a working borehole but it is not prolific. Tested at 1,000 litres per hour we don’t push our luck and the lawn dies off in the dry season. This year we’ve pumped the swimming pool dry (it’s filled with rainwater runoff collected off the roof) so that we can get the leaks fixed and the pool tiled. Grey water from the kitchen and shower is collected and used on the garden too. We keep our fingers crossed and try to balance having a nice garden without having to recourse to buying in water.
That there is no interest on the part of the government in changing the situation is best summarized in a conversation I had with Anton, my personal trainer, at a nearby gym. His wife, also a person trainer, used to have the Egyptian ambassador as a client. She, the ambassador, told Anton’s wife that Egypt had offered to completely rebuild the water treatment works at Lake Chivero. It would have been a gift from Egypt to Zimbabwe. The Zimbabwean government turned it down; there was nothing in it for them. The ambassador commented that she’d worked in a number of African countries but had never encountered one in which the government cared less for it’s people.
“Boss, come and have a look at this” Mapeno, the gardener exclaimed, clearly excited. He held up two expensive day packs. “Where did you find them?” I responded. “Over here right by the gate” came the reply. “Are you sure they don’t belong to the builders?” I asked. “No, I already checked with them”. I wasn’t surprised, they didn’t look like the sort of day packs a Zimbabwean builder could afford.
I was just about to go to work so he brought them over to my truck and we started to go through them. Diaries with copious notes on what looked like engineering projects, a wallet with South African gun licences, credit cards and no cash. Two South African passports (one full) in one pack in the name of a male and another in the second pack with a woman’s name and photo. This was obviously stolen property but why had it come over the wall into our property? And how was I going to contact the owners?
Fortunately the diaries had contact phone numbers in them albeit different ones. I tried both – one did nothing and the other was unreachable. Maybe I could contact the South African Embassy and give them the passports and then the owners would likely go there and then be able to contact me. I was on the way to work when I realized that WhatsApp works everywhere irrespective of phone number so I entered the unreachable number and called. It was quickly answered. “Is this Mr M and are you missing a couple of day packs?” I said. “Yes we are – did you find any passports?”. I answered that we’d found three and asked what they’d lost. A laptop and US$2,000 was the response. “It was just stuff, the passports are the most important things, at least we can get back home tomorrow” he added.
They had stopped for breakfast at a café at a local shopping centre and left the laptop and day packs on the back seat of the pickup in plain view. As they sat down to breakfast thieves smashed the back window, grabbed the packs and computer and got away in a waiting car.
“While this is not Jo’burg you still have to switch on. Thieves hang out in car parks just waiting for that sort of opportunity” I commented.
“Yes, we know that now” he replied. “Please send me your address so that I can come and pick up our stuff”.
I wasn’t there when they arrived but our maid phoned me to confirm who they were and wrote down the registration number of their pickup truck. I did wonder why the thieves bothered to “return” the day packs and their contents – a distinctly curious form of criminal ethics. If I were they I’d have kept the rather smart packs and dumped the contents into the nearest ditch.
Crime in Cape Town is an altogether different league. One could easily be lulled into a false sense of security by the first world shopping centres, immaculate roads and civilised driving standards (traffic lights are actually respected) contrary to Zimbabwe. Tourism is booming – the driver we used from the airport told us that in December 2024, 1.6 million tourists came through the airport – tourists we met on Table Mountain commented on how cheap Cape Town is. People are positive about their future and investing and developing in agriculture – rare attitudes in Zimbabwe.
Visiting Oaklands Estate near Wellington in the Western Cape was a case in point. David, a friend of my cousin, bought the abandoned racehorse stud in 2009 before occupying it in 2011. The derelict buildings have been renovated into tourist accommodation and the old stables will once again house a stud. Hillsides are being planted to proteas for their flowers for export. Other stables have been converted into a conference centre and come the tourist season the accommodation is full. I asked David if his positive outlook was down to living in the Western Cape. He answered “Pretty much. You can still avoid the corruption bullshit if you want to”. The Western Cape is relatively well run compared with the other provinces in South Africa. It is under the control of the Democratic Alliance with Alan Winde as the premier.
