So why now after a decade-long hiatus? The simple answer is that I needed somewhere to stay in an interim capacity. After returning to the UK after an equally-long absence I needed to re-establish myself, register as a job-seeker, get back on the NHS etc, without impinging upon the lives of friends and family. Now in my mid-forties I feel the need to assert a bit more of a measured countenance. After a few weeks as a guest of my cousin in Ringwood I decided that it would be best to clear out until Christmas, whereupon I would return to the Netherlands to see my boys. Volunteering seemed the cheapest and easiest means to do so, hence HelpX. My hosts: Ros and John Kent in Mildenhall, Suffolk.

So there you have it in a nutshell (video above). Through assisting the elderly couple with various renovation tasks such as plumbing in bathroom basins, mounting shelves and spice racks, painting the living room wall, and re-routing satellite cables, I was housed and fed for the duration of a month or so. Meals were shared and the food was more than adequate. In the mornings I would run in neighbouring Mildenhall Forest, or on a loop that took me along the perimeter of the RAF-USAF Airforce base nearby. Later in the day or on weekends. I would walk their large Newfoundland-cross breed, Obi, in the aforementioned forest, and along the neighbouring waterways.

Suffolk is not a county I am familiar with. I once went punting on the Cam with the Martinellis in Cambridge, a half hour’s drive away. So far as I’m aware two of my cousins were born in neighbouring Norfolk, a part of the UK I’m also yet to visit. The town of Mildenhall is dominated by RAF Mildenhall, an airbase also accommodating the US Air Force. At 16.30 every afternoon strains of God Save the King and the Star-Spangled Banner would waft across from the base through any open windows in the two-storey terraced apartment. A perusal of photos and videos on Google Maps reveal that no lesser a person than Mr DJ Trump, President of the USA, stopped by on Air Force One, earlier that year.

Ros and John are a congenial couple who have hosted vounteers for the last couple of decades and shared many interesting and amusing anecdotes, such as the Hong Kongers who sent their clueless kids to Europe to learn everything they had never taught them (no thanks! said Ros and John), or the American kid who insisted on a tumble-drier for his laundry in mid-summer (the washing line will do just fine Ros told him), or the hispanic girlfriend of another volunteer who insisted she was only there to provide her boyfriend company (well I hope enjoy watching him eat his meals then Ros elaborated).

For most of the last twenty years they have lived near Poitiers in central France, a lovely medieval city steeped in history, which I happen to have visited a year earlier with my French friend, Katia. In fact, Ros and John’s French abode is a stone’s throw from her quaint, straw-bale house in Menigout. I first met Katia on my initial Workaway experience back in 2015, when we worked together at le Jardin de Verrines, a community garden in neighbouring Deux-Sevres. The Kents’ didn’t seem unduly surprised when I mentioned the connection, although when I retrieved some photos on my phone, Ros was able to point out the village pharmacy where John had received a parking fine in the summer. Small world!

I was particularly impressed by John and Ros’s technical savvy. John had started off as a TV repairman/technician, and later moved into computer and hardware repairs. Ros had worked for Fuji, the Japanese tech firm, for many years. As a result their apartment was littered with old tablets they had restored and repaired, and various other gadgets and gizmos. John helped me to try and repair a wireless mouse which had stopped working (partial success), offered to upgrade my operating system to Win 11 (I declined), and regailed me with various anecdotes regarding overhauling airport terminal servers, working on prison systems, including getting locked up in a cell for his own protection while they moved a dangerous prisoner, and the ins and outs of repairing cathode-ray tubes.

In the kitchen Ros had installed a tablet which operated a rudimentary irrigation system for a plastic tub of garden cress via a C+ script she had written for the purpose. From this same kitchen she produced an amazing diversity of cooked evening meals, ensuring that my calorific intake remained above-average throughout my stay. As a result I had to offset it by running frequently, at least four or five times a week throughout my stay.

I reciprocated by cooking a meal on either a Saturday or Sunday every other week during my visit. Otherwise I kept busy on the various projects they had in mind, enjoying the recipricol hospitality extended to me during mealtimes and in the evenings.

Ros and John had one daughter, Erika, living in the next door apartment with her family. We shared a few Sunday lunches together and I became quite friendly with them in due course. Their other son Liam was attached to the RAF in a technical capacity and was, at that time, seconded to the Falklands.

A third child, Matthew, had died in infancy at the age of six. A photograph on a wall of the stairwell between the middle and upper floors showed a gentle-looking young boy in spectacles alongside his grinning, slightly elder brother Liam. Matthew had developed a cancerous tumour somewhere on his head or face and Ros and John had evidently cared for him with great dedication and determination during his short life. His passing at such a tender age must have been a great blow for them all. Ros hinted at the long hours spent at St Ormond’s Children’s Hospital in London.

It didn’t take long to fall into the homely rhythm of their life: breakfast at 9 or 9.30, a leisurely working morning, lunch, work and then a meeting in the living room at around five for the game show, Pointless, followed by House of Games, dinner, and then a film. A pint of larger or Guinness was a staple of the evening routine, and one I’ll miss! The couple were proud of brewing their own ale, the knowedge of which they were happy to share with me. The various stages of the process of brewing and bottling are illustrated below.

I also faced up to my phobia of plumbing and successfully installed a single-tap basin on the upper floor and another on the kitchen-level bathroom below, replete with isolators and an overflow pipe for the bioler condensor. Of course there were leaks and faulty seals to deal with, but I overcame them! At long last I can put the ghost of previous failures to rest…

In summary I can best say that this volunteer exchange in the country of my birth was perhaps one of the most authentic. Embedded as I was in the day-to-day life of this hospitable couple, sharing meals and listening to their stories and experiences, I was reminded of the sort of decent, working people on whom the nation had always relied. People like my own grandparents who emigrated from the UK to Rhodesia in the early 1950s, but who remained wedded to the culture and values of the nation.

As the UK goes through the process of redefining itself and its ideas of what it means to be British today, it would do well to remember the people like Ros and John who’ve contibuted in no small part to its economic and social success and well-being, while never giving up on the idea of being part of a larger world, regularly welcoming foreigners into their home to share a meal and a laugh and an exchange of ideas.

