Wednesday, November 21, 2007
Ian Smith, Defiant Symbol of White Rule in Africa, Is Dead at 88
November 21, 2007
Ian Smith, Defiant Symbol of White Rule in Africa, Is Dead at 88
By ALAN COWELL
New York Times
Ian Smith, the former prime minister of Britain’s rebellious colony of Rhodesia, who once promised that white rule in Africa would endure for 1,000 years, died yesterday in South Africa. He was 88.
The cause was a stroke suffered at a nursing home near Cape Town, said Sam Whaley, a friend and former senator in Mr. Smith’s Rhodesian Front government.
Mr. Smith’s resistance to black rule led to a unilateral declaration of independence from Britain in 1965 and, later, severe repression and a seven-year guerrilla war, costing about 30,000 lives, most of them black fighters and civilians.
Second only to the apartheid rulers of South Africa, Mr. Smith became a symbol, both to black Africans and many others, of iniquitous white rule.
The land Mr. Smith left behind is markedly different from the one he nurtured before white-ruled Rhodesia became majority-ruled Zimbabwe, an era in which a tiny white minority of mainly settlers of British descent clung to privilege, prosperity and power in the teeth of international pressure.
In the earliest years of independence, in the 1980s, Zimbabwe impressed many outsiders as a stable and prosperous land, where high school enrollment for black children, held back in the long decades of white minority rule, soared and tourism to game parks and the famed Victoria Falls on the Zambezi River flourished.
But in later years the formerly white-owned farms that once fed much of southern Africa and earned millions of dollars in foreign exchange were decimated by a precipitate land-redistribution program. The economy is in tatters, with hyperinflation running at such a pace that currency bills change hands in brick-sized bundles.
An urban elite with ties to the regime of President Robert G. Mugabe prospers while the poor go hungry. Millions of Zimbabweans have fled to neighboring African states. Political opposition to Mr. Mugabe’s regime has been suppressed with the same zeal as Mr. Smith himself once displayed in the fight against African nationalist strivings for majority rule.
Zimbabwe’s troubles only fed Mr. Smith’s unwavering white supremacist views, his unshakable belief that Africa without white rule would not work.
“I’m pleasantly surprised at the number of people who come to me and say, when you were in the chair, we thought you were too inflexible and unbending; we now see that you were right,” he said in an interview during a visit to London in 2004.
Physically, the man at the center of these storms appeared almost drab. Tall and slightly stooped, he spoke in the clipped monotones of his country, where the English language seemed overlaid with the Afrikaans of South Africa.
Ian Douglas Smith was born on April 8, 1919, in Selukwe, a village about 200 miles southwest of Salisbury, now Harare, the capital, where he later owned a 7,500-acre cattle spread. His father, Douglas Smith, had immigrated to the territory in 1898 from Hamilton, Scotland, settling in Selukwe and eventually establishing a butcher shop.
At school, Mr. Smith excelled in sports rather than academics. In 1940, after studying commerce at Rhodes University in South Africa, he joined the British Royal Air Force as a fighter pilot in World War II. He crashed twice.
The first time, taking off in a Hurricane fighter plane in the Western Desert, he hit a runway obstruction. Flight Lieutenant Smith was badly hurt. Plastic surgery left him with a lopsided expression and a drooping eyelid. Afterward he rarely smiled, partly because of a dour temperament but partly because of the surgery.
His second downing, by enemy ground fire, took place over the Po Valley in Italy. Joining the partisans as a guerrilla fighter there, he trekked across the Alps to Allied lines and flew again over Germany. He returned home a war hero.
Mr. Smith entered politics in 1948 to campaign successfully for a Parliament seat. A little-known political figure who referred to himself as “a backroom worker,” Mr. Smith attained the office of deputy prime minister in 1962, the year his party, the Rhodesian Front, first won power. In 1964, a cabinet revolt against his predecessor, Winston Field, gave Mr. Smith the job of prime minister.
He stepped momentously into the history of central Africa a few months later, at a time when the flood tide of black nationalism seemed to be racing down the continent. Mr. Smith and his colleagues, with the kind of defiance that white Rhodesians applauded, set themselves against what in time proved to be inevitable.
On Nov. 11, 1965, Mr. Smith announced in emotionless tones that Rhodesia had declared independence from Britain rather than bow to pressure from London for concessions toward the black majority.
It was a broadcast proclamation of rebellion, ending with the words: “We have struck a blow for the preservation of justice, civilization and Christianity, and in this belief we have this day assumed our sovereign independence. God bless you all.”
His white countrymen were confident that “good old Smithy” knew what he was doing. His black compatriots were aghast at his display of defiance. But their resentments were countered by a state machinery that encompassed detention without trial, an efficient secret police and, later, martial law. Mr. Mugabe was one of many black nationalists jailed for years by the white authorities under emergency powers.
Condemnation of the rebellion heaped up. The United Nations applied international sanctions intended to cut off Rhodesia from the rest of the world in 1966.
Mr. Smith would not bend. “No African rule in my lifetime,” he said. “The white man is master of Rhodesia. He has built it, and he intends to keep it.”
Later, in 1976, he declared that there would be no majority rule, “not in a thousand years,” in Rhodesia. Black Africans, Mr. Smith said, were not ready for self-government.
He and his followers justified their repression by saying they were “holding the line” against Communism and “resisting the chaos” of newly formed black nations beyond the Zambezi River. He expressed bewilderment at the refusal of the United States, Britain and other Western powers to reinforce his self-adopted “front line against international Communism” — code language for black domination and a reflection of the cold war divisions of the era.
Mr. Smith’s relations with the West, Britain in particular, were not improved by the series of negotiations through which London, the lawful authority in Rhodesia, sought to end the rebellion. Each round of discussions ended with mutual accusations of deviousness and deceit. Each collapse bought Mr. Smith a little more time to extend minority domination. Each time, black anger deepened.
For the black majority, the rebellion was the worst of affronts, an institutionalized humiliation, and in December 1972 nationalist guerrillas attacked a farm in northeastern Rhodesia with rockets, starting a war that eventually took some 30,000 lives, with much of the insurgency mounted from nearby Zambia and Mozambique.
Only in 1976, under pressure by the United States secretary of state, Henry A. Kissinger, through South Africa, Mr. Smith’s main ally, did Mr. Smith acknowledge a need for majority rule. Even then, it was a grudging acceptance, which Mr. Smith was slow to carry out.
On March 3, 1978, he signed an agreement with moderate black leaders, who had pledged to eschew war. Under the arrangement, Mr. Smith agreed to step down, and handed over power to Bishop Abel T. Muzorewa, who won elections in April 1979.
But the vote was condemned by the guerrillas. Their exiled leaders, Mr. Mugabe and Joshua Nkomo, dismissed the settlement as a ploy, because it enabled whites to retain control of the army, economy and legislature. The agreement won no international recognition, and the war continued.
In the fall of 1979, however, Britain presided over what was to be its final conference on Rhodesia. Only Mr. Smith, a member of Bishop Muzorewa’s delegation, resisted the terms that led to British-supervised elections and lawful independence the next spring. Mr. Mugabe came to power. The white Rhodesians’ rebellion had finally crumbled.
A Constitution drawn up at Lancaster House in London contained compromises guaranteeing that whites would have 20 of the 100 seats in Parliament. The Rhodesian Front, Mr. Smith’s party, won them all in the first elections in 1980, and despite wartime threats against his life, he stayed on, asserting that it was in the interests of his white followers.
Mr. Smith and Mr. Mugabe, an odd couple, cooperated with each other at first. After having labeled Mr. Mugabe a bloodthirsty terrorist, Mr. Smith now described him as “a very pleasant change from what most of us had expected.”
But Mr. Smith never apologized for leading the country into war and never came to terms with what he depicted as inevitable decline under black majority rule.
“We gave Rhodesia 15 wonderful years extra,” he said in an interview on his farm at Selukwe, since renamed Shurugwi, in 1983. If he had not declared unilateral independence in 1965, he said, “then this sort of scene would have come earlier.”
The final rift with Mr. Mugabe came in 1985, at the first post-independence election, when white voters gave Mr. Smith’s party 15 of the 20 seats reserved for whites under the Lancaster House Constitution.
Mr. Mugabe said the vote showed that “the enemy of yesterday is still today’s enemy.” From then onward, he shunned Mr. Smith. Two years later, Mr. Smith left Parliament, claiming he had been forced out illegally by Mr. Mugabe.
While he later played a modest, behind-the-scenes role in political life, Mr. Smith never regained the prominence of his days as a rebel against the British crown. He did not figure significantly when an opposition group, the Movement for Democratic Change, began to challenge Mr. Mugabe in 2000. And when Mr. Smith visited Britain in 2004, meeting with Conservative legislators, his stay went virtually unreported in British newspapers.
As he aged, he remained bitter that, in his view, successive outside powers including the United States, South Africa and most of all Britain had broken promises, betraying Rhodesia’s white minority and its leaders in the name of political expediency.
“And in all honesty, what had Rhodesia done to deserve all of this treachery?” he wrote in his 1996 memoir, “Bitter Harvest: The Great Betrayal.” Returning to his prophecies of economic decline under black majority rule, he added in a 1998 postscript to the book: “I think I can correctly comment: I told you so. History records that my predictions have materialized.”
Mr. Smith stayed put in Harare, insisting that his descent from the first settlers who arrived to colonize Rhodesia in the 1890s bound him to Zimbabwe. Even after Mr. Mugabe had ordered a bloody campaign to strip the country’s white farmers of their land in the early 2000s, Mr. Smith kept on farming two estates.
To the end, Mr. Smith insisted that his government, condemned in the outside world as racist and unlawful, had been beneficial to most of the country’s people. Indeed, as Zimbabwe slid into corruption and decline under Mr. Mugabe, Mr. Smith sensed events had vindicated his refusal to dilute white dominance.
“There are millions of black people who say things were better when I was in control,” he said in 2004. “I have challenged Mugabe to walk down the street with me and see who has most support. I have much better relations with black people than he does.”
Sunday, November 04, 2007
The bleeding wound: Zimbabwe's slow suicide
The bleeding wound: Zimbabwe's slow suicide
Susie Linfield
Extracted from Dissent Magazine, Fall 2007 Circa October 2007
http://dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=950
ZIMBABWE was known as the “jewel of Africa,” as Samora Machel, the Marxist president of Mozambique, told Robert Mugabe when the new nation won its independence in 1980. As the second-most-industrialized country on the continent, the former Southern Rhodesia already had a decent infrastructure, including roads and railways (“You were lucky to have had the British,” another Mozambican leader told Mugabe, no doubt wistfully); an energetic, talented, book-hungry populace; and democratic institutions such as a relatively free press and a functioning judiciary. The problems, of course, were immense: there was the need to recover—economically, psychically, spiritually—from over a decade of brutal civil war; and there were vast disparities between whites and blacks in wealth, education, skills, and land ownership. But in addition to having had some historic, manmade luck, Zimbabwe was naturally lucky, too: beautiful, mineral-rich, and astoundingly fertile. Zimbabwe’s vast, sophisticated commercial farms were ingeniously irrigated and passionately tended; they produced, and often exported, fruits, flowers, peanuts, grains, tobacco, cotton, coffee, poultry, pigs, and some of the best beef in the world. Doris Lessing, who was raised in Southern Rhodesia, called the country “paradise,” and she is among the least sentimental of writers.
This year, Zimbabwe ranks number four—perched between Somalia and Chad—on the Failed States Index of Foreign Policy magazine. Zimbabwe’s catastrophe is so multilayered, its paradise so lost, that to describe it is a daunting task. Mugabe’s government has tortured, raped, and killed opposition activists; closed newspapers; jailed journalists. But not only opponents are targeted. In 2005, in an operation called “drive out the rubbish,” the state forcibly evicted an estimated 700,000 black, mainly poor city dwellers: burning their homes, destroying their businesses, savagely beating them. Zimbabwe’s human-rights score on the Failed States Index equals Iraq’s; only Sudan is worse.
The country’s once-promising economy is in a grotesque free-fall. Beginning in 2000, most of the country’s commercial farmers, who were white, were driven from their lands, violently and without compensation; hundreds of thousands of black farm workers have, consequently, also lost their homes, livelihoods, and access to medical care—particularly devastating in a country where at least one-fifth of the population is HIV-positive. The newly appropriated farms, many now in the hands of Mugabe’s cronies, lie in ruins: and so in what was once the breadbasket of Africa, famine looms for millions.
Zimbabwe’s inflation rate is the highest in the world: as of late June, it stood officially at 4,500 percent and unofficially at 9,000 percent, though both those figures will in all likelihood be obsolete by the time you read this. (The U.S. ambassador to Zimbabwe has predicted that inflation will reach 1.5 million percent by the end of the year, which conjures images of Weimar-era wheelbarrows stuffed with cash; last year, the government estimated that a family of five would need seventeen million Zimbabwean dollars—per month—to survive.) Four out of five Zimbabweans are out of work; a quarter of its citizens, including many of the most skilled, now live abroad; and thousands of Zimbabweans stream each week into a none-too-welcoming South Africa in search of food, jobs, and asylum. This summer, in a belated response to the inflation—which, bizarrely, he has blamed on Britain—Mugabe imposed dramatic price controls; this led to panic buying, closed stores, and production shutdowns. Armed youth militias were sent to patrol the markets and threaten shopkeepers.
Zimbabwe’s decimated health care system, combined with AIDS and poverty, have produced a life expectancy for women of thirty-four years: shockingly, the world’s lowest. (Equally shocking: it was sixty-one years in 1991.) On the political front, Zimbabwe’s judiciary and electoral processes have become bitter farces, the rule of law is virtually nonexistent, and its corruption is considered startling even on a continent known for kleptocracy. The World Bank has called Zimbabwe’s woes unprecedented for a country not at war, while the International Crisis Group has, ominously, compared its meltdown to that of the Congo at the end of Mobutu’s rule.
For a calamity of this magnitude, there can be no one cause. Zimbabwe experienced two wrenching years of severe drought in the early 1990s. At the same time, unwise structural readjustment programs, imposed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, led the country to sell its grain reserves in search of foreign currency; the confluence of these factors couldn’t have been worse. In the 1980s, Zimbabwe was surrounded by the destabilizing forces of violence and failure—in Angola, Mozambique, Namibia—much of it fueled by the apartheid regime in South Africa; this deepened an already paranoid style of governance. Still, however complex Zimbabwe’s recent history may be, every discussion of its ruin centers, always and inevitably, on one factor: Robert Gabriel Mugabe, head of the country’s ZANU-PF party and Zimbabwe’s president for twenty-seven years. As the Failed States Index report points out, “Though many events—natural disasters, economic shocks, an influx of refugees from a neighboring country—can lead to state failure, few are as decisive or as deadly as bad leadership.”
MUGABE’S authoritarian tendencies—and his murderous ones—were evident early on. Just two years after his election in the country’s first multiracial vote, he unleashed a reign of terror against Matabeleland, a province in the southwest that he suspected of housing a dissident movement. The word “genocide” has been used to describe this assault, which lasted five years; it may or may not be accurate, but there is no doubt that tens of thousands of unarmed civilians were beaten, raped, starved, and killed in a merciless scorched-earth policy. And from the first, the ruling party’s rapaciousness, combined with its sense of utter impunity, was startling to outside observers and native citizens alike; one United Nations official remarked on the rapidity with which Zimbabwe had created a “boss class . . . to the accompaniment of Marxist rhetoric.”
But the early years under Mugabe were full of good things too. Even as Matabeleland was massacred, the rest of the country hummed with hopeful energy, and literacy zoomed to almost 80 percent: an astonishing figure for Africa. (Lessing writes that on the day the education budget surpassed that for defense, members of Parliament “cheered and wept.”) Mugabe’s policy of racial reconciliation was rare and inspirational; an early speech welcoming all citizens of the new nation as friends and allies is “still remembered,” Philip Gourevitch wrote, “as one of the great declarations of the age.” There is no doubt that the vast majority of Zimbabweans, especially in the rural areas, trusted Mugabe and, in many cases, loved him; as Lessing noted, “Never has a ruler come to power with more goodwill.” Mugabe’s descent into unrestrained tyranny, and the bizarre wreckage of his country, were not inevitable: one can easily imagine very different scenarios that are neither fantasies nor wishful thinking. This makes the country’s destruction even more bewildering, infuriating, and tragic.
IN HIS NEW BOOK, When a Crocodile Eats the Sun, the journalist Peter Godwin paints a portrait of an imploding Zimbabwe that is alternately tender and furious. But it is a portrait that is also startlingly, almost willfully, partial, and it sent me looking to Zimbabwe’s complex past—exactly the place Godwin refuses to go—in an attempt to understand its present despair. And to try, too, to find voices other than those of Zimbabwe’s liberal whites—not because their views are wrong or unimportant, but because there is much that they cannot tell us.
Godwin was born and raised in Southern Rhodesia; his mother was a doctor who often worked in the countryside, his father the manager of a mine. They were tolerant, and progressive, and they knew that white rule was wrong. So did their son; still, as he recounts in his first memoir, Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africa, he fought for Ian Smith’s apartheid government. Duty was considered a higher value than individual conscience; and anyway, an eighteen-year-old Peter naively promises himself when he enters the war, “I wouldn’t do anything I disagreed with or was ashamed of.”