Oaklands Estate close to Wellington in the Western Cape. Who could not be optimistic in this environment?
While Oaklands Estate is far enough out of Cape Town to not be overly attractive to criminals, the township of Guguletu is an epicentre of crime. The taxi driver was quite clear on this: “If you are a person of colour” – he tapped his own light brown skin – “or a white, you stay out of there” – he gestured to the left of the motorway. It was a maze of corrugated iron shacks, broken fencing, goats, rubbish and bizarrely – satellite dishes on nearly every dwelling I could see. We asked him about the white tourist who’d been killed there earlier in the year. “Actually there were two who went in there” he responded “but one survived”. “You see that road up there?” he gestured with his right hand to a road sweeping a curve over the motorway into the township. “There was traffic backed up on the other side of this road so both asked their traffic navigator apps for an alternative and it took them into Guguletu. One guy was robbed of his car and beaten up but got out to a hospital and survived. The other was a doctor and they shot him. Dead. You don’t mess with the gangs in there – they run the place.” I mused that they were probably not the type that would return high quality day packs over a suburban wall in the expectation that they would be returned to their owners.
We arrived at the airport and said goodbye to Mario. It was time to head back to Harare. I got chatting to the porter who was assisting us whilst Marianne filled in forms to get VAT back. I asked him where he lived. “Oh, Guguletu” he replied. When I asked him how he coped with the gangs and crime he shrugged “God looks after me”.
The sunrises over a decent crop of maize on ART farm. Not exceptional rains but enough.
It’s been a strange rainy season here in Zimbabwe. Our rains arrived pretty much on schedule in the middle of November but that’s about all that has been normal about them. The usually dry southern and south-western parts of the country have been inundated. The Bubye river, normally notable for it’s sand content has flooded. Lake Mutirikwe has actually spilled and the largest internal lake in the country (discounting Lake Kariba which is shared on the border with Zambia) VERY rarely spills. The Barotse Floodplain in western Zambia has lived up to its name and flooded and a Zambian-based colleague confirmed that most of that country has had good rains. That’s just as well, as it’s a major source of water for Lake Kariba which has been below generating capacity and has only been letting water downstream as part of an agreement with Mozambique on which Lake Cahora Bassa is situated.
The agricultural town of Chipinge is located in the south east of the country near the Mozambique border. Being on top of the escarpment on the edge of the Mozabique coastal plain, it gets a lot of rain. The climate is mild and the area is known for it’s avocado, banana, macadamia, coffee and other sub-tropical fruit farms. It’s also the home of the biggest tree in Zimbabwe, a red mahogany (Khaya anthotheca).
I was chatting to a potential customer from the area last week. Of course we discussed the rain. Up until December last year his farm had only received 200mm of rain. “Then it rained for three weeks solidly. Look, I’m not complaining but it was a bit intense. Now we’ve had 1,600mm!”
The rains here in Harare started pretty much as usual in mid-November but took a while to get going. The farmer on ART Farm where we walk the dogs in the morning took a chance by planting the commercial maize early but then had to keep it going with supplemental irrigation and even had to replant some lands when the irrigation couldn’t move fast enough. Elsewhere farmers were more lucky.
A decent crop of commercial maize. It’s seldom profitable and grown largely for political purposes – “Look, I’m doing my bit for the country”
The rains have been regular enough to encourage fungi growth. Mushrooms have been regularly cropping up in our garden. Were they edible? I am not at all sure. As one wag put it; “All mushrooms are edible, but some only once”. I do have a book but am not at all an expert in identifying them and I wouldn’t trust Google Lens quite that far.
Probably not Chlorophyllum molybdites as it doesn’t have a green tinge. Bottom right is Agaricus bisporus, the common domestic mushroom, but it’s rather old.Small and short-lived, these (unidentified fungi) regularly cropped up in the same place in the garden after a decent shower. By the next day they were gone .