My first port of call was Amsterdam. I arrived feeling rather emotionally bruised. My time in South Africa had been a mixed bag: with James I had collected several samples from the sills I had studied as an undergraduate and taken some photographs of the rocks in situ, both of which would contribute to the publication of an article in the South African Journal of Geology. Presumably, I would be listed as a co-author next to Dr Wolf Maier of the University of Cardiff. Whoop-eeee! Only 22 years in the making!

He recently emailed me to say that he would submit the article for publication. It will then be reviewed and possible amendments to the manuscript requested, before final publication. That may be some months away, I just don’t know. No big sweat though. The good thing is that if I do choose to study again I will have a relatively recent publication to my name.

What had left me feeling bruised was the lack of momentum after the field work. James dropped off the radar due to health issues and the demands of lecturing and assisting students on fieldwork. I then got a dose of flu and was down for the better part of a week. It was whilst Larry and Leanne were on holiday for a two weeks that I resolved to travel to Europe. I was glad to have talked to Lynette and JC from my UP days, but visiting the old house and leaving the angel amulet hadn’t yielded any immediate release. I kept on feeling pretty shit to be honest.

After touching down in Amsterdam and going to stay with a Zimbabwean friend, Tom, did I decide, on a sudden impulse, to contact Dirk, a South African I had met recently in Zim, living in Cape Town. He was friendly with Ant Simpson, the bohemian drum-playing Catholic that I met at the Nazareth House parish church in Chisipite, Harare, earlier that year. He knew Dirk from Cape Town, his birthplace, and somewhere he ventured back to down the years. Dirk had started a Men’s Group and Anthony had been a part of it. Dirk visited while I was staying with Ant in order to help negotiate some issues, as friend’s do.

Dirk was a quirky character: in some respects quite single-mindedly fixated on a sort of Jungian life-will-manifest-your-dreams philosophy, yet simultaneously a free spirit and full of youthful curiosity in the world about him. He had made his name as a portrait photographer in Cape Town, and everywhere he went his iPhone 15 was near at hand. He would whip it out at any moment he deemed opportune which could be a bit unsettling, but I have to admit that his photos were fantastic. The gallery below will testify to that.

So while I had landed in Amsterdam my mind was still in South Africa. Knowing that Dirk had recently returned to SA and his relative proximity to Hermanus, where my old landlady resided, I messaged him. You see, while in Boksburg I had located the address of the said landlady via a Facebook page she controlled. I was quite pleased with my sleuthing. My messages to her had gone unanswered for the better part of a year. If you have read my previous post or indeed my book, Revisiting South Africa, you will have a better idea of the nature of our relationship. I was beginning to wonder if it was just me or if her (the landlady) protestations about being so very busy were not just a way of fobbing me off.

Therefore I messaged Dirk with these thoughts in mind. As luck had it he was visiting his property in Grabouw in the direction of Hermanus, the seaside town famous for whale-watching and fabulous Cape scenery.

“Sure, I can pop in,” he replied when I told him how heavily it was weighing in on me. It seemed too fortuitous to pass up. I explained the prior situation and experiences as best I could over the course of several conversations. He thought he might tie it in with a visit to a cousin of his in the same town.

I may as well use my landlady’s given name, Marietjie. I had reconnected with her in Germany earlier last year and we’d had a good chat without touching significantly on the past. Whilst I appreciated being brought up to date on her life and that of her son Daniel, I thought that the best way to broach the difficult issues around my tenancy was through the book I’d written. It was not particularly long and the bit about my stay in Pretoria had been condensed into one chapter. While I envisioned this as a fairly innocuous request it had gone unanswered. I knew this because I had asked my Afrikaans editor and translator, Estelle, to contact her via WhatsApp a few months back, and the reply she got was about her being too busy with music lessons and concerts (she told me last year that she would take a look at it over Christmas when she would have ample time).

On one level I felt very uncomfortable about sending Dirk to Marietjie’s doorstep, but on the other I felt a touch of the devil-may-care. God bless old Dirk for doing what he did. I first heard about the visit from Marietjie in an irate email, a first, indignant that I should send strangers to her house unannounced.

“You don’t know my circumstances, and the trouble this could cause. My husband was livid.” I have no idea what exactly she was insinuating. She finished off the email with a warning that,

“If you do not desist from trying to contact me, my husband will take legal action”.

While disappointed I was not surprised. Furthermore, I had my answer. She most certainly did not want to discuss the past, nor examine her role in the unhappy state of affairs that prevailed upon their sudden, unannounced departure.

As for Dirk, what exactly had he said? We spoke the following day.

“What a magnificent house,” he stated at the outset. “Truly amazing. I think she was responsible for the decor.” There was no hint of animosity in the initial encounter. He and his elderly cousin, a lady, had been invited inside and sat in the living room. When asked their business he replied,

“I’m here to deliver a message from a remarkable young man I happened to meet in Zimbabwe this year” (me, obviously, haha).

“And this message is just to convey a tidal load of love for you and Kobus,” (her ex-husband).” When I heard this I couldn’t help but laugh out loud. I hadn’t asked him to say this of course, but I’m glad he had. Was it well received? Apparently, with indifference.

“I hardly remember him,” she had replied, which makes our hour-long plus conversation on the phone last year seem rather odd.

Apparently her new husband, Chris, had sat there without saying a word until Dirk had eventually addressed him directly. Once again, no obvious animosity, just a factual reply as to his name and perhaps what he did in life. I can’t recall the exact words in my phone conversation with Dirk, but quite obviously, judging by Marietjie’s email response, he was hiding his true emotions.

When I mentioned the tone of Marietjie’s email to Dirk he was nonplussed. “People can choose how to react to a message of Love, and if they don’t want it, that’s their loss. It has nothing to do with me,” or words to that effect.

On the one hand I was sad that this was clearly the end of my back-and-forth with Marietjie, but at least the message now was unambiguous. I had tried to contact her son Daniel in Germany but likewise without success. I remembered him as a somewhat lonely but sweet boy. Now he appeared to have a successful career with a bank, working in their IT department. Again I had to respect his right not to respond if he chose not to do so.

