Episode 5 (Zimbabwe, Part 1 of 4)

The transcript of this episode is available at Buzzsprout.com/1970784.
For photos of the places discussed, see greatmirror.com

Transcript

                      Episode 5

                (Zimbabwe, Part 1 of 4)

My copy of The Official Airline Guide for May, 1999 shows that Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe, has nonstop flights to London, Paris, Frankfurt, Vienna, Amsterdam, and even Sydney.  I know.  It’s hard to believe. 

I arrived almost 20 years later.  By then, BA had abandoned the country.  So had Lufthansa, Austrian, KLM, and Qantas. Zimbabwe had one and only one flight out of Africa.  No surprise there: it was Emirates to Dubai.  I came in on a short-haul from Johannesburg.  

To my surprise, the Robert F. Mugabe Airport—formerly Harare Airport and, earlier still, Salisbury Airport—was immaculate.  There were no long immigration or customs lines, and nobody even hinted at a bribe.  I got a rental car and some cash from an ATM.  The fifteen-minute drive into town was fine, and so was the hotel—an older, two-story place built around a well-kept garden.  The next morning, without my asking, a waiter brought excellent croissants, still hot on the baking sheet.   The French Revolution comes to mind.

A few months earlier, Robert Mugabe had been driven from office by a smiling henchman.  People were still hoping that the new man would not live up to his nickname, the Crocodile, and while I was there, people seemed willing to believe that things might get better, not just for a few but to some degree for everyone.

I can imagine a conversation in the hotel garden.  “First, we have to root out corruption and abuses in the security forces.  Then we have to restore and stabilize the currency.  Once we’ve done those things, we can invest in public health and education.  We’re broke, but we can get funding from aid agencies once they recognize our integrity.  With their help we’ll stabilize the power and water supply.  We’ll work on sanitation and roads.  Then private investors will come.  The old cut-and-sew factories are still there, idle in Bulawayo.  They will reopen, but our young people have strong English-language skills.  That fluency will attract call centers and then engineering centers.”

I know: it sounds like a fantasy, but a comparable program had actually been executed shortly after 1889.  That’s when the British South Africa Company arrived and established its control over what it called Rhodesia, named for the company’s boss, Cecil John Rhodes of South African diamonds fame.  The British South Africa Company remained in charge of Rhodesia until 1923, when the part of Rhodesia south of the Zambezi River became the self-governing crown colony of Southern Rhodesia.   Self-governed should be in quotes, because Southern Rhodesia was “self-governed” by and for the Whites.  They were outnumbered by Blacks fifteen-to-one.  Every now and then, the troublesome Anglican minister Arthur Shearly Cripps would speak up from his remote mission station to say that Africa belonged to the Africans.  His church is now in ruins, but the site is venerated.

A capital city was established in 1890 and was named Salisbury after Britain’s prime minister of the day. As late as 1963, The Columbia Encyclopedia called it “one of Africa’s most modern towns.”  It was also one of Africa’s Whitest towns.  Blacks were not allowed to stay overnight, except in servant’s quarters.  Otherwise, they left at sundown for adjacent Harare.  The Rhodesian census of 1921 counted 5,700 Whites in Salisbury and didn’t bother to count the Blacks in Harare.

One major street in Salisbury was predictably called Rhodes Avenue.  Parallel streets were named for lesser stars of the pantheon: Jameson, Baker, Gordon, Speke, and others.  Buildings along these streets had, and mostly still have, stone facades fitted with the curved and recurved gables characteristic of Cape Dutch architecture.  It’s no mystery: Salisbury’s first settlers came from South Africa, and, like people everywhere, they built what they knew.  I’m reminded of a bit of American suburbia I saw a few years ago in the modest capital of the Federated States of Micronesia.  “Must be housing for the American Embassy staff,” I said to myself.  Score one point. 

Iron verandas began to appear in Salisbury in 1899.  That date is firm because the verandas came from MacFarlane’s of Glasgow, and they could not have been imported at a reasonable cost until Salisbury was linked to the outside world by rail.  That happened that year with the opening of a line from Beira, 300 miles away on the coast of Mozambique.  The cost of shipping a ton of freight from London to Salisbury plummeted from forty pounds to two.

An impressive hotel was built by the Meikle brothers, recently arrived from Scotland.  The façade was trimmed with iron from MacFarlane’s, whose foundry was all of fifteen miles from the Meikle brothers’ hometown, Strathaven.  In 1958 a modernist block of a dozen stories replaced the old hotel, but the new hotel was still called Meikles. 

Colonial Salisbury had stylish shops, too, most prominently a Meikles department store.  It also had a cathedral, designed by no less than Herbert Baker, famous from his work in Pretoria and New Delhi.  North of the cathedral, Dutch-themed bungalows lined wide and quiet residential streets of the kind that estate agents describe as “gracious.”  

A wave of British immigrants arrived after World War II and moved into low-rise apartment buildings with names that spoke either of nostalgia for Britain, for example Chiltern Court, or of pride in Rhodesia, for example Rhodes Mansions.  That pride survived into the 1970s, when the Rhodesian government built the twenty-story Earl Grey Building to house government offices.  Earl Grey–the fourth Earl Grey–had been a chairman of the British South Africa Company.  Later, he became governor-general of Canada, whence the Grey Cup.

A well-grounded fear of Black suffrage persuaded the government of Southern Rhodesia in 1965 to declare unilateral independence from Britain.  Independent Rhodesia was born, but fifteen bloody years later, the Whites gave up, and the reign of Robert Mugabe began.  Rhodesia became Zimbabwe.  The Earl Grey Building became the Mukwati Building, named for a martyr in a failed uprising against Earl Grey’s company.   Rhodes Avenue became Herbert Chitepo Avenue, named after Rhodesia’s first Black barrister, who had been killed in a car bomb explosion.  Manica Road, named for the town in Mozambique to which it leads, became Robert Mugabe Road.  Jameson Avenue, named for an acolyte of Rhodes, became Samora Machel Avenue to thank the Mozambican president who had supported Mugabe in his years of struggle.  

Along that street, the city in 1997 got its tallest building, the twenty-eight-story reserve bank tower.  A decade later, that bank would oversee the hyperinflation that destroyed the Zimbabwe dollar, replaced in 2009 by the U.S. dollar.  American currency was still in use in 2018.   I picked up a few dust-impregnated American bills that had passed through so many hands that the paper felt like an old T-shirt.  

I still have a few demonetized hundred-thousand-dollar bills.  They’re nothing to brag about: collectors are after the hundred-trillion-dollar bills.  They all look and feel like Monopoly money.  

That’s about what they were worth in 2008, when a loaf of bread cost ten million Zim dollars. The reverse sides of my bills have no words or numbers and are oddly blank except for a picture of the country’s most famous natural feature, Victoria Falls.  I look at the picture and imagine Zimbabwe falling off a cliff.  The collapse was all the more devastating to anyone who recalled the words of the president of Tanzania at the ceremony marking Zimbabwe’s independence.  It may be apocryphal, but Julius Nyerere is said to have said that Robert Mugabe had inherited a jewel.