Zimbabwe Absurdity

I have just got back from exercising Jenni on the farm where I live. It was a beautiful evening, typical for summer. Large cumulus clouds were building in the east, lit up by the setting sun. Irrigation sprinklers were gently “tufting” completely out of sync. There was no indication that anything is wrong in Zimbabwe. It all seemed completely normal.

Earlier in the afternoon I’d been to visit Peter, an ex-farmer on whose farm I’d lived when working for a vegetable export business. It was also idyllic and I enjoyed many an evening’s walk with my two dogs over the huge granite “kopjes” on the northern boundary of the farm. It’s all gone now (no, the granite will be there forever of course); the last I saw there was a small cleared patch near one of the dams and the rest was just weeds. I have not been back there for some time.

Peter, however, was not just a farmer. He had a substantial share in the vegetable export business and fingers in a number of other pies around town. He’s a sharp businessman and it shows in the property he’s bought and put a not insubstantial amount of effort and money into renovating. I did not ask him why he still lives here as I thought it obvious – he could not have this lifestyle anywhere else.

Dave is another ex-farmer from the Raffingora area some 120km north of Harare. Like Peter he had an idyllic farm, nestled in kopjes and msasa groves in which leopards lurked and much to his delight took the occasional calf. Dave also lost his farm but managed to get a few implements and equipment off. It’s all been sold now and he works as a caretaker at a local private school. He enjoys his job; he is a perfectionist and played cricket at national level so can still indulge in preparing the perfect pitch, but it’s not like living in the bush and between him and his wife they can make ends meet.

Gary is a big man in every way. He still farms though he lost most of his farm to A2 farmers (medium scale often “weekend” farmers who want to “have a go”). The remainder of the farm is too small to be economic but he hangs in there for the lifestyle which includes guiding canoe trips on the Zambezi, acting as a foster parent for neglected community children, producing the Christmas pantomime and his animals. Long a national polo player they have dozens of polo ponies and a giraffe called Rebecca. Rebecca is drop dead gorgeous with legs that go on forever and eyelashes to die for. She had a calf but it was killed by “war vets”*. Oh, did I mention the pack of Rhodesian Ridgebacks, the pack of Dachshunds (turbo rats as I call them), the parrot, the guinea pigs, the hornbill the crowned crane the…. When I worked in the area I knew Gary to be the easiest going man around. Sadly that is not the case anymore and I don’t think he’s very happy farming at all. He is continually being threatened to help out various A2 farmers or else. It is very stressful.

Other Gary is my best friend, though I don’t see him that much, and he lives in Mozambique. He also lost his farm in Penhalonga which is on the eastern border of Zim and suffered the indignity of watching US$65000 worth of hard wood being stolen in front of him. The local police watched too. I had already helped him get various implements off the farm by the “back” route. Gary is the least materialistic person I know, so long as he has enough money for a beer or two and his paraglider then he is happy. It drives his wife June, scatty. June works as a local headmistress while Gary works for an NGO in Mozambique. Between them they make ends meet and fund their youngest son’s university education. It has not done their marriage much good but they are holding on.

The people above have all survived. They are relatively lucky. A lot are not coping and stories abound of suicides, abandoned children and broken marriages. They are also all whites (though I know there have been casualties amongst the black commercial farmers who don’t have the right “connections”).

There is the absurd optimism amongst a lot of people in this country that “it has to come right sometime”. When I ask them why they cannot give me a reason, maybe they think we are tossing a fate coin here and it must eventually come up heads. I don’t share that mindless optimism (I’m all for optimism, I just find the mindless sort irritating). A lot of people with the right connections are making a lot of money and it is not in their interest to change the status quo. Peter Godwin was correct when he stated in a National Geographic article that the old style, large scale, hyper efficient (and many were just that) commercial farms are gone forever. So are most of the commercial farmers and their skills have not been transferred and many of their farms are derelict. For an agricultural economy such as Zimbabwe’s that can only mean disaster.

The landscape was deceiving me.

* war vet – often derogatory term for those claiming to be ex-combatants on the side of Joshua Nkomo’s ZIPRA or Robert Mugabe’s ZANLA during the civil war here. Many are far too young to have participated.

Hey y’all, it’s my birthday today! But hold the cards, it’s not a big one; the decade is not changing!