As for Dirk and I, we will not doubt remain friends. Again, I understand that life is strange but if not for me returning to Zimbabwe this year I would never have met Anthony, nor Dirk though him, nor the opportunity to have him quite literally deliver my message to the proprietor of a house which has long held such a prominent place in my mind. And while the mental tentacles of the past may never leave me entirely, right now I feel more relaxed about these events, as if a pressure valve has been released after a very long time.

You can find my book, Revisiting South Africa in English and Afrikaans, at these retailers:

Either in print, via Kindle (£1.89) or various other ebook retailers (FREE!)

Afrikaans version from Takealot SA

So what have I achieved, if anything? It’s difficult to qualify, but let me try…

For a start, this trip was a long time coming. I’d been mulling it for years now, especially the South African leg. If you’ve read my book, Revisiting South Africa (or its translation), you’ll know that I didn’t have the easiest passage through my undergraduate years. They’re freely available as eBooks, and of course it comes highly recommended !

I suppose one day all will be accounted for, perhaps not in a giant heavenly ledger as my junior school Religious Education teacher, Mrs Sedan, would have me believe, but in a manner which we cannot conceive of in our limited human-perception sort of way. I would certainly like to have a few answers if I don’t resolve them in this life-time…

I was always a sensitive kid I suppose, perhaps with good reason. It’s hard to say, but I did feel things deeply: my parents’ respective illnesses in my childhood years, the pain of seeing them growing apart, the angst of Catholic guilt, struggling with my environmental convictions when none of my peers seemed to care very much. You get the picture. Perhaps not unique to me I confess, but we all have our own realities as a councillor was once at pains to point out.

Anyway, for the sake of making things tangible and actionable, let me return to the last leg of my Africa trip, South Africa, a country I have known and visited many times down the years, from childhood days. I have great memories of Christmas and seaside holidays with my Durban cousins, layovers with my aunt and uncle in Pretoria, and the more difficult student years at Rhodes and later UP. My final Honours year at the University of Pretoria had left me with several lasting impressions, namely:

• Relationships between men and women are complicated

• Relations between generations are complicated

• Relations between different racial and cultural groups are complicated

Recall that this was a university in rapid transition. The country had only attained independence nine years earlier in 1994, and only six years earlier had the 1997 Language Policy for Higher Education Act been enacted, to encourage universities and polytechnics to adopt multilingualism and a move away from the English- or Afrikaans-only system that previously divided universities along racial and linguistic lines.

Pretoria had been one of the latter, and even in 2003, an Afrikaans identity was still dominant. Official letters and correspondence were usually communicated in Afrikaans first, followed by English. Today at least one of the African languages, Sotho, Xhosa or isiZulu, have been included alongside the so-called “white tongues” beneath the coat of arms and in official communications.

All other things being equal, I suppose this was a natural progression. Did it go too fast or too slow? I’m not qualified to say. What I can say is that my particular department, Geology, was mostly white South African, complimented by a few black students in the lower years and only one in my Honours-year group.

The staff compliment at that time had no black or coloured individuals in a teaching or academic position, but only at the level of technicians, and only one non-white lecturer in the form of Ms Mouri, a young Algerian lecturer.

I found myself in a class with four young Afrikaans chaps, two years younger than me, who had studied together since first year, and an English-speaker from Pretoria who had done Years One to Three at the University of Port Elizabeth. About half way through the year we were joined by a softly-spoken black South African girl called Eunice.

The only one I had a difficulty with was PW ,who had risen to the unofficial position of senior undergraduate and viewed my arrival with a dose of suspicion. We later came to respect each other, but it took years to get a better understanding from my perspective. Of the other three, Guan was the brightest, and most outgoing. He had a great sense of humour. JC, the youngest member of the quartet, was soft spoken and not given much to conversation. Not then anyway. And Chris, the last member, was the suave, self-assured type, a musician, who seemed to get along with everyone.

I’ve written about the tragic events surrounding our Easter fieldtrip to KwaZulu Natal in April of that year in my first memoir which I finished about a decade later. It’s also available free of charge to those with digital devices. On that trip the best member of our class drowned near the coastal town of Hibberdene. The header image to this post was taken that very day, probably only minutes before the incident.

Four years later I returned there and witnessed the most tranquil and serene of mornings, dolphins riding the shore-break and a right whale breaching the calmer waters a hundred metres out. It was a subdued atmosphere that prevailed in the classroom after Guan’s premature passing.

As a backdrop to all this I was still negotiating my relationship with my dad, a year after my mum had passed away from cancer. That was my primary challenge, learning to forgive and accept what had come to be. I did manage in the end but it came at quite a cost. Just like building less unequal, egalitarian societies is a multi-generational challenge, so too the challenge of understanding and loving unconditionally our own families. I’ve come to love and remember my father and my mother for what they did best, but sometimes I lapse. Recall bullet point #two: Relationships between generations are complicated.

The damage caused by an imposed, racially-hierarchical system like Apartheid, is not just in terms of wealth inequality, but in what it did to people’s souls. Despite the tensions and intolerance coming from some people on campus – a minority – there was the challenge of the home environment. I rented a room from an Afrikaans lady, Mrs Els, her son Daniel, and his step-father Kobus (or Cobus). My co-renters were two girls of colour, one from Zimbabwe, Joy, the other, Bianca, from Swaziland. Later in the year we were joined by a white, English-speaking South African male, Travis.

We occupied an annexe to the main house but when Travis came he got to rent an extra room in the main house. To cut a long story short, Kobus had an obvious difficulty communicating with the girls. What’s his problem? one of them exclaimed one day. It was obvious that he wasn’t a very happy individual. Daniel complained that he didn’t have time for him and even Mrs Els suggested that the place needed some mood-improvement, alluding to the absence of Joy’s pervasive laughter when she was away. At the end of the year the family moved out and left us in the lurch, and I’ve contemplated it for years.

So on my return to South Africa this time around I resolved to do two things: revisit the old house (478A, Sussex Ave) and have a coffee with Guan’s mother, Lynnette, with whom I’d been corresponding for several years. I’m pleased to say that I managed to do both things.

