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
Tuesday, October 30, 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 ???
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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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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
Monday, July 16, 2007
Mugabe heads for clash with spurned Mbeki
Mugabe heads for clash with spurned Mbeki
Wisani Wa Ka Ngobeni, Wally Mbhele and Sunday Times Foreign Desk
Published:Jul 15, 2007
President Thabo Mbeki and Zimbabwean leader Robert Mugabe are on course for a head-on collision following the collapse this week of inter-party talks aimed at resolving Zimbabwe’s political and economic crisis.
Mugabe has effectively dumped Mbeki as mediator in the Zimbabwe crisis. He has ordered his party’s key negotiators, Patrick Chinamasa and Nicholas Goche, to boycott negotiations that were supposed to resume in Pretoria this week.
The talks are chaired by South Africa’s Provincial and Local Government Minister Sydney Mufamadi.
Mugabe took the decision to boycott the talks at his Zanu- PF’s central committee meeting on July 7. He did not give Mbeki any reasons for his team’s no- show this week.
The Sunday Times can, however, reveal that a furious Mugabe has accused Mbeki of promising Western European leaders — in particular former British Prime Minister Tony Blair — that he would secure Mugabe’s exit from Zimbabwean politics.
Mugabe is also said to be unhappy that Pretoria appears sympathetic to the suggestion by the main opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) that Zimbabwe needs a new constitution before its elections next year.
South African officials were this week frantically trying to rescue the dialogue.
Mugabe’s latest antics come at a time when his political fortunes are increasingly waning within his own Zanu-PF. He is expected to be ousted from office during Zanu-PF’s critical special congress in December due to growing internal opposition and his country’s dire economic meltdown.
Mugabe’s pullout from negotiations also puts him on a collision course with Southern African Development Community (SADC) leaders, who appointed Mbeki as mediator in March.
Senior South African government officials say Mbeki would report Mugabe’s actions to the SADC leaders when they meet in Zambia next month.
Mbeki would tell SADC leaders that Mugabe was an “obstacle” to a political settlement. According to senior government officials, Mbeki has been pushing Mugabe to agree to a “draft constitution” that will ensure Zimbabwe has free and fair elections next year.
The draft, the officials said, had been compiled before the 2005 election in Zimbabwe. The document, signed by both Zanu- PF and the MDC, has been gathering dust in Mbeki’s office.
An official said Mugabe had previously agreed to it but was now refusing to endorse it. One of the key issues in the draft is the formation of an independent electoral commission.
The official said: “If Zanu-PF does not come to the negotiating table, President Mbeki would have no option but to go back to SADC leaders and brief them about the developments. He will certainly tell them his view of the situation and the individual who might be preventing the South African government from helping Zimbabweans find a political settlement. SADC will have to decide on the way forward because it is a collective issue,” he said.
The official view in Pretoria is that Mugabe is a “major stumbling block”.
SADC leaders are now expected to confront Mugabe directly for the first time at their summit. Diplomatic sources say the chairman of the SADC organ on politics, defence and security, President Jakaya Kikwete of Tanzania, to whom Mbeki reports on the Zimbabwe mediation, is leading a campaign to tackle Mugabe once and for all.
Zanu-PF insiders said party leaders feared that Mugabe’s continued hold on power was threatening their business interests. A faction led by retired army chief General Solomon Mujuru is pushing hard for Mugabe to quit in December.
Mugabe’s close ally, Reserve Bank governor Gideon Gono, on Tuesday wrote a “private and confidential” memo to Mugabe warning him his price reduction blitz had led to “unintended consequences” that could lead to the fall of his government within six months.
Wisani Wa Ka Ngobeni, Wally Mbhele and Sunday Times Foreign Desk
Published:Jul 15, 2007
President Thabo Mbeki and Zimbabwean leader Robert Mugabe are on course for a head-on collision following the collapse this week of inter-party talks aimed at resolving Zimbabwe’s political and economic crisis.
Mugabe has effectively dumped Mbeki as mediator in the Zimbabwe crisis. He has ordered his party’s key negotiators, Patrick Chinamasa and Nicholas Goche, to boycott negotiations that were supposed to resume in Pretoria this week.
The talks are chaired by South Africa’s Provincial and Local Government Minister Sydney Mufamadi.
Mugabe took the decision to boycott the talks at his Zanu- PF’s central committee meeting on July 7. He did not give Mbeki any reasons for his team’s no- show this week.
The Sunday Times can, however, reveal that a furious Mugabe has accused Mbeki of promising Western European leaders — in particular former British Prime Minister Tony Blair — that he would secure Mugabe’s exit from Zimbabwean politics.
Mugabe is also said to be unhappy that Pretoria appears sympathetic to the suggestion by the main opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) that Zimbabwe needs a new constitution before its elections next year.
South African officials were this week frantically trying to rescue the dialogue.
Mugabe’s latest antics come at a time when his political fortunes are increasingly waning within his own Zanu-PF. He is expected to be ousted from office during Zanu-PF’s critical special congress in December due to growing internal opposition and his country’s dire economic meltdown.
Mugabe’s pullout from negotiations also puts him on a collision course with Southern African Development Community (SADC) leaders, who appointed Mbeki as mediator in March.
Senior South African government officials say Mbeki would report Mugabe’s actions to the SADC leaders when they meet in Zambia next month.
Mbeki would tell SADC leaders that Mugabe was an “obstacle” to a political settlement. According to senior government officials, Mbeki has been pushing Mugabe to agree to a “draft constitution” that will ensure Zimbabwe has free and fair elections next year.
The draft, the officials said, had been compiled before the 2005 election in Zimbabwe. The document, signed by both Zanu- PF and the MDC, has been gathering dust in Mbeki’s office.
An official said Mugabe had previously agreed to it but was now refusing to endorse it. One of the key issues in the draft is the formation of an independent electoral commission.
The official said: “If Zanu-PF does not come to the negotiating table, President Mbeki would have no option but to go back to SADC leaders and brief them about the developments. He will certainly tell them his view of the situation and the individual who might be preventing the South African government from helping Zimbabweans find a political settlement. SADC will have to decide on the way forward because it is a collective issue,” he said.
The official view in Pretoria is that Mugabe is a “major stumbling block”.
SADC leaders are now expected to confront Mugabe directly for the first time at their summit. Diplomatic sources say the chairman of the SADC organ on politics, defence and security, President Jakaya Kikwete of Tanzania, to whom Mbeki reports on the Zimbabwe mediation, is leading a campaign to tackle Mugabe once and for all.
Zanu-PF insiders said party leaders feared that Mugabe’s continued hold on power was threatening their business interests. A faction led by retired army chief General Solomon Mujuru is pushing hard for Mugabe to quit in December.
Mugabe’s close ally, Reserve Bank governor Gideon Gono, on Tuesday wrote a “private and confidential” memo to Mugabe warning him his price reduction blitz had led to “unintended consequences” that could lead to the fall of his government within six months.
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
Rich Zimbabwe shops differently to poor
Source : www.zwnews.com
Rich Zimbabwe shops differently to poor
AFPDate posted:
Wed 11-Jul-2007Date published:
Tue 10-Jul-2007
Back to previous page
"While everyone else is crying about the shortages, life goes on for those with money"By Fanuel JongweHarare - The shelves may be bare in most of Harare's supermarkets but in Borrowdale Brooke, home to Zimbabwe's rich and famous, everything from lobster to single malt whisky can be bought - at a price. As shoppers in townships such as Chitungwiza have to endure a stampede for groceries in the wake of price cuts ordered by President Robert Mugabe's government, customers at the Spar supermarket in Borrowdale can fill their trolleys with luxuries to a background of soothing piped music.
"You can get anything you want here," said a women who identified herself only as Lindi. "It's just the prices that are too high." Indeed the prices are beyond not only the pay packets but the wildest dreams of most Zimbabweans who are trying to cope with the effects of the world's highest rate of inflation and an 80 percent unemployment rate.A two-kilogramme box of prawns imported from neighbouring Mozambique is currently on sale for Z$9,5-million which is the equivalent of three months' salary for a schoolteacher.
A large packet of imported potato chips cost $459 000, which is what an average family pays their housemaid for a month. Other shelves groan under the weight of imported goods such as nappies, dog food and children's toys which were struck off most shopping lists long ago. "If you check on the shelves you find almost everything you can no longer find in an ordinary supermarket," Lindi said. "While everyone else is crying about the shortages, life goes on for those with money."Borrowdale, with its rows of mansions, has traditionally been home to the country's elite, such as central bank governor Gideo Gono and tennis star Byron Black.
Mugabe himself also has a private home in the neighbourhood. The opulence of Borrowdale is only a 20 minute drive from Chitungwiza, one of the poorest townships in the country where the stench of raw sewage can be smelt several kilometers away. In one of its local supermarkets, the TM store, the shelves are devoid of even basics such as sugar, salt, rice and cooking oil - let alone lobster. The power has been switched off from all the fridges bar one deep freezer where tubs of ice cream are stacked. There are few takers as electricity in this part of town can be blacked out for hours every day, giving rise to fears about food safety.
The scrum of shoppers trying to pack their baskets with the little food that is still available battle for space with an army of shop assistants who work round the clock repricing goods in line with a government directive to slash the prices of all products. More than 1 750 shop owners and business executives have been arrested since the government edict came into force a fortnight ago for defying the price freeze which they claim makes their business unviable.One assistant, speaking on condition of anonymity, worried that he would soon be joining the long ranks of the unemployed as the shops run bare and business instead reverts to the increasingly thriving black market. "Our worry is whether we will still have our jobs because the stocks are running out and no fresh deliveries are coming in," he told AFP.
Crack teams of inspectors are on patrol throughout the capital to ensure stores keep their prices in line with the government controls. Members of the public are also encouraged to ring toll-free hotlines to report any violations. Announcing the freeze on June 26, Industry Minister Obert Mpofu accused manufacturers and supermarkets of colluding with the country's foes in the west to increase price and ignite a revolt against Mugabe.