This would prove to be untrue—all the more reason, at war’s end, for Godwin to welcome ZANU’s triumph and the end of Zimbabwe’s international isolation. “I reveled in that brief and liberating period of social anarchy that marked the change between societies,” he recalls. “I loved the bizarre mix of people. The Scandinavian sandal brigade and the Third World groupies, the sudden flood of communist diplomats . . . .The cultural boycott was over. . . .Now Bob Marley performed at our independence celebrations.” But disillusion arrives quickly: Godwin becomes one of the first reporters—and risks his life—to expose the Matabeleland massacres. (An old black woman, whose name Godwin never learns, tips him off: “You must write about this thing in your newspapers, otherwise it will never stop until all of us are killed.”) Appearing in the Sunday Times of London, Godwin’s exposés infuriate the government, which declares him an enemy of the state. On the eve of arrest, he flees the country.
But it is the little details of Godwin’s early childhood in Rhodesia rather than the dramatic later events in Zimbabwe that are the most engaging parts of Mukiwa: for it is in these details that the complexity of life, and of human relations, in a racist regime are revealed. We see how inequality—how difference—looks to a child; the injustices peek through, so there is no need to shout about them. “We had cook boys and garden boys, however old they might be,” Godwin writes. “We knew them just by their Christian names, which were often fairly strange. . . .They believed that having a name in the white man’s language would attract the white man’s power. . . Sixpence, Cigarette or Matches were commonly used. . . . Baby girls were often called after the emotion felt by the mother at birth—Joy, Happiness, Delight. But, as far as I know, there were no girls called Disappointment, Pain or Exhaustion.”
Godwin spends his early years roaming the countryside with his nanny, Violet, whom he dearly loves; unbeknownst to his parents, he even joins her Apostolic sect, whose revival meetings thrill him. And he trails his mother as she makes her rounds (there were, of course, separate clinics for blacks and whites), helping to dispense sugar-cube vaccinations. (Years later, as a reporter in Mozambique, Godwin’s life will be saved when the fierce guerrilla who captures him turns out to be a grateful former patient.) We watch a young Peter begin to notice his world, and to try to make sense of it: “White people didn’t get such interesting diseases as Africans. They sometimes got ill, and even died, but this was rare.”
In his new book, the childhood idyll is long gone. Godwin, who now lives in New York, charts the decline of his country, and of his parents as they age, and the ways in which the former makes the latter so much sadder and scarier and worse. This is a book written in bitter anger: Mugabe, Godwin writes, is “the man who would grimly turn his country into an African Albania rather than relinquish power.” And disappointed sorrow: “A people who once rose against white rule and joined guerrilla movements in the thousands has now been cowed.”
Godwin offers a panoramic look at a crumbling nation. There is the human-rights collapse, epitomized by a hospital full of wounded protesters, including “middle-aged black ladies” beaten by Mugabe’s thugs. There is the explosion of crime, forcing his parents to install a “rape gate” to protect against violent intruders—though his father is viciously carjacked anyway. There is, most crucially, the takeover and ruin of the once-proud farms by drunken, unskilled youths; and the rigged, indeed absurd, elections: “ ‘I shan’t be voting for Mr. Mau Mau,’ says Dad.”
GODWIN is especially sharp, and heartbreaking, in evoking his parents’ descent into penury (their pensions aren’t adjusted for inflation). In one scene, at a bakery, “Dad loads his little basket with a small selection of loaves, which he will later freeze, and, as a special treat . . . two croissants.” The total: Z$12,000. “The black shop assistant manages to look sympathetic and embarrassed at the same time. . . . Dad slowly counts out all the notes in his wallet but they fall short. . . . He points to one of the loaves, and she removes it. . . .But the total is still too much, so he hands back the rolls one at a time.” Through it all his parents, then in their seventies and ailing, remain modest, level-headed, sane. They insist on using the public hospital rather than seek out special treatment; they hold hands like teenagers, “murmuring to each other like new lovers”; most of all, they refuse self-pity. Godwin is lucky to have such folks.
Yet some of Godwin’s most vivid scenes are also the most problematic, and raise questions not about what he sees but about what he doesn’t. One day, Godwin drives his father to a grocery store to collect bottle-deposit refunds. “Our line sullenly watches these diplomats and black-marketeers, expatriates, and corrupt government officials packing their Pajeros and Range Rovers and Mercs with mountains of groceries,” he recalls. The point is well-taken; yet Godwin seems unaware that this is precisely what blacks must have felt about his parents, and virtually all other whites, in the pre-independence days. In another vignette, white farmers at a pre-departure party speak of the “great life” and “good fun” they have lost. But Godwin doesn’t stop to think that for most blacks, the former dispensation was probably not great, or good, or fun. Godwin is right to insist that the politics of resentment that Mugabe has fomented—evidenced most clearly in the farm takeovers—are both practically destructive and morally ugly, and should never be mistaken for justice. But he seems loath to acknowledge that the vast inequities between blacks and whites, both before and since independence, were both unsustainable and wrong.
Another striking scene takes place at Godwin’s sister’s gravesite. (She had been killed, at age twenty-seven, by “friendly fire” during the civil war.) The cemetery is a shambles, and apparently people now live, or at least farm, in it: dirty toilet paper is littered among little plots of maize. Coming upon his sister’s grave, Godwin finds a fresh mound of excrement. “ ‘Fuck this!’ I shout, and I hurl the flowers away. . . .It lands near two women who are bent over, hoeing their cemetery corn, their babies strapped to their backs. They stop their hoeing, look up for a moment . . . and one laughs.”
Godwin’s anger is not only justified, but bracing. Who would not feel the same? Yet there is something puzzling about his lack of interest in the women’s plight. What does it say, what does it mean, that women must raise their food, and their babies, among graves? To ask this question is not a matter of political correctness or pity, nor does it suggest that Godwin should mute his rage. It is a matter of broadening one’s perspective, of expanding one’s sightline, of synthesizing one’s personal reactions with the realities of the wider world. The critic Vivian Gornick once observed how George Orwell, in “Shooting an Elephant,” “shrinks from the natives, yet his repulsion is tinged with compassion. At all times he is possessed of a sense of history, proportion, and paradox.” This is precisely what Godwin too often lacks.
When a Crocodile Eats the Sun contains another story, too. On one of Godwin’s visits home, his mother abruptly reveals a secret about Godwin’s father, a man of propriety and deep reserve who had always struck his son as the quintessential Englishman: “George Godwin, this Anglo-African in a safari suit and desert boots, with his clipped English accent.” But it turns out that George Godwin was actually Kazimierz Jerzy Goldfarb, and Kazimierz Jerzy Goldfarb was a Jew from Warsaw whose mother and sister were murdered at Treblinka.
Naturally, this sends his son—who, as an expatriate white from Africa, is already struggling with his “mongrel” identity—into a tailspin. Large chunks of Crocodile chart Godwin’s search for his father’s family’s fate, and his more general research into the Holocaust, about which he apparently knew almost nothing. But Godwin attempts, also, to synthesize his father’s history with the present realities of Zimbabwe, and this is where the book falters most. Because Godwin fails to discover, or to formulate, any organic link between the destruction of the Jews and of Zimbabwe, he slips into a series of sloppy, fundamentally misleading analogies.
“A white in Africa is like a Jew everywhere—on sufferance, watching warily, waiting for the next great tidal swell of hostility,” Godwin claims. Well, no. Mugabe’s treatment of the white farmers is utterly indefensible: they were terrorized and sometimes assaulted, and an estimated fifteen were killed. But Harare is not Sderot—much less Warsaw in 1939. And more than that: can it be that Godwin has forgotten, so quickly, the violence and inequities of Rhodesia’s white-supremacist regime? Earlier, and in a similar vein, Godwin writes that Zionism “resonated too closely with my white African narrative,” and that Israel’s similarities to apartheid-era South Africa are “uncanny”: a truism of the Southern African left. But this comparison, too, mistakes discrete parts for a much wider whole, and therefore clouds rather than illuminates reality. Godwin substitutes hyperbolic, emotionally charged parallels—a “this equals that”—for the difficulties of real thought.
LIKE PETER GODWIN, Alexandra Fuller came of age as white-led Rhodesia was bloodily transformed into majority-rule Zimbabwe. (Her family also lived in Malawi and Zambia.) The Fullers were the kind of riff-raff that the Godwins probably never met. Fuller’s mother is a drunk, and she belly-dances in bars, and her hands are “worn, blunt with work: years of digging in a garden, horses, cows, cattle, woodwork, tobacco.” Alexandra’s father is rough, though very good with guns—“Dad is away in the bush, fighting gooks”—and the parents refer to blacks as “Affies,” “cheeky kaffirs,” and “bloody baboons.” Their house is ugly, their food disgusting, and their land so bad that when Mugabe appropriates it, he gives it to an enemy. In the Fullers’ garden stands “an enormous cardboard cutout of a crouched, running terrorist,” which the family uses for target practice.
And whereas Godwin, as a child, spent long hours listening to the stories of the black servants and reverentially absorbing their wisdom, Fuller, known to her family as “Bobo,” is a brat who bosses them around while threatening to fire them. Paradoxically, though, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, far more than Godwin’s books, sings with a lush, raw love for Africa. Fuller is close to the feel of the dirt and the things that grow in it, to the shrieks of the animals and “the smell of people who are not afraid to eat meat,” to the pitilessness of the sun and the fury of the rains.
Fuller’s powers of observation are so trenchant that she suggests a world, or sometimes several worlds, in a few sentences. Also, she has a nice and useful feel for the incongruous. “There go the horses, two white faces and one black peering over the stable doors . . . And here come the dogs running, ear-flapping hopeful after the pickup. . . .And there goes the old cook, hunched and massive . . . He is almost seventy and has just sired another baby; he looks exhausted. He’s sitting in the kitchen doorway with a joint the size of a sausage hanging from his bottom lip . . . .The gardener stands to attention on his bush-broom, with which he is sweeping leaves from the dusty driveway. ‘Miss Bobo,’ he mouths, and raises his fist in a black power salute.”
The Fullers are not lucky. In 1974, when Alexandra is five, they move to a farm in a bad location, “right into the middle, the very birthplace and epicenter, of the civil war in Rhodesia and a freshly stoked civil war in Mozambique. . . . We erect a massive fence with slanting-backward barbed wire at the top.” Although they work very hard, they do not prosper; the commodity price of tobacco rules their lives.
But their real bad luck lies elsewhere. Alexandra’s mother gives birth to five children, three of whom die before they are toddlers. It is the second death—for which Alexandra blames herself—that tips her mother from wacky neurosis into something closer to madness. Like Godwin, Fuller tries to understand the connection between her family’s trauma and her nation’s. Ironically—precisely because she is less “political” than Godwin, and because she tells her story through a child’s eyes—she is more successful at allowing us to feel her sense of that terrible bond between personal and historic cataclysm.
“After Olivia dies, Mum and Dad’s joyful careless embrace of life is sucked away, like water swirling down a drain,” Fuller recalls. “The war and mosquitoes and land mines and ambushes don’t seem to matter.” The parents drink constantly and the family, carrying “our new, hungry sorrow,” takes off on a grief-stricken holiday. “So we drive recklessly through war-ravaged Rhodesia,” Fuller writes. “We are driving through a dreamscape. The war has cast a ghastly magic . . . .Everything is waiting and watchful and suspicious . . . .The only living creatures to celebrate our war are the plants, which spill and knot and twist victoriously around buildings and closed-down schools. . . Rhodesia’s war has turned the place back on itself.”
After the third child’s death, “things get worse,” and Fuller’s mother has a breakdown. For Alexandra, the center cannot hold in either home or world—the war is over but the violence continues—and she watches a dance of disaster unfold. “[Mum’s] is a contained, soggy madness, which does little more than humidify the dry, unspoken grief we all feel. But then the outside world starts to join in and has a nervous breakdown all its own, so that it starts to get hard for me to know where Mum’s madness ends and the world’s madness begins. . . .The world is a terrifying, unhinged blur and I cannot determine whether it is me, or the world, that has come off its axis.” It is Alexandra’s older sister, Vanessa, who finally explains the simple, prosaic truth: “Bad-luck things happen. That’s just the way it is. . . .It doesn’t mean anything, Bobo. . . .If you start thinking that bad luck comes all together on purpose or that it has to do . . . with you or with anything else, you’ll go bonkers.” There is cruelty in that randomness, but perhaps a glimmer of freedom too.
DORIS LESSING left Southern Rhodesia for London in 1949, when she was thirty; as a member of the Communist Party, she had been declared a Prohibited Immigrant by the government in Salisbury. She returned to Zimbabwe for the first time in 1982, and visited again in 1988, 1989, and 1992. Of her initial exile, she recalls, “I did not want to live in Southern Rhodesia, for if its climate was perfection, probably the finest in the world, and its landscape magnificent, it was provincial and tedious.” But, she adds, “These rational considerations did not reach some mysterious region of myself that was apparently an inexhaustible well of tears, for night after night I wept in my sleep and woke knowing I was unjustly excluded from my own best self.”
Lessing’s portrait of Zimbabwe is the richest of any that I know. Here is the “moment of social evolution” presented from a dizzying array of angles. Lessing shows us the “triumphant malice” of whites eagerly pointing to black failures, and the hopefulness of those who want to help the country prosper. She meets black villagers desperately yearning for work, for literature, for the life of the cities; and she observes former guerrillas, now government “chefs,” who have “taken to thievery as if born to it.” She tells of the students who shout “Tiananmen Square!” as they protest government corruption. She watches the visitors: international aid workers traipsing in and out of the country, and South African soldiers on holiday who “have had to forgive themselves too much.” She sees the squatters, too: angry, ignorant, destroyers of the land they covet. She admires the idealistic organizers mobilizing women in the villages, who remind her of the early Russian revolutionaries. And she finds an odd parallel of arrested development: whites, she writes, were drowning in childish self-pity, while blacks were in thrall to a fantasy, equally childish, of instant modernity, instant wealth, instant justice.
What Lessing encounters, again and again, is a country of complexity, contradiction, and movement: a country in the midst of remaking itself. The stakes are high, the expectations even higher, the outcome never overdetermined. Lessing loved Zimbabweans’ sense of “intense personal involvement” in the country’s future, so different from the ironic apathy of the West. Despite the country’s daunting problems, she wrote in 1988, “what came across was not the flat dreary hopelessness of Zambia, the misery of Mozambique, but vitality, exuberance, optimism, enjoyment. . . . Relish. . . in the unexpected, was very much the note of new Zimbabwe.”
Lessing discovers something else too, something subtler and deeper and harder to bear. Again and again she finds people—mainly blacks, though not only they—stunned and grief-stricken by the war, yet unwilling or unable to explore their bewildered pain. “It is not possible to fight this kind of war, a civil war, without the poisons going deep,” she observes. “Something has been blasted or torn deep inside people, an anger has gone bad, and bitter, there is disbelief that this horror can be happening at all.” Zimbabwe was reeling from violence, brutality, betrayal, yet determined to refashion itself without acknowledging its wounds; its development was predicated, in fact, on the repression of trauma. Lessing listens to a young ex-guerrilla named Talent who says, in a rare moment of exposure, “I was lucky, I wasn’t one of the pretty girls”—for the pretty ones were used for sex. Lessing continues, “But it seems the War has never really left her: she has terrible headaches and sometimes cannot move for days. . . .A war ends, you bury the dead, you look after the cripples—but everywhere among ordinary people is this army whose wounds don’t show: the numbed, or the brutalized, or those who can never, not really, believe in the innocence of life, of living; or those who will for ever be slowed by grief.”
THIS IS THE TERRAIN that the black Zimbabwean writer Yvonne Vera explores in her novel, The Stone Virgins. (Vera died two years ago, at age forty.) It is set in Matabeleland during the massacres: “Then independence arrived and brought with it a spectacular arena for a different war, in which they were all casualties.” Brutality’s tenaciousness, and its mystery, is Vera’s subject.
The Stone Virgins reads like a slow-motion atrocity film. Its central act is a horrific rape and mutilation—the victim’s lips are sliced off—by an ex-guerrilla named Sibaso of a village girl named Nonceba. (Sibaso also decapitates Nonceba’s beloved sister, Thenjiwe.) The novel, which is highly impressionistic, alludes to the ways that suffering changes Nonceba, splitting her off from a former, now irretrievable self: “Now she is alone, the shadow to her own being. The other is vanished with a sudden and astonishing finality.”
Most striking is Vera’s portrait of Sibaso. She has not an ounce of liberal sympathy, or even liberal explanation, for this monstrous predator. He is a man who not only loves violence but who needs violence: “If he loses an enemy, he invents another.” He is good at what he does, for he has honed “all the fine instincts of annihilation.” Most tellingly: Sibaso is “a hunter who kills not because he is hungry but because his stomach is full, and therefore he can hunt with grace.” He is a man, in short, whose nihilistic violence foretells the civil wars of places like Liberia and Sierra Leone, as well as the madness of today’s jihadist groups. He kills not because he is oppressed but because killing suits him; his sadism is not a cry for help but a shout of joy.