I dropped by the house with an old colleague, James, now head of the geology department at UP, on the tail end of a two-day excursion. I’ll come to that later. Anyway, I knew the house had changed hands because I had sent a letter to the address from the Netherlands about five or six years ago with my email address and a brief explanation. It took a whole year for me to receive I reply, but I eventually got one from a Mrs Willis, now living in in the Western Cape, but happy to help if she could. A few years on and the house has changed hands again. Mrs Willis sent me the name and number of the new owner, Leonard, and I made arrangements to drop by the place.

So, consider this: 22 years after having lived there I revisit my old student accommodation, except that no-one from back then lives there any more. However, I get to see the other side of the house, that part of the property to which I was never invited. Back then I was very aware of the unspoken divide between us and them. If Mrs Els wanted to communicate something to us she would type it up on her PC, print it off, and pin it to our doors.

Daniel would wander over from time to time and he was my unofficial source of information. Through him I learnt that his own father had died in a car accident, that Kobus was his stepfather, that he didn’t much like the rugby jocks at school, and that the tortoiseshell cat that came to visit my room every night was named Kitsy.

Did it feel cathartic to be back there all those years later? Hard to say; it’s much changed. It now operates as a student commune. While the basic structure of the building and the tiles and colour of the exterior walls remained the same, the gate had been widened, the brickwork of the driveway was lifting, and it looked altogether more drab and less well maintained than I remembered it. The tree ferns and water feature outside my old room were gone, the kitchen had been partitioned and Bianca’s poky little room was now a shower-toilet unit.

In my mind I could recall parking my parents’ old bakkie out front, a turquoise Nissan truck with a canopy, alongside Kobus’ white Toyota equivalent, canopy not included. I remember the space being tight and looking at it again, I realised how little green space there had been. It was all bricks and paving and walls. I had only been there a day or two before Kobus had come to the front door of the annexe, making Ksss-ksss sounds to get my attention and avoid having to actually ask one of the girls to alert me. That’s the thing, while he couldn’t bear to talk to them, he was almost apologetic in the manner he asked me to park a little closer to the house so that he could squeeze his bakkie in net to mine.

Perhaps there will be others of you out there who will understand how living in a foreign place can exacerbate problems and challenges that already exist. My love and pain in trying to understand my father and what motivated him was also superimposed on the relationships around me: dealing with the haughty PW at the department and the intense man that was Kobus in the domestic environment. Why did he go out to smoke alone in the evenings? Why did he turn heel when we bumped in to each other on one of these occasions? I’ve pondered these questions for years. Sometimes they recede into the background and sometimes they come roaring back into the foreground. It’s not anger or animosity I feel, more a sense of disconnection.

You might be interested to hear that I got back in touch with Mrs Els, Marietjie, in early 2024. I discovered her old number in a notebook and entered it into my phone. Lo and behold an active user came up on WhatsApp and before long we arranged to have a catch-up. That was cathartic. I was in Germany at the time and I learnt that her son, Daniel, had just moved to Berlin. The little boy with freckles was now a young man, working in IT at a bank in one of Europe’s leading cities. She had divorced and remarried again and moved to a town in the Western Cape. At the end of our conversation I asked if I might send her a copy of my book, or point her in the direction of the ebook, to which she agreed. After all, I do mention her and the house in one of the chapters.

That was the last time we spoke. Anxious to know how she felt about the book I messaged her a number of times. She replied with a laughing emoji and said something about not having time, being too busy with lessons and concerts (she taught piano). So far as I know she has never taken the time to read it, and my appeals seem to have been in vane. I must accept that she probably doesn’t want to revisit those times. In our single phone conversation I did ask her if she knew of Kobus’ whereabouts. No idea she’d replied. When I suggested that he had been an unhappy man, she somewhat candidly suggested that he was a women hater. Whatever that means. Personally, I think its too easy to write someone off like that. Kobus, if you’re out there, I’d love to have a beer with you. I’m sure you’re not the devil you’re made out to be.

Anyhow, before leaving the house after our brief visit a few weeks back, I turned to the gardener, Eddie, a young Zimbabwean man, blind in one eye, dressed in blue overalls with a tight woollen sock-hat pulled over the back of his head. He had guided me round the property under instructions from his boss, Leonard. It seemed fitting that I should give him something, so I reached into my bag and pulled out a small figurine of an angel carved from opal. It had been given to me by a vagrant German man on a train between Greece and Bulgaria after I paid his ticket. He had been all the way to the Holy Land before being turned away. I had been very touched by the gift.

“Eddie,” I said. “Place this somewhere here, in this house.” He looked at me quizzically.

“It’s personal,” I tried to explain, grasping for the right words. “This place means a lot to me. There are a lot of memories tied up here.” He asked me if there was a tracking device inside, such is the suspicion people have these days.

“No” I replied with a laugh. “Nothing like that. But can you do that for me?” I asked. He nodded slowly and then gave me smile, revealing several missing teeth. Perhaps he will, perhaps he won’t. Will it even mean anything? Who can say. The truth is that I had been thinking about it for quite a while. If I did visit the house on Sussex Ave, how would I confront those ghost memories? What would be appropriate? The legacy of a romantic mind perhaps, but an opal angel figurine offered me by a pilgrim seemed a fitting thing.

For the last three weeks or so I have resided in a suburb of Boksburg, one of the largest suburbs of the former East Rand, a term still used colloquially, but since the millennium a part of the Ekurhuleni Metropolitan Municipality. It is one of eight in South Africa and constitutes a network of towns and suburbs like Germiston, Benoni, Kempton Park, Edenvale, Alberton and Tembisa township, covering an area of almost 2, 000 km2 and populated by 3.5 million people.

Many English-speakers from traditionally English parts of Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban and even Harare, would probably not venture to these parts without good reason. Anecdotally speaking. An Afrikaans friend of mine who I shared a few beers with earlier today admitted that it has “all sorts” i.e decent types and less reputable ones as well. Another friend, Marc, of mixed white parentage and half-Afrikaans, proclaimed a grudging admiration when we spoke on the phone.

