The Zimbabwe of Memory, Eroded by a Deluge of Troubles
Zimbabwe, how it was before:
The smell of millet beer, the smoke from cooking fires, Oliver Mtukudzi singing at a club downtown, the grasses of the veld waving in the breeze. Drone of ceiling fans. Sadza meal, rolled up in the palm to eat. Rain, driving down so hard it explodes in the dust, sending up tiny showers of droplet shrapnel. Farms stretching for thousands of acres, people walking alongside the roads at first light, tourists drinking gin and tonics on safaris, elephants flapping their ears in the heat of Mana Pools. Termite hills as tall as your head. Notebooks of pulp paper. Women going across the border into South Africa and bringing back things to sell in street markets. Lots of children with no parents, and lots of 42-year-olds dying after a "short illness," a "long illness," a "sudden illness."
This was 1997.
Zimbabwe, how it is now:
Life expectancy is 36, the lowest in the world. Annual inflation at an unofficial rate of 4 million percent, which is, you might have guessed, the highest in the world. Grocery store shelves are empty. There are power failures every day and water shortages most days. There are roadblocks on most main roads, many of them run by armed thugs who will steal your food and remind you that the West is the enemy. There aren't any tourists to speak of. There was a presidential election the other day that doesn't really mean anything because the old man running the country has made it clear, in his megalomaniacal kind of way, that he will kill any number of black people so that he can spend the few years he has left in a deranged version of comfort. (There aren't enough white people left to make any difference.) The nation is one of the world's AIDS epicenters, a crisis that doesn't even rate headlines anymore because so much more is so much worse.
I was one of the few Western reporters based there from 1997 to 2000, and then I had to get out before I was expelled. I talked to Morgan Tsvangirai, the presidential contender who has taken shelter in the Dutch Embassy, as well as Robert Mugabe, the old man and president who has led the country over a cliff....
Read entire article at Neely Tucker in the WaPo
The smell of millet beer, the smoke from cooking fires, Oliver Mtukudzi singing at a club downtown, the grasses of the veld waving in the breeze. Drone of ceiling fans. Sadza meal, rolled up in the palm to eat. Rain, driving down so hard it explodes in the dust, sending up tiny showers of droplet shrapnel. Farms stretching for thousands of acres, people walking alongside the roads at first light, tourists drinking gin and tonics on safaris, elephants flapping their ears in the heat of Mana Pools. Termite hills as tall as your head. Notebooks of pulp paper. Women going across the border into South Africa and bringing back things to sell in street markets. Lots of children with no parents, and lots of 42-year-olds dying after a "short illness," a "long illness," a "sudden illness."
This was 1997.
Zimbabwe, how it is now:
Life expectancy is 36, the lowest in the world. Annual inflation at an unofficial rate of 4 million percent, which is, you might have guessed, the highest in the world. Grocery store shelves are empty. There are power failures every day and water shortages most days. There are roadblocks on most main roads, many of them run by armed thugs who will steal your food and remind you that the West is the enemy. There aren't any tourists to speak of. There was a presidential election the other day that doesn't really mean anything because the old man running the country has made it clear, in his megalomaniacal kind of way, that he will kill any number of black people so that he can spend the few years he has left in a deranged version of comfort. (There aren't enough white people left to make any difference.) The nation is one of the world's AIDS epicenters, a crisis that doesn't even rate headlines anymore because so much more is so much worse.
I was one of the few Western reporters based there from 1997 to 2000, and then I had to get out before I was expelled. I talked to Morgan Tsvangirai, the presidential contender who has taken shelter in the Dutch Embassy, as well as Robert Mugabe, the old man and president who has led the country over a cliff....