Vera understands that sadistic violence not only shatters but actually unmakes the world of the survivors. In one scene, a group of government soldiers carefully skins alive an Indian shopkeeper, then massacres all the customers, including children, in his store. She writes: “They committed evil as though it were a legitimate pursuit, a ritual for their own convictions. Each move meant to shock, to cure the naïve mind. The mind [is] not supposed to survive it, to retell it, but to perish.”
MOST OF US accept the fact that violence is sometimes necessary in the pursuit of political aims; all of us feel comforted by this fact. For if violence has an aim, it has a limit. The violence itself may be obscene, disgusting, criminal; the aim might be impossible or unjust. Still, this kind of violence has not seceded from cause and effect, claims and demands; Primo Levi described it as “hateful but not insane.”
But the violence that “cures” the mind, which is to say negates it, is something different. This is the “curing” that took place in Auschwitz, and several decades later in the hills of Rwanda, and it was the aim, I think, of the rape camps in Bosnia. This is what Levi called “useless violence”: the infliction of unbearable pain, humiliation, and suffering, just for its own sake and no other. It is a kind of moral autism. Unburdened by tradition, by politics, by consequences, it claims for itself an absolute freedom.
In The Stone Virgins, Nonceba wonders “what exactly it took for a man to look at a woman and cut her up like a piece of dry hide without asking himself a single question.” It is we who must ask this question, especially in this age of martyrs’ brigades and suicide-killers. And yet the answer, I think, may be impossible to come by, for the very texture of such violence defies reason. (This is why, Jean Améry claimed, in Auschwitz it was intellectuals who were particularly defenseless.) It is wishful thinking, for instance—and an odd sort of narcissism—to believe that the torture-carnage that has swept through Iraq will end if America pulls out its troops (though that might be a good idea); or that the thirst for martyrdom will be quenched if Israel pulls back her borders (though that might be a good idea). The cult of suffering and death, the exultation in suffering and death, does not necessarily answer to traditional political solutions.
Zimbabwe isn’t Rwanda or Cambodia or Sierra Leone. Yet in thinking of its ruin, I am haunted by Lessing’s warnings about the hidden poisons of war. One can’t help wondering if Zimbabwe would, or at least could, have become a very different place had it found the space, the means, and the courage to delve into the violence of its birth. Those wounds that “don’t show” have revealed themselves, and they bleed.
Susie Linfield is the director of the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program at New York University.
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Susie Linfield
Extracted from Dissent Magazine, Fall 2007 Circa October 2007
http://dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=950
ZIMBABWE was known as the “jewel of Africa,” as Samora Machel, the Marxist president of Mozambique, told Robert Mugabe when the new nation won its independence in 1980. As the second-most-industrialized country on the continent, the former Southern Rhodesia already had a decent infrastructure, including roads and railways (“You were lucky to have had the British,” another Mozambican leader told Mugabe, no doubt wistfully); an energetic, talented, book-hungry populace; and democratic institutions such as a relatively free press and a functioning judiciary. The problems, of course, were immense: there was the need to recover—economically, psychically, spiritually—from over a decade of brutal civil war; and there were vast disparities between whites and blacks in wealth, education, skills, and land ownership. But in addition to having had some historic, manmade luck, Zimbabwe was naturally lucky, too: beautiful, mineral-rich, and astoundingly fertile. Zimbabwe’s vast, sophisticated commercial farms were ingeniously irrigated and passionately tended; they produced, and often exported, fruits, flowers, peanuts, grains, tobacco, cotton, coffee, poultry, pigs, and some of the best beef in the world. Doris Lessing, who was raised in Southern Rhodesia, called the country “paradise,” and she is among the least sentimental of writers.
This year, Zimbabwe ranks number four—perched between Somalia and Chad—on the Failed States Index of Foreign Policy magazine. Zimbabwe’s catastrophe is so multilayered, its paradise so lost, that to describe it is a daunting task. Mugabe’s government has tortured, raped, and killed opposition activists; closed newspapers; jailed journalists. But not only opponents are targeted. In 2005, in an operation called “drive out the rubbish,” the state forcibly evicted an estimated 700,000 black, mainly poor city dwellers: burning their homes, destroying their businesses, savagely beating them. Zimbabwe’s human-rights score on the Failed States Index equals Iraq’s; only Sudan is worse.
The country’s once-promising economy is in a grotesque free-fall. Beginning in 2000, most of the country’s commercial farmers, who were white, were driven from their lands, violently and without compensation; hundreds of thousands of black farm workers have, consequently, also lost their homes, livelihoods, and access to medical care—particularly devastating in a country where at least one-fifth of the population is HIV-positive. The newly appropriated farms, many now in the hands of Mugabe’s cronies, lie in ruins: and so in what was once the breadbasket of Africa, famine looms for millions.
Zimbabwe’s inflation rate is the highest in the world: as of late June, it stood officially at 4,500 percent and unofficially at 9,000 percent, though both those figures will in all likelihood be obsolete by the time you read this. (The U.S. ambassador to Zimbabwe has predicted that inflation will reach 1.5 million percent by the end of the year, which conjures images of Weimar-era wheelbarrows stuffed with cash; last year, the government estimated that a family of five would need seventeen million Zimbabwean dollars—per month—to survive.) Four out of five Zimbabweans are out of work; a quarter of its citizens, including many of the most skilled, now live abroad; and thousands of Zimbabweans stream each week into a none-too-welcoming South Africa in search of food, jobs, and asylum. This summer, in a belated response to the inflation—which, bizarrely, he has blamed on Britain—Mugabe imposed dramatic price controls; this led to panic buying, closed stores, and production shutdowns. Armed youth militias were sent to patrol the markets and threaten shopkeepers.
Zimbabwe’s decimated health care system, combined with AIDS and poverty, have produced a life expectancy for women of thirty-four years: shockingly, the world’s lowest. (Equally shocking: it was sixty-one years in 1991.) On the political front, Zimbabwe’s judiciary and electoral processes have become bitter farces, the rule of law is virtually nonexistent, and its corruption is considered startling even on a continent known for kleptocracy. The World Bank has called Zimbabwe’s woes unprecedented for a country not at war, while the International Crisis Group has, ominously, compared its meltdown to that of the Congo at the end of Mobutu’s rule.
For a calamity of this magnitude, there can be no one cause. Zimbabwe experienced two wrenching years of severe drought in the early 1990s. At the same time, unwise structural readjustment programs, imposed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, led the country to sell its grain reserves in search of foreign currency; the confluence of these factors couldn’t have been worse. In the 1980s, Zimbabwe was surrounded by the destabilizing forces of violence and failure—in Angola, Mozambique, Namibia—much of it fueled by the apartheid regime in South Africa; this deepened an already paranoid style of governance. Still, however complex Zimbabwe’s recent history may be, every discussion of its ruin centers, always and inevitably, on one factor: Robert Gabriel Mugabe, head of the country’s ZANU-PF party and Zimbabwe’s president for twenty-seven years. As the Failed States Index report points out, “Though many events—natural disasters, economic shocks, an influx of refugees from a neighboring country—can lead to state failure, few are as decisive or as deadly as bad leadership.”
MUGABE’S authoritarian tendencies—and his murderous ones—were evident early on. Just two years after his election in the country’s first multiracial vote, he unleashed a reign of terror against Matabeleland, a province in the southwest that he suspected of housing a dissident movement. The word “genocide” has been used to describe this assault, which lasted five years; it may or may not be accurate, but there is no doubt that tens of thousands of unarmed civilians were beaten, raped, starved, and killed in a merciless scorched-earth policy. And from the first, the ruling party’s rapaciousness, combined with its sense of utter impunity, was startling to outside observers and native citizens alike; one United Nations official remarked on the rapidity with which Zimbabwe had created a “boss class . . . to the accompaniment of Marxist rhetoric.”
But the early years under Mugabe were full of good things too. Even as Matabeleland was massacred, the rest of the country hummed with hopeful energy, and literacy zoomed to almost 80 percent: an astonishing figure for Africa. (Lessing writes that on the day the education budget surpassed that for defense, members of Parliament “cheered and wept.”) Mugabe’s policy of racial reconciliation was rare and inspirational; an early speech welcoming all citizens of the new nation as friends and allies is “still remembered,” Philip Gourevitch wrote, “as one of the great declarations of the age.” There is no doubt that the vast majority of Zimbabweans, especially in the rural areas, trusted Mugabe and, in many cases, loved him; as Lessing noted, “Never has a ruler come to power with more goodwill.” Mugabe’s descent into unrestrained tyranny, and the bizarre wreckage of his country, were not inevitable: one can easily imagine very different scenarios that are neither fantasies nor wishful thinking. This makes the country’s destruction even more bewildering, infuriating, and tragic.
IN HIS NEW BOOK, When a Crocodile Eats the Sun, the journalist Peter Godwin paints a portrait of an imploding Zimbabwe that is alternately tender and furious. But it is a portrait that is also startlingly, almost willfully, partial, and it sent me looking to Zimbabwe’s complex past—exactly the place Godwin refuses to go—in an attempt to understand its present despair. And to try, too, to find voices other than those of Zimbabwe’s liberal whites—not because their views are wrong or unimportant, but because there is much that they cannot tell us.
Godwin was born and raised in Southern Rhodesia; his mother was a doctor who often worked in the countryside, his father the manager of a mine. They were tolerant, and progressive, and they knew that white rule was wrong. So did their son; still, as he recounts in his first memoir, Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africa, he fought for Ian Smith’s apartheid government. Duty was considered a higher value than individual conscience; and anyway, an eighteen-year-old Peter naively promises himself when he enters the war, “I wouldn’t do anything I disagreed with or was ashamed of.”
This would prove to be untrue—all the more reason, at war’s end, for Godwin to welcome ZANU’s triumph and the end of Zimbabwe’s international isolation. “I reveled in that brief and liberating period of social anarchy that marked the change between societies,” he recalls. “I loved the bizarre mix of people. The Scandinavian sandal brigade and the Third World groupies, the sudden flood of communist diplomats . . . .The cultural boycott was over. . . .Now Bob Marley performed at our independence celebrations.” But disillusion arrives quickly: Godwin becomes one of the first reporters—and risks his life—to expose the Matabeleland massacres. (An old black woman, whose name Godwin never learns, tips him off: “You must write about this thing in your newspapers, otherwise it will never stop until all of us are killed.”) Appearing in the Sunday Times of London, Godwin’s exposés infuriate the government, which declares him an enemy of the state. On the eve of arrest, he flees the country.
But it is the little details of Godwin’s early childhood in Rhodesia rather than the dramatic later events in Zimbabwe that are the most engaging parts of Mukiwa: for it is in these details that the complexity of life, and of human relations, in a racist regime are revealed. We see how inequality—how difference—looks to a child; the injustices peek through, so there is no need to shout about them. “We had cook boys and garden boys, however old they might be,” Godwin writes. “We knew them just by their Christian names, which were often fairly strange. . . .They believed that having a name in the white man’s language would attract the white man’s power. . . Sixpence, Cigarette or Matches were commonly used. . . . Baby girls were often called after the emotion felt by the mother at birth—Joy, Happiness, Delight. But, as far as I know, there were no girls called Disappointment, Pain or Exhaustion.”
Godwin spends his early years roaming the countryside with his nanny, Violet, whom he dearly loves; unbeknownst to his parents, he even joins her Apostolic sect, whose revival meetings thrill him. And he trails his mother as she makes her rounds (there were, of course, separate clinics for blacks and whites), helping to dispense sugar-cube vaccinations. (Years later, as a reporter in Mozambique, Godwin’s life will be saved when the fierce guerrilla who captures him turns out to be a grateful former patient.) We watch a young Peter begin to notice his world, and to try to make sense of it: “White people didn’t get such interesting diseases as Africans. They sometimes got ill, and even died, but this was rare.”
In his new book, the childhood idyll is long gone. Godwin, who now lives in New York, charts the decline of his country, and of his parents as they age, and the ways in which the former makes the latter so much sadder and scarier and worse. This is a book written in bitter anger: Mugabe, Godwin writes, is “the man who would grimly turn his country into an African Albania rather than relinquish power.” And disappointed sorrow: “A people who once rose against white rule and joined guerrilla movements in the thousands has now been cowed.”
Godwin offers a panoramic look at a crumbling nation. There is the human-rights collapse, epitomized by a hospital full of wounded protesters, including “middle-aged black ladies” beaten by Mugabe’s thugs. There is the explosion of crime, forcing his parents to install a “rape gate” to protect against violent intruders—though his father is viciously carjacked anyway. There is, most crucially, the takeover and ruin of the once-proud farms by drunken, unskilled youths; and the rigged, indeed absurd, elections: “ ‘I shan’t be voting for Mr. Mau Mau,’ says Dad.”
GODWIN is especially sharp, and heartbreaking, in evoking his parents’ descent into penury (their pensions aren’t adjusted for inflation). In one scene, at a bakery, “Dad loads his little basket with a small selection of loaves, which he will later freeze, and, as a special treat . . . two croissants.” The total: Z$12,000. “The black shop assistant manages to look sympathetic and embarrassed at the same time. . . . Dad slowly counts out all the notes in his wallet but they fall short. . . . He points to one of the loaves, and she removes it. . . .But the total is still too much, so he hands back the rolls one at a time.” Through it all his parents, then in their seventies and ailing, remain modest, level-headed, sane. They insist on using the public hospital rather than seek out special treatment; they hold hands like teenagers, “murmuring to each other like new lovers”; most of all, they refuse self-pity. Godwin is lucky to have such folks.
Yet some of Godwin’s most vivid scenes are also the most problematic, and raise questions not about what he sees but about what he doesn’t. One day, Godwin drives his father to a grocery store to collect bottle-deposit refunds. “Our line sullenly watches these diplomats and black-marketeers, expatriates, and corrupt government officials packing their Pajeros and Range Rovers and Mercs with mountains of groceries,” he recalls. The point is well-taken; yet Godwin seems unaware that this is precisely what blacks must have felt about his parents, and virtually all other whites, in the pre-independence days. In another vignette, white farmers at a pre-departure party speak of the “great life” and “good fun” they have lost. But Godwin doesn’t stop to think that for most blacks, the former dispensation was probably not great, or good, or fun. Godwin is right to insist that the politics of resentment that Mugabe has fomented—evidenced most clearly in the farm takeovers—are both practically destructive and morally ugly, and should never be mistaken for justice. But he seems loath to acknowledge that the vast inequities between blacks and whites, both before and since independence, were both unsustainable and wrong.
Another striking scene takes place at Godwin’s sister’s gravesite. (She had been killed, at age twenty-seven, by “friendly fire” during the civil war.) The cemetery is a shambles, and apparently people now live, or at least farm, in it: dirty toilet paper is littered among little plots of maize. Coming upon his sister’s grave, Godwin finds a fresh mound of excrement. “ ‘Fuck this!’ I shout, and I hurl the flowers away. . . .It lands near two women who are bent over, hoeing their cemetery corn, their babies strapped to their backs. They stop their hoeing, look up for a moment . . . and one laughs.”
Godwin’s anger is not only justified, but bracing. Who would not feel the same? Yet there is something puzzling about his lack of interest in the women’s plight. What does it say, what does it mean, that women must raise their food, and their babies, among graves? To ask this question is not a matter of political correctness or pity, nor does it suggest that Godwin should mute his rage. It is a matter of broadening one’s perspective, of expanding one’s sightline, of synthesizing one’s personal reactions with the realities of the wider world. The critic Vivian Gornick once observed how George Orwell, in “Shooting an Elephant,” “shrinks from the natives, yet his repulsion is tinged with compassion. At all times he is possessed of a sense of history, proportion, and paradox.” This is precisely what Godwin too often lacks.
When a Crocodile Eats the Sun contains another story, too. On one of Godwin’s visits home, his mother abruptly reveals a secret about Godwin’s father, a man of propriety and deep reserve who had always struck his son as the quintessential Englishman: “George Godwin, this Anglo-African in a safari suit and desert boots, with his clipped English accent.” But it turns out that George Godwin was actually Kazimierz Jerzy Goldfarb, and Kazimierz Jerzy Goldfarb was a Jew from Warsaw whose mother and sister were murdered at Treblinka.
Naturally, this sends his son—who, as an expatriate white from Africa, is already struggling with his “mongrel” identity—into a tailspin. Large chunks of Crocodile chart Godwin’s search for his father’s family’s fate, and his more general research into the Holocaust, about which he apparently knew almost nothing. But Godwin attempts, also, to synthesize his father’s history with the present realities of Zimbabwe, and this is where the book falters most. Because Godwin fails to discover, or to formulate, any organic link between the destruction of the Jews and of Zimbabwe, he slips into a series of sloppy, fundamentally misleading analogies.