“I hear there are some rough characters that side.” Indeed there probably are, but it’s all relative I’m sure, especially when you consider metropolitan South Africa as a whole.

But, and here I must underscore this strongly for the sake of the good residents of Boksburg and Benoni, I must profess that I’ve experienced nothing but the kindest reception in my short time here. Larry and his wife, Leanne, are long-term pillars of local community, and old family friends. Larry, the hardy product of a German-Jewish-British heritage, grew up in Macheke and then Marondera, in the east of Zimbabwe. He’s a gas engineer by profession.

When his father moved from the farm to Marondera town, he got to know my father and his myriad syblings and parents, part of a sizeable Greek contingent within Marondera (then Marandellas), a medium-sized town in a very productive maize and tobacco-growing region. I’ve written about my dad’s family elsewhere, but never mentioned Larry.

He shared a sweet anecdote with me about how it was my dad’s mum, my Yia-Yia, who taught him to love olives. “Bigger and better than anything on the shelves,” he said of her olives, bottled and cured in brine at home he alleged. It may be true or it may be a bit romanticized (I don’t remember any olive trees in the garden) but the essence of the story rings true, remembering what a warm and genial person my grandmother was.

One day I asked Larry and Leanne to drop me off at a sort of artistic retail village to the east of the airport in Benoni North. I needed a decent second hand bookshop for some reading fodder. The centre went by the name of Uncle Tim’s and constituted a café and restaurant, a few retro-boutiques and antique shops and a small bookshop tucked away in one corner called Kevin’s Cove.

The bookshop was perfect, replete with a tabby cat, shelves heaving with novels, novellas and reference works, and an elderly, greying woman behind the counter. When I said that I wanted to browse she told me to make myself at home with a sweep of her arm. An hour-and-a-half later I walked out with an Arkady Renko novel, by the author of Gorky Park, a fantastic read from a few month’s earlier, The Diary of Anne Frank and a translated short-story by Thomas Mann. Enough to engage me for the next two weeks I was sure.

Going back to the issue of the East Rand and why some might not venture that way, I guess part of it is class prejudice, considering most of the wealth in Jo’burg is concentrated in the Sandton-Rosebank area. I got Larry to drop me in Sandton Central one day after we had visited a philatelist in Fourways, nearby, and I have to say that it is still the potent symbol of capitalism I remember it to be. No less impressive for the passage of a decade.

Sandton Mall is enormous, surrounded by gleaming glass and steel monoliths including the Joburg Stock Exchange, Liberty Life Insurance and various international banks. A different vibe to the East Rand completely. However, what the East Rand may not have in the way of banks and hotels, it makes up for in sheer area: retail parks, warehouses, automobile showrooms, residential suburbs and industry.

Coming back from Uncle Tim’s posed a dilemma for me. Larry and Leanne had continued on for a holiday break in the north of the country and I was loathe to pay for yet another ride hail service, although to be fair they are really quite reasonable. I’m talking about Bolt and Uber, services which use an app on your phone to hail a taxi. No, more out of a desire to challenge my own sensibilities than anything else, I chose to take a black, commuter taxi. No one batted an eye, but it meant that I first had to go to Benoni Town proper before I could switch to another heading towards East Rand Mall, a stone’s throw from Larry’s place. Or so I thought.

While I was impressed by the broad avenues and pleasant suburbia on the approach to central Benoni, I was a bit out of my depth at the taxi rank. I saw a sign indicating taxis heading to Boksburg, without appreciating just how big Boksburg is. Keeping Google Maps open and tracking our progress, I realised that I would be too far to the south. Back at the rank someone told me to get off at a KFC, but since that failed to materialise I jumped off outside a police station near the old Transvaal Hotel, now gutted and empty, on the western extremity of Boksburg Town proper. It probably wasn’t the best idea. While I contemplated my direction of travel a wizened old man trundled across the intersection pushing a vegetable cart. The imposing, red brick police station itself looked more like a prison than a station.

I walked up a kind of off-ramp indicated as Comet Street, following closely behind several other pedestrians, black men and boys mostly. We passed a few small allotments, and at one point I looked down on a garage-yard setup where I glimpsed a few middle-aged whites sitting on plastic chairs and sharing a beer. A little further on was a main road, an extension of the R21 coming all the way from Pretoria. In the classic instance of crossing the tracks I found myself in a very different-looking neighbourhood on the other side of the dual carriageway.

Fortunately, taking an immediate left turn kept me on a service road parallel to the main road. A short distance away were mostly dilapidated houses, and lots of people on foot, either stationary or walking either way. My sense of self-preservation told me to avoid the suburb and hence the service road. The trash on either side of the road, some incinerated, some not, contrasted with the lovely new leaf of an oak tree just off the highway.

As I walked on, late afternoon by this time, I passed various black people, commuters mostly. And for the most part they averted their gaze or eyed me warily. But one or two gave me a friendly smile. All I knew was that I had to keep going north. Before too long I came to a big intersection. While I waited for the lights to change, a white bakkie (a sort of domestic truck or pick-up popular in South Africa) pulled up next to me. The guy in the front passenger seat stuck his head out.

“Waarheen gaan jy?” Now my Afrikaans is pretty terrible so my immediate response was “Engles asseblief” (English, please!)

After explaining my predicament he invited me to jump inside.

“Man, you musn’t be walking around these parts. You’re asking for trouble. There’s an informal settlement just down there” he told me, thumbing in a westward direction. “They’ll rob you for anything these days. Even ten rand (about 50 cents)”. It turned out that he and the driver were plain-clothes policemen on patrol.

“What kind of things are you guys on the lookout for?” I asked Cop #One, a middle-aged guy with short-cropped white hair and a goatee. “And what is this device?” I inquired about a contraption with four antennas sharing the backseat with me.

“Oh ja, that’s a radio receiver, for tracking stolen vehicles. But like everything else, it doesn’t work anymore.”

“The receiver?” I asked.

“No, the satellite tracking,” he replied. “The companies can’t pay or don’t pay the satellite providers, so it’s useless” he said of the device on the seat beside me. “I’m going to get rid of it.”