Weather apps abound but they are notoriously inaccurate, at least in this part of the world. Marianne belongs to a WhatsApp group that shares rainfall information and the variations in rainfall just a few kilometers apart were often stark. Whilst it’s tempting to attribute this to inaccurate rain gauges and exaggeration tendencies, it cannot account for differences in excess of 100%. We’ve had 648mm to date, in a “normal” season we’d expect at least 750mm, whilst guests this afternoon said they’d had over 1000mm some 30km away to the east. Bill, the owner of the rain gauge that recorded this, did admit on being a bit skeptical as to its accuracy.
A January issue of the South African Farmer’s Weekly magazine echoes the inconsistency of rainfall over small distances and the increased difficulty in making accurate forecasts
I am not sure if the weather apps are more reliable elsewhere in the world but it wasn’t unusual to get a high probability forecast of rain to be greeted with a clear sky when it was forecasted to be raining. It did on occasion go the other way – heavy rain when the forecast was for clear skies.
The grassland flowers have been spectacular this year. Admittedly the cosmos are usually spectacular so maybe it’s just my perspective. Every year I try to capture the intensity of the displays and inevitably am disappointed. Will give it another go next year!
Cosmos bipinnatus – possibly introduced in horse feed from Argentina around the time of the Anglo-Boer war in South Africa.
The yellow hibiscus below is indigenous to Africa, Yemen and India (and some sources say Australia) which makes me wonder if it goes all the way back to Gondwana, the super continent that began to break up some 180 million years ago in the early Jurassic.
Whilst not as intensely showy as the cosmos, the Hibiscus panduriformis is spectacular in its own way.
There is not a lot of information on the yellow hibiscus but it seems to be mostly nocturnal. The image above was taken at 6.20 a.m. and there is already a dead flower on the stem. From observing flowers by the road on the way to my work I know that by midday all flowers are gone. Apparently it’s relatively easily propagated from seed and cuttings so I might try establishing a few in the “wild” section of our garden.
As we approach the end of March we are unlikely to get much more in the way of significant rain though in April last year there was a 42mm on the 6th. This was unusual as it is normally a month of warm days and cool nights a plenty of sunshine. What most people would call perfect weather. We like a bit of rain with it too.
Not a massively tall termite chimney but enough to start a rumour of rain
There is a common myth that circulates Zimbabwe at this time of year; if the termites are building bigger nest chimneys than usual then the coming rains are going to be good. Apparently the logic is that they want to keep their nests dry and so need the chimney to be above the water line. It’s more than a bit flawed thinking. A lot of nests are nowhere near any flood level, historical or otherwise.
This year the chimneys are perhaps a little more noticeable than usual but that might be my appalling memory (it’s genuinely bad as a result of a medical condition but that explanation doesn’t belong here). They certainly are not big by world standards – in Australia they are really big and their primary function is cooling of the nest. Maybe they have the same function in Zimbabwe but it hasn’t been particularly hot this year.
To be a successful farmer in Zimbabwe it pays not to rely on the vagaries of the weather and use a more reliable source of water. Hence irrigation is big business. That’s not to say that all farmers have the finance or the water source to irrigate and must rely, at least to some extent, on the rains.
Land prepared and sown with soya beans – hopeful…
The farm where we walk the dogs prepared and sowed land some weeks back in anticipation of getting the soya bean crop off to an early start – essential in order to get a good yield. We do get some rains in October though the real season starts mid-November and whilst this year has not been an exception, not enough rain has fallen so far to get the crop germinated.
The medium-term forecast is not looking great
Last year was not a great one for rain. Crops failed, animals starved. At one point the abattoirs stopped taking any more cattle such was the desperation of poorer farmers who couldn’t afford supplemental feed over the dry season. El Niño was squarely to blame. That dissipated and was replaced by the much more favorable la Niña phenomenon which usually influences our weather to supply normal to above normal rains. Unfortunately it seems that la Niña has dissipated early and we are in for another, at best, erratic rainy season and yes, distribution can be more important than quantity. So much for the termite myth.