The price freeze was intended to counter the impact of the galloping inflation rate, now estimated to be running at well beyond 5,000 percent, which has meant prices rising several times a day. But main opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai and Mugabe's former information minister Jonathan Moyo have dismissed the crackdown as a "desperate" propaganda ploy ahead of elections due next year."It is only a clueless government driven by a desperate political party supported by a corrupt and partisan police, national intelligence and national army that can even entertain the inherently foolish thought that pricing in the national economy of a modern society can be run in an effective, efficient and sustainable way on the basis of commissariat commands and decrees," Moyo said in article in the privately-owned weekly, The Zimbabwe Independent
Rich Zimbabwe shops differently to poor
AFPDate posted:
Wed 11-Jul-2007Date published:
Tue 10-Jul-2007
Back to previous page
"While everyone else is crying about the shortages, life goes on for those with money"By Fanuel JongweHarare - The shelves may be bare in most of Harare's supermarkets but in Borrowdale Brooke, home to Zimbabwe's rich and famous, everything from lobster to single malt whisky can be bought - at a price. As shoppers in townships such as Chitungwiza have to endure a stampede for groceries in the wake of price cuts ordered by President Robert Mugabe's government, customers at the Spar supermarket in Borrowdale can fill their trolleys with luxuries to a background of soothing piped music.
"You can get anything you want here," said a women who identified herself only as Lindi. "It's just the prices that are too high." Indeed the prices are beyond not only the pay packets but the wildest dreams of most Zimbabweans who are trying to cope with the effects of the world's highest rate of inflation and an 80 percent unemployment rate.A two-kilogramme box of prawns imported from neighbouring Mozambique is currently on sale for Z$9,5-million which is the equivalent of three months' salary for a schoolteacher.
A large packet of imported potato chips cost $459 000, which is what an average family pays their housemaid for a month. Other shelves groan under the weight of imported goods such as nappies, dog food and children's toys which were struck off most shopping lists long ago. "If you check on the shelves you find almost everything you can no longer find in an ordinary supermarket," Lindi said. "While everyone else is crying about the shortages, life goes on for those with money."Borrowdale, with its rows of mansions, has traditionally been home to the country's elite, such as central bank governor Gideo Gono and tennis star Byron Black.
Mugabe himself also has a private home in the neighbourhood. The opulence of Borrowdale is only a 20 minute drive from Chitungwiza, one of the poorest townships in the country where the stench of raw sewage can be smelt several kilometers away. In one of its local supermarkets, the TM store, the shelves are devoid of even basics such as sugar, salt, rice and cooking oil - let alone lobster. The power has been switched off from all the fridges bar one deep freezer where tubs of ice cream are stacked. There are few takers as electricity in this part of town can be blacked out for hours every day, giving rise to fears about food safety.
The scrum of shoppers trying to pack their baskets with the little food that is still available battle for space with an army of shop assistants who work round the clock repricing goods in line with a government directive to slash the prices of all products. More than 1 750 shop owners and business executives have been arrested since the government edict came into force a fortnight ago for defying the price freeze which they claim makes their business unviable.One assistant, speaking on condition of anonymity, worried that he would soon be joining the long ranks of the unemployed as the shops run bare and business instead reverts to the increasingly thriving black market. "Our worry is whether we will still have our jobs because the stocks are running out and no fresh deliveries are coming in," he told AFP.
Crack teams of inspectors are on patrol throughout the capital to ensure stores keep their prices in line with the government controls. Members of the public are also encouraged to ring toll-free hotlines to report any violations. Announcing the freeze on June 26, Industry Minister Obert Mpofu accused manufacturers and supermarkets of colluding with the country's foes in the west to increase price and ignite a revolt against Mugabe.
The price freeze was intended to counter the impact of the galloping inflation rate, now estimated to be running at well beyond 5,000 percent, which has meant prices rising several times a day. But main opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai and Mugabe's former information minister Jonathan Moyo have dismissed the crackdown as a "desperate" propaganda ploy ahead of elections due next year."It is only a clueless government driven by a desperate political party supported by a corrupt and partisan police, national intelligence and national army that can even entertain the inherently foolish thought that pricing in the national economy of a modern society can be run in an effective, efficient and sustainable way on the basis of commissariat commands and decrees," Moyo said in article in the privately-owned weekly, The Zimbabwe Independent
Sunday, July 08, 2007
For a long time the club had an inscription bearing the words: "No natives no Jews". In other words... only open to people of pure British descent
(posted on the Herald's website)...one paragraph on the Harare Club caught my eye...see below
How the City of Harare Was Born
The Herald (Harare)
COLUMN16
June 2007
Posted to the web
16 June 2007 Harare
After writing at length about Zimbabwe's many breathtakingly beautiful tourist resorts, regular readers of this column have asked me to write something about the origins of the City of Harare.
For some weeks I have resisted that temptation but today, I shall give you an insight into how Harare was born. In later instalments, I shall explain how certain place names came into being.
Clearly, so many things happened since 1890 and I would need acres of space to give write about every event that shaped Harare. Next week I will touch on the dramatic changes that have taken place since independence in 1980.
Harare, as we know it today, was born at 10am on September 13 1890, when Colonel Robert Pannefather's Pioneer Column hoisted their colonial flag -- the Union Jack -- in what is today Africa Unity Square.
But were it not for an accident of geography, the Sunshine City would have been located at Mt Hampden, about 20km west of the current site.
In September 1890, as the Pioneer Column drew closer to their destination -- Mount Hampden -- after travelling about 230 kilometres from Shashi River, in Chirumanzi, near Masvingo, its commander, Col Pannefather, rode ahead to look for a suitable site for what was to become the capital city of Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe.
Col Pannefather's initial idea was to establish the city near Gwebi River but realised that it would be too expensive to build there.
As his horse galloped around, he met a man on horseback by the name Frank Johnson, who had been in the area for much longer.
Johnson told Pannefather that there was a good ground near a stream and a "good sized kopje" about 20km east of Mount Hampden that was suitable for a settlement.
When the column reached the recommended spot on September 12, Johnson's Order Book recorded simply that "It is noted for general information that the Column having arrived at its destination will halt. The name of this place will be Fort Salisbury."
The next day on September 13 at 10am, the Pioneers paraded on a piece of land now occupied by Africa Unity Square and named it Cecil Square.
The place was named Cecil Square, not after Cecil John Rhodes, but after bald-headed and heavily bearded Robert Cecil, the Third Marquess of Salisbury, who was three times prime minister of the United Kingdom from 1885 to 1886, 1886 to 1892 and 1895 to 1902. He also served four times as British Foreign Secretary. He was bestowed with the title of Lord Salisbury.
Lieutenant E. G. Tyndale-Biscoe solemnly hoisted the Union Jack on a Msasa tree pole and Canon Balfour offered a prayer followed by a salute fired from two field guns.
Then they cheered thrice, first for the Queen of England, second for Prime Minister Salisbury after whom the city was then named and for the goodwill of the Pioneers.
The Pioneer Column immediately went to work on the square, turning it into a "living" replica of the British flag.
The fountain in the centre of the square marks the exact spot where the flag was hoisted on a Msasa pole.
In the next two weeks, the appearance of the square changed dramatically with four pathways, one linking Second Street (now Sam Nujoma) with Third Street and the other joining Baker Avenue (now Nelson Mandela) to Stanley Avenue (now Jason Moyo) and two diagonals linking all the four streets. The four pathways met at the centre of the square, transforming it into a Union Jack.
Jacaranda trees were planted around the square at the edge to resemble the edges of the flag and still stand today as a reminder of their legacy.
Other trees, flowers and lawn were planted between the pathways to add colour to the flag.
Thus was born the City of Harare.
At the end of the month the Pioneers were discharged with three months' rations and most of them went off to peg their mining claims or to ride out the farms which were their due reward for successfully expanding the frontiers of the British Empire.
The first Police Quarters were built by Major Forbes on the site of Meikles Hotel, just opposite the park, and the first bakery was a small red house at the corner of First Street and Robert Mugabe Road (now occupied by Standard Chartered Bank), and its oven a great big anthill. It was, in fact, the anthill that put paid to plans to extend First Street up to the railway station, like the rest of the north-south streets in the city centre, notably Second Street (Sam Nujoma), Angwa Street, Julius Nyerere Way, Fourth Street, etc.
The Pioneers immediately built a stable for their horses at what is today the Harare Civil Court. It was previously known as Stables Building.
They also set up a police station at Old Shell House in Nelson Mandela Avenue, then Baker Avenue, and a visit to the some of the rooms there confirms that they were actually holding cells.
They also built a club, now the Harare Club, on Third Street overlooking the Square. For a long time the club had an inscription bearing the words: "No natives no Jews". In other words, it was only open to people of pure British descend.
Those who ventured west of the new city wrote: "Between our laager and the Kopje was a big black marsh which could only be crossed by jumping from tuft to tuft of grass but it could be avoided by going up north where it starts (Harare Gardens near the two NSSA buildings)."
The Pioneers also built the Anglican Cathedral for their church services, in addition to Cecil Hotel, which is now the Parliament Building.
When Salisbury, now Harare, was granted municipal status in 1935, the Africa Unity Square and the surrounding area were taken over by the council. It was Harare City Council's turn in 1982, when Salisbury gave way to Harare.
How the City of Harare Was Born
The Herald (Harare)
COLUMN16
June 2007
Posted to the web
16 June 2007 Harare
After writing at length about Zimbabwe's many breathtakingly beautiful tourist resorts, regular readers of this column have asked me to write something about the origins of the City of Harare.
For some weeks I have resisted that temptation but today, I shall give you an insight into how Harare was born. In later instalments, I shall explain how certain place names came into being.
Clearly, so many things happened since 1890 and I would need acres of space to give write about every event that shaped Harare. Next week I will touch on the dramatic changes that have taken place since independence in 1980.
Harare, as we know it today, was born at 10am on September 13 1890, when Colonel Robert Pannefather's Pioneer Column hoisted their colonial flag -- the Union Jack -- in what is today Africa Unity Square.
But were it not for an accident of geography, the Sunshine City would have been located at Mt Hampden, about 20km west of the current site.
In September 1890, as the Pioneer Column drew closer to their destination -- Mount Hampden -- after travelling about 230 kilometres from Shashi River, in Chirumanzi, near Masvingo, its commander, Col Pannefather, rode ahead to look for a suitable site for what was to become the capital city of Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe.
Col Pannefather's initial idea was to establish the city near Gwebi River but realised that it would be too expensive to build there.
As his horse galloped around, he met a man on horseback by the name Frank Johnson, who had been in the area for much longer.