My morning habit includes a compulsory juicing up. That’s the slang term for a bit of electricity. I have a small box of electronics that I attach to my left quadriceps muscle with electrodes in an effort to get it to build up quicker after the knee op in February. It certainly stimulates the muscle – the contraction is impossible to resist and I do believe it’s working although I have only been using it regularly for about 3 weeks.

Anyway, I was lying on the bed listening to the satellite radio and pondering not my advancing age but trees. There is an acacia about 20m away in the garden that I planted when I first moved into this house about 3.4 years ago (it’s weird how thought trains work, I was reading about parsecs last night which are a unit of astronomical measurement and one is the equivalent of 3.26 light years – never mind) and it must be close to 3m high already. I have a mild obsession with planting trees; I must have inherited it from my mother. I’m always picking up tree seeds and germinating them and then looking for places to plant the trees. This garden is pretty much full up; I think I have planted 9 since I have been here!

I regard the number of trees planted as a contentment indicator. I have moved 3 times in the past 7 years that I have lived in the Harare environs and this is the first garden that I have felt the planting compulsion. Yes, I certainly like living here. The view on a clear day is a good 70km to the Great Dyke where we often (used) to paraglide and there are no other houses clearly visible. It is the best of both worlds; close enough to town (8km to Borrowdale) to be convenient and far enough to be in the country. It is also only 2km to my business. There is a cloud on the horizon though. This farm where I live, ART Farm (Agricultural Research Trust) was set up in the 80’s (I think) as a research farm to serve the mainly commercial farming interest. As such it is theoretically not under threat from the land redistribution policies of the government. That does not mean much as we found out 3 weeks ago when an “official” from the ZANU PF Youth League decided he wanted some property and promptly moved into a house at the other end of the farm. The ART employee spent a very uncomfortable night and then moved out. ART Farm is an amalgamation of several title deeds and the one in question has had a Section 8 (intent to acquire) on it for some years though it is a house, some sheds and a small piece of land. One does have a right to challenge the Section 8, which was duly done, but that means little. The mood amongst the management is pessimistic and with good reason. Past experience shows that this is the thin end of the wedge and the greed factor will soon set in.

But for the moment it’s a special day. It’s also a beautiful day so maybe I’ll plant a tree – my little bit of immortality. Now where to plant it?

Jenni, chienne sauvage, madam. She’s my girl, my raison d’etre and everyone says she is beautiful. Of course she is! She’s mine and you can see how well she has me trained. She sleeps on my bed, gets her tummy tickled on demand and usually gets her way with walks too. Click on the thumbnail and fall under the spell!

I’m always rather amused when the US Fed moves the interest rates. One quarter of one percent (why not just say a quarter of a percent?) movement makes the BBC. Economists from leading banks are interviewed, opinions expressed and gloomy forecasts made. This last Friday our money market rate was 390% p.a. for a 30 day investment. Today it was slashed to between 30 and 40% for the same period. It might make an inside page of the Financial Gazette on Thursday.

Those who have never lived in sub-Saharan Africa will never understand our obsession with rain. It is life to us (hey we are mostly water anyway!). Bad rains mean a bad harvest and more hardship. The first rains are anticipated with eagerness and nothing can compare with the fresh, fertile, smell of rain on hot soil. The smoke from the endless bush fires clear and within weeks the bush has become a lush green from a brittle, dusty, dry. Morning conversations inevitable start with “How much rain did you get last night?” and bragging rights go to those who had the most spectacular storms. Of course with all the spare electricity in the atmosphere that in the national grid inevitably gets knocked out, sometimes for days. These days it’s becoming more difficult to distinguish between fault and power shedding. The latter is a programmed (sometimes) period without power. It is ostensibly to reduce the national electricity debt as we import a large proportion of our requirement. No, power shedding can occur at any time of day and is not the preserve of the suburbs. How this reduced dependence on power importation helps us build the economy, I’m not really sure. But we Zimbos are a resourceful lot and the importers of generators, computer UPS’s and inverters have thrived so we just “make a plan” and carry on. Well, a UPS and very large truck battery has allowed me to stay online this evening!