“A white in Africa is like a Jew everywhere—on sufferance, watching warily, waiting for the next great tidal swell of hostility,” Godwin claims. Well, no. Mugabe’s treatment of the white farmers is utterly indefensible: they were terrorized and sometimes assaulted, and an estimated fifteen were killed. But Harare is not Sderot—much less Warsaw in 1939. And more than that: can it be that Godwin has forgotten, so quickly, the violence and inequities of Rhodesia’s white-supremacist regime? Earlier, and in a similar vein, Godwin writes that Zionism “resonated too closely with my white African narrative,” and that Israel’s similarities to apartheid-era South Africa are “uncanny”: a truism of the Southern African left. But this comparison, too, mistakes discrete parts for a much wider whole, and therefore clouds rather than illuminates reality. Godwin substitutes hyperbolic, emotionally charged parallels—a “this equals that”—for the difficulties of real thought.
LIKE PETER GODWIN, Alexandra Fuller came of age as white-led Rhodesia was bloodily transformed into majority-rule Zimbabwe. (Her family also lived in Malawi and Zambia.) The Fullers were the kind of riff-raff that the Godwins probably never met. Fuller’s mother is a drunk, and she belly-dances in bars, and her hands are “worn, blunt with work: years of digging in a garden, horses, cows, cattle, woodwork, tobacco.” Alexandra’s father is rough, though very good with guns—“Dad is away in the bush, fighting gooks”—and the parents refer to blacks as “Affies,” “cheeky kaffirs,” and “bloody baboons.” Their house is ugly, their food disgusting, and their land so bad that when Mugabe appropriates it, he gives it to an enemy. In the Fullers’ garden stands “an enormous cardboard cutout of a crouched, running terrorist,” which the family uses for target practice.
And whereas Godwin, as a child, spent long hours listening to the stories of the black servants and reverentially absorbing their wisdom, Fuller, known to her family as “Bobo,” is a brat who bosses them around while threatening to fire them. Paradoxically, though, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, far more than Godwin’s books, sings with a lush, raw love for Africa. Fuller is close to the feel of the dirt and the things that grow in it, to the shrieks of the animals and “the smell of people who are not afraid to eat meat,” to the pitilessness of the sun and the fury of the rains.
Fuller’s powers of observation are so trenchant that she suggests a world, or sometimes several worlds, in a few sentences. Also, she has a nice and useful feel for the incongruous. “There go the horses, two white faces and one black peering over the stable doors . . . And here come the dogs running, ear-flapping hopeful after the pickup. . . .And there goes the old cook, hunched and massive . . . He is almost seventy and has just sired another baby; he looks exhausted. He’s sitting in the kitchen doorway with a joint the size of a sausage hanging from his bottom lip . . . .The gardener stands to attention on his bush-broom, with which he is sweeping leaves from the dusty driveway. ‘Miss Bobo,’ he mouths, and raises his fist in a black power salute.”
The Fullers are not lucky. In 1974, when Alexandra is five, they move to a farm in a bad location, “right into the middle, the very birthplace and epicenter, of the civil war in Rhodesia and a freshly stoked civil war in Mozambique. . . . We erect a massive fence with slanting-backward barbed wire at the top.” Although they work very hard, they do not prosper; the commodity price of tobacco rules their lives.
But their real bad luck lies elsewhere. Alexandra’s mother gives birth to five children, three of whom die before they are toddlers. It is the second death—for which Alexandra blames herself—that tips her mother from wacky neurosis into something closer to madness. Like Godwin, Fuller tries to understand the connection between her family’s trauma and her nation’s. Ironically—precisely because she is less “political” than Godwin, and because she tells her story through a child’s eyes—she is more successful at allowing us to feel her sense of that terrible bond between personal and historic cataclysm.
“After Olivia dies, Mum and Dad’s joyful careless embrace of life is sucked away, like water swirling down a drain,” Fuller recalls. “The war and mosquitoes and land mines and ambushes don’t seem to matter.” The parents drink constantly and the family, carrying “our new, hungry sorrow,” takes off on a grief-stricken holiday. “So we drive recklessly through war-ravaged Rhodesia,” Fuller writes. “We are driving through a dreamscape. The war has cast a ghastly magic . . . .Everything is waiting and watchful and suspicious . . . .The only living creatures to celebrate our war are the plants, which spill and knot and twist victoriously around buildings and closed-down schools. . . Rhodesia’s war has turned the place back on itself.”
After the third child’s death, “things get worse,” and Fuller’s mother has a breakdown. For Alexandra, the center cannot hold in either home or world—the war is over but the violence continues—and she watches a dance of disaster unfold. “[Mum’s] is a contained, soggy madness, which does little more than humidify the dry, unspoken grief we all feel. But then the outside world starts to join in and has a nervous breakdown all its own, so that it starts to get hard for me to know where Mum’s madness ends and the world’s madness begins. . . .The world is a terrifying, unhinged blur and I cannot determine whether it is me, or the world, that has come off its axis.” It is Alexandra’s older sister, Vanessa, who finally explains the simple, prosaic truth: “Bad-luck things happen. That’s just the way it is. . . .It doesn’t mean anything, Bobo. . . .If you start thinking that bad luck comes all together on purpose or that it has to do . . . with you or with anything else, you’ll go bonkers.” There is cruelty in that randomness, but perhaps a glimmer of freedom too.
DORIS LESSING left Southern Rhodesia for London in 1949, when she was thirty; as a member of the Communist Party, she had been declared a Prohibited Immigrant by the government in Salisbury. She returned to Zimbabwe for the first time in 1982, and visited again in 1988, 1989, and 1992. Of her initial exile, she recalls, “I did not want to live in Southern Rhodesia, for if its climate was perfection, probably the finest in the world, and its landscape magnificent, it was provincial and tedious.” But, she adds, “These rational considerations did not reach some mysterious region of myself that was apparently an inexhaustible well of tears, for night after night I wept in my sleep and woke knowing I was unjustly excluded from my own best self.”
Lessing’s portrait of Zimbabwe is the richest of any that I know. Here is the “moment of social evolution” presented from a dizzying array of angles. Lessing shows us the “triumphant malice” of whites eagerly pointing to black failures, and the hopefulness of those who want to help the country prosper. She meets black villagers desperately yearning for work, for literature, for the life of the cities; and she observes former guerrillas, now government “chefs,” who have “taken to thievery as if born to it.” She tells of the students who shout “Tiananmen Square!” as they protest government corruption. She watches the visitors: international aid workers traipsing in and out of the country, and South African soldiers on holiday who “have had to forgive themselves too much.” She sees the squatters, too: angry, ignorant, destroyers of the land they covet. She admires the idealistic organizers mobilizing women in the villages, who remind her of the early Russian revolutionaries. And she finds an odd parallel of arrested development: whites, she writes, were drowning in childish self-pity, while blacks were in thrall to a fantasy, equally childish, of instant modernity, instant wealth, instant justice.
What Lessing encounters, again and again, is a country of complexity, contradiction, and movement: a country in the midst of remaking itself. The stakes are high, the expectations even higher, the outcome never overdetermined. Lessing loved Zimbabweans’ sense of “intense personal involvement” in the country’s future, so different from the ironic apathy of the West. Despite the country’s daunting problems, she wrote in 1988, “what came across was not the flat dreary hopelessness of Zambia, the misery of Mozambique, but vitality, exuberance, optimism, enjoyment. . . . Relish. . . in the unexpected, was very much the note of new Zimbabwe.”
Lessing discovers something else too, something subtler and deeper and harder to bear. Again and again she finds people—mainly blacks, though not only they—stunned and grief-stricken by the war, yet unwilling or unable to explore their bewildered pain. “It is not possible to fight this kind of war, a civil war, without the poisons going deep,” she observes. “Something has been blasted or torn deep inside people, an anger has gone bad, and bitter, there is disbelief that this horror can be happening at all.” Zimbabwe was reeling from violence, brutality, betrayal, yet determined to refashion itself without acknowledging its wounds; its development was predicated, in fact, on the repression of trauma. Lessing listens to a young ex-guerrilla named Talent who says, in a rare moment of exposure, “I was lucky, I wasn’t one of the pretty girls”—for the pretty ones were used for sex. Lessing continues, “But it seems the War has never really left her: she has terrible headaches and sometimes cannot move for days. . . .A war ends, you bury the dead, you look after the cripples—but everywhere among ordinary people is this army whose wounds don’t show: the numbed, or the brutalized, or those who can never, not really, believe in the innocence of life, of living; or those who will for ever be slowed by grief.”
THIS IS THE TERRAIN that the black Zimbabwean writer Yvonne Vera explores in her novel, The Stone Virgins. (Vera died two years ago, at age forty.) It is set in Matabeleland during the massacres: “Then independence arrived and brought with it a spectacular arena for a different war, in which they were all casualties.” Brutality’s tenaciousness, and its mystery, is Vera’s subject.
The Stone Virgins reads like a slow-motion atrocity film. Its central act is a horrific rape and mutilation—the victim’s lips are sliced off—by an ex-guerrilla named Sibaso of a village girl named Nonceba. (Sibaso also decapitates Nonceba’s beloved sister, Thenjiwe.) The novel, which is highly impressionistic, alludes to the ways that suffering changes Nonceba, splitting her off from a former, now irretrievable self: “Now she is alone, the shadow to her own being. The other is vanished with a sudden and astonishing finality.”
Most striking is Vera’s portrait of Sibaso. She has not an ounce of liberal sympathy, or even liberal explanation, for this monstrous predator. He is a man who not only loves violence but who needs violence: “If he loses an enemy, he invents another.” He is good at what he does, for he has honed “all the fine instincts of annihilation.” Most tellingly: Sibaso is “a hunter who kills not because he is hungry but because his stomach is full, and therefore he can hunt with grace.” He is a man, in short, whose nihilistic violence foretells the civil wars of places like Liberia and Sierra Leone, as well as the madness of today’s jihadist groups. He kills not because he is oppressed but because killing suits him; his sadism is not a cry for help but a shout of joy.
Vera understands that sadistic violence not only shatters but actually unmakes the world of the survivors. In one scene, a group of government soldiers carefully skins alive an Indian shopkeeper, then massacres all the customers, including children, in his store. She writes: “They committed evil as though it were a legitimate pursuit, a ritual for their own convictions. Each move meant to shock, to cure the naïve mind. The mind [is] not supposed to survive it, to retell it, but to perish.”
MOST OF US accept the fact that violence is sometimes necessary in the pursuit of political aims; all of us feel comforted by this fact. For if violence has an aim, it has a limit. The violence itself may be obscene, disgusting, criminal; the aim might be impossible or unjust. Still, this kind of violence has not seceded from cause and effect, claims and demands; Primo Levi described it as “hateful but not insane.”
But the violence that “cures” the mind, which is to say negates it, is something different. This is the “curing” that took place in Auschwitz, and several decades later in the hills of Rwanda, and it was the aim, I think, of the rape camps in Bosnia. This is what Levi called “useless violence”: the infliction of unbearable pain, humiliation, and suffering, just for its own sake and no other. It is a kind of moral autism. Unburdened by tradition, by politics, by consequences, it claims for itself an absolute freedom.
In The Stone Virgins, Nonceba wonders “what exactly it took for a man to look at a woman and cut her up like a piece of dry hide without asking himself a single question.” It is we who must ask this question, especially in this age of martyrs’ brigades and suicide-killers. And yet the answer, I think, may be impossible to come by, for the very texture of such violence defies reason. (This is why, Jean Améry claimed, in Auschwitz it was intellectuals who were particularly defenseless.) It is wishful thinking, for instance—and an odd sort of narcissism—to believe that the torture-carnage that has swept through Iraq will end if America pulls out its troops (though that might be a good idea); or that the thirst for martyrdom will be quenched if Israel pulls back her borders (though that might be a good idea). The cult of suffering and death, the exultation in suffering and death, does not necessarily answer to traditional political solutions.
Zimbabwe isn’t Rwanda or Cambodia or Sierra Leone. Yet in thinking of its ruin, I am haunted by Lessing’s warnings about the hidden poisons of war. One can’t help wondering if Zimbabwe would, or at least could, have become a very different place had it found the space, the means, and the courage to delve into the violence of its birth. Those wounds that “don’t show” have revealed themselves, and they bleed.
Susie Linfield is the director of the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program at New York University.
Please credit www.kubatana.net if you make use of material from this website. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License unless stated otherwise.
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Last BA flight from a grounded economy…
Last BA flight from a grounded economy…
The last flight out taxied from the sparkling new Harare airport, built to handle the non-existent tourists, lifted over the city and dipped its wings in farewell. With that, at 9am on Sunday, British Airways (BA) said goodbye to Zimbabwe, amid mutterings from supporters of President Robert Mugabe that the pull-out had less to do with the collapse of its economy than a British government plot to unseat the Zimbabwean ruler.
In seat 13H, Cephas Msipa, a lifelong member of Mugabe's Zanu-PF, said he thought it probably was all a conspiracy but he was going to miss British Airways anyway, particularly when he reflects on the alternative. "In these difficult times, Air Zimbabwe has developed what you might call a reputation for being unreliable," he said.What he means is that Zimbabwe's national carrier is in much the same state as the country, with flights running days late for lack of fuel or maintenance, or diverted at Mugabe's whim to a shopping trip in Kuala Lumpar or to attend the Pope's funeral.Annie, a white Zimbabwean who preferred not to give her surname for fear of retribution by "Comrade Bob" as Mugabe is nicknamed, is going to miss BA for another reason.
"You know there's toilet paper on this plane. I haven't been able get toilet paper in the shops for weeks," she said. "I don't know why it matters that this is the last flight but it does. It's as if we're finally being cut off from the rest of the world. I think for us [whites] it felt like the escape route if we ever needed it. It's stupid really because we can get to South Africa easily enough but it just made us feel better having the BA link."Though symbolic, it's not the first time BA has been forced out of Zimbabwe in the 75 years since the first flying boats opened up the aerial link with Southern Africa.
Services were discontinued in 1965 as Ian Smith declared independence for Rhodesia with the deluded pledge that not in a thousand years would a black man rule. BA was back 15 years later as Smith was defeated by the reality of economics as much as war; Rhodesia ceased to exist and the only black man to ever rule Zimbabwe, Mugabe, took power.On Sunday, the last plane left behind another government sinking deeper into the delusion that everything is under its control. As the economy contracts amid hyperinflation and collapsing production, Mugabe has created a vast new bureaucracy to oversee price controls on non-existent goods in the shops.His finance minister maintains an official exchange rate so out of proportion with the hidden market that the central bank governor has to send his staff out to buy dollars on the street.
The regime has declared "the mother of all agricultural seasons" even though there is no bread in the shops because the wheat harvest has fallen short by two-thirds and production of tobacco, once Zimbabwe's biggest money earner, has dropped to one-fifth of what it once was. Cigarettes are in such short supply that a marijuana joint is cheaper.The government has even announced plans to sell electricity to Namibia next year although it doesn't generate the power to keep lights on at home.The reality is that a man living in a Harare township lucky enough to have a job earns, on average, Z$5-million dollars a month, or R33 at the hidden-market rate. His transport to work in Harare costs more than that but he has to overspend if he wants to keep his job.Other European airlines abandoned Zimbabwe as it sank deeper into the mire but BA stayed because historic ties with Britain, the old colonial power, assured a steady supply of passengers.But the airline says it has been defeated by escalating costs, particularly the price of having to ship fuel in by road from South Africa, and the unreal maths of the Zimbabwean economy.An Air Zimbabwe economy class ticket to London and back officially costs £7 500 at the government exchange rate but just £225 on the alternative rate, half the price of a BA ticket (which could only be bought in pounds sterling or US dollars), after the Zimbabwe dollar plummeted from $5 100 to the pound at the beginning of the year to close to $2-million today.Msipa is suspicious of the economic claims, as is the Zimbabwean government.
He doesn't understand how BA isn't making money. "It's interesting that it's pulling out at the same time [British Prime Minister] Gordon Brown came in and made a more concerted effort to cut ties with Zimbabwe. To us it would seem it's part of the ratcheting up of sanctions.Msipa admits there is a crisis though, and that his dad might be part of the problem.His father, who shares the same name, is a liberation war hero and now the Zanu-PF governor of Midlands province where he has overseen the confiscation of white-owned farms and the collapse of agriculture. Msipa concedes this may have been a mistake.
"Being an old nationalist he would be in the mainstream of this soil-based development, that everything is about the land. Whereas our generation says we should get into computers and call centres. I don't see myself being a horse-drawn plough," he said.The younger Msipa is a property developer who travels regularly to London. At home he also sells houses. He suspects many of those buying are Zimbabweans living abroad, and those selling are in desperate need of cash. That has kept the worst of it at bay for him and his five children."We have a relative advantage. I can get things done ... I have contacts," he said. "But how I'm going to get to London now is a problem. No one wants to go through Johannesburg. They steal your luggage there. I suppose it will just have to be Air Zimbabwe."
- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2007
The last flight out taxied from the sparkling new Harare airport, built to handle the non-existent tourists, lifted over the city and dipped its wings in farewell. With that, at 9am on Sunday, British Airways (BA) said goodbye to Zimbabwe, amid mutterings from supporters of President Robert Mugabe that the pull-out had less to do with the collapse of its economy than a British government plot to unseat the Zimbabwean ruler.