Johnson told Pannefather that there was a good ground near a stream and a "good sized kopje" about 20km east of Mount Hampden that was suitable for a settlement.
When the column reached the recommended spot on September 12, Johnson's Order Book recorded simply that "It is noted for general information that the Column having arrived at its destination will halt. The name of this place will be Fort Salisbury."
The next day on September 13 at 10am, the Pioneers paraded on a piece of land now occupied by Africa Unity Square and named it Cecil Square.
The place was named Cecil Square, not after Cecil John Rhodes, but after bald-headed and heavily bearded Robert Cecil, the Third Marquess of Salisbury, who was three times prime minister of the United Kingdom from 1885 to 1886, 1886 to 1892 and 1895 to 1902. He also served four times as British Foreign Secretary. He was bestowed with the title of Lord Salisbury.
Lieutenant E. G. Tyndale-Biscoe solemnly hoisted the Union Jack on a Msasa tree pole and Canon Balfour offered a prayer followed by a salute fired from two field guns.
Then they cheered thrice, first for the Queen of England, second for Prime Minister Salisbury after whom the city was then named and for the goodwill of the Pioneers.
The Pioneer Column immediately went to work on the square, turning it into a "living" replica of the British flag.
The fountain in the centre of the square marks the exact spot where the flag was hoisted on a Msasa pole.
In the next two weeks, the appearance of the square changed dramatically with four pathways, one linking Second Street (now Sam Nujoma) with Third Street and the other joining Baker Avenue (now Nelson Mandela) to Stanley Avenue (now Jason Moyo) and two diagonals linking all the four streets. The four pathways met at the centre of the square, transforming it into a Union Jack.
Jacaranda trees were planted around the square at the edge to resemble the edges of the flag and still stand today as a reminder of their legacy.
Other trees, flowers and lawn were planted between the pathways to add colour to the flag.
Thus was born the City of Harare.
At the end of the month the Pioneers were discharged with three months' rations and most of them went off to peg their mining claims or to ride out the farms which were their due reward for successfully expanding the frontiers of the British Empire.
The first Police Quarters were built by Major Forbes on the site of Meikles Hotel, just opposite the park, and the first bakery was a small red house at the corner of First Street and Robert Mugabe Road (now occupied by Standard Chartered Bank), and its oven a great big anthill. It was, in fact, the anthill that put paid to plans to extend First Street up to the railway station, like the rest of the north-south streets in the city centre, notably Second Street (Sam Nujoma), Angwa Street, Julius Nyerere Way, Fourth Street, etc.
The Pioneers immediately built a stable for their horses at what is today the Harare Civil Court. It was previously known as Stables Building.
They also set up a police station at Old Shell House in Nelson Mandela Avenue, then Baker Avenue, and a visit to the some of the rooms there confirms that they were actually holding cells.
They also built a club, now the Harare Club, on Third Street overlooking the Square. For a long time the club had an inscription bearing the words: "No natives no Jews". In other words, it was only open to people of pure British descend.
Those who ventured west of the new city wrote: "Between our laager and the Kopje was a big black marsh which could only be crossed by jumping from tuft to tuft of grass but it could be avoided by going up north where it starts (Harare Gardens near the two NSSA buildings)."
The Pioneers also built the Anglican Cathedral for their church services, in addition to Cecil Hotel, which is now the Parliament Building.
When Salisbury, now Harare, was granted municipal status in 1935, the Africa Unity Square and the surrounding area were taken over by the council. It was Harare City Council's turn in 1982, when Salisbury gave way to Harare.
Hunting in Zimbabwe For Identity And Family Memoir
Hunting in Zimbabwe For Identity And Family Memoir
James Kirchick Tue. Jun 26, 2007
When a Crocodile Eats the Sun
By Peter Godwin
Little, Brown and Company, 352 pages, $24.99.
Last August, I visited an elderly Jewish couple at their spacious apartment in an affluent neighborhood in Johannesburg, South Africa. A distant family friend had referred to them as people who would welcome the opportunity to take me out for dinner during a long journalistic assignment in a country in which I had few acquaintances. Ronnie and Avner were not South African, however, but Zimbabwean, two of the very few Jews left in that troubled country. They lived in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second largest city, where Avner owned a clothing factory, but they frequently traveled to South Africa to escape their country’s awful state of affairs. Avner had fought in the Israeli War of Independence; he and Ronnie visited Israel frequently. I was shocked that an elderly couple with the means to move would continue to live in a country that, since the seizure of white-owned commercial farmland ordered by President Robert Mugabe in 2000, has been steeped in lawlessness, violence and poverty.
A few months later, I heard that Avner had passed away. When I expressed my condolences to Ronnie, she told me that she had finally decided to make aliya. If there is ever a reason for the State of Israel, I thought, Jewish Zimbabweans are it.
In Peter Godwin’s mesmerizing memoir of contemporary Zimbabwe, “When a Crocodile Eats the Sun,” the matter of Israel never comes up. But it was one that nagged me from the minute I read Godwin’s account of the discovery at the heart of this book. When Godwin’s father suffered a heart attack in 1996, Godwin’s mother, Helen, a doctor, told her son to return home. There, hanging on the wall, he saw a photograph of his father’s family that he had never seen before, one that prompted a revelation from his mother: Godwin’s father, George, was not the “Anglo-African in a safari suit and desert boots, with his clipped British accent” that his son had always imagined him to be, but rather a Polish Jew, born Kazimierz Jerzy Goldfarb.
Thus begins Godwin’s process of self-discovery, through which he attempts to learn more about the fate of the European Jews in general and those of his family in particular. He visits museums and libraries, and contacts various European ministries, in an effort to determine what happened to his father’s mother and sister, from whom George was separated as a young man. Godwin learns that his father managed to escape Poland and joined the Free Poles in England, where he met Helen. After the war, the couple immigrated to Southern Rhodesia, a British colony rich with opportunity due to the postwar boom.
Why did George Godwin invent a new life for himself? For starters, “a white in Africa is like a Jew everywhere,” Godwin writes, referring to the loneliness and terror that haunt his parents in a country where going to the supermarket requires carrying stacks of currency — Zimbabwe has the world’s highest rate of inflation — and risking attack by armed thugs. At any moment, their home could be raided by government apparatchiks or by common criminals calling themselves veterans of their country’s war of independence against white rule. The septuagenarian George once got into fisticuffs with a burglar, forcing Helen to install a bolted “rape door” in the hallway as an extra precaution against home invasion.
There were cultural taboos to resist, as well — including characterization as soutpiels, an Afrikaans epithet meaning “salt penis,” used to describe Anglo-Africans who bestride the ocean with one foot in Africa and the other in Europe, allowing their “genitals to dangle in the ocean where they pickle in the brine of cultural confusion.” And if being European was difficult, life as a European Jew must have seemed unbearable. Once a proud community of several thousand, the Jewish population in Zimbabwe has by now diminished to a few hundred, most of them elderly. During one of Peter’s visits, the synagogue in Bulawayo burned down, likely the victim of Mugabe’s campaign of destruction.
But Godwin stumbled upon a more nuanced explanation at, of all places, his father’s funeral. Surveying the multiracial attendants, Godwin notes, “Mugabe had managed to achieve something hitherto so elusive, a common bond forged in the furnace of resistance to an oppressive rule.” Escaping European antisemitism some 60 years ago, George Godwin was simply not going to let hatred chase him and his wife halfway around the world again. Opting out — as so many white Zimbabweans, including the author, had done — was simply not something this hardy old couple could even contemplate. A new life in Africa was “clearly the antidote to Europe’s great burden of history,” and leaving it would be a betrayal of all the Zimbabweans that the Godwins had come to care for and love.
“Like my father before me, I am rejecting my own identity. I am committing cultural treason,” Godwin writes, referring to his decision to leave Zimbabwe and move to America. Yet this admission evinces not simply the guilt of a man who witnessed grave suffering in his country and feels impassive in its enormity, but also of a conflicted Jew who suddenly feels some ineffable — yet ultimately elusive — connection to a people.
James Kirchick is the assistant to the editor-in-chief of The New Republic and reported from Zimbabwe last year.
James Kirchick Tue. Jun 26, 2007
When a Crocodile Eats the Sun
By Peter Godwin
Little, Brown and Company, 352 pages, $24.99.
Last August, I visited an elderly Jewish couple at their spacious apartment in an affluent neighborhood in Johannesburg, South Africa. A distant family friend had referred to them as people who would welcome the opportunity to take me out for dinner during a long journalistic assignment in a country in which I had few acquaintances. Ronnie and Avner were not South African, however, but Zimbabwean, two of the very few Jews left in that troubled country. They lived in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second largest city, where Avner owned a clothing factory, but they frequently traveled to South Africa to escape their country’s awful state of affairs. Avner had fought in the Israeli War of Independence; he and Ronnie visited Israel frequently. I was shocked that an elderly couple with the means to move would continue to live in a country that, since the seizure of white-owned commercial farmland ordered by President Robert Mugabe in 2000, has been steeped in lawlessness, violence and poverty.
A few months later, I heard that Avner had passed away. When I expressed my condolences to Ronnie, she told me that she had finally decided to make aliya. If there is ever a reason for the State of Israel, I thought, Jewish Zimbabweans are it.
In Peter Godwin’s mesmerizing memoir of contemporary Zimbabwe, “When a Crocodile Eats the Sun,” the matter of Israel never comes up. But it was one that nagged me from the minute I read Godwin’s account of the discovery at the heart of this book. When Godwin’s father suffered a heart attack in 1996, Godwin’s mother, Helen, a doctor, told her son to return home. There, hanging on the wall, he saw a photograph of his father’s family that he had never seen before, one that prompted a revelation from his mother: Godwin’s father, George, was not the “Anglo-African in a safari suit and desert boots, with his clipped British accent” that his son had always imagined him to be, but rather a Polish Jew, born Kazimierz Jerzy Goldfarb.
Thus begins Godwin’s process of self-discovery, through which he attempts to learn more about the fate of the European Jews in general and those of his family in particular. He visits museums and libraries, and contacts various European ministries, in an effort to determine what happened to his father’s mother and sister, from whom George was separated as a young man. Godwin learns that his father managed to escape Poland and joined the Free Poles in England, where he met Helen. After the war, the couple immigrated to Southern Rhodesia, a British colony rich with opportunity due to the postwar boom.