We had our first rain here (Harare) today. It was not as spectacular as it could have been but the air cleared and became fresh again and I didn’t get stuck on the way to exercise Jenni.  There’s a bit of hope…

Actually, I’m completely uninspired to write anything. I have no real claim to any artistic talent but I do find that some days I can get down and write and others… Well, I struggle.

It has been a hot day, in the low 30’s which is not oppressive, but hot enough to get the sweat going with any sort of exertion. This afternoon I took Jenni over to the microlight club on the Mazoe road where we winch paragliders up behind a pickup. It is quite a social place; there are a surprising number of microlights of all types and sizes (including a microlight helicopter), a small strip for the model aircraft and when the thermals are a bit much for the others we use the microlight runway.

Today was not great for winching as the wind was too strong which tends to fragment the thermals but later in the evening we moved to a road in a maize field and winched there to stay out of the way of the now active powered aircraft. A number of ex-pats had showed up and Barry, our only instructor took them for flights on his tandem paraglider. By now conditions were very smooth so it was a great introduction and by nightfall we had two new students.

One of them is Anna, an attractive German girl who is here with Care International. It took me a while of puzzling to work out her accent as she speaks faultless English which is almost too precise. She has only been here a few weeks and has already decided that she wants to stay longer than her allotted contract which ends at the end of March next year. She thinks that Zim is such a great place especially when compared to the other African countries she has experienced. “I have never been so misled by the press” she commented to me. My brother and his family from the UK were out here in August and he said much the same to a mutual acquaintance. I told Anna that yes, Zim IS a great country to visit and work in if you are earning real money (the black market money makes for cheap living) but it is a struggle to make a living as a local.

Yes, things ARE bad here but personally one does not feel threatened and we are FAR better off than a lot of countries to the north. So why do we get such a bad press? The media does love a dramatic story and the Zimbabwe government can be very belligerent and its policies are not well thought out, if at all but that should not affect the visitor. We are a lot safer than South Africa and we have a relatively good infrastructure by African standards. I went with my brother to Victoria Falls for a night and they did all the tourist things. A jet boat ride on the river for my nephews went down well but they were the only tourists in the only Zim boat. The Zambian side was rocking! Would we have such a negative press if we weren’t an ex-colony with a minority white population who has taken a hammering in the land issue? I really don’t know.

The African bee is a totally different lady from her European sister. She is a real kick-ass, don’t mess with me, all-or-nothing woman (the male drones don’t sting). They could use a few of these ladies in Iraq.

Some year ago when I was flower farming near Lion’s Den on the Kariba road, my landlord, Mike Wilson, recounted a story of a bee swarm in their garden that had got too big for the branch to which it was attached and the whole lot had fallen into the yard one afternoon. Unfortunately there was a flock of geese under where the swarm had been and the bees, now very angry set upon the geese. Once they start stinging they give off a smell that starts the other bees stinging and it all gets out of hand very quickly. Mike told me that he looked out of the kitchen window and all he could see of the gander was an outline of bees. The flock was wiped out. This “going mad” behaviors was uppermost in my mind as I beat a very hasty retreat from the lounge at lunchtime, bees boiling out of the fireplace, bent on stinging SOMETHING!

A rat had moved into my hi-fi cabinet and had made an appalling mess, pee and dung all over the place and it stank! Having moved all the hi-fi out and swept up what I could I decided to give the whole thing a wipe with some carbolic based disinfectant, Dettol by trade name. I had been warned that bees hated the smell of the stuff but had forgotten all about them. After all, this particular swarm has been living in the chimney, a favourite site in Zimbabwean houses, for some 2 years. Surely they were used to me by now and aside from the odd sting we’d got on OK. How wrong I was. Fortunately my pickup truck was parked outside the back door so I made a bee line (sorry, irresistible) for it and sweated in the November heat while the bees flew angrily at the windscreen. I waited for the excitement to die down a bit then went back into the kitchen to wash my hands of the Dettol smell. It was not a wise idea. Within seconds of me entering the house they were onto me though I made it to the truck again without getting stung. It was time to retreat to the garage where I could at least get on with the myriad projects I always seem to have on the go. It was 3 hours later before I could get back into the house without attracting their attention. I even did a circuit of the house in the pickup just to check things out. Jenni, my Rhodesian Ridgeback thought it was a great time to go for a run until the bees chased her!