Before he and Cop #Two dropped me off at the house, a five minute drive hence, he turned to me and said “Look, we’ve got to look out for each other. Take care of yourself and careful where you walk.”

With a friendly wave they continued on their way. Reading between the lines, I understood each other to mean us whites, which is problematic on one level, but also a frank reality on another. And don’t get me wrong, I very much appreciated what they did for me. It was strangely reassuring.

I hadn’t always had a good rapport with members of the SAPS. While a student in Pretoria I had been harassed by a couple of young white Afrikaans officers as I cycled up Lynwood Avenue, a short while after purchasing a bicycle to commute to and forth to campus.

More recently at Beit Bridge border post, one of the officials – not strictly police, but closely allied – had quite blatantly solicited for a bribe after insisting that I couldn’t carry both a Zimbabwean and British passport. How they had managed to single me out as we drove away from customs and immigration I don’t know but it was very unpleasant for a few minutes. Fortunately, my driver, Daniel, was a seasoned cameraman. His camera and an assortment of lenses on the backseat might well have given them pause for thought. Amazingly I didn’t even land up parting with the thirty USD I offered up to the sly official to avoid him taking me back to the Zimbabwean side.

From a racial perspective this may look bad, but honestly, I have only anecdote to go by. This part of Boksburg is predominately white still, so it’s no real surprise that there are white cops willing to lend a helping hand to a half-decently dressed white guy walking by the side of the road.

Walking around Larry’s neighbourhood, accompanied at times by their elderly hound Jake, I noticed how it was defined by the boundary roads. To the east was the last stretch of the R21, a short bit of Main Reef Rd to the south and Pretoria Rd to the West, maybe 5km2 in total. An upmarket golf course, the ERPM (East Rand & Pretoria Mines), extended partly eastwards into the southern sector, but mostly in the other direction. Around Larry’s place, quite central to the suburb of Morgansridge, and for several blocks in each direction, are mostly free-standing suburban houses fronted by deep verges.

The roads are wide and, for the most part, in good condition. On some of the widest streets, like Tim, on which Larry et famille reside, the distance from one property boundary wall to the other is between twenty to thirty metres, unusual even in Harare, where the suburban layout is not all that different. People in European towns and cities would kill for this kind of space. Even better, there are no cars parked out front. That would inviting trouble. Everyone park their vehicles in a garage or within the property.

As one approaches the southern and westerly edges of the delineated suburb I noticed the size and quality of the housing diminish. Especially in the southern sector, the yards are smaller, cars parked up close against the houses in places. Walking on a Sunday I caught glances from bare-chested, tattooed young men, their kids frolicking in the yard, dogs working themselves into a frenzy at the sight of old Jake.

The Abie Meyer Recreational Park in that direction showed noticeable decay since my prior visit in 2016. This time around the garbage bins had all rusted through and since no-one had bothered to repair them, garbage lay strewn about in a haphazard manner. However, the swings and other playground paraphernalia seemed to be functional and a little way down a white father and son duo were kicking a football and it seemed quiet and relatively peaceful.

Elsewhere, especially in the area NW of Larry’s, town and terraced housing proliferate. Mostly constructed of austere, brown bricks with names like Paul Mews, Shellyvale, Lodestar and Skymaster, they are nonetheless tidy, fronted by well-trimmed trees and bushes. Security is always a chief consideration, walls topped by multiple-strand electric wires, and the electric entrance gates advertising security firms of various names.

Just yesterday Leanne forwarded her daughter, Kathryn, a message from the neighbourhood WhatsApp Group Chat about an incident unfolding on Odendaal Rd which flanks these same housing complexes, if not in real time, not long after. A voice note from a resident warned of a white Suzuki with Multiple Bravos having forced an entry into one of the properties or estates, and to exercise caution.

I asked Kathryn if she and her husband, Jason, saw themselves living in the house after her folks passed away or moved to a smaller place in retirement.

“Not ideally,” she replied. “This place is too big for my folks alone, so I’m hoping they will find somewhere smaller. As for Jace and I, we’d prefer to live in Benoni. The council there is DA (Democratic Alliance) and better run. Also, as may have noticed, Morgansridge is not such a great area any more. We have Comet to the south (suburb I mentioned above) which is attracting crime, and as you can see the roads and infrastructure are deteriorating.”

Walking along the edge of the Golf course, between the concrete palisade fence and Sett Street one had to be careful not to fall into the uncovered man holes every thirty or forty metres. The concrete covers were either in an advanced stage of decay, or missing all together. Once upon a time they had been made of cast iron from local foundries, but they had long since been pillaged by scrap metal thieves, a universal problem, but particularly acute in this part of Africa. Peering into one of these holes revealed a drop of several meters to a concrete drains in which tepid greywater flowed.

Another element of the neighbourhood suburbs which put me in mind of Harare was the power utility boxes. As in Harare quite a number of them had been vandalised and the flimsy doors hung open, their locks smashed and broken, to reveal either cut wires or an assortment of analogue and digital electric meters.

I took a photo on a walk and later showed it to Larry, who seemed nonplussed. He was quite outspoken in his criticism of the local government as were many other people, both black and white.

It’s no secret that there are white vagrants in modern day South Africa. There have been for years now. I saw them loitering by the bottle stores and corner shops on Reitfontein Rd (R21). A young guy in his early twenties was cracking a length of rope angrily against the pavement and I was ready to take flight, but he greeted me with a polite nod. His companion, inked and pierced, stared into the middle-distance from where he was seated in front of the bottle store. I walked on and later encountered the two of them a few blocks away seated on the verge of a suburban home.

Where Main Reef and Reitfontein intersect, a route I often walk when going to the a supermarket for goods, there is usually a white person, or two, usually women, begging money from passing motorists. One day, right in front of an entrance to the nearby shopping centre, a whole white family, two adults and two kids, sat by the roadside with a (mostly) empty shopping trolley. I couldn’t bring myself to make eye contact so it was only a glance. I’m not sure why, but I felt a sense of shame. Conditioning, I suppose.

Just this evening I encountered another white vagrant sort on my evening stroll. I had seen him earlier in the day on our street pulling a cart behind him. I stopped and chatted with him for a few minutes.