They are not the world’s prettiest birds, as befits their role as a scavenger, but they are magnificent flyers. They have the largest wingspan of any land bird (up to 3.2m) and I often have the opportunity to marvel at their thermalling skills.
The local refuse tip is on the route to my work and I often spot them standing, sentinel-like, on the rubbish. Sometimes they are soaring, effortlessly and majestic, over the road in a stack of a dozen or more. There is water in a dam (small reservoir) on the neighbouring ART Farm where we walk our dogs and I occasionally see them congregated there, no doubt slaking their thirst after a good bit of scavenging on the refuse tip.
We came across the unfortunate bird above on this morning’s dog walk on ART Farm. He/she was very newly dead, the eyes still clear, with no clue as to the cause of death. There is a high voltage power line close by which may have been the culprit – we didn’t look closely. It’s the first marabou I have seen up close and I had to admire the perfect sculpturing of the wings – designed to soar. We’ll be walking in the area again soon but we are not expecting to see much left as there is a jackal or two that lives in the nearby wetland and it will undoubtedly do a bit of scavenging itself.
Dawn breaking on ART farm – it was colder than it looks!
The car thermometer read 10C but I was determined to get the photograph that I’d seen on several early morning trips to walk the dogs on ART farm on the northern boundary of Harare. There was nothing for it but to just put up with the cold. Yes, it’s winter here in the southern hemisphere and we expect it to get cold, with the occasional frost in low-lying areas, but this winter has been unusually warm during the day.
We get our rains in our summer and this last season was marked by an El Niño event in the south Pacific Ocean (unusually warm temperatures) which kept the Inter-tropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ), the source of most of our summer rain, well to the north over Kenya and Tanzania. Zimbabwe went dry and consequently hungry. Most of the staple crop of maize grown in the country is rain-dependent and there was widespread crop failure. Farmers desperate to sell their cattle while they were marketable, swamped the abattoirs who eventually refused to buy any more. I’m told by my commercial farmer customers that what maize has been grown has been subject to widespread theft.
Droughts are nothing new in this part of the world – in 1992 when I was living in the east of the country we had a similar one and I took the photo below near where I was living. The next year the rains returned and the grazing recovered.
Not the sort of temperatures we expect to have in what is usually the coldest time of the year
From my business’ point of view I am not complaining – the warmer temperatures help us to get the seedlings through the nursery quicker and reduce costs. We really do need the prospect of a good wet season though as we rely entirely on boreholes for our water supply and despite the La Niña event of 2020 to 2022 we didn’t get the good rains the rest of the country experienced so they will need replenishing.
Zimbabwe Absurdity 
Entertaining my brother
6 05 2026My brother, Duncan, arrived from the UK on Good Friday for a three week holiday. Originally he’d booked on Emirates the day before the Gulf war started but took up the offer of a full refund rather than take a chance. Asked what he thought of his flight on Rwandair he replied that it was just fine and the planes were relatively new. I am not sure how he justifies a holiday given that he’s retired. Maybe it’s our weather that’s so attractive – which it is when compared with the English weather. I was especially pleased to see him as he’d brought me a mixed pack of cheeses which can be found in Zimbabwe but are notoriously expensive. Oh, yes, we do get along well too. Our sibling rivalries of our teenage years are long past.
The following day was my aunt, on my mother’s side, 97th birthday party. She’s doing well for her age and still lives by herself albeit with a carer. Unlike me she doesn’t need to use a wheelchair, just two walking sticks. I also walk with two sticks but on occasions such as this find a wheelchair easier. Most of her family were in attendance as nobody can be certain how much longer she’ll be around.