Why did George Godwin invent a new life for himself? For starters, “a white in Africa is like a Jew everywhere,” Godwin writes, referring to the loneliness and terror that haunt his parents in a country where going to the supermarket requires carrying stacks of currency — Zimbabwe has the world’s highest rate of inflation — and risking attack by armed thugs. At any moment, their home could be raided by government apparatchiks or by common criminals calling themselves veterans of their country’s war of independence against white rule. The septuagenarian George once got into fisticuffs with a burglar, forcing Helen to install a bolted “rape door” in the hallway as an extra precaution against home invasion.
There were cultural taboos to resist, as well — including characterization as soutpiels, an Afrikaans epithet meaning “salt penis,” used to describe Anglo-Africans who bestride the ocean with one foot in Africa and the other in Europe, allowing their “genitals to dangle in the ocean where they pickle in the brine of cultural confusion.” And if being European was difficult, life as a European Jew must have seemed unbearable. Once a proud community of several thousand, the Jewish population in Zimbabwe has by now diminished to a few hundred, most of them elderly. During one of Peter’s visits, the synagogue in Bulawayo burned down, likely the victim of Mugabe’s campaign of destruction.
But Godwin stumbled upon a more nuanced explanation at, of all places, his father’s funeral. Surveying the multiracial attendants, Godwin notes, “Mugabe had managed to achieve something hitherto so elusive, a common bond forged in the furnace of resistance to an oppressive rule.” Escaping European antisemitism some 60 years ago, George Godwin was simply not going to let hatred chase him and his wife halfway around the world again. Opting out — as so many white Zimbabweans, including the author, had done — was simply not something this hardy old couple could even contemplate. A new life in Africa was “clearly the antidote to Europe’s great burden of history,” and leaving it would be a betrayal of all the Zimbabweans that the Godwins had come to care for and love.
“Like my father before me, I am rejecting my own identity. I am committing cultural treason,” Godwin writes, referring to his decision to leave Zimbabwe and move to America. Yet this admission evinces not simply the guilt of a man who witnessed grave suffering in his country and feels impassive in its enormity, but also of a conflicted Jew who suddenly feels some ineffable — yet ultimately elusive — connection to a people.
James Kirchick is the assistant to the editor-in-chief of The New Republic and reported from Zimbabwe last year.
Wednesday, July 04, 2007
Cutting edge e-commerce and hyperinflation...
Expat Zimbabweans use the Internet to arrange care packages for the folks back home
With the economy collapsing and inflation running wild, there's no longer any point in sending cash to family and friends
STEPHANIE NOLEN
From Wednesday's Globe and Mail
July 4, 2007 at 4:17 AM EDT
JOHANNESBURG — What do you get when you combine the cutting edge of e-commerce technology with hyperinflation, a collapsing economy, and a burgeoning humanitarian crisis? You get zimbuyer.com, a website that allows Zimbabweans in exile to make online purchases of food and other necessities for delivery to family back home, letting them know via text message that a sack of corn or cooking oil is waiting.
The website is the brainchild of a 26-year-old named Laz, who left the country in 1999 to study information technology in Texas. But by the time he was finished school, President Robert Mugabe had begun his slide into dictatorship and Zimbabwe's economy - once the healthiest in Africa - was imploding.
Laz knew there was no work back home; instead he stayed abroad and found a job at America Online. Then, last year, it occurred to him that he could put his e-commerce training to work for people back in Zimbabwe. (Like many others working in this field, Laz was afraid to have his surname published for fear of reprisal from the Zimbabwean government, which has criticized initiatives such as this that subvert what remains of the Zimbabwean economy.)
Zimbabwe, like many African countries, has long been dependent on remittances from citizens working abroad (which far exceeds the value of all foreign aid that is delivered to the continent). But these days inflation in Zimbabwe runs at 4,500 per cent, in the government estimate, or twice that, if you believe independent economists. That means that people insist on getting paid their wages daily, that an estimate from a business for work to be done is good for only 30 minutes, and that prices on restaurant menus change from the start of the lunch hour to the end.
It also means that there is little point in Zimbabweans working abroad sending cash: It must be delivered at the posted government exchange rate, rendering it almost worthless, and it loses what value it has in a matter of days.
"The only things that keep value are commodities - petrol, cooking oil, sugar - or foreign currency," said Joeseph, an expatriate Zimbabwean who works in the Alberta oil patch and who uses zimbuyer.com regularly to send parcels to relatives. "And if you don't send help, how are they going to survive?"
So, suddenly there is a thriving business in websites such as this which allow people to send commodities back home, and to help their families negotiate the increasing scarcities in Zimbabwe by electronically providing them with cellphone airtime or fuel vouchers.
On zimbuyer.com, Joeseph can place an order for pork chops, or school notebooks or a generator, and pay for it with a credit card or the Web-based service PayPal. Laz and his staff then e-mail the order through to Harare immediately, and their local team goes into action: Six staffers in Harare and four in Bulawayo physically fill the orders - they are outside the shops at 5 a.m., scouting out a rumoured shipment of cooking oil. When they can't find products to fill an order in Zimbabwe, they cross into South Africa or Botswana and import the products, facing the crippling import taxes and bribes that go with that - but Laz said they are insulated to some degree because their buyers have purchased in foreign exchange. Deliveries are made within 72 hours. (Business could get more complicated in the coming weeks, however, as Mr. Mugabe has deployed riot police to enforce government price controls, which he blames for inflation; as a consequence many shop owners say they simply will not restock.)
Zimbuyer.com has had more than 4,000 clients, and is adding them by the day. "You've got Zimbabweans who are economic migrants all over the world what they have in common is that everyone wants to support their families," said Laz, who now lives in Birmingham, England, and runs the site with his sister. He still has a day job in Web design, while she is a health-care assistant.
Never Ndemera founded zimland.com three years ago, and it focuses on selling food hampers. Mr. Ndemera owns a nursing-placement agency in Britain, at which the majority of his clients are nurses who have fled Zimbabwe's collapsed civil service. Zimland.com grew out of a desire to provide a perk to employees: He knew many were worried about the children they left back home, and wanted to provide a way of reassuring them that they were getting fed each day. Customers place an order on his website, he sends it through to a shop in Zimbabwe, which prepares the parcel - meanwhile, recipients receive a text message advising them of what's waiting and where they can collect it. Mr. Ndemera's agents in Zimbabwe settle their accounts with local shops each week.
The slickest entry into this field is the site mukuru.com, created by a Zimbabwean named Rob, now 29, who went to work in Britain three years ago. He, too, found work in the tech sector, but as he watched British designers get obsessed with videos and gaming on cellphones, it seemed to him they were missing the most obvious thing a cellphone could do.
"You can send 160 characters of information from the First World to Africa in seconds for almost nothing," he said.
So, 1½ years ago he created mukuru.com (the name means "respected" in Shona, one of Zimbabwe's main languages) on this business model: They buy bulk cellphone air time, satellite TV time, or petrol coupons, resell them at a margin in small quantities on the website, then notify people in Zimbabwe than they have been "sent" air time or 50 litres of petrol. "We send a [text message] that says to the recipient, 'Hi, your aunt in London just sent you 40 litres of petrol,' " he said.
This business has been so successful that mukuru.com has expanded into South Africa and will begin imminently to serve Kenya and other African countries, which don't have Zimbabwe's particular desperate need for commodities, but have many expatriate citizens who routinely help out family back home.
The site has had 8,000 customers so far and is adding 50 a day these days as word of its reliability spreads, said Rob - who now has a team of eight and has long since left his cellphone-ring-tone job.
Like Rob, Laz finds himself with a successful e-commerce business in zimbuyer.com, but he would love to pack it all in. "Any Zimbabwean that you ask will tell you, 'I'd rather be back in Zim,' " he said. "It's just the current state of things that's keeping people away - it would make no sense to go back now, I'd have no way of supporting my family."
And how many people is he supporting? The question made him laugh. "I don't even really know. When you add in the cousins, the grandchildren, a lot. Just a lot."
*****
Crippled by inflation
Inflation in Zimbabwe has reached the point where the price of basic goods is now more than 45 times what it was a year ago. The graph shows the percentage increase in the Zimbabwe Consumer Price Index over the previous 12 months. Most independent economists say the real rate of inflation is double the official rate.
January, 2000: 55.9%
May, 2000: 4.530%
SOURCE: RESERVE BANK OF ZIMBABWE, NMBZ HOLDINGS LTD.
With the economy collapsing and inflation running wild, there's no longer any point in sending cash to family and friends
STEPHANIE NOLEN
From Wednesday's Globe and Mail
July 4, 2007 at 4:17 AM EDT
JOHANNESBURG — What do you get when you combine the cutting edge of e-commerce technology with hyperinflation, a collapsing economy, and a burgeoning humanitarian crisis? You get zimbuyer.com, a website that allows Zimbabweans in exile to make online purchases of food and other necessities for delivery to family back home, letting them know via text message that a sack of corn or cooking oil is waiting.
The website is the brainchild of a 26-year-old named Laz, who left the country in 1999 to study information technology in Texas. But by the time he was finished school, President Robert Mugabe had begun his slide into dictatorship and Zimbabwe's economy - once the healthiest in Africa - was imploding.
Laz knew there was no work back home; instead he stayed abroad and found a job at America Online. Then, last year, it occurred to him that he could put his e-commerce training to work for people back in Zimbabwe. (Like many others working in this field, Laz was afraid to have his surname published for fear of reprisal from the Zimbabwean government, which has criticized initiatives such as this that subvert what remains of the Zimbabwean economy.)
Zimbabwe, like many African countries, has long been dependent on remittances from citizens working abroad (which far exceeds the value of all foreign aid that is delivered to the continent). But these days inflation in Zimbabwe runs at 4,500 per cent, in the government estimate, or twice that, if you believe independent economists. That means that people insist on getting paid their wages daily, that an estimate from a business for work to be done is good for only 30 minutes, and that prices on restaurant menus change from the start of the lunch hour to the end.
It also means that there is little point in Zimbabweans working abroad sending cash: It must be delivered at the posted government exchange rate, rendering it almost worthless, and it loses what value it has in a matter of days.