In seat 13H, Cephas Msipa, a lifelong member of Mugabe's Zanu-PF, said he thought it probably was all a conspiracy but he was going to miss British Airways anyway, particularly when he reflects on the alternative. "In these difficult times, Air Zimbabwe has developed what you might call a reputation for being unreliable," he said.What he means is that Zimbabwe's national carrier is in much the same state as the country, with flights running days late for lack of fuel or maintenance, or diverted at Mugabe's whim to a shopping trip in Kuala Lumpar or to attend the Pope's funeral.Annie, a white Zimbabwean who preferred not to give her surname for fear of retribution by "Comrade Bob" as Mugabe is nicknamed, is going to miss BA for another reason.
"You know there's toilet paper on this plane. I haven't been able get toilet paper in the shops for weeks," she said. "I don't know why it matters that this is the last flight but it does. It's as if we're finally being cut off from the rest of the world. I think for us [whites] it felt like the escape route if we ever needed it. It's stupid really because we can get to South Africa easily enough but it just made us feel better having the BA link."Though symbolic, it's not the first time BA has been forced out of Zimbabwe in the 75 years since the first flying boats opened up the aerial link with Southern Africa.
Services were discontinued in 1965 as Ian Smith declared independence for Rhodesia with the deluded pledge that not in a thousand years would a black man rule. BA was back 15 years later as Smith was defeated by the reality of economics as much as war; Rhodesia ceased to exist and the only black man to ever rule Zimbabwe, Mugabe, took power.On Sunday, the last plane left behind another government sinking deeper into the delusion that everything is under its control. As the economy contracts amid hyperinflation and collapsing production, Mugabe has created a vast new bureaucracy to oversee price controls on non-existent goods in the shops.His finance minister maintains an official exchange rate so out of proportion with the hidden market that the central bank governor has to send his staff out to buy dollars on the street.
The regime has declared "the mother of all agricultural seasons" even though there is no bread in the shops because the wheat harvest has fallen short by two-thirds and production of tobacco, once Zimbabwe's biggest money earner, has dropped to one-fifth of what it once was. Cigarettes are in such short supply that a marijuana joint is cheaper.The government has even announced plans to sell electricity to Namibia next year although it doesn't generate the power to keep lights on at home.The reality is that a man living in a Harare township lucky enough to have a job earns, on average, Z$5-million dollars a month, or R33 at the hidden-market rate. His transport to work in Harare costs more than that but he has to overspend if he wants to keep his job.Other European airlines abandoned Zimbabwe as it sank deeper into the mire but BA stayed because historic ties with Britain, the old colonial power, assured a steady supply of passengers.But the airline says it has been defeated by escalating costs, particularly the price of having to ship fuel in by road from South Africa, and the unreal maths of the Zimbabwean economy.An Air Zimbabwe economy class ticket to London and back officially costs £7 500 at the government exchange rate but just £225 on the alternative rate, half the price of a BA ticket (which could only be bought in pounds sterling or US dollars), after the Zimbabwe dollar plummeted from $5 100 to the pound at the beginning of the year to close to $2-million today.Msipa is suspicious of the economic claims, as is the Zimbabwean government.
He doesn't understand how BA isn't making money. "It's interesting that it's pulling out at the same time [British Prime Minister] Gordon Brown came in and made a more concerted effort to cut ties with Zimbabwe. To us it would seem it's part of the ratcheting up of sanctions.Msipa admits there is a crisis though, and that his dad might be part of the problem.His father, who shares the same name, is a liberation war hero and now the Zanu-PF governor of Midlands province where he has overseen the confiscation of white-owned farms and the collapse of agriculture. Msipa concedes this may have been a mistake.
"Being an old nationalist he would be in the mainstream of this soil-based development, that everything is about the land. Whereas our generation says we should get into computers and call centres. I don't see myself being a horse-drawn plough," he said.The younger Msipa is a property developer who travels regularly to London. At home he also sells houses. He suspects many of those buying are Zimbabweans living abroad, and those selling are in desperate need of cash. That has kept the worst of it at bay for him and his five children."We have a relative advantage. I can get things done ... I have contacts," he said. "But how I'm going to get to London now is a problem. No one wants to go through Johannesburg. They steal your luggage there. I suppose it will just have to be Air Zimbabwe."
- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2007
Sunday, October 28, 2007
Otis Waygood (Blues Band0
Otis Waygood (Blues Band)
STORMING HEAVEN ON HALLUCINOGENICS
(The Otis Waygood Story)
sleeve notes from CD re-issue of "The Black Album"
Rian Malan,
November 2000
It was the worst of times in Joburg's white suburbs. The Beatles were banned on state radio. Haircut regulations were merciless. The closest thing to a pop star was Gê Korsten. Life was an unutterable hell of boredom and conformity, but lo: salvation awaited. They came from the north in the summer of '69, armed with axes and Scarabs, long hair streaming behind them, and proceeded to slay the youth of the nation with an arsenal of murderous blues-rock tunes, synchronized foot-stomping and, on a good night, eye-popping displays of maniacal writhing in advanced states of rock 'n' roll transfiguration. The masses roared. The establishment was shaken. They were the biggest thing our small world had ever seen, our Led Zeppelin, our Black Sabbath, maybe even our Rolling Stones. They were the Otis Waygood Blues Band, and this is their story.
It begins in 1964 or so, at a Jewish youth camp in what was then Rhodesia. Rob and Alan Zipper were from Bulawayo, where their dad had a clothes shop. Ivor Rubenstein was Alan's best mate, and Leigh Sagar was the local butcher's son. All these boys were budding musicians. Alan and Ivor had a little "Fenders and footsteps" band that played Shadows covers at talent competitions, and Rob was into folk. They considered themselves pretty cool until they met Benny Miller, who was all of 16 and sported such unheard-of trappings as a denim jacket and Beatles-length hair. Benny had an older sister who'd introduced him to some way-out music, and when he picked up his guitar, the Bulawayo boys were staggered: he was playing the blues, making that axe sing and cry like a negro.
How did the music of black American pain and sufferation find its way to the rebel colony of Rhodesia, where Ian Smith was about to declare UDI in the hope of preserving white supremacy for another five hundred years? It's a long story, and it begins in Chicago in the forties and fifties, where blues cats like Howlin' Wolf and Sonny Boy Williamson cut '78s that eventually found their way into the hands of young British enthusiasts like John Mayall and Eric Clapton, who covered the songs in their early sessions and always cited the bluesmen as their gurus. Word of this eventually penetrated Rhodesia, and sent Benny scrambling after the real stuff, which he found on Pye Records' Blues Series, volumes one through six. Which is how Benny Miller came to be playing the blues around a campfire in Africa, bending and stretching those sad notes like a veteran. The Bulawayo contingent reached for their own guitars, and thus began a band that evolved over several years into Otis Waygood.
In its earliest incarnation, the band was built around Benny Miller, who remains, says Rob Zipper, "one of the best guitarists I've ever heard." Rob himself sang, played the blues harp and sax. His younger brother Alan was on bass. Bulawayo homeboys Ivor and Leigh were on drums and rhythm respectively, and flautist Martin Jackson completed the lineup. Their manager, Andy Vaughan, was the dude who observed that if you scrambled the name of a famous lift manufacturer you came up with a monniker that sounded authentically American negro: Otis Waygood. Rob thought it was pretty witty. Ivor said, "Ja, and lifts can be pretty heavy too." And so the Otis Waygood Blues Band came into being.
By now, it was 1969, and the older cats were students at the University College of Rhodesia, earnest young men, seriously involved in the struggle against bigotry, prejudice and short hair. By day they were student activists, by night they played sessions. Their repetoire consisted of blues standards and James Brown grooves, and they were getting better and better. They landed a Saturday afternoon gig at Les Discotheque. Crowds started coming. When Rob stood up to talk at student meetings, he was drowned out by cries of, "You're Late Miss Kate."
"Miss Kate" was the band's signature tune, an old Deefore/Hitzfield number that they played at a bone-crunching volume and frantic pace. Towards the end of '69, Otis were asked to perform "Miss Kate" on state TV. The boys obliged with a display of sneering insolence and hip-thrusting sexuality that provoked indignation from your average Rhodesian. These chaps are outrageous, they cried. They have "golliwog hair" and bad manners! They go into the locations and play for natives! They aren't proper Rhodies!
Indeed they weren't, which is why they were planning to leave the country as soon as they could. Rob graduated at the end of 1969, and he was supposed to be the first to go, but it was summer and the boys were young and wild and someone came up with the idea of driving to Cape Town. Benny Miller thought it was a blind move, and refused to come. But rest were bok, so they loaded their amps into a battered old Kombi and set off across Africa to seek their fortune.
South of the Limpopo River, they entered a country in which a minor social revolution was brewing. In the West, the hippie movement had already peaked, but South Africa was always a few years behind the times, and this was our summer of love. Communes were springing up in the white suburbs. Acid had made its debut. Cape Town's Green Point Stadium was a great milling of stoned longhairs, come to attend an event billed as "the largest pop festival south of and since the Isle of Wight." It was also a competition, with the winner in line for a three-month residency at a local hotel. Otis Waygood arrived too late to compete, but impresario Selwyn Miller gave them a 15-minute slot as consolation -- 2pm on a burning December afternoon.
The audience was half asleep when they took the stage. Twelve bars into the set, they were on their feet. By the end of the first song, they were "freaking out," according to reports in the next morning's papers. By the time the band got around to "Fever," fans were attacking the security fence, and Rob got so carried away that he leapt off the ten-foot-high stage and almost killed himself. "That's when it all started," he says. Otis made the next day's papers in a very big way, and went on to become the "underground" sensation of 1969's Christmas holiday season, drawing sell-out crowds wherever they played.
In South Africa, this was the big time, and it lasted barely three weeks. The holidays ended, the tourists departed, and that was that: the rock heroes had to pack their gear and go back home. As fate would have it, however, their Kombi broke down in Johannesburg, and they wound up gigging at a club called Electric Circus to raise money for a valve job. One night, after a particularly sweaty set, a slender blonde guy came backstage and said, "I'm going to turn you into the biggest thing South Africa has ever seen."
This was Clive Calder, who went on to become a rock billionaire, owner of the world's largest independent music company. Back then he was a lightie of 24, just starting out in the record business. His rap was inspirational. Said he'd just returned from Europe, where he'd seen how the moguls broke Grand Funk Railroad. Maintained he was capable of doing the same thing with Otis Waygood, and that together, they would conquer the planet. The white bluesboys signed on the dotted line, and Clive Calder's career began.
The album you're holding in your hand was recorded over two days in Joburg's EMI studios in March, 1970, with Calder producing and playing piano on several tracks. Laid down in haste on an old four-track machine, it is less a work of art than a talisman to transport you back to sweaty little clubs in the early days of Otis Waygood's reign as South Africa's premier live group. Rob would brace himself in a splay-legged rock hero stance, tilt his head sideways, close his eyes and bellow as if his life depended on it. As the spirit took them, the sidemen would break into this frenzied bowing motion, bending double over their guitars on every beat, like a row of longhaired rabbis dovening madly at some blues-rock shrine. By the time they got to "Fever," with its electrifying climactic footstomp, the audience was pulverized. "It was like having your senses worked over with a baseball bat," said one critic.
Critics were somewhat less taken with the untitled LP's blank black cover. "We were copying the Beatles," explains Alan Zipper. "They'd just done The White Album, so we thought we'd do a black album." It was released in May 1970, and Calder immediately put Otis Waygood on the road to back it. His plan was to broaden the band's fan base to the point where kids in the smallest town were clamouring for the record, and that meant playing everywhere - Kroonstad, Klerksdorp, Witbank, you name it; towns where longhairs had never been seen before.
"In those smaller towns we were like aliens from outer space," says drummer Ivor. "I remember driving into places with a motorcycle cop in front and another behind, just sort of forewarning the town, 'Here they come.'" Intrigued by Calder's masterful hype campaign, platteland people turned out in droves to see the longhaired weirdos. "It was amazing," says Ivor. "Calder had the journalists eating out of his hand. Everything you opened was just Otis."
The boys in the band were pretty straight when they arrived in South Africa, but youths everywhere were storming heaven on hallucinogenics, and pretty soon, Otis Waygood was doing it too. By now they were living in an old house in the suburbs of Jo'burg, a sort of head quarters with mattresses strewn across the bare floors and a family of 20 hippies sitting down for communal meals.
The acid metaphyisicians of Abstract Truth crashed out there for weeks on end. Freedom's Children were regular guests, along with African stars like Kippie Moeketsi and Julian Bahula. Everyone would get high and jam in the soundproofed garage. Otis' music began to evolve in a direction presaged by the three bonus tracks that conclude this album. The riffs grew darker and heavier. Elements of free jazz and white noise crept in. Songs like "You Can Do (Part I)" were eerie, unnerving excursions into regions of the psyche where only the brave dared tread. Flautist Martin Jackson made the trip once too often, suffered a "spiritual crisis" and quit the band.
His replacement was Harry Poulos, the pale Greek god of keyboards, recruited from the ruins of Freedom's Children. Harry was a useful guy to have around in several respects, an enormously talented musician and a Zen mechanic to boot, capable of diagnosing the ailments of the band's worn-out Kombi just by remaining silent and centred and meditating on the problem until a solution revealed itself. With his help, the band recorded two more albums in quick succession ('Simply Otis Waygood' and 'Ten Light Claps and a Scream') and continued its epic trek through platteland towns, coastal resorts and open-air festivals. They finished 1970 where they started - special guests at the grand final of Cape Town's annual Battle of the Bands. The audience wouldn't let them off the stage. Rob worked himself into such a state of James Brownian exhaustion that he had to be carried off in the end. "Whether you accept it or not," wrote critic Peter Feldman, "1970 was their year."
After that, it was all downhill in a way. There were only so many heads in South Africa, and by the end of 1970, they'd all bought an Otis LP and seen the band live several times. Beyond a certain point, Otis could only go round in circles. Worse yet, conservatives were growing intolerant of long-haired social deviance. National Party MPs complained that rock music was rotting the nation's moral fibre. Right-wing students invaded a pop festival where Otis was playing and gave several particants an involuntary haircut. "We had police coming to the house every second night," says Ivor, "or guys with crewcuts and denim jackets saying, 'Hey, man, the car's broken down, can we sleep here?' They always planted weed in the toilets, but we always found it before they bust us."
By March, 1971, the day of was drawing nigh. Describing drug abuse as a "national emergency," the Minister of Police announced a crackdown. At the same time, various armies started breathing down Otis Waygood's neck. When the SADF informed Ivor that he was liable for military service, the boys sneaked back into Rhodesia, but more call-up papers were waiting for them at their parents' homes. "Ian Smith despised us," says Ivor. "They wanted to make an example of us, so we basically escaped." At the time, international airlines weren't supposed to land in Rhodesia because of sanctions. But there was a Jo'burg-Paris flight that made a secret stop in Salisbury. The boys boarded it and vanished.
Back in Jo'burg, we were bereft. Friends and I started a tribute band that played garage parties in the white suburbs, our every lick, pose and song copied off Otis, but that petered out in a year or two, and we were left with nothing but their records and vague rumours from a distant hemisphere. Otis were alive and well in Amsterdam. Later, they were spotted in England, transmogrified into a white reggae band that played the deeply underground blacks-only heavy dub circuit. Later still, they became Immigrant, a multi-racial outfit that did a few gigs at the Rock Garden and the Palladium. But it never quite came together again, and the band disintegrated at the end of the seventies.
Today, Leigh Sagar is a barrister in London. Rob Zipper practices architecture. Alan Zipper runs a recording studio. Ivor Rubenstein returned to Bulawayo, where he manufactures hats. Clive Calder is chairman of Jive Records and ruling genius of the teen pop genre, responsible inter alia for the Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears. Martin Jackson was last seen drifting around Salisbury with a huge cross painted on his back, and is rumoured to have died in the mid-seventies. Harry Poulos stepped off a building, another casualty of an era whose mad intensity made a reversion to the ordinary unbearable.
As for Benny Miller, the guy who started it all, he's still in Harare, wryly amused by the extraordinary adventure he missed by ducking out of that fateful trip to Cape Town. He still plays guitar in sixties nostalgia bands, and produces African music for a living.
(editor update : Unfortunately Benny Miller passed away suddenly in Harare in 2006)
Webpage:
Otis Waygood
Discography:
Otis Waygood Blues Band
Simply Otis Waygood
Ten Light Claps And A Scream
STORMING HEAVEN ON HALLUCINOGENICS
(The Otis Waygood Story)
sleeve notes from CD re-issue of "The Black Album"
Rian Malan,
November 2000
It was the worst of times in Joburg's white suburbs. The Beatles were banned on state radio. Haircut regulations were merciless. The closest thing to a pop star was Gê Korsten. Life was an unutterable hell of boredom and conformity, but lo: salvation awaited. They came from the north in the summer of '69, armed with axes and Scarabs, long hair streaming behind them, and proceeded to slay the youth of the nation with an arsenal of murderous blues-rock tunes, synchronized foot-stomping and, on a good night, eye-popping displays of maniacal writhing in advanced states of rock 'n' roll transfiguration. The masses roared. The establishment was shaken. They were the biggest thing our small world had ever seen, our Led Zeppelin, our Black Sabbath, maybe even our Rolling Stones. They were the Otis Waygood Blues Band, and this is their story.