Bees are not the only wildlife that I’ve had come out of the chimney, but they are certainly the most aggressive. About a year ago I was sitting in the lounge reading a book when I heard a scrabbling from the fireplace. Damn. It had to be those rats again. I thought I’d manage to kill them off after they got into the washing machine and chewed holes in the pipes. Try as I might I could not see any rats, obviously they were keeping quiet when I approached the fireplace. The next 2 nights I went out but on the third night I was once again reading and the scrabbling started again. This time I realized that it was coming from above the fireplace, where the chimney flares out into the metal grate. Getting a torch I looked up and there were some striped tail feathers. It could only be an owl. Now what? If I put my hand up one side of the flue it would move to the other and it was too far up to put both my hands up. Looking at the fireplace I realized there was a metal flap that could come off so getting the right sized spanner I set about taking it apart. I could now see the owl peering down at me but if I tried to grab it I was sure it would panic and get injured. Well, maybe I should just move away and see what happened. Sure enough after a couple of minutes there was a clatter, a “fwump” and a very sooty, blinking barn owl appeared in front of the grate. I’d taken the precaution of turning off most of the room lights but it still blinked at me owlishly (oops, another pun) and took off around the room. Fwap, it hit the wall above the door and left a spread-eagled owl imprint in pure soot above the lintel (hey, we DO get a spotted eagle-owl here so would that have been a spread-eagled-owl imprint?). I approached cautiously with my shirt to try and trap it but it took off and left another imprint on the opposite wall. Then it landed on a chair. Ah, now I had it! But hardly had the shirt settled when it was off again. Clearly another tactic was required. I opened all the windows and doors in both the lounge and adjoining room and moved behind it. It worked perfectly. The owl flew into the dining room and landed on the floor. It took a few steps to the base of the outside door and paused. It looked back once with big yellow eyes and took off silently into the garden. It flew low over the lawn and disappeared into the bush. I was concerned that all the soot on its feathers might impede its flight but it did not seem to and besides, a fair amount of the soot was left on the walls of the lounge.

There are a number of spotted eagle owls that seem to hang around my garden. They hoot and screech at each other. They are such beautiful birds and I am very pleased to have them around so it was with great sadness that I found a dead one by the road on the farm where I live. I’d been out exercising Jenni and spotted it lying on the grass. I can only think it flew into the power line because it was too small to have shorted itself out on the wires, though I have seen that happen on two occasions on other lines.

Owls are regarded with great superstition by the locals in Zim. They are apparently harbingers of death! Some time ago we were up at one of our paragliding sites on the Zambezi Valley (see www.paragliding.co.zw) and I asked the village elder at the nearby kraal why he was cutting the branches off the only tree on top of the hill. Oh, he said, it was the owl that kept sitting there; it needed to be chased off. Eventually the entire tree was cut down and the highest point on the hill was a hut. I have not been back for a long time so cannot vouch for it not being struck by lightening but if it is I’m sure the owl will be blamed!

Well, I guess I should start by explaining the title “Zimbabwe Absurdity” though you will get the idea as the days roll on and hopefully I can stay connected. Those of you out there in the civilized world may find that at times you will struggle to believe me but if you know the Third (oops, undeveloped) World you should have no trouble at all. So stay with it if you can!

You will have been either in a prolonged coma or illiterate, deaf and blind not to have noticed that Zimbabwe has a few problems these days. Today’s problem: no fresh milk (I might visit other problems later). Now there is a Prices Review Board (or some such organization) that controls the prices of essentials in our 2000%+ inflation and woe betide any unscrupulous character who tries to make an honest profit by charging more than the stipulated price which is often sub-economic. Last week someone ratted to the afore mentioned organization that milk was being sold at more than the regulated price and they clamped down on all the offenders (which was all the major suppliers and dairies) and … waddoyaknow – no milk. Well not exactly. One CAN get milk powder and the UHT milk which is not controlled and therefore very expensive but as everyone is after ANY milk they can find there is not a lot to be had. So what is happening to all the fresh milk? It is made into cheese, yoghurt and the like which is uncontrolled (you must understand this is all done so the masses can afford the essential products) and only the wealthy (relatively) would want to buy. There, that’s a start!