"The only things that keep value are commodities - petrol, cooking oil, sugar - or foreign currency," said Joeseph, an expatriate Zimbabwean who works in the Alberta oil patch and who uses zimbuyer.com regularly to send parcels to relatives. "And if you don't send help, how are they going to survive?"
So, suddenly there is a thriving business in websites such as this which allow people to send commodities back home, and to help their families negotiate the increasing scarcities in Zimbabwe by electronically providing them with cellphone airtime or fuel vouchers.
On zimbuyer.com, Joeseph can place an order for pork chops, or school notebooks or a generator, and pay for it with a credit card or the Web-based service PayPal. Laz and his staff then e-mail the order through to Harare immediately, and their local team goes into action: Six staffers in Harare and four in Bulawayo physically fill the orders - they are outside the shops at 5 a.m., scouting out a rumoured shipment of cooking oil. When they can't find products to fill an order in Zimbabwe, they cross into South Africa or Botswana and import the products, facing the crippling import taxes and bribes that go with that - but Laz said they are insulated to some degree because their buyers have purchased in foreign exchange. Deliveries are made within 72 hours. (Business could get more complicated in the coming weeks, however, as Mr. Mugabe has deployed riot police to enforce government price controls, which he blames for inflation; as a consequence many shop owners say they simply will not restock.)
Zimbuyer.com has had more than 4,000 clients, and is adding them by the day. "You've got Zimbabweans who are economic migrants all over the world what they have in common is that everyone wants to support their families," said Laz, who now lives in Birmingham, England, and runs the site with his sister. He still has a day job in Web design, while she is a health-care assistant.
Never Ndemera founded zimland.com three years ago, and it focuses on selling food hampers. Mr. Ndemera owns a nursing-placement agency in Britain, at which the majority of his clients are nurses who have fled Zimbabwe's collapsed civil service. Zimland.com grew out of a desire to provide a perk to employees: He knew many were worried about the children they left back home, and wanted to provide a way of reassuring them that they were getting fed each day. Customers place an order on his website, he sends it through to a shop in Zimbabwe, which prepares the parcel - meanwhile, recipients receive a text message advising them of what's waiting and where they can collect it. Mr. Ndemera's agents in Zimbabwe settle their accounts with local shops each week.
The slickest entry into this field is the site mukuru.com, created by a Zimbabwean named Rob, now 29, who went to work in Britain three years ago. He, too, found work in the tech sector, but as he watched British designers get obsessed with videos and gaming on cellphones, it seemed to him they were missing the most obvious thing a cellphone could do.
"You can send 160 characters of information from the First World to Africa in seconds for almost nothing," he said.
So, 1½ years ago he created mukuru.com (the name means "respected" in Shona, one of Zimbabwe's main languages) on this business model: They buy bulk cellphone air time, satellite TV time, or petrol coupons, resell them at a margin in small quantities on the website, then notify people in Zimbabwe than they have been "sent" air time or 50 litres of petrol. "We send a [text message] that says to the recipient, 'Hi, your aunt in London just sent you 40 litres of petrol,' " he said.
This business has been so successful that mukuru.com has expanded into South Africa and will begin imminently to serve Kenya and other African countries, which don't have Zimbabwe's particular desperate need for commodities, but have many expatriate citizens who routinely help out family back home.
The site has had 8,000 customers so far and is adding 50 a day these days as word of its reliability spreads, said Rob - who now has a team of eight and has long since left his cellphone-ring-tone job.
Like Rob, Laz finds himself with a successful e-commerce business in zimbuyer.com, but he would love to pack it all in. "Any Zimbabwean that you ask will tell you, 'I'd rather be back in Zim,' " he said. "It's just the current state of things that's keeping people away - it would make no sense to go back now, I'd have no way of supporting my family."
And how many people is he supporting? The question made him laugh. "I don't even really know. When you add in the cousins, the grandchildren, a lot. Just a lot."
*****
Crippled by inflation
Inflation in Zimbabwe has reached the point where the price of basic goods is now more than 45 times what it was a year ago. The graph shows the percentage increase in the Zimbabwe Consumer Price Index over the previous 12 months. Most independent economists say the real rate of inflation is double the official rate.
January, 2000: 55.9%
May, 2000: 4.530%
SOURCE: RESERVE BANK OF ZIMBABWE, NMBZ HOLDINGS LTD.
Sunday, June 24, 2007
Inflation in Zimbabwe hits 4,500%
Inflation in Zimbabwe hits 4,500%
Calcutta News.Net
Saturday 23rd June, 2007
The Zimbabwe dollar has gone into free fall with the supply of hard currency in the country evaporating.
Late this week it took 150,000 Zimbabwe dollars to buy just one U.S. dollar. Last month the cost was 50,000.On informal offshore exchanges the Zimbabwe currency tumbled to Z$300,000 to the greenback in larger financial exchanges usually involving businesses.The Zimbabwean dollar's accelerating depreciation reflects surging inflation, recently estimated at 4,500% over the 12 months through May – the country's Central Statistical Office has not yet released the official version of the data. The currency's steep slide and the soaring inflation rate prompted U.S. Ambassador Christopher Dell, soon to leave Harare for Kabul, Afghanistan – to issue predictions that economic pressures will drive the administration of President Robert Mugabe and the ruling ZANU-PF party out of power sooner than political opponents.He quoted economists as saying inflation could hit 1.5 million percent by year's end. Opposition Movement for Democratic Change founding president Morgan Tsvangirai, in Britain late this week, voiced similar sentiments, saying the collapsing economy would force President Mugabe to allow free and fair elections to be held.Economist Tony Hawkins, a lecturer at the University of Zimbabwe’s Graduate School of Management, told reporter Blessing Zulu of VOA's Studio 7 for Zimbabwe that the economic meltdown can be attributed directly to the policies pursued by Harare.
Calcutta News.Net
Saturday 23rd June, 2007
The Zimbabwe dollar has gone into free fall with the supply of hard currency in the country evaporating.
Late this week it took 150,000 Zimbabwe dollars to buy just one U.S. dollar. Last month the cost was 50,000.On informal offshore exchanges the Zimbabwe currency tumbled to Z$300,000 to the greenback in larger financial exchanges usually involving businesses.The Zimbabwean dollar's accelerating depreciation reflects surging inflation, recently estimated at 4,500% over the 12 months through May – the country's Central Statistical Office has not yet released the official version of the data. The currency's steep slide and the soaring inflation rate prompted U.S. Ambassador Christopher Dell, soon to leave Harare for Kabul, Afghanistan – to issue predictions that economic pressures will drive the administration of President Robert Mugabe and the ruling ZANU-PF party out of power sooner than political opponents.He quoted economists as saying inflation could hit 1.5 million percent by year's end. Opposition Movement for Democratic Change founding president Morgan Tsvangirai, in Britain late this week, voiced similar sentiments, saying the collapsing economy would force President Mugabe to allow free and fair elections to be held.Economist Tony Hawkins, a lecturer at the University of Zimbabwe’s Graduate School of Management, told reporter Blessing Zulu of VOA's Studio 7 for Zimbabwe that the economic meltdown can be attributed directly to the policies pursued by Harare.
Sunday, June 10, 2007
Which way is up
Which way is up
Saturday 9th june 2007
Dear Family and Friends,
This week all semblances of normalcy collapsed in most parts of Zimbabwe. The supply of electricity was negligible for most of the week and we found ourselves behaving in the most absurd fashion in order to remain functional. Going to bed at 7 in the evening in the cold and the dark - and 'waking up' when the lights came on at 11pm.Mostly your body doesn't know which way is up as it struggles to understand your new absurd routine. Doing the ironing at 11 pm; downloading emails and working on the computer at midnight. Getting up again at 4am to cook porridge for breakfast and being thankful for that achievement as the electricity goes off again at 5am and another day of insanity starts.
The eerie silence characterising suburban life was not much better in shopping and business centres - machines not working, lifts not moving, supermarket meat fridges defrosting, butchery saws silent, bakery ovens cold, food going bad and people just sitting out on walls and pavements. The absurditities of the situation kept slapping you in the face all week. One evening, in the cold and dark, Short Wave Radio Africa interviewed a top official in ZESA ( Electricity Supply Authority). Bear in mind this Radio Station is banned from operating in Zimbabwe and it's staff members are prohibited from returning to the country - and yet the ZESA executive speaks openly on the forbidden radio station!
She had a great swathe of excuses in order to apportion blame for this diabolical situation and then uses the opportunity to announce a 50% increase in the price of electricity. Oh really, what electricity is that! On Tuesday it was World Environment Day and again Zimbabwe was in the quiet and the dark - at least we were doing our bit for the world - however unintentionally!
That absurd irony was then punctuated all day by the sound of tree chopping and the sight of people pouring out of the bush carrying sticks, branches and cart loads of newly cut indigenous timber. 60 year old trees felled in minutes - what tragedy for Zimbabwe and what a disgrace for the country whose Minister of Tourism heads the UN body on Sustainable Development. What disgrace too for the world who chose him for the job. The near complete collapse of Zimbabwe's electricity supply is affecting country areas too. In a rural area near me people are walking up to six kilometres to reach the nearest grinding mill.
They arrive to find the mill not able to function without electricity and there is no option but to leave your precious bag of maize and return the next day to collect it - hoping that most of it is still there. The millers are having to work at night or whenever the power comes back on - its all about survival. Perhaps the greatest irony of the power cuts is that at least now we physically don't have the means to listen to or watch the propaganda on ZBC radio and TV - a blessed relief, particularly as the bigwigs have begun positioning themselves for the next round of elections - just eight months away.
Until next week, thanks for reading and please take note of my new website address: www.cathybuckle.com
Love cathy
Speaker and Spectator
Saturday 2nd June 2007
Dear Family and Friends,
As ridiculous as it may sound, little lights of hope are flickering on all the time now in Zimbabwe. They are not practical everyday lights of decreasing prices, increasing food and medical supplies or improved services - quite the contrary in fact. The lights of hope that I am talking about are those that are beginning to illuminate the future direction. Some are from events across the border where it seems there are actually things going on - although no one is saying what! Other signs of hope are coming from within.