My mother’s side of the family seemed to either live a long time – brother Anthony to 94, Helen 97 so far – or not. My mother died of melanoma at 67 and her other brother Steven died at 72 from prostate cancer. Not much is known about my father’s family. He was an only child and no father is listed on his birth certificate. A scandal in our family – quelle horreur! Us siblings were delighted and my sister Diana, who died at 62 from breast cancer, noticed this and asked my mother about it but the curtains came down. The man whose surname my father inherited died on the Somme in 1918 and my father was born in 1925. It’s not that my mother was prudish but she was born in 1925 and some things were not up for discussion. She once asked me if I would consider marrying a woman who’d lived with someone else. I replied that I’d be seriously restricting my choice if I were to apply that criterion. She looked thoughtful for a moment then said: “Yes, I suppose so”.
She was a strong woman my mother. My father was murdered in 1978 and bled to death outside the front door within three metres of her (she was on the other side) and she could do nothing to help. It was near the peak of the Rhodesian bush war and civilians were fair targets for the combatants/terrorists of Robert Mugabe’s ZANLA and Joshua Nkomo’s ZIPRA. Understandably she didn’t talk much about it but did say that flying on the air force helicopter into Umtali (as Mutare was known then) she recalled that the countryside being beautiful by the light of the full moon.
We decided to take a trip to the Eastern Highlands of Zimbabwe. The district of Nyanga, where our parents had met in the early 1950s, was to be the first port-of-call, but Duncan wanted to call in and visit Kerry Stanger, near the small town of Rusape, who has a crowned eagle nesting in her garden. Some of her fantastic photos can be found here. Her husband John farms a variety of crops including tobacco and pecan nuts and is looking to put in chili peppers for export to China. Unusually for the area, he has managed to keep a fair proportion of his original farm and as a title deed holder is looking to invest in a solar farm with a Dutch company. He also has a dairy!
I couldn’t access the observation point where Kerry takes her photos of the chick that she calls JJ. He/she was not cooperating so they didn’t get a clear view anyway. We did enjoy the views of the unspoilt countryside of granite rock outcrops or “kopjes”, grasslands and bush-veld.
The road from Rusape to Nyanga was quiet and all the potholes had been filled – with sand. It was a pleasant trip and we even saw a black mamba snake crossing the road. Fortunately it was close to a police roadblock and I was going slow enough to easily avoid it. This was a relatively small one at about 1.5m but they can often get to 3m or more. Duncan got out of the car to try and get a photo. He seemed to think that they would only attack if cornered. That maybe, but as Africa’s largest venomous snake I was pleased that it had quickly moved off.
The road from Troutbeck Hotel up to the Connemara lakes is in very poor shape. We arrived at Venus Cottage where we were staying just in time to capture the setting sun reflecting in the clouds covering Mt Nyangani, Zimbabwe’s highest peak. It was getting cold enough for a fleece (for me at least) and the fire was lit.
After my mother died in 1992 I moved back from the Chinhoyi (central west) area of Zimbabwe, where I was working on a flower farm, to her cottage in the mining village of Penhalonga on the Mozambique border about an hour south of Nyanga. I was keen to try to earn a living doing freelance programming for the agricultural sector. After a couple of years and merely subsisting I closed shop and moved to formal employment near Harare. I did however get hooked on paragliding whilst in Penhalonga.
Gary and his family lived at the top of the Penhalonga valley, close to the Mozambique border. One day he called past the cottage and said “I am going paragliding, come along, you might be interested”. On the local training hill I watched him lay out his wing, inflate it and step off the slope into the air. I was entranced. “I just have to do that!” I thought. I duly did a course and bought my own wing.
We had three flying sites in the area; Penhalonga, the Honde Valley to the north and then World’s View further north again. The World’s View takeoff, to the right of the picture above, faces west and when the wind blows from that direction can deliver extraordinary flying.
Not long after I learnt to fly I went with Barry, who’d taught me to fly, and others to World’s View. It looked good so we launched into what we found out later was convergence* and conditions were extraordinary. We didn’t have to look for thermals – the lift was everywhere, smooth and strong. We were carrying variometers (an instrument with audio and visual rate-of-climb and sink indicators and an altimeter) so we knew both how fast we were climbing and how high we were. At 1,000m above takeoff the terrain below looked completely flat. Barry had to go back to Harare so we landed and I went home to Penhalonga. We had many good flights at this site but none that quite matched that day. My love of paragliding never dimmed and I went on to fly in South Africa, France and the USA where I famously had to be rescued by a US Navy marines helicopter!