It begins in 1964 or so, at a Jewish youth camp in what was then Rhodesia. Rob and Alan Zipper were from Bulawayo, where their dad had a clothes shop. Ivor Rubenstein was Alan's best mate, and Leigh Sagar was the local butcher's son. All these boys were budding musicians. Alan and Ivor had a little "Fenders and footsteps" band that played Shadows covers at talent competitions, and Rob was into folk. They considered themselves pretty cool until they met Benny Miller, who was all of 16 and sported such unheard-of trappings as a denim jacket and Beatles-length hair. Benny had an older sister who'd introduced him to some way-out music, and when he picked up his guitar, the Bulawayo boys were staggered: he was playing the blues, making that axe sing and cry like a negro.
How did the music of black American pain and sufferation find its way to the rebel colony of Rhodesia, where Ian Smith was about to declare UDI in the hope of preserving white supremacy for another five hundred years? It's a long story, and it begins in Chicago in the forties and fifties, where blues cats like Howlin' Wolf and Sonny Boy Williamson cut '78s that eventually found their way into the hands of young British enthusiasts like John Mayall and Eric Clapton, who covered the songs in their early sessions and always cited the bluesmen as their gurus. Word of this eventually penetrated Rhodesia, and sent Benny scrambling after the real stuff, which he found on Pye Records' Blues Series, volumes one through six. Which is how Benny Miller came to be playing the blues around a campfire in Africa, bending and stretching those sad notes like a veteran. The Bulawayo contingent reached for their own guitars, and thus began a band that evolved over several years into Otis Waygood.
In its earliest incarnation, the band was built around Benny Miller, who remains, says Rob Zipper, "one of the best guitarists I've ever heard." Rob himself sang, played the blues harp and sax. His younger brother Alan was on bass. Bulawayo homeboys Ivor and Leigh were on drums and rhythm respectively, and flautist Martin Jackson completed the lineup. Their manager, Andy Vaughan, was the dude who observed that if you scrambled the name of a famous lift manufacturer you came up with a monniker that sounded authentically American negro: Otis Waygood. Rob thought it was pretty witty. Ivor said, "Ja, and lifts can be pretty heavy too." And so the Otis Waygood Blues Band came into being.
By now, it was 1969, and the older cats were students at the University College of Rhodesia, earnest young men, seriously involved in the struggle against bigotry, prejudice and short hair. By day they were student activists, by night they played sessions. Their repetoire consisted of blues standards and James Brown grooves, and they were getting better and better. They landed a Saturday afternoon gig at Les Discotheque. Crowds started coming. When Rob stood up to talk at student meetings, he was drowned out by cries of, "You're Late Miss Kate."
"Miss Kate" was the band's signature tune, an old Deefore/Hitzfield number that they played at a bone-crunching volume and frantic pace. Towards the end of '69, Otis were asked to perform "Miss Kate" on state TV. The boys obliged with a display of sneering insolence and hip-thrusting sexuality that provoked indignation from your average Rhodesian. These chaps are outrageous, they cried. They have "golliwog hair" and bad manners! They go into the locations and play for natives! They aren't proper Rhodies!
Indeed they weren't, which is why they were planning to leave the country as soon as they could. Rob graduated at the end of 1969, and he was supposed to be the first to go, but it was summer and the boys were young and wild and someone came up with the idea of driving to Cape Town. Benny Miller thought it was a blind move, and refused to come. But rest were bok, so they loaded their amps into a battered old Kombi and set off across Africa to seek their fortune.
South of the Limpopo River, they entered a country in which a minor social revolution was brewing. In the West, the hippie movement had already peaked, but South Africa was always a few years behind the times, and this was our summer of love. Communes were springing up in the white suburbs. Acid had made its debut. Cape Town's Green Point Stadium was a great milling of stoned longhairs, come to attend an event billed as "the largest pop festival south of and since the Isle of Wight." It was also a competition, with the winner in line for a three-month residency at a local hotel. Otis Waygood arrived too late to compete, but impresario Selwyn Miller gave them a 15-minute slot as consolation -- 2pm on a burning December afternoon.
The audience was half asleep when they took the stage. Twelve bars into the set, they were on their feet. By the end of the first song, they were "freaking out," according to reports in the next morning's papers. By the time the band got around to "Fever," fans were attacking the security fence, and Rob got so carried away that he leapt off the ten-foot-high stage and almost killed himself. "That's when it all started," he says. Otis made the next day's papers in a very big way, and went on to become the "underground" sensation of 1969's Christmas holiday season, drawing sell-out crowds wherever they played.
In South Africa, this was the big time, and it lasted barely three weeks. The holidays ended, the tourists departed, and that was that: the rock heroes had to pack their gear and go back home. As fate would have it, however, their Kombi broke down in Johannesburg, and they wound up gigging at a club called Electric Circus to raise money for a valve job. One night, after a particularly sweaty set, a slender blonde guy came backstage and said, "I'm going to turn you into the biggest thing South Africa has ever seen."
This was Clive Calder, who went on to become a rock billionaire, owner of the world's largest independent music company. Back then he was a lightie of 24, just starting out in the record business. His rap was inspirational. Said he'd just returned from Europe, where he'd seen how the moguls broke Grand Funk Railroad. Maintained he was capable of doing the same thing with Otis Waygood, and that together, they would conquer the planet. The white bluesboys signed on the dotted line, and Clive Calder's career began.
The album you're holding in your hand was recorded over two days in Joburg's EMI studios in March, 1970, with Calder producing and playing piano on several tracks. Laid down in haste on an old four-track machine, it is less a work of art than a talisman to transport you back to sweaty little clubs in the early days of Otis Waygood's reign as South Africa's premier live group. Rob would brace himself in a splay-legged rock hero stance, tilt his head sideways, close his eyes and bellow as if his life depended on it. As the spirit took them, the sidemen would break into this frenzied bowing motion, bending double over their guitars on every beat, like a row of longhaired rabbis dovening madly at some blues-rock shrine. By the time they got to "Fever," with its electrifying climactic footstomp, the audience was pulverized. "It was like having your senses worked over with a baseball bat," said one critic.
Critics were somewhat less taken with the untitled LP's blank black cover. "We were copying the Beatles," explains Alan Zipper. "They'd just done The White Album, so we thought we'd do a black album." It was released in May 1970, and Calder immediately put Otis Waygood on the road to back it. His plan was to broaden the band's fan base to the point where kids in the smallest town were clamouring for the record, and that meant playing everywhere - Kroonstad, Klerksdorp, Witbank, you name it; towns where longhairs had never been seen before.
"In those smaller towns we were like aliens from outer space," says drummer Ivor. "I remember driving into places with a motorcycle cop in front and another behind, just sort of forewarning the town, 'Here they come.'" Intrigued by Calder's masterful hype campaign, platteland people turned out in droves to see the longhaired weirdos. "It was amazing," says Ivor. "Calder had the journalists eating out of his hand. Everything you opened was just Otis."
The boys in the band were pretty straight when they arrived in South Africa, but youths everywhere were storming heaven on hallucinogenics, and pretty soon, Otis Waygood was doing it too. By now they were living in an old house in the suburbs of Jo'burg, a sort of head quarters with mattresses strewn across the bare floors and a family of 20 hippies sitting down for communal meals.
The acid metaphyisicians of Abstract Truth crashed out there for weeks on end. Freedom's Children were regular guests, along with African stars like Kippie Moeketsi and Julian Bahula. Everyone would get high and jam in the soundproofed garage. Otis' music began to evolve in a direction presaged by the three bonus tracks that conclude this album. The riffs grew darker and heavier. Elements of free jazz and white noise crept in. Songs like "You Can Do (Part I)" were eerie, unnerving excursions into regions of the psyche where only the brave dared tread. Flautist Martin Jackson made the trip once too often, suffered a "spiritual crisis" and quit the band.
His replacement was Harry Poulos, the pale Greek god of keyboards, recruited from the ruins of Freedom's Children. Harry was a useful guy to have around in several respects, an enormously talented musician and a Zen mechanic to boot, capable of diagnosing the ailments of the band's worn-out Kombi just by remaining silent and centred and meditating on the problem until a solution revealed itself. With his help, the band recorded two more albums in quick succession ('Simply Otis Waygood' and 'Ten Light Claps and a Scream') and continued its epic trek through platteland towns, coastal resorts and open-air festivals. They finished 1970 where they started - special guests at the grand final of Cape Town's annual Battle of the Bands. The audience wouldn't let them off the stage. Rob worked himself into such a state of James Brownian exhaustion that he had to be carried off in the end. "Whether you accept it or not," wrote critic Peter Feldman, "1970 was their year."
After that, it was all downhill in a way. There were only so many heads in South Africa, and by the end of 1970, they'd all bought an Otis LP and seen the band live several times. Beyond a certain point, Otis could only go round in circles. Worse yet, conservatives were growing intolerant of long-haired social deviance. National Party MPs complained that rock music was rotting the nation's moral fibre. Right-wing students invaded a pop festival where Otis was playing and gave several particants an involuntary haircut. "We had police coming to the house every second night," says Ivor, "or guys with crewcuts and denim jackets saying, 'Hey, man, the car's broken down, can we sleep here?' They always planted weed in the toilets, but we always found it before they bust us."
By March, 1971, the day of was drawing nigh. Describing drug abuse as a "national emergency," the Minister of Police announced a crackdown. At the same time, various armies started breathing down Otis Waygood's neck. When the SADF informed Ivor that he was liable for military service, the boys sneaked back into Rhodesia, but more call-up papers were waiting for them at their parents' homes. "Ian Smith despised us," says Ivor. "They wanted to make an example of us, so we basically escaped." At the time, international airlines weren't supposed to land in Rhodesia because of sanctions. But there was a Jo'burg-Paris flight that made a secret stop in Salisbury. The boys boarded it and vanished.
Back in Jo'burg, we were bereft. Friends and I started a tribute band that played garage parties in the white suburbs, our every lick, pose and song copied off Otis, but that petered out in a year or two, and we were left with nothing but their records and vague rumours from a distant hemisphere. Otis were alive and well in Amsterdam. Later, they were spotted in England, transmogrified into a white reggae band that played the deeply underground blacks-only heavy dub circuit. Later still, they became Immigrant, a multi-racial outfit that did a few gigs at the Rock Garden and the Palladium. But it never quite came together again, and the band disintegrated at the end of the seventies.
Today, Leigh Sagar is a barrister in London. Rob Zipper practices architecture. Alan Zipper runs a recording studio. Ivor Rubenstein returned to Bulawayo, where he manufactures hats. Clive Calder is chairman of Jive Records and ruling genius of the teen pop genre, responsible inter alia for the Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears. Martin Jackson was last seen drifting around Salisbury with a huge cross painted on his back, and is rumoured to have died in the mid-seventies. Harry Poulos stepped off a building, another casualty of an era whose mad intensity made a reversion to the ordinary unbearable.
As for Benny Miller, the guy who started it all, he's still in Harare, wryly amused by the extraordinary adventure he missed by ducking out of that fateful trip to Cape Town. He still plays guitar in sixties nostalgia bands, and produces African music for a living.
(editor update : Unfortunately Benny Miller passed away suddenly in Harare in 2006)
Webpage:
Otis Waygood
Discography:
Otis Waygood Blues Band
Simply Otis Waygood
Ten Light Claps And A Scream
Monday, October 22, 2007
RUNNING ON EMPTY
RUNNING ON EMPTY
by Beka Owens(Published in the FT - Oct 2007)
I recently visited my home town of Bulawayo,Zimbabwe’s second-largest city. I had been warned to bring enough food to live on during my trip. So I packed dozens of one-minute noodle packs, rice and soups. But my efforts were wasted: there’s not much you can do with rice and pasta when there is no water or electricity to cook them.
I found life changed beyond belief. Everythingis a struggle. There is no petrol – only government officials, some emergency crews and a lucky few who manage to scrounge US dollars can buy a few litres of petrol. Because there is no fuel, there’s no rubbish collection. Since there is no electricity, people burn their rubbish to provide fire. Everything goes into the flames –including plastic and rubber. The stench inBulawayo is awful.
The stuff that can’t be burned is dumped into the river, which draws the rats, the only thriving population in Bulawayo. The rats then raid residents’ carefully hoarded food stocks. A local joke is that Zimbabwe has reverted to a hunter-gatherer society – locals spend the day hunting for food on shelves, then gathering it – at huge cost – to take home, hoping not to be mugged. I secretly took photos of what I saw around me. One supermarket filled up its empty shelves with a delivery of lavatory paper, although it’s cheaper to use Z$100 notes than to use a proper loo roll. There is no meat at all. Meat and poultry freezers do not operate as there is no electricity – besides there is nothing to put in them anyway.
Zimbabwe is in its seventh year of drought. There is no water for hours, or sometimes days, and one learns to live with the stench of unflushed sewage. But when water flows, it brings its own problems– things back up, but the city’s engineers can’t reach many areas (there’s no fuel for them to get there), so the sewage spills out into the roads. The threat of cholera is very real.
People are dying of starvation and disease even in the richer western suburbs of Bulawayo. There are few medicines or medical staff – most middle-class people have left so that they can earn cash to send home.
Only hard currency will do in this “parallel” market. But having foreign currency is no ticket to success – everyone has to beg for the scarce supplies. People have turned on each other, and must swallow their pride and take abuse, then thank them so that they can leave with a petrol coupon, chicken or a packet of milk. Still, millions of Zimbabweans who have fled abroad send back hard currency to help their families survive – ironically, one of the things that keeps Robert Mugabe in power is the vibrant black market that this creates. It’s a horrible dilemma for those of us who have left Zimbabwe. But we cannot let our families rot in an impoverished, drought-ridden hell hole.
Beka Owens is a pseudonym.
Scarce story: (main picture) empty meat and poultry
freezers; supermarket shelves bulked up with lavatory paper
by Beka Owens(Published in the FT - Oct 2007)
I recently visited my home town of Bulawayo,Zimbabwe’s second-largest city. I had been warned to bring enough food to live on during my trip. So I packed dozens of one-minute noodle packs, rice and soups. But my efforts were wasted: there’s not much you can do with rice and pasta when there is no water or electricity to cook them.
I found life changed beyond belief. Everythingis a struggle. There is no petrol – only government officials, some emergency crews and a lucky few who manage to scrounge US dollars can buy a few litres of petrol. Because there is no fuel, there’s no rubbish collection. Since there is no electricity, people burn their rubbish to provide fire. Everything goes into the flames –including plastic and rubber. The stench inBulawayo is awful.
The stuff that can’t be burned is dumped into the river, which draws the rats, the only thriving population in Bulawayo. The rats then raid residents’ carefully hoarded food stocks. A local joke is that Zimbabwe has reverted to a hunter-gatherer society – locals spend the day hunting for food on shelves, then gathering it – at huge cost – to take home, hoping not to be mugged. I secretly took photos of what I saw around me. One supermarket filled up its empty shelves with a delivery of lavatory paper, although it’s cheaper to use Z$100 notes than to use a proper loo roll. There is no meat at all. Meat and poultry freezers do not operate as there is no electricity – besides there is nothing to put in them anyway.
Zimbabwe is in its seventh year of drought. There is no water for hours, or sometimes days, and one learns to live with the stench of unflushed sewage. But when water flows, it brings its own problems– things back up, but the city’s engineers can’t reach many areas (there’s no fuel for them to get there), so the sewage spills out into the roads. The threat of cholera is very real.
People are dying of starvation and disease even in the richer western suburbs of Bulawayo. There are few medicines or medical staff – most middle-class people have left so that they can earn cash to send home.
Only hard currency will do in this “parallel” market. But having foreign currency is no ticket to success – everyone has to beg for the scarce supplies. People have turned on each other, and must swallow their pride and take abuse, then thank them so that they can leave with a petrol coupon, chicken or a packet of milk. Still, millions of Zimbabweans who have fled abroad send back hard currency to help their families survive – ironically, one of the things that keeps Robert Mugabe in power is the vibrant black market that this creates. It’s a horrible dilemma for those of us who have left Zimbabwe. But we cannot let our families rot in an impoverished, drought-ridden hell hole.
Beka Owens is a pseudonym.
Scarce story: (main picture) empty meat and poultry
freezers; supermarket shelves bulked up with lavatory paper
Thursday, October 18, 2007
Help for Zimbabwe Jews
World Jewish Relief supports Zimbabwe Jews
17/10/2007
London, October 2007: With the situation in Zimbabwe causing increasing concern world wide, World Jewish Relief (WJR), in its capacity as the charity that channels the UK Jewish community’s response to international disasters has continued its funding to support Zimbabwe’s Jewish citizens. As Zimbabwe’s economy continues to plummet, many of its citizens are struggling to survive.
Ongoing political and economic issues have forced much of the population to eke out a hand to mouth existance in a country which was reknowned only a decade ago for its agricultrual productivity.Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second city, has a population of 1.5 million people. Sadly the Jewish community in Zimbabwe has shrunk considerably in recent years and now numbers only a couple of hundred. Most are elderly and 22 reside at Savyon Lodge, a Jewish care home (also home to three non-Jewish residents).