One is the blatantly obvious declining interest and support by people in rural areas for overweight politicians in smart clothes and fancy cars who come only at election time - and then shout and threaten people in their bid to garner votes. A prime example is underway at the moment in the run up to a by election about to be held in Zaka East. At last both sides of the MDC have managed to stand together and say they will not contest the seat - what is the point if conditions are not free and fair.
This leaves Zanu PF standing against two virtually unknown parties, the UPP (United People's Party) and the UPDP (United People's Democratic Party). Some of the earlier ZANU PF rallies were shown on ZBC television and it was embarrassing to watch great obese men, shouting and waving their fists at the painfully thin people, sitting barefoot in the dust staring blankly ahead. The contrast between speaker and spectators was so extreme it was a wonder it was shown on national TV at all. A few days later, arriving to whip up support for the ruling party candidate , a former soldier, disappointment was immediate and the rally cancelled. Zanu PF Chairman, John Nkomo, said: "We have to postpone this rally to Thursday next week because we cannot address these few people."
The days of Zanu PF being able to take support for granted - even in remote dusty villages - are gone. Other reasons for hope are coming from people in positions of responsibility who are making courageous decisions and are standing up to do the right thing - politics and propaganda aside.This week High Court Judge Tedious Karwi granted bail to Ian Makone - one of 32 leading opposition officials and activists arrested in late March who have been held without trial for the past 2 months and 2 days. In making the bail ruling Judge Karwi stated a fact which of late is not guaranteed and has been very elusive in Zimbabwe. The Judge said:" Our law presumes people to be innocent until proven guilty." Until next week, thanks for reading, love cathy.
Saturday 9th june 2007
Dear Family and Friends,
This week all semblances of normalcy collapsed in most parts of Zimbabwe. The supply of electricity was negligible for most of the week and we found ourselves behaving in the most absurd fashion in order to remain functional. Going to bed at 7 in the evening in the cold and the dark - and 'waking up' when the lights came on at 11pm.Mostly your body doesn't know which way is up as it struggles to understand your new absurd routine. Doing the ironing at 11 pm; downloading emails and working on the computer at midnight. Getting up again at 4am to cook porridge for breakfast and being thankful for that achievement as the electricity goes off again at 5am and another day of insanity starts.
The eerie silence characterising suburban life was not much better in shopping and business centres - machines not working, lifts not moving, supermarket meat fridges defrosting, butchery saws silent, bakery ovens cold, food going bad and people just sitting out on walls and pavements. The absurditities of the situation kept slapping you in the face all week. One evening, in the cold and dark, Short Wave Radio Africa interviewed a top official in ZESA ( Electricity Supply Authority). Bear in mind this Radio Station is banned from operating in Zimbabwe and it's staff members are prohibited from returning to the country - and yet the ZESA executive speaks openly on the forbidden radio station!
She had a great swathe of excuses in order to apportion blame for this diabolical situation and then uses the opportunity to announce a 50% increase in the price of electricity. Oh really, what electricity is that! On Tuesday it was World Environment Day and again Zimbabwe was in the quiet and the dark - at least we were doing our bit for the world - however unintentionally!
That absurd irony was then punctuated all day by the sound of tree chopping and the sight of people pouring out of the bush carrying sticks, branches and cart loads of newly cut indigenous timber. 60 year old trees felled in minutes - what tragedy for Zimbabwe and what a disgrace for the country whose Minister of Tourism heads the UN body on Sustainable Development. What disgrace too for the world who chose him for the job. The near complete collapse of Zimbabwe's electricity supply is affecting country areas too. In a rural area near me people are walking up to six kilometres to reach the nearest grinding mill.
They arrive to find the mill not able to function without electricity and there is no option but to leave your precious bag of maize and return the next day to collect it - hoping that most of it is still there. The millers are having to work at night or whenever the power comes back on - its all about survival. Perhaps the greatest irony of the power cuts is that at least now we physically don't have the means to listen to or watch the propaganda on ZBC radio and TV - a blessed relief, particularly as the bigwigs have begun positioning themselves for the next round of elections - just eight months away.
Until next week, thanks for reading and please take note of my new website address: www.cathybuckle.com
Love cathy
Speaker and Spectator
Saturday 2nd June 2007
Dear Family and Friends,
As ridiculous as it may sound, little lights of hope are flickering on all the time now in Zimbabwe. They are not practical everyday lights of decreasing prices, increasing food and medical supplies or improved services - quite the contrary in fact. The lights of hope that I am talking about are those that are beginning to illuminate the future direction. Some are from events across the border where it seems there are actually things going on - although no one is saying what! Other signs of hope are coming from within.
One is the blatantly obvious declining interest and support by people in rural areas for overweight politicians in smart clothes and fancy cars who come only at election time - and then shout and threaten people in their bid to garner votes. A prime example is underway at the moment in the run up to a by election about to be held in Zaka East. At last both sides of the MDC have managed to stand together and say they will not contest the seat - what is the point if conditions are not free and fair.
This leaves Zanu PF standing against two virtually unknown parties, the UPP (United People's Party) and the UPDP (United People's Democratic Party). Some of the earlier ZANU PF rallies were shown on ZBC television and it was embarrassing to watch great obese men, shouting and waving their fists at the painfully thin people, sitting barefoot in the dust staring blankly ahead. The contrast between speaker and spectators was so extreme it was a wonder it was shown on national TV at all. A few days later, arriving to whip up support for the ruling party candidate , a former soldier, disappointment was immediate and the rally cancelled. Zanu PF Chairman, John Nkomo, said: "We have to postpone this rally to Thursday next week because we cannot address these few people."
The days of Zanu PF being able to take support for granted - even in remote dusty villages - are gone. Other reasons for hope are coming from people in positions of responsibility who are making courageous decisions and are standing up to do the right thing - politics and propaganda aside.This week High Court Judge Tedious Karwi granted bail to Ian Makone - one of 32 leading opposition officials and activists arrested in late March who have been held without trial for the past 2 months and 2 days. In making the bail ruling Judge Karwi stated a fact which of late is not guaranteed and has been very elusive in Zimbabwe. The Judge said:" Our law presumes people to be innocent until proven guilty." Until next week, thanks for reading, love cathy.
Tuesday, June 05, 2007
Eddie Cross on Zimbabwe - Collapse looms
29th May 2007
Subject: Eddie Cross on Zimbabwe
Collapse looms.
In my own business we passed a milestone today – by our calculations inflation in our business now exceeds 10 000 percent per annum. I was told by my supplier today that flour for the bakery would now cost me Z$250 000 for a 50 kilogram bag and that I have to collect it at my own cost from Harare – 600 kilometers distant, the last time I bought flour from the same supplier it was Z$30 000 a 50 kilogram bag delivered to Bulawayo.
We have given our staff a 100 per cent raise at the month end for two months now – it still leaves them with insufficient funds to cover their basic costs of living. We started today to provide food to them in addition to their wages or they simply will not be able to feed their families and come to work.
One major supplier told me today that they are selling every product in their range below cost. They are headed for bankruptcy and do not know what to do next. Another service provider told me they were not able to replace their stocks of spares and essential inputs. When they had run their stocks down to zero, they would then go onto a hand to mouth basis, asking their clients to source the required spares and raw materials before they could start work.
Fuel is trading at Z$45 000 a litre, the dollar at Z$50 000 to 1 against the US dollar and it has depreciated by 50 per cent in a week. I estimate prices are rising 20 per cent a day and this is putting huge pressure on all firms.
There is no sign of this process slowing down and with the government simply spending wildly in anticipation of an election in 2008, we cannot expect inflation to slow – we are headed for super inflation in the near future. It will then be impossible to hold money – people will have to consider barter and the widespread use of another currency. In Mozambique when they were experiencing similar conditions the common currency was the US dollar. The same situation existed in Angola but because of the shortage of actual foreign currency notes there, they also used things such as canned beer and coca cola as currency.
The difficulty in Zimbabwe is that we have a relatively sophisticated economy and strict currency controls. The use of either the Rand or the US dollar for exchange would actually be illegal at present.
From other countries experience this situation will be bound to escalate the collapse of the formal sector, exacerbate human and capital flight, destroy the value of savings in any form except property and the stock market and plunge civil servants, whose conditions of service are less flexible, into a state of crisis.
In the face of these critical concerns, neither the government nor the Reserve Bank exhibits any concern or understanding of just what they are doing. Their remedies suggest they have little understanding of the complexities of macro economic management policy or how the economy and business actually functions. Virtually every prescription they have trundled out in recent weeks has simply made things worse.
Food is scarce and unaffordable and a real humanitarian crisis is building up – one that might still threaten national stability and put the lives of millions are at stake. There is plenty of evidence that Zimbabweans living in the Diaspora are pouring money into the country to try and keep their families afloat. With some 4,5 million adult Zimbabweans abroad, this carries quite a punch and is probably the single most important factor in helping keep things stable.
Eddie Cross Bulawayo, 29th May 2007
Subject: Eddie Cross on Zimbabwe
Collapse looms.
In my own business we passed a milestone today – by our calculations inflation in our business now exceeds 10 000 percent per annum. I was told by my supplier today that flour for the bakery would now cost me Z$250 000 for a 50 kilogram bag and that I have to collect it at my own cost from Harare – 600 kilometers distant, the last time I bought flour from the same supplier it was Z$30 000 a 50 kilogram bag delivered to Bulawayo.
We have given our staff a 100 per cent raise at the month end for two months now – it still leaves them with insufficient funds to cover their basic costs of living. We started today to provide food to them in addition to their wages or they simply will not be able to feed their families and come to work.
One major supplier told me today that they are selling every product in their range below cost. They are headed for bankruptcy and do not know what to do next. Another service provider told me they were not able to replace their stocks of spares and essential inputs. When they had run their stocks down to zero, they would then go onto a hand to mouth basis, asking their clients to source the required spares and raw materials before they could start work.
Fuel is trading at Z$45 000 a litre, the dollar at Z$50 000 to 1 against the US dollar and it has depreciated by 50 per cent in a week. I estimate prices are rising 20 per cent a day and this is putting huge pressure on all firms.
There is no sign of this process slowing down and with the government simply spending wildly in anticipation of an election in 2008, we cannot expect inflation to slow – we are headed for super inflation in the near future. It will then be impossible to hold money – people will have to consider barter and the widespread use of another currency. In Mozambique when they were experiencing similar conditions the common currency was the US dollar. The same situation existed in Angola but because of the shortage of actual foreign currency notes there, they also used things such as canned beer and coca cola as currency.