*Convergence in meteorological terms is when two airmasses converge and the air is forced up. Conditions can be fantastic for soaring in dry weather but in summer storms often develop along the convergence line.
The following day we took a trip to the plot that my mother had bought not long after my parents were married. The intention was that one day they’d retire there and relax and enjoy the view, which is fantastic. It was not to be. My father was murdered as a result of the bush war in 1978 and my mother died in 1992. She left the plot to both myself and Bridget Galloway (Hamilton) whose parents mine befriended in the area in the 1950s. I realized that I was never going to develop the land so sold my share to Bridget some years ago. She has built a very rustic cottage and lives there by herself with no apparent need for any sort of security – not even a fence around the cottage.
The road to the plot was awful. It took us an hour to cover the 13km and in two places we used four-wheel-drive. It probably wasn’t necessary but it made life easier. Bridget had told me earlier when I’d asked about the condition of it (she was working elsewhere when we arrived) that in March heavy rains had made the road impassable for three weeks. When at school in Mutare we used to make monthly trips to the plot and even then the road wasn’t great but still passable to any vehicle with reasonable clearance.
On the way back from the plot we had to wait twenty minutes for a logging truck to finish loading with poles. Duncan, being an ex truck driver in the UK went to speak to the driver. He marveled how the truck managed to negotiate some of the tighter corners on the road and even had turned around.
We called in at the Troutbeck Resort on the way to see Barry (the one who taught me to paraglide) who was working there helping refurbish a conference room – he’s a professional carpenter. We reminisced about our paragliding days over tea and beers and came to the conclusion that our paragliding days were over – neither of us could afford a bad landing – but hell, we’d had a lot of fun. I still fly a paramotor on occasion but it doesn’t really compare with the thrill of catching a thermal and feeling the glider pitch into the lift and the variometer start to squeal. So far as I know there is nobody flying paragliders in the country. The World’s View takeoff is overgrown as is the Honde valley takeoff to the south. There is another site on the Zambezi Valley north of Harare and I had amazing cross country flights there but access was problematic even then.
The next day we left the cottage and headed back south to Mutare. On the way there we stopped off to see Sue in the Imbeza valley where she lives on a smallholding. Together with my mother, she was one of the founder teachers of Hillcrest Primary School closer to Mutare. She also lost her husband in the war in the Cashel valley south of Mutare where they were farming. Farmers were especially vulnerable and Tim was ambushed near the farm apparently in a case of mistaken identity. One of his sons found out many years later that the target was another farmer following behind him.
Then it was on to Mutare to meet up with Gary (the one who introduced me to paragliding) and his family. After a pleasant afternoon chatting and catching up (they don’t often come up to Harare) we headed into the nearby Bvumba mountains to the White Horse Inn for the night. On the way we passed through the centre of the city and I was pleasantly surprised at how clean it was.
The decor of the inn is still very much as it was 50 years ago. Duncan sent photos to an old school mate who’d lived in the area and said it hadn’t changed since his youth. The staff were very pleasant, the food good even if the service was a little slow and the rooms comfortable. It scores a well-deserved 4.3 stars on Trip Advisor.
The next morning the mist was down as befitting the name Bvumba which refers to the “misty mountains” so we had a relaxed breakfast and started down the hill to Mutare.
The drive back to Harare was uneventful with none of the heavy trucks forming nearly impossible to overtake informal convoys. Duncan drove like a good Zimbabwean driver – overtaking on solid white lines, pushing into small gaps in the left lane and cutting in front of a car in oncoming traffic in Harare. He needs to work on the speeding bit though. He kept to the 120 km/h limit all the way and even used cruise control so he only qualifies for a provisional licence! It was a good trip with plenty of time to reminisce about our distant youth and catch up with old friends.
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