Bulawayo currently suffers from acute water shortages, which has lead to an increase in water borne diseases as people resort to digging small wells and drinking contaminated water. Unreliable electricity supplies have had a dramatic impact in bringing the city’s water supply system to almost a standstill. With recent maize harvests poor, both food and water supplies add to the everyday burden of life in Zimbabwe.
The dire situation has impacted on all aspects of society, and Savyon Lodge now finds it impossible to meet the daily needs of its residents,. WJR has allocated funds to finance essential supplies to be brought in from South Africa which include basic food such as flour, powdered milk, margarine and vegetables, as well as diesel for the generator.
It is hoped that this modest support will continue and even expand to assist larger numbers of Zimbabweans in need.
Paul Anticoni, WJR’s Chief Executive, commented:“As the major humanitarian arm of the British Jewish community, WJR is responding to the crisis in Zimbabwe by providing these essential funds in a bid to ease the suffering of needy Zimbabwean Jews, who have until now been hugely neglected. We recognise that our support is small in proportion to the need but we anticipate being able to scale up our engagement in Zimbabwe over the coming year."
17/10/2007
London, October 2007: With the situation in Zimbabwe causing increasing concern world wide, World Jewish Relief (WJR), in its capacity as the charity that channels the UK Jewish community’s response to international disasters has continued its funding to support Zimbabwe’s Jewish citizens. As Zimbabwe’s economy continues to plummet, many of its citizens are struggling to survive.
Ongoing political and economic issues have forced much of the population to eke out a hand to mouth existance in a country which was reknowned only a decade ago for its agricultrual productivity.Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second city, has a population of 1.5 million people. Sadly the Jewish community in Zimbabwe has shrunk considerably in recent years and now numbers only a couple of hundred. Most are elderly and 22 reside at Savyon Lodge, a Jewish care home (also home to three non-Jewish residents).
Bulawayo currently suffers from acute water shortages, which has lead to an increase in water borne diseases as people resort to digging small wells and drinking contaminated water. Unreliable electricity supplies have had a dramatic impact in bringing the city’s water supply system to almost a standstill. With recent maize harvests poor, both food and water supplies add to the everyday burden of life in Zimbabwe.
The dire situation has impacted on all aspects of society, and Savyon Lodge now finds it impossible to meet the daily needs of its residents,. WJR has allocated funds to finance essential supplies to be brought in from South Africa which include basic food such as flour, powdered milk, margarine and vegetables, as well as diesel for the generator.
It is hoped that this modest support will continue and even expand to assist larger numbers of Zimbabweans in need.
Paul Anticoni, WJR’s Chief Executive, commented:“As the major humanitarian arm of the British Jewish community, WJR is responding to the crisis in Zimbabwe by providing these essential funds in a bid to ease the suffering of needy Zimbabwean Jews, who have until now been hugely neglected. We recognise that our support is small in proportion to the need but we anticipate being able to scale up our engagement in Zimbabwe over the coming year."
Sunday, August 19, 2007
Zimbabwe: anarchy in four, says the West
Zimbabwe: anarchy in four, says the WestStephen Bevan in Pretoria, Sunday Telegraph
Last Updated: 12:42am BST 19/08/2007
The economy of Zimbabwe is facing total collapse within four months, leaving the country facing a slide into Congo-style anarchy, The Sunday Telegraph has been told.
Western officials fear the business, farming and financial sectors may be crippled by Christmas, triggering a collapse of government control that could leave the country prey to warlords and ignite long-suppressed tribal tensions.
80 per cent of Zimbabweans live below the poverty line and the economy is close to total collapse The stark warning of the scale of the crisis comes despite the welcome given to Mr Mugabe by fellow African leaders at a summit in neighbouring Zambia last week, where critics had hoped he might be pressurised into changing his policies.
It also follows reports that Britain's military is reviewing contingency plans to evacuate more than 20,000 Britons, were any widespread state of emergency to occur.
Speaking anonymously because of the sensitivity of the subject, one Western official said: "It is hard to be definitive, but probably within months, by the end of the year, we will see the formal economy cease to work."
He added: "One of the great dangers in all this, if Mugabe hangs on for much longer, is that the country will slip from authoritarianism to anarchy, the government will lose control of the provinces, it will lose control of the towns and you will have a situation where the central authority's writ no longer holds."Asked which other African nation Zimbabwe might end up resembling under a worst-case scenario, the official cited as an example the Democratic Republic of Congo (the former Zaire), beset for years by famine, civil war and inter-ethnic conflict.
There are also fears that a breakdown in law and order could lead to an outbreak of ethnic conflict between Zimbabwe's two main tribes, Mugabe's own Shona and the Ndebele in the southwest.
Some political groups are already talking about regime change as an opportunity to press for independence, while more extreme elements have voiced agendas that could amount to "ethnic cleansing".
The official added that, because of Mr Mugabe's slum clearance programme, -Zimbabwe's informal subsistence economy, made up largely of street traders, hawkers and black marketeers, had lost much its ability to absorb shocks from the government's three-month price freeze, which has emptied shop shelves of stocks.
Poverty was now endemic, he said, with 80 per cent of people living "below any definition of the poverty line."
The fear among Western officials is that as Zimbabwe sinks deeper into crisis, the task of rebuilding, if or when Mugabe does go, is being made ever more difficult.
The infrastructure is breaking down after years of no investment, with both Bulawayo and parts of the capital, Harare, virtually without water supplies.
The Zimbabwe Electricity Supply Authority generates barely a fifth of the country's needs and neighbouring countries' generating companies are now refusing to sell to Zimbabwe except for cash.
John Robertson, a Harare-based independent economist, said the prediction that the formal economy would cease to function within four months might even be optimistic.
"We could be a matter of a month or two away from that kind of collapse, and some would tell you that it's happened already," he said. "They can't pay the wages that would be necessary for people to carry on working, because the price at which they're allowed to sell goods is way below the production costs."
The most immediate effect of the worsening economic situation is escalating migration.
The Western official said that four million Zimbabweans, or around one third of the population, had already left the country, with "another two million packing their cases to leave", mostly to South Africa. The "flight rather than fight" strategy, however, suggests a mass uprising against Mr Mugabe is unlikely.
While Western governments have publicly backed attempts by South Africa's president Thabo Mbeki to mediate between the Zanu PF government and the opposition Movement for Democratic Change in a bid to ease the political crisis, there was little sign of a breakthrough at last week's 14-nation Southern African Development Community summit in Zambia.
Privately, Western officials now say that "the time for talking is past", and that reconciliation between government and opposition is unlikely.
Zimbabwe's neighbours now had to decide whether they were willing to tell Mr Mugabe that his policies were not acceptable, said the official.
"We're not talking about tanks across Beit Bridge (the border post with South Africa) but they do have to decide whether there is a stick in this equation and what that stick should be," he said.
Monday, August 13, 2007
Zimbabwe's horrors
Jeff Jacoby
Zimbabwe's horrors
By Jeff Jacoby, Globe Columnist August 12, 2007
NO ONE is surprised when a Roman Catholic bishop condemns the violence of war. But when was the last time you heard of one pleading for a military invasion?
Zimbabwe's leading cleric has been doing just that in recent weeks, imploring Great Britain to invade its former colony and oust Robert Mugabe, the dictator whose brutal misrule has reduced a once-flourishing country to desperation, starvation, and death.
Given the "massive risk to life" the regime poses, says Pius Ncube, the archbishop of Bulawayo, "I think it is justified for Britain to raid Zimbabwe and remove Mugabe. We should do it ourselves but there's too much fear. I'm ready to lead the people, guns blazing, but the people are not ready." Millions of Zimbabweans have fled the country, and those who remain tend to be hungry, impoverished, and intimidated by Mugabe and his goons. "How can you expect people to rise up," Ncube asks, "when even our church services are attended by state intelligence people?"
The archbishop is no saber-rattler. But given the misery and murder spawned by Mugabe and his fascist Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front, or ZANU-PF, it is immoral not to fight them. "If you are no longer serving your people and are choosing death for them," says Ncube, "then certainly . . . stronger nations have a right to put you down."
Considering that "stronger nations" have been unwilling to put down Omar al-Bashir, head of the Sudanese regime that is perpetrating genocide in Darfur, the likelihood that they will muster the fortitude to drive Mugabe from power in Zimbabwe is, in a word, nil. Instead they will go on issuing empty condemnations, like the Bush administration's recent statement that it "deplores actions taken by the Mugabe regime," but is "ready to engage a new Zimbabwean government committed to democracy, human rights, sound economic policy, and the rule of law."
Unfortunately, hollow pieties from the free world will not end the chaos and cruelty that have turned Zimbabwe into a hellhole. In the nation once known as the breadbasket of Africa, Mugabe's deranged policies are starving millions. In a land many hoped would be a model of postcolonial self-government, opposition politicians are beaten and imprisoned and elections are blatantly rigged to keep ZANU-PF in power. In a country where a decade ago the currency traded at the rate of eight Zimbabwe dollars to $1, it now takes 200,000 Zimbabwe dollars to buy a single American dollar.
The wretchedness that is Mugabe's Zimbabwe was captured recently by New York Times reporter Michael Wines, who described what happened when the dictator -- in the face of hyperinflation estimated at more than 10,000 percent a year -- commanded merchants nationwide to cut their prices in half or face jail time and the confiscation of their businesses:
"Bread, sugar, and cornmeal, staples of every Zimbabwean's diet, have vanished. . . . Meat is virtually nonexistent . . . Gasoline is nearly unobtainable. Hospital patients are dying for lack of basic medical supplies. Power blackouts and water cutoffs are endemic. Manufacturing has slowed to a crawl because few businesses can produce goods for less than their government-imposed sale prices. Raw materials are drying up because suppliers are being forced to sell to factories at a loss . . . As many as 4,000 businesspeople have been arrested, fined, or jailed."
Eighty percent of Zimbabwe's adults are now unemployed. Life expectancy has plummeted to 36 years. The death rate for children 5 and under has soared 65 percent since 1990. While Mugabe's kleptocratic cronies and thugs drive expensive cars, build elaborate mansions, and amass fortunes by manipulating the currency market, ordinary citizens are reduced to unspeakable degradation. Schoolteachers sell themselves for sex in order to feed their children, the Times of London reports. A man in Rushinga was convicted of killing his 10-year-old son with an ax handle for eating four mice meant for the family's lunch. One-time accountants, bankers, headmasters, now refugees in South Africa, survive through menial labor or begging in the streets.
Yet Mugabe, with his Hitler-style moustache and armed loyalists, remains firmly in control.
"Anyone who is ready to starve his people to death for the sake of power is a murderer," Archbishop Ncube says. "What more does he have to do?"
Countless lives could be saved, and incalculable suffering ended, if Mugabe were forced from power. A detachment of US Marines, I wrote on this page in 2002, could do the job on its lunch break. The British could do it. South Africa could do it.
But of course no one will do anything. The death toll in Zimbabwe will continue to mount; the misery will continue to spread; the horror stories will continue to multiply. Cry, the beloved country.
Jeff Jacoby's e-mail address is jacoby@globe.com.
© Copyright 2007 Globe Newspaper Company.
Zimbabwe's horrors
By Jeff Jacoby, Globe Columnist August 12, 2007
NO ONE is surprised when a Roman Catholic bishop condemns the violence of war. But when was the last time you heard of one pleading for a military invasion?
Zimbabwe's leading cleric has been doing just that in recent weeks, imploring Great Britain to invade its former colony and oust Robert Mugabe, the dictator whose brutal misrule has reduced a once-flourishing country to desperation, starvation, and death.
Given the "massive risk to life" the regime poses, says Pius Ncube, the archbishop of Bulawayo, "I think it is justified for Britain to raid Zimbabwe and remove Mugabe. We should do it ourselves but there's too much fear. I'm ready to lead the people, guns blazing, but the people are not ready." Millions of Zimbabweans have fled the country, and those who remain tend to be hungry, impoverished, and intimidated by Mugabe and his goons. "How can you expect people to rise up," Ncube asks, "when even our church services are attended by state intelligence people?"
The archbishop is no saber-rattler. But given the misery and murder spawned by Mugabe and his fascist Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front, or ZANU-PF, it is immoral not to fight them. "If you are no longer serving your people and are choosing death for them," says Ncube, "then certainly . . . stronger nations have a right to put you down."
Considering that "stronger nations" have been unwilling to put down Omar al-Bashir, head of the Sudanese regime that is perpetrating genocide in Darfur, the likelihood that they will muster the fortitude to drive Mugabe from power in Zimbabwe is, in a word, nil. Instead they will go on issuing empty condemnations, like the Bush administration's recent statement that it "deplores actions taken by the Mugabe regime," but is "ready to engage a new Zimbabwean government committed to democracy, human rights, sound economic policy, and the rule of law."
Unfortunately, hollow pieties from the free world will not end the chaos and cruelty that have turned Zimbabwe into a hellhole. In the nation once known as the breadbasket of Africa, Mugabe's deranged policies are starving millions. In a land many hoped would be a model of postcolonial self-government, opposition politicians are beaten and imprisoned and elections are blatantly rigged to keep ZANU-PF in power. In a country where a decade ago the currency traded at the rate of eight Zimbabwe dollars to $1, it now takes 200,000 Zimbabwe dollars to buy a single American dollar.
The wretchedness that is Mugabe's Zimbabwe was captured recently by New York Times reporter Michael Wines, who described what happened when the dictator -- in the face of hyperinflation estimated at more than 10,000 percent a year -- commanded merchants nationwide to cut their prices in half or face jail time and the confiscation of their businesses:
"Bread, sugar, and cornmeal, staples of every Zimbabwean's diet, have vanished. . . . Meat is virtually nonexistent . . . Gasoline is nearly unobtainable. Hospital patients are dying for lack of basic medical supplies. Power blackouts and water cutoffs are endemic. Manufacturing has slowed to a crawl because few businesses can produce goods for less than their government-imposed sale prices. Raw materials are drying up because suppliers are being forced to sell to factories at a loss . . . As many as 4,000 businesspeople have been arrested, fined, or jailed."
Eighty percent of Zimbabwe's adults are now unemployed. Life expectancy has plummeted to 36 years. The death rate for children 5 and under has soared 65 percent since 1990. While Mugabe's kleptocratic cronies and thugs drive expensive cars, build elaborate mansions, and amass fortunes by manipulating the currency market, ordinary citizens are reduced to unspeakable degradation. Schoolteachers sell themselves for sex in order to feed their children, the Times of London reports. A man in Rushinga was convicted of killing his 10-year-old son with an ax handle for eating four mice meant for the family's lunch. One-time accountants, bankers, headmasters, now refugees in South Africa, survive through menial labor or begging in the streets.
Yet Mugabe, with his Hitler-style moustache and armed loyalists, remains firmly in control.
"Anyone who is ready to starve his people to death for the sake of power is a murderer," Archbishop Ncube says. "What more does he have to do?"
Countless lives could be saved, and incalculable suffering ended, if Mugabe were forced from power. A detachment of US Marines, I wrote on this page in 2002, could do the job on its lunch break. The British could do it. South Africa could do it.
But of course no one will do anything. The death toll in Zimbabwe will continue to mount; the misery will continue to spread; the horror stories will continue to multiply. Cry, the beloved country.
Jeff Jacoby's e-mail address is jacoby@globe.com.
© Copyright 2007 Globe Newspaper Company.
Thursday, August 02, 2007
Mugabe's decree on prices puts Zimbabwe economy in a tailspin
Mugabe's decree on prices puts Zimbabwe economy in a tailspin
By Michael Wines
Wednesday, August 1, 2007
Source: International Herald Tribune
BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe: Robert Mugabe has ruled over this benighted country, his every wish endorsed by Parliament and implemented by the police and military, for more than 27 years. It appears, however, that not even an unchallenged autocrat can repeal the laws of supply and demand.
BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe: Robert Mugabe has ruled over this benighted country, his every wish endorsed by Parliament and implemented by the police and military, for more than 27 years. It appears, however, that not even an unchallenged autocrat can repeal the laws of supply and demand.
One month after Mugabe decreed just that, commanding merchants nationwide to counter 10,000-percent-a-year hyperinflation by slashing prices by half and more, Zimbabwe's economy is at a halt.
Essentials like bread, sugar and cornmeal, staples of every Zimbabwean's diet, have vanished, seized by mobs of bargain-hunters who denuded stores like locusts in wheat fields. Meat is nonexistent. Gasoline is nearly unobtainable. Hospital patients are dying for lack of basic medical supplies. Power blackouts and water cutoffs are endemic.
Manufacturing has slowed to a crawl, because few businesses can produce goods for less than their government-imposed sale prices. Raw materials are drying up because suppliers are being forced to sell to factories at a loss. Businesses are laying off workers or reducing their hours.
Zimbabwe's economy has been shrinking since 2000, buffeted by political turmoil, capital flight and mismanagement. Never has it been in a more dire state than now, business executives say.
"The last seven years, I haven't panicked at all. I always figured that where there's a will, there's a way, and I'd make some sort of plan," said one Bulawayo clothing manufacturer who, like most people, refused to be identified for fear of retaliation by the government. "Now I'm not so sure. I think there's a real collapse coming."