“What are you up to?” I asked.

“Working,” he replied. “Tidying up people’s garbage and yards. I can do all kinds of things.”

His hands and arms were filthy and it didn’t look like he had shaved in months. His teeth were not too good either. However, his eyes were clear and still had the spark of life.

“Man, all I need is four hundred Rand to get to Cape Town. My brother has a job for me there. Fixing pipes along the Strand (beach).”

“Do you have family?”

“Ja, a wife and two kids. We stay yonder side,” indicating somewhere to the north of us.

I asked him the standard question: “How is life in South Africa these days?” and got the standard response: “tough.”

“The problem is these Malawians and Mozambiquens. They’ll work a whole day for hundred and fifty rand… for even a hundred rand.” I commiserated and mentioned the family I had seen by the shopping centre. He knew them by name. Apparently they lived nearby, like them, in a cheap apartment.

“And do you get any help from outside? The Dutch Reformed Church over there for instance?”

“No, not really, but sometimes people come from other places, from other churches, and bring us food and pray with us.” I studied him for any sense of irony or resentment but there was none.

“Can you help me with a donation?” he asked before I continued on. I didn’t have either money nor phone on me. Only the day before I had been talking to the Zimbabwean maid back at the house who warned me about phone thieves operating in broad daylight. She had fallen victim to them on several occasions.

So there you have it, the East Rand in a nutshell. Or at least a small corner of it. I’ll try write further tomorrow. There’s more to be said.

Enjoy this post? Read more about the author’s travels and adventures in South Africa in a free ebook in both English and Afrikaans.

Therefore, when I took my letter by the British High Commission the following Monday, I thought to myself that it would be too much to expect the letter to be accepted without some sort of postal charge or fee. The security booth was manned by a local agency, Safeguard, a long-established company. The guard on duty was polite, and whilst initially sceptical of my request, asked the reception on my behalf if a certain gentleman could mail a letter addressed to someone of Royal significance. Lo and behold my request was granted! How serendipitous: a letter printed, inserted in an envelope and posted overseas without a cent spent!

Driving around town I regularly give lifts to people, especially since I’m usually driving around in an empty car. Most assumed a white person offering a lift was doing it out of the goodness of their heart – some of them even had white employers – and while mostly true, filling up a fuel tank didn’t come cheaply. Ironically enough, the ones who did offer something in the way of compensation, tended to be rural folk or out-of-towners. That speaks for itself.

One black man I gave a lift to turned out to be a telecoms engineer who had worked abroad for many years, in the UK and elsewhere. He had probably had a well-paid job but had chosen to return in Zimbabwe in recent years for personal reasons.

“I am regretting my decision,” he confided. “Things are tough in Zimbabwe.”

It wasn’t clear if he was planning to stick it out. When I mentioned I had been living in mainland Europe for the previous seven or eight years he was delighted and asked for my number. Later in the day he messaged me to say that “because I met you today, I registered with Netherlands Angel Investment Network.”

Perhaps Zimbabweans’ greatest strength, and simultaneously, our greatest weakness, is that we are always on the look out for an opportunity – to trade, barter, sell or exchange, whether it be information or an asset, item or possession. We are known abroad as hard-working people, friendly and (by-and-large) honest in our dealings. As in any country there are exceptions, but as a rule we do acquit ourselves well.

There is not a street-corner or bus-stop in the capital without a gaggle of vendors and airtime sellers, hustling for a living. These are fairly desperate times for the working classes: wages are low and the cost of living is high. Yet, certain things remain affordable for most – some fresh fruit and vegetables, a packet of cigarettes ($1), if you’re a smoker, bottled soft drinks (50c a bottle), roasted corn on the cob…

On the flip side I’ve noticed how many men, young and old, are inebriated by the roadside on the average weekend afternoon, plastic bottles of Chibuku scattered randomly in the verges and ditches. In fact, plastic and carton waste of every description, oftentimes mixed in with construction rubble, adorns the city roads and suburban streets which I find quite revolting. Even when it appears that the verge is clean and maintained, oftentimes the litter has only been pushed to one side or aggregated out of sight amongst plants and bushes.

I’ve written of the many contradictions inherent in this city, this nation, where shopping malls spring up suddenly alongside major roads, while the side-streets and roads nearby decay and crumble; where vendors eek out a living selling tomatoes and cigarettes next to brand new fast-food chicken joints, for which there seem to be an unlimited appetite.

It reminds me a little of my years in Luton, Bedfordshire, in the UK. We used to joke that it was a “chicken and chips” town because, taken collectively with the betting shops, clubs and pubs, that was about half the local economy at least. I knew a lovely Egyptian man who would cook you a chicken shwarma on a charcoal fire and serve it with yoghurt and fresh greens. He went out of business while the fast-food place next door thrived.

And yet, at the danger of being overly negative, let me shine a light back onto the things that give reason for hope: diversification being one, and continuity another. Whilst here in Harare I have returned to an old routine of playing frisbee (Ultimate Frisbee, officially) on a Saturday afternoon at Gateway Primary School.

When, as a group, we first moved there about twenty years ago from another school at which we became persona non grata, it was mostly a white sport, with a few exceptions. Today, it draws a majority black participation, from both middle- and working-class backgrounds. The white players are a mix of young and old, as always with a small contingent of Americans affiliated to the embassy. The vibe is excellent, with a great sense of camaraderie.

We recently played the Bulawayo side, likewise an amateur outfit, in the town of Kwekwe, in-between the two major cities. We were well beaten by a smaller team, both better drilled and with a more comprehensive game plan. The future of the game here is bright, although I was pretty glum after a lacklustre performance. However, on the way back I fell into conversation with Langa, a pretty, young black lady recently back from university in South Africa, while the young US Marines in the back seat, both casual players, spoke self-effacingly and made us laugh. It was interesting too to observe the hierarchy amongst the Americans.

The driver, Eric, was the husband of a high-ranking official at the embassy. The marines deferred to him as ‘sir’ and he called them by their surnames. Hence Corporal Bauer was simply called Bauer. They were good people – straight-forward and straight-talking – and I appreciated that. Eric paid the tolls and made the two-way trip without asking for a dime.

