Weekend in Zim

The Zimbabwe of the news world, when it’s covered at all, is a Zimbabwe ravaged by years of tyrannical rule. It’s a Zimbabwe of cholera outbreaks, of crumbling infrastructure, of supply shortages, of kidnapped journalists, of farms overrun and dilapidated, of a currency so inflated that the US dollar has now taken its place as the official currency. It may in fact be all of those things, but in my brief glance at it this weekend, I saw glimpses of the great country it must have been, and still is in some ways. In a brief couple of days, I understood the love of my white Zimbabwean friends for their lost homeland. I drove through breathtaking, great rolling, acacia and baobab tree covered hills, along well-maintained roads no less! I passed by massive (empty) silos, laying in wait for a time when Zim can return to being the great agricultural giant it once was. I stared in shock at the beautiful, CLEAN, tree-lined city streets of Harare, plots with large lawns, and appealing, shiny and modern buildings downtown. I danced at the Harare International Festival of the Arts in Harare Gardens, a massive park complex in the middle of the city. If I squinted a bit, I could almost have been in any big US city, tall hotels peaked from between the palms and deciduous trees that surrounded the music stage. I soaked up the culture- the music, the dance, and the artwork in the National Gallery. I enjoyed the festival together with well-dressed, well-spoken, well-educated Zimbabweans of all sorts, black and white.

What’s wrong with you Zambia?! You could learn a thing or two from your neighbors. You have so much potential! Even with Mugabe’s awful control, Zim seems so much more put together, at least in some ways. The roads, the city, the education, the culture. How does a suffering country keep its roads drivable, its people educated, its parks beautiful? Lusaka doesn’t even have parks!!! I could not get over how clean it was. In Lusaka, garbage on the streets is the norm, but in Harare, there was barely any. You have to look hard in Lusaka to find incredibly intelligent and driven Zambians, yet just in my brief few hours in Harare, I feel I observed several Zimbabweans like that. A week-long festival of the arts would never ever work in Zambia. There wouldn’t be a venue for it. And nobody to clean up after it. And the electronics for the stage would never work, at least not well, and not for the whole time. Just about the only obvious sign to me that all was not right in Harare, was having to drive through several gas stations with no gas, before we could find enough to get us back to Makuti, in northern Zimbabwe where we were staying.

There were multiple time over the weekend, as I sat on the second story deck of Rodney’s friends’ house in Makuti, overlooking nothing but breathtaking rolling hills, that I just wanted to scream out loud, or collapse in happiness, or hold my breath, from the loveliness of it all, of being able to see it and experience it and take it all in.

Of course it was only a weekend, at a vacation home in a quiet part of the country. I did not stay in Harare long term. I did not have to interact with clinic staff and ministry of health officials. My view of Zim was a vacation view. And of course it’s not all well and good there. Of course there are shortages of nearly everything, including food and medicine, and many people are suffering greatly.
This was Rodney’s first time being back for seven years. I asked him about it, and he said it was good to be back, but so much of the experience for him was intense memories. Every bend of the road, it seemed, he would glance around- Is that farm still there? Is that restaurant still open? I wonder if so and so still lives there? He even tried calling an old neighbor of his, but the phone lines weren’t working. At the festival, we saw children performing from the school where he used to teach. He recognized old students of his, now with children of their own. For him, I think, it was good to see that life was going on and people were making do, but it was also a reminder of a place he could never really go back to. Even if he did, he would never really be accepted, at least not by the government, as the Zimbabwean he once was. He would just be a white South African with a South African passport, just another ex pat wanting to move there.

When we decided to go to Zim for the weekend, I was curious how much of the obvious signs of suffering I would see, to get a sense for how bad things really are there. I could never have expected to see what I actually saw. But I’m glad that I did. I’m glad I got to know the good parts of life in Zim, all that it is now, and a flavor of what it once was. I feel now that I can better share in the hope that one day, when Mugabe has finally gone away, that it may return to that, or maybe even better, a true example to the countries around it, including Zambia.

After crossing the border, as we headed back to Lusaka, I noticed every pothole we had to avoid and every pile of burning garbage. Although the landscape of Southern Zambia is very similar to that of Northern Zimbabwe, and it is indeed beautiful, it somehow lacked the special feeling that I got in Zim when taking it all in.

Or perhaps I just had a Zim-biased weekend. I don’t mean to paint Zambia in a bad light. Lusaka is indeed a relatively developed and modern city, and I found more here than I ever expected to, but contrasting it with its southern neighbor, they’ve a long way to go on the road to development.