Zimbabwe's vast underclass, the majority of its 10 or 11 million people, is perhaps less affected by this latest economic shock, simply because it has long been unable to afford most food anyway. The rural poor survive on whatever they can grow. Urban and rural poor alike stay afloat with food and money sent by the two million or more Zimbabweans who have fled abroad. Remittances are so vital that in some rural areas, the South African rand has replaced Zimbabwe's worthless dollar as the currency of choice.
Rather, it is the middle class, which had muddled through the last seven years of decline, that is likely to feel the brunt. Factory layoffs and slowdowns are bringing new poverty to the 15 percent or 20 percent of adult Zimbabweans who still have jobs. Pensioners, whose fixed incomes already have been gutted by hyperinflation, now find that no amount of money can purchase some staples.
Private doctors said in interviews that diseases of poverty, including tuberculosis and malnutrition, are starting to appear among their patients, including the minority whites who once comprised the wealthy class.
"Considerations of color have begun to blur very much," said one Bulawayo doctor whose average patient is a white business manager. "White people will tell you, a little embarrassed and shy, that they're eating nothing but sadza," or corn meal porridge, the doctor said. "They've been reduced to the diet of the rural poor."
Bulawayo, whose 700,000 or more people make it Zimbabwe's second-largest city, painfully reflects the impact both of Zimbabwe's long economic descent and of the latest price-slashing. Most of the goods available on store shelves this week were those that people did not need or could not afford - dog biscuits; ketchup; toilet paper, which has become a luxury here; gin; onions; cookies.
At city-center and suburban locations of TM, a major supermarket chain, aisles of meat coolers were empty save a few plastic bags of dog meat. Flour, sugar, cooking oil, corn meal and other basics were not to be found. A long line hugged the rear of one store, waiting for a delivery of the few loaves of bread that a baker provided to stay in compliance with the price directive.
Amid the chaos, the government remains resolute. Mugabe has cast the price cuts as a strike not against hyperinflation, but against profiteering businesses who, he says, are part of a Western conspiracy to re-impose colonial rule. In that view, hyperinflation is part of their strategy; price rollbacks are the government's countermeasure.
Mugabe's June 26 decree, much of which was later enacted into law, was draconian: businesses were ordered to reduce their prices to the levels existing on June 18, generally by about 50 percent. Shop owners who refused to comply would be jailed. Stores that closed or refused to restock goods would be taken over by the government.
"We are at war. We will not allow shelves to be empty," one of Mugabe's vice presidents, Joseph Msika, said in a July 18 speech.
Since then, gangs of price inspectors have patrolled shops and factories, imposing sometimes-arbitrary price reductions, and as many as 4,000 businesspeople have been arrested, fined or jailed. State-run newspapers publish lists of telephone numbers on their front pages daily, exhorting citizens to report merchants whose prices exceed dictates.
Ordinary citizens initially greeted the price cuts with a euphoric - and short-lived - shopping spree. However, merchants and the government's many critics say that much of the cut-rate merchandise has not been snapped up by ordinary citizens, but by the police, soldiers and members of Mugabe's ruling party who have been tipped off to the price inspectors' rounds.
In Plumtree, a hamlet near the border with Botswana, a line of shoppers gathered outside a shoe store last week even before opening hours, the area's member of Parliament, Moses Mzila-Ndlovu, said this week. As the store opened, government inspectors appeared - and the throng followed them in, buying up stock as it was marked down.
"It's theft, outright theft," Mzila said. "Some of them had big cars, shiny, sparkling double-cabs, and they filled them up with shoes and just drove away."
Notes:
Sunday, July 22, 2007
Investors bet on new dawn for Zimbabwe
Source: Financial Times, London
Investors bet on new dawn for Zimbabwe
By By William Wallis in London and Alec Russell in Johannesburg
Published: July 20 2007 20:38
Last updated: July 20 2007 20:38
Foreign investors tend to avoid imploding African economies. But a small crew are bucking the trend in Zimbabwe, lured by plunging asset prices and a belief that once 83-year-old President Robert Mugabe goes, recovery could be swift.
Leading the charge is Lonrho, the conglomerate that has been seeking to rebuild the African empire created by the late Tiny Rowland.
It announced on Friday that it had raised an initial £32.3m ($66.4m, €48m) from shareholders towards a new subsidiary – Lonzim – to buy up assets in Zimbabwe with a “significant opportunity for future growth”.
David Lenigas, Lonrho’s executive chairman, told the Financial Times that he aimed to raise a total of £100m for the company through a share offer to be launched in London soon.
He said demand for Lonzim shares was coming from Europe, South Africa and the Middle East. But it had been strongest among institutional investors including pension and hedge funds in the US.
He thought this was driven by a broader appetite for African risk.
“They see Africa as the last big investment frontier. Africa is where Asia was 30 years ago,” he said.
Looking beyond current figures for Zimbabwe – 15,000 per cent inflation and an economy shrinking by 12 per cent a year – he said the country’s infrastructure, skilled workforce and farming potential provided the basis for a solid recovery.
Lonzim would focus on recapitalising companies that had been starved of credit, buying up and rehabilitating hotels and game parks.
It would also target commercial property and build stakes in transport, construction and aviation. “We are trying to hold these things together and wait for recovery,” said Mr Lenigas.
Lonrho – whose name derives partly from the old British colony, Rhodesia – has a long history in Zimbabwe. But others with less experience are betting on the country, too. Botswana-based Imara asset management launched a $13.5m (£6.57m, €9.8m) fund to invest in Zimbabwe earlier this year, the day after Morgan Tsvangirai, the opposition leader, emerged battered from a Harare jail.
It is a “punt”, concedes Mark Tunmer, Imara’s chief executive. But he adds that the country’s natural and human resources are still there and people are “prepared to put their cash down on that in the expectation of a return to free markets”.
One such punter is Sean Jackson, a British entrepreneur based in Cambridge, who invested in land in Poland when prices were cheap in the aftermath of communism there. His stake has increased by about 20 times since then, he says. He is now looking at Zimbabwe as a similar long-term investment opportunity.
Kola Karim, chief executive of Shoreline Energy International, a Nigerian group, says he hopes to seal two deals in Zimbabwe in the next month – both with European companies who have had enough there.
“We are not going to asset-strip. We can buy big international names for cheap and stay in partnership with locals to drive the business as we have done, for example, in Tanzania and Uganda,” he said. In one case he hoped to acquire a company for roughly a tenth of its 1997 value.
There is concern among some Zimbabwean businessmen that properties will be sold off at rock-bottom prices.
“But the investors are not seen as vultures,” said the chief executive of a Bulawayo-based small manufacturing firm. “It gives us hope for the future that people from the outside are interested.”
At a Bulawayo business forum this week, many members seemed determined to batten down the hatches and not to sell.
There may be other disincentives to investors on the way. Possibly the greatest would be the Indigenisation and Empowerment Bill, which the government has promised to pass into law within a month. This would authorise the authorities to seize 51 per cent of the shareholding of foreign firms in order to “empower” black Zimbabweans.
Dianna Games, director of Africa@Work, a southern African business consultancy, expressed caution, saying that the bill – and Mr Mugabe’s recently enforced price cuts on many commodities – had changed the climate from one of an “investment opportunity to a bit of a fire sale”.
“There is a lot of talk around dinner party tables [in South Africa and Zimbabwe]” about opportunities, she said. But it was far from clear that the situation would be transformed when Mr Mugabe finally left power.
“Everyone seems to think that when Mugabe goes, all kinds of doors may open . . . but we don’t know.”
Investors bet on new dawn for Zimbabwe
By By William Wallis in London and Alec Russell in Johannesburg
Published: July 20 2007 20:38
Last updated: July 20 2007 20:38
Foreign investors tend to avoid imploding African economies. But a small crew are bucking the trend in Zimbabwe, lured by plunging asset prices and a belief that once 83-year-old President Robert Mugabe goes, recovery could be swift.
Leading the charge is Lonrho, the conglomerate that has been seeking to rebuild the African empire created by the late Tiny Rowland.
It announced on Friday that it had raised an initial £32.3m ($66.4m, €48m) from shareholders towards a new subsidiary – Lonzim – to buy up assets in Zimbabwe with a “significant opportunity for future growth”.
David Lenigas, Lonrho’s executive chairman, told the Financial Times that he aimed to raise a total of £100m for the company through a share offer to be launched in London soon.
He said demand for Lonzim shares was coming from Europe, South Africa and the Middle East. But it had been strongest among institutional investors including pension and hedge funds in the US.
He thought this was driven by a broader appetite for African risk.
“They see Africa as the last big investment frontier. Africa is where Asia was 30 years ago,” he said.
Looking beyond current figures for Zimbabwe – 15,000 per cent inflation and an economy shrinking by 12 per cent a year – he said the country’s infrastructure, skilled workforce and farming potential provided the basis for a solid recovery.
Lonzim would focus on recapitalising companies that had been starved of credit, buying up and rehabilitating hotels and game parks.
It would also target commercial property and build stakes in transport, construction and aviation. “We are trying to hold these things together and wait for recovery,” said Mr Lenigas.
Lonrho – whose name derives partly from the old British colony, Rhodesia – has a long history in Zimbabwe. But others with less experience are betting on the country, too. Botswana-based Imara asset management launched a $13.5m (£6.57m, €9.8m) fund to invest in Zimbabwe earlier this year, the day after Morgan Tsvangirai, the opposition leader, emerged battered from a Harare jail.
It is a “punt”, concedes Mark Tunmer, Imara’s chief executive. But he adds that the country’s natural and human resources are still there and people are “prepared to put their cash down on that in the expectation of a return to free markets”.
One such punter is Sean Jackson, a British entrepreneur based in Cambridge, who invested in land in Poland when prices were cheap in the aftermath of communism there. His stake has increased by about 20 times since then, he says. He is now looking at Zimbabwe as a similar long-term investment opportunity.
Kola Karim, chief executive of Shoreline Energy International, a Nigerian group, says he hopes to seal two deals in Zimbabwe in the next month – both with European companies who have had enough there.
“We are not going to asset-strip. We can buy big international names for cheap and stay in partnership with locals to drive the business as we have done, for example, in Tanzania and Uganda,” he said. In one case he hoped to acquire a company for roughly a tenth of its 1997 value.
There is concern among some Zimbabwean businessmen that properties will be sold off at rock-bottom prices.
“But the investors are not seen as vultures,” said the chief executive of a Bulawayo-based small manufacturing firm. “It gives us hope for the future that people from the outside are interested.”
At a Bulawayo business forum this week, many members seemed determined to batten down the hatches and not to sell.
There may be other disincentives to investors on the way. Possibly the greatest would be the Indigenisation and Empowerment Bill, which the government has promised to pass into law within a month. This would authorise the authorities to seize 51 per cent of the shareholding of foreign firms in order to “empower” black Zimbabweans.
Dianna Games, director of Africa@Work, a southern African business consultancy, expressed caution, saying that the bill – and Mr Mugabe’s recently enforced price cuts on many commodities – had changed the climate from one of an “investment opportunity to a bit of a fire sale”.
“There is a lot of talk around dinner party tables [in South Africa and Zimbabwe]” about opportunities, she said. But it was far from clear that the situation would be transformed when Mr Mugabe finally left power.
“Everyone seems to think that when Mugabe goes, all kinds of doors may open . . . but we don’t know.”
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
Predicting that Zimbabwe will come to a total collapse
All the papers are predicting that Zimbabwe will come to a total collapse middle of next week - Nothing to buy - not even petrol..... Quo Vadis Zimbabwe ???
************ ********* ********* ********* ********* ********* ********* *********
A Warning ..I hope nobody thinks that next week will be business as usual. This week the private sector has gradually wound down its operations. The retail sector – most retailers carry stock for a month approximately, are the last to shut down but already you can see empty shelves and shortages of all the fast moving basic items are now widespread.Butcheries and bakeries that work on stock levels of about a week are already closed as their stocks ran out. The same with filling stations. Manufacturers must work with quite significant stock levels – especially of imported items and they will run these down and then close unless there is a U-turn on the part of the government and new directives which are half reasonable.There are no signs as yet as to what the State will do when this shutdown occurs. But all that we are seeing and hearing right now are threats and an insistence that this situation is going to be maintained for some time.
The most immediate problem is the very basics – fuel for transport and the essential foods, maize meal, rice, bread, meat and milk. By Monday all of these will be virtually unobtainable. Farmers with pigs and poultry are pondering what to do with their animals as they run out of stock feed, dairy farmers also face huge problems as they cannot pay their feed bills and must start winding down – how do you tell a cow in milk, used to being milked three times a day, that she must stop producing?Hundreds of thousands of workers and non-formal sector businesspersons are being faced with no work and are being forced to stay home – at present on full pay, but in a few weeks what then?
There is no law to turn to; there are no political leaders to go to with any sort of sense and authority. We are in the hands of a madman who has nothing to loose but his life and has his back to the wall and is using the only tools that he knows to try and stay afloat while the country drowns.How will the average Zimbabwean respond? Friends of mine are doing a day trip to Francistown in Botswana – just 200 kilometers away, today. They will buy what they need for next week and return. A few will do the same. Others are going on holiday, unable to stand the specter of seeing all that they have built up over the past decades swept away. They are the lucky ones – what about the rest?
There is only one way out and that is across the Limpopo. I must warn South Africa that they will now face a huge upsurge in economic refugees and they had better brace themselves for that if nothing effective is done to halt this madness. I mean hundreds of thousands of new, desperate, hungry Zimbabweans flooding in and disappearing into the vast urban slums that surround all South African cities.The alternative is a military coup led by the junior officers with the compliance of some in the ruling Party who see that this situation is not sustainable and that it is creating a regional crisis of substantial proportions. Such an event would close the door to the SADC process under way today in South Africa and plunge the country and the region into a huge political crisis that would require military intervention. Am I being alarmist? I do not think so. The actions of this rogue regime in the past week have been enough to tip us over and into a state of crisis we have never faced before.Irreparable damage is being done to the country and if this is not stopped in its tracks by immediate and radical measures taken by regional governments very serious consequences are going to follow.The humanitarian and economic crisis that is about to break out in Zimbabwe is simply staggering and certainly way beyond the capacity of the country to handle on its own.
Eddie Cross
Bulawayo, 7th July 2007
************ ********* ********* ********* ********* ********* ********* *********
A Warning ..I hope nobody thinks that next week will be business as usual. This week the private sector has gradually wound down its operations. The retail sector – most retailers carry stock for a month approximately, are the last to shut down but already you can see empty shelves and shortages of all the fast moving basic items are now widespread.Butcheries and bakeries that work on stock levels of about a week are already closed as their stocks ran out. The same with filling stations. Manufacturers must work with quite significant stock levels – especially of imported items and they will run these down and then close unless there is a U-turn on the part of the government and new directives which are half reasonable.There are no signs as yet as to what the State will do when this shutdown occurs. But all that we are seeing and hearing right now are threats and an insistence that this situation is going to be maintained for some time.
The most immediate problem is the very basics – fuel for transport and the essential foods, maize meal, rice, bread, meat and milk. By Monday all of these will be virtually unobtainable. Farmers with pigs and poultry are pondering what to do with their animals as they run out of stock feed, dairy farmers also face huge problems as they cannot pay their feed bills and must start winding down – how do you tell a cow in milk, used to being milked three times a day, that she must stop producing?Hundreds of thousands of workers and non-formal sector businesspersons are being faced with no work and are being forced to stay home – at present on full pay, but in a few weeks what then?
There is no law to turn to; there are no political leaders to go to with any sort of sense and authority. We are in the hands of a madman who has nothing to loose but his life and has his back to the wall and is using the only tools that he knows to try and stay afloat while the country drowns.How will the average Zimbabwean respond? Friends of mine are doing a day trip to Francistown in Botswana – just 200 kilometers away, today. They will buy what they need for next week and return. A few will do the same. Others are going on holiday, unable to stand the specter of seeing all that they have built up over the past decades swept away. They are the lucky ones – what about the rest?
There is only one way out and that is across the Limpopo. I must warn South Africa that they will now face a huge upsurge in economic refugees and they had better brace themselves for that if nothing effective is done to halt this madness. I mean hundreds of thousands of new, desperate, hungry Zimbabweans flooding in and disappearing into the vast urban slums that surround all South African cities.The alternative is a military coup led by the junior officers with the compliance of some in the ruling Party who see that this situation is not sustainable and that it is creating a regional crisis of substantial proportions. Such an event would close the door to the SADC process under way today in South Africa and plunge the country and the region into a huge political crisis that would require military intervention. Am I being alarmist? I do not think so. The actions of this rogue regime in the past week have been enough to tip us over and into a state of crisis we have never faced before.Irreparable damage is being done to the country and if this is not stopped in its tracks by immediate and radical measures taken by regional governments very serious consequences are going to follow.The humanitarian and economic crisis that is about to break out in Zimbabwe is simply staggering and certainly way beyond the capacity of the country to handle on its own.
Eddie Cross
Bulawayo, 7th July 2007
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