The difficulty in Zimbabwe is that we have a relatively sophisticated economy and strict currency controls. The use of either the Rand or the US dollar for exchange would actually be illegal at present.
From other countries experience this situation will be bound to escalate the collapse of the formal sector, exacerbate human and capital flight, destroy the value of savings in any form except property and the stock market and plunge civil servants, whose conditions of service are less flexible, into a state of crisis.
In the face of these critical concerns, neither the government nor the Reserve Bank exhibits any concern or understanding of just what they are doing. Their remedies suggest they have little understanding of the complexities of macro economic management policy or how the economy and business actually functions. Virtually every prescription they have trundled out in recent weeks has simply made things worse.
Food is scarce and unaffordable and a real humanitarian crisis is building up – one that might still threaten national stability and put the lives of millions are at stake. There is plenty of evidence that Zimbabweans living in the Diaspora are pouring money into the country to try and keep their families afloat. With some 4,5 million adult Zimbabweans abroad, this carries quite a punch and is probably the single most important factor in helping keep things stable.
Eddie Cross Bulawayo, 29th May 2007
Monday, March 19, 2007
The Left's Abandonment of Zimbabwe
source : www.jewishcomment.com
The Left's Abandonment of Zimbabwe
Last uploaded : Monday 19th Mar 2007 at 04:45
Contributed by : Carol Gould
London18 March 2007
It has been a revelation this past week registering the reactions of people on the political Left when the subject of Zimbabwe creeps into the conversation.I have been following the fortunes of Morgan Tsvangarai for some time because of my British friends’ admiration for his valiant battle against the tyranny of Robert Mugabe. These friends have family in Zimbabwe on farmland there until suffering total destruction and even brutal murder in recent years. Last week Morgan, the head of the Movement for Democratic Change, was nearly beaten to death in what was described as a police detention after an anti-government demonstration. His colleagues, including two prominent female officials, were brutalised and barely left alive. According to reports from African correspondents in London an activist was shot dead and then the mourners at his funeral shot by police. One corpse was taken miles away and buried by the authorities to avoid a further demonstration.
This weekend MP Nelson Chamisa was stopped at Harare airport and brutally beaten as he was preparing to leave for a conference in Belgium. Already badly injured from last week’s police station attack, it is feared he has a cracked skull. Arthur Mutambara, leader of one of the factions of the MDC, was re-arrested on Saturday, and is now being held at Harare central police station. His fate does not bear thinking about. Frail Grace Kwinje and Sekai Holland, who also suffered beatings in the police roundup, were on their way to South Africa to receive treatment on Saturday, Tafadzwa Mugabe, a lawyer who accompanied them, told the BBC's World Today programme. Ms Mugabe said all their papers were in order but just before boarding the flight officials said the women needed a supplemental "clearance letter from the ministry of health". This is a sorry state of affairs.
Two British friends, one of whom I had not heard from in a year, rang me last week to thank America for intervening before Tsvangarai was murdered. Indeed, it was the US envoy who protested and was reported to have been instrumental in getting the wounded activists to hospital. The American Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice also intervened. President Mugabe reacted by threatening to expel any Western envoys who interfered in the running of the country. What this all adds up to is a remarkable sequence of reactions that have come my way in the past few days from anti-war, anti-Israel, anti-Bush campaigners and hangers-on. I rang a colleague who is active with Jews for Justice for Palestinians and she very nearly deafened me with a screaming rebuke that went something like this: ’ There are plenty of people dying in the Congo and Rwanda and nobody is making headlines about that.’
I tried to explain that Zimbabwe, once the Orchard, Bread Basket and Garden of Africa, was now suffering 80% unemployment and 1700% inflation, not to mention the murders of white farmers, and she could only rage more about how she ‘did not care’ about Morgan Tsvangarai.I thought I had caught this lady on a bad day. But then I saw Clare Short MP on BBC ‘Question Time’ and to my utter disbelief she showed not one ounce of sympathy for the campaigners and said that the rest of Africa was not stepping in to help because Britain had sullied its reputation with them when it had expressed concern for the white farmers. What twisted logic! Nobody on the panel challenged her on this and I was stunned.
Clare Short will spend hours complaining with considerable passion about the plight of the Palestinians, but where is her compassion for the people of Zimbabwe?This puzzle of the heartless Left came better into focus tonight when I watched ‘Dateline London’ on BBC News 24, and Abdel Bari Atwan of Al Quds newspaper said the problems of Zimbabwe stem solely from the sanctions imposed by Britain and America. (Oh, yes, blame evil America for the countless murders and burning of farms across that once fertile paradise.) Thankfully the panel demolished this idea and suggested it was the brutality of Mugabe and the stupidity of his replacing the white farmers with cronies who knew nothing about agriculture that had caused the famine and economic catastrophe gripping the nation. ( Later Bari Atwan made sure to get in a dig at the USA about using up 90% of the world’s consumer goods each year. When will these Third World pundits get a life? )
So, it seems that the Left that rails against Israel and the USA and organises marches for the liberation of Palestine is going to do nothing about the plight of Zimbabwe because that means siding with America. Such twisted logic is sickening. As of this posting the brutality of the regime is becoming the shame of Africa. Desmond Tutu has scolded the rest of Africa for doing nothing and sitting in silence. If the USA has to step in to save Zimbabwe from total destruction so be it; if saving lives and putting food on tables is the result then God Bless America, and Clare Short, Bari Atwan and the ‘peace’ movement be damned.
The Left's Abandonment of Zimbabwe
Last uploaded : Monday 19th Mar 2007 at 04:45
Contributed by : Carol Gould
London18 March 2007
It has been a revelation this past week registering the reactions of people on the political Left when the subject of Zimbabwe creeps into the conversation.I have been following the fortunes of Morgan Tsvangarai for some time because of my British friends’ admiration for his valiant battle against the tyranny of Robert Mugabe. These friends have family in Zimbabwe on farmland there until suffering total destruction and even brutal murder in recent years. Last week Morgan, the head of the Movement for Democratic Change, was nearly beaten to death in what was described as a police detention after an anti-government demonstration. His colleagues, including two prominent female officials, were brutalised and barely left alive. According to reports from African correspondents in London an activist was shot dead and then the mourners at his funeral shot by police. One corpse was taken miles away and buried by the authorities to avoid a further demonstration.
This weekend MP Nelson Chamisa was stopped at Harare airport and brutally beaten as he was preparing to leave for a conference in Belgium. Already badly injured from last week’s police station attack, it is feared he has a cracked skull. Arthur Mutambara, leader of one of the factions of the MDC, was re-arrested on Saturday, and is now being held at Harare central police station. His fate does not bear thinking about. Frail Grace Kwinje and Sekai Holland, who also suffered beatings in the police roundup, were on their way to South Africa to receive treatment on Saturday, Tafadzwa Mugabe, a lawyer who accompanied them, told the BBC's World Today programme. Ms Mugabe said all their papers were in order but just before boarding the flight officials said the women needed a supplemental "clearance letter from the ministry of health". This is a sorry state of affairs.
Two British friends, one of whom I had not heard from in a year, rang me last week to thank America for intervening before Tsvangarai was murdered. Indeed, it was the US envoy who protested and was reported to have been instrumental in getting the wounded activists to hospital. The American Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice also intervened. President Mugabe reacted by threatening to expel any Western envoys who interfered in the running of the country. What this all adds up to is a remarkable sequence of reactions that have come my way in the past few days from anti-war, anti-Israel, anti-Bush campaigners and hangers-on. I rang a colleague who is active with Jews for Justice for Palestinians and she very nearly deafened me with a screaming rebuke that went something like this: ’ There are plenty of people dying in the Congo and Rwanda and nobody is making headlines about that.’
I tried to explain that Zimbabwe, once the Orchard, Bread Basket and Garden of Africa, was now suffering 80% unemployment and 1700% inflation, not to mention the murders of white farmers, and she could only rage more about how she ‘did not care’ about Morgan Tsvangarai.I thought I had caught this lady on a bad day. But then I saw Clare Short MP on BBC ‘Question Time’ and to my utter disbelief she showed not one ounce of sympathy for the campaigners and said that the rest of Africa was not stepping in to help because Britain had sullied its reputation with them when it had expressed concern for the white farmers. What twisted logic! Nobody on the panel challenged her on this and I was stunned.
Clare Short will spend hours complaining with considerable passion about the plight of the Palestinians, but where is her compassion for the people of Zimbabwe?This puzzle of the heartless Left came better into focus tonight when I watched ‘Dateline London’ on BBC News 24, and Abdel Bari Atwan of Al Quds newspaper said the problems of Zimbabwe stem solely from the sanctions imposed by Britain and America. (Oh, yes, blame evil America for the countless murders and burning of farms across that once fertile paradise.) Thankfully the panel demolished this idea and suggested it was the brutality of Mugabe and the stupidity of his replacing the white farmers with cronies who knew nothing about agriculture that had caused the famine and economic catastrophe gripping the nation. ( Later Bari Atwan made sure to get in a dig at the USA about using up 90% of the world’s consumer goods each year. When will these Third World pundits get a life? )
So, it seems that the Left that rails against Israel and the USA and organises marches for the liberation of Palestine is going to do nothing about the plight of Zimbabwe because that means siding with America. Such twisted logic is sickening. As of this posting the brutality of the regime is becoming the shame of Africa. Desmond Tutu has scolded the rest of Africa for doing nothing and sitting in silence. If the USA has to step in to save Zimbabwe from total destruction so be it; if saving lives and putting food on tables is the result then God Bless America, and Clare Short, Bari Atwan and the ‘peace’ movement be damned.
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
Family secrets emerge from the ruins of Zimbabwe
Family secrets emerge from the ruins of Zimbabwe
Night falls, and I am sitting beside a fire with Prince Galenja Biyela in Zululand. I am there on an assignment for National Geographic magazine and the old Prince wants to relive the glory days of his grandfather, Nkosani, the hero of the battle of Isandlwana, in which the Zulus famously trounced the British in 1879.
He is interrupted by a jarring ring tone. "Umakhalekhukhwini," says one of his acolytes. It means "the screaming in the pocket", Zulu for a mobile phone.