When I talk of continuity, I’m referring to ‘cultural continuity’, even when I have a Catholic Church Service in mind. You see I was raised in the CC and by chance, more than anything else, landed up living these last five months just around the corner from Nazareth House Church where I received my First Communion several decades ago.

I decided to go along to a 9.30 Sunday morning service more out of curiosity and a sense of nostalgia than anything else but have returned there repeatedly. Once upon a time it would have been a majority white congregation, but today the opposite is true. I am usually only one of two or three white faces amongst the rows of black faces in a church filled to capacity.

https://youtu.be/EssJnoggtoE

It wasn’t our regular church, but being in the same parish, the two churches often came together for major events and festivities, such as conferring the sacraments of First Communion and Confirmation on children and young adults in the parish. That’s me in photographs below, at Nazareth House, sometime around 1987/88.

Originally, in the 80s and even early 90s, all the hymns sung during the English-language Mass were taken from the Celebration Hymnal, a collection of (largely) English songs from the last several hundred years. Along with my brothers and friends we would poke fun the elderly church choristers as they battled through a seven-verse hymn with all the verve and energy of battered Zupco bus firing on two cylinders, going uphill. The Shona choir, on the other hand, was quite the opposite, bursting with energy and multi-part harmonies while accompanied by drums, shakers and the swaying of hips and torsos.

For me, perhaps the most interesting thing about my latter-day attendance of the church mass, is to see that this fusion of the traditional English songs and the contemporary Shona ones has not been abandoned despite the lack of white congregants. The traditional English hymns are sung well, almost dutifully, only occasionally invoking the sound of a hand-shaker or drum, and almost immediately followed by a Shona worship song. Often the opening chord of the latter is announced by the lead singer before the final note of the English hymn had ended!

On several occasions this year, the English hymns were accompanied on the electric church organ by Sister Memory, a light-skinned nun, perhaps of mixed-race origins. As the name of the parish would suggest, it was run by the Sisters of Nazareth. I chuckle when I think of Sr Memory’s stirring accompaniments, either completely out of key, or at least one beat ahead of the congregants. I suspect that she was finally discouraged, strongly, from further duty at the organ, because the past two months have passed without her input, although I have seen her in the church alongside the other Sisters.

It is also interesting to listen to the language of the congregants: many converse in English – it is primarily an English-medium Mass with only a few words of Shona thrown in – and the announcements at the end of the service accented by what I would previously have termed a typical white, middle-class intonation. Today, I suppose, the accent is the de facto accent of the privately educated Black Zimbabwean middle and ruling classes, and not just the white minority.

As I mentioned previously, the congregation is majority black, with only a handful of other ethnicities. Besides myself, there are typically one or two other whites, usually elderly, but occasionally a foreign visitor or two, as well as a few coloured folk (mixed-race) and a Chinese gentleman who introduced himself to me as Joseph, from somewhere in Fujian Province, China.

“I am from a Catholic family,” he told me. They were allowed some freedom of expression there it seemed, but his limited English prevented a more in-depth conversation on the topic.

Like many Chinese people, he was in Zimbabwe pursuing “business opportunities”. On our most recent post-service exchange he took out a mobile phone and showed me a video he had taken of a small-scale artisanal gold-mining operation somewhere in, or near, the area of Mazowe.

It showed a group of casually dressed ‘makorokoza’ pouring a slurry of ore-bearing sediments down a channel made of towels, furled along the edges. This was followed by a still of several large flakes of gold in the hand of one of them. With the inexorable month-on-month increase in the value of the metal, driven by geopolitical events far beyond the borders of Zimbabwe and Southern Africa, mining by whatever method continues to draw people in from all walks of life.

After the Mass the mood outside the Church is convivial. A group of women, sometimes a few men too, offer up tea, instant coffee and a selection of cakes and biscuits. The children are served at a separate table. At first, I felt somewhat self-conscious queuing amidst the black members of the church, until I realised that nobody seemed in any way bothered by my presence, nor was I treated differently or preferentially. This put my mind at ease. I sometimes found myself behind a poorer member of society, piling his plate up with edibles, but for the most part people were considerate enough not to overindulge.

Nearby, other members of the church were selling their wares, which varied from plastic rosaries and trinkets to packets of spice and herbs, and some selling farm produce (spinach and tomatoes). Occasionally, young parishioners, usually girls, would approach shyly, asking for contributions towards a fund-raiser of one sort or another.

Just off the entrance foyer to the church itself I discovered the church library: several low bookcases beneath the staircase to the mezzanine level at the rear of the church. It was an equal mix of spiritual-themed works, and fiction and non-fiction titles. I was delighted to pick out books by Penelope Lively and William Boyd, two of my favourite English authors, as well as Gorky Park, the bestselling thriller set in Cold War Moscow in the early 1980s. It seemed like a topical time to be reading such a book. I loved it.

Second-hand book selling is one industry that has weathered the economic ups-and-downs of the last twenty-five years. One can find their stalls at Avondale Flea Market, Stables Market, at the SPCA second-hand shop and in the city proper. To be sure there are bookshops selling new books as well, but the prices are often eye-wateringly expensive.

I found it particularly interesting to talk to a vendor of books at Avondale Flea Market who specialised in selling African-themed works from the Anglo-Boer War to the Liberation Struggle. The vendor, a black man in his mid- to late forties, told me that the book most in demand was called Dzino – Memories of a Freedom Fighter by Wilfred Mhanda. His last copy had sold for US $100, although he reckoned there would be people willing to pay twice that amount.

“It is considered a subversive book by the authorities,” he explained, referring to the ruling party, Zanu PF, “because it tells the uncomfortable truth about how the riches went to the few and not the many.”

But I digress. I was discussing cultural continuity and then I got onto religion, and my experiences of contemporary Catholicism. Let me add to this. During my time here I have visited my fair share of religious buildings and groups: Sunday morning service at a new Protestant church in Borrowdale, Hope Church; a dozen or more services at Nazareth House; one Mass at St Gerards, our old family church; a visit to the church at Chishawasha Mission, one of the oldest in the country; and to the nearby cemetery where