It is mine. My mother's voice, 800 miles north in Zimbabwe, sounds strained. "It's your father," she says. "He's had a heart attack. I think you'd better come home."
Scroll down for more...
Family: Peter Godwin as a boy with his father (top), and a picture of his family before the war
I drive fast through the night to Johannesburg to catch a flight north. When I arrive at my father's bedside, his eyes are shut. His hair, usually tamed by some sort of pomade, has become unruly, sprouting out in small horns over his ears onto the thin hospital pillow.
I sit by Dad's bed. Contemplating his death, I think how remote I have been from him all my life. At boarding school from the age of six, then university in England and working abroad as a journalist, I have been a largely absent son.
He is emotionally truculent, quick to anger, irascible, rather forbidding - a Victorian paterfamilias.
I imagine trying to write his obituary and realise that I know almost nothing about his family or past, just the basics: born in England, in 1924, he fought in World War II, before coming out to Africa to run copper mines and timber estates. He is survived by a wife and two children.
Mentally, I start deal-making. If my father survives I will ... what? I could stop running around the world and come home to Africa. Come back and spend time with my father.
My suggested deal works and Dad recovers. I've got my reprieve. So now I embark on my strange journey, getting to know my father - witnessing the destruction of my beautiful homeland, Zimbabwe, uncovering our family secret and watching my parents' lives ebb away.
At home in Zimbabwe for the wedding of my sister, Georgina, in March 1997, I find that Dad has shrugged off his brush with mortality and is restored to his old, bluff, inaccessible self, fiddling happily in the garden.
Georgina had returned from English drama school three years previously and now reads the local TV news and wears big hats to open supermarkets. She is marrying Jeremy, a blond photographer.
My Dad, however, is being difficult, refusing to wear a dinner jacket. Mum says quietly: "It's because he's afraid. Afraid to enjoy this wedding, after what happened before Jain's wedding."
Jain is my other sister, my dead sister, older than me by seven years, but forever frozen at 27, killed in 1978, during the civil war, just weeks before her own wedding.
A primary school teacher, she and her fiance ran into an army ambush preparing to attack guerrillas. Their car was destroyed and she died instantly. Her death is a sore that after all these years still suppurates.
The wedding goes ahead. Dad still can't bring himself to acknowledge its lethal precedent, so it just hangs there full of menace.
In 1999, I return with my girlfriend Joanna. We bring our new baby, Thomas. My parents seem nonplussed that we have a baby but are not married. Dad in particular.
But later, when I examine the photographs of our visit, I realise that I had somehow missed his glowing smile.
The following year, I return on an assignment for the New York Times Magazine. I am flying into a firestorm. After ten years of one-party rule, President Robert Mugabe, described by South African church leader Archbishop Desmond Tutu as "the very caricature of an African tyrant" - has suddenly encountered real opposition.
In response, he is ordering the seizure of white farmland and its redistribution to black peasants.
People calling themselves "war vets" - ex- combatants from the civil war and Mugabe supporters - have begun to squat on white-owned farms.
When the farm killings began, it took my parents by surprise. Farmer Martin Olds was murdered on April 18, 2000, at his farm 300 miles south of Harare. A hundred men, with AK47s and machetes arrived in a 14-vehicle convoy when he was alone.
I speak to a family friend, Maria, the widow of David Stevens, the first farmer to die. He was abducted from his farm, forced to drink diesel oil and then shot.
I visit her at a temporary safe-house as her twin 20-month-old boys crawl restlessly over her.
I visit other white Zimbabweans, living under siege, terrorised by the drunk or stoned war vets occupying their land. I worry for my ageing parents in their adopted land.
The government's fury has been stoked recently on the streets of London when Peter Tatchell, head of the gay-rights group Outrage!, tried to perform a citizen's arrest on Robert Mugabe as he arrived to shop at Harrods.
I say to my parents it might be time for them to think of leaving. But they won't. This is their home. They're damned if they will allow Mugabe to drive them out, to win. Ordinary people don't hate us, my father says. They couldn't be nicer.
Mum, a doctor, is still working at her medical clinic, there is no one to replace her, and the country is being ravaged by Aids.
On a visit home the following year, I find Dad's eye is swollen shut, and there are deep gashes along his arm and face. He had been car-jacked at gunpoint. As we eat, I look at Dad. He seems smaller, hunched. His health is failing.
On my last day, I see a new picture hanging on the wall. It is a black and white photograph of a middle-aged couple and a young girl.
"Who are these people?" I ask my mother.
She takes a deep breath. "They are Dad's parents and his younger sister, your grandparents and your aunt," she says. "I'm afraid we haven't been entirely honest with you. Dad's family wasn't from England. They were from Poland. He's from Poland. They were Jews."
For a moment I can't quite grasp what she's saying. My father, George Godwin, with his clipped British accent, is an invention? All these years he has been living a lie?
"What's his real name?" I ask. "Goldfarb," she says. "Kazimierz Jerzy Goldfarb." She asks me not to talk to Dad about it until he is feeling stronger.
Not long after, when I am back in New York, Georgina writes to say she is planning to leave Zimbabwe for London with her baby daughter and Jeremy.
She is helping to start a new opposition radio station, which will broadcast to Africa free of the censorship and threats of the Mugabe regime.
My father sends me a family tree. I see his sister, Halina Goldfarb, born 1926. The 12-year-old girl stands frozen in the photograph, an Alice band holding back her long hair.
Next to her name, Dad has written a series of codes. His footnotes explain that they mean "Died"; "Holocaust"; "Extinction of branch of family".
I count the symbols. Of the 24 family members in Poland at the time, 16 were killed in the Holocaust, including his mother and sister.
There are also some terse instructions. It seems that my father wants me to initiate a Red Cross tracing inquiry for his family.
An e-mail arrives from Dad. "It is so hard, Pete, after all this time," he says. "I find it quite amazing how little I remember."
He is trying to see into the heart of a Polish boy in Warsaw a lifetime ago. Trying to reimagine whom he'd once been. He remembers a fancy dress party, his sister dressed as Marie Antoinette in a long white dress, her beautiful curls topped with a bonnet.
At 13 he began to learn English. After a lot of discussion with his parents, he wrote to the Daily Mail in London asking them to recommend places where he might study for the summer. The Goldfarbs chose an establishment in St Leonard's-on-Sea, and Kazio set off in June 1939.
In September, Hitler invaded Poland and Dad was stranded. He took a job as a camera rewind boy in a cinema, and went on to fight with the Allies.
At the end of the war, his father back in Poland wrote to tell him that his mother and sister had been picked up by a Nazi patrol and never seen again.
"I knew then that everything I had known in Poland was gone, destroyed. And that I would never go back," says Dad. A few years later, he received a cable from Poland to say that his father, trapped behind the Iron Curtain, had died.
He met my mother, Helen, at university in London. She comes from four generations of Anglican churchmen. Together, they made a life together and moved to Africa, a hopeful place.
When I next visit Zimbabwe, I ask Dad: "Why did you conceal the Jewish stuff?' He looks at me as though I am being deliberately obtuse. "For you," he says. "So that you could be safe. So that what happened to my mother and sister would never happen to you."
He adds: "Being a white here is starting to feel a bit like being a Jew in Poland in 1939, an endangered minority, the target of ethnic cleansing."
In our regular transatlantic calls, my parents assure me that all is well, while everything I read describes Zimbabwe as collapsing in a quickening downward spiral.
Back home in May 2003, I find Mum has retreated to her bed permanently, in need of a hip replacement.
Water and the electricity are intermittent. Hyper-inflation means they can barely afford their medicines and food. They keep a loaded revolver to protect themselves.
Everyone is talking about the latest atrocities being committed by Mugabe's henchmen. And the next day, I leave. As our plane soars away into a cloudless sky, I feel the profound guilt of those who can escape. I am abandoning my post. Like my father before me, I am rejecting my own identity.
On my next trip home, I stop over in London to see my sister. Georgina's husband Jeremy has decided he is gay, and has moved out, leaving her alone with their small daughter, Xanthe.
She is banned from entering Zimbabwe, thanks to her radio broadcasts. "Xanthe will never know Africa the way we did," she weeps.
Already in the grip of diabetes, Dad is now rotting alive from his feet upward - he has gangrene. Mum tells me that he is suicidally depressed and we decide to remove all the guns from the house.
Dad has asked me to find out what happened to his mother and sister. It seems that as they prepared to leave Warsaw, Halina and Janina were arrested. They were put on a death camp train and died at Treblinka, an industrial-sized killing factory in Poland to which up to 12,000 Jews a day were sent.
Women's heads were shaved before they were stripped naked and gassed. I think of Halina's glossy dark hair, that exuberant mane in her family portrait. I think of her died. This is a conversation I had been anticipating and yet it still seems so unexpected. It is January 2004, he was a week short of his 80th birthday.
I pack my black suit, and head for the airport. We decide Georgina should not come - Mum is terrified she will be arrested.
On that first evening in Africa after my father died, it rains. My mother and I sit on the veranda. "When Dad was a boy at St Leonard's before the war, his mother sent him some Polish delicacies in a box wrapped in brown paper and tied with string," says Mum.
"He saved a piece of that string and carried it around in his pocket for years. He said it was the last contact he had with his mother before she was killed by the Nazis. The last thing that she had actually touched. When he lost the string, not very long ago, he was heartbroken."
At the church, I know I have to speak and yet great sobs swell up inside me, pure and angry, grief not just at the loss of my father, but for the loss of it all, the loss of hope. Grief at our solitude, our transience. Grief too, at my father's isolation.
Tears roll down my face and splash onto my suit. At the end of the service, we file out to a variation on the hymn "God Bless Africa".
Emerging into the light, I look at the long line of people of all races waiting to offer condolences, and I realise then that Mugabe has unintentionally managed to achieve something hitherto so elusive; he has created a real racial unity, a hard-won sense of comradeship, a common bond forged in the furnace of resistance to an oppressive rule.
I realise just how African my parents have become. That my mother will stay. That this is their home. That my father really has died at home. That in this most unpromising of places, where he could never be regarded as truly indigenous, finally, he belonged.
• ABRIDGED extract from When A Crocodile Eats The Sun by Peter Godwin, published by Picador at £16.99. ° Peter Godwin 2007. To order a copy at £15.30 (p&p free), call 0870 161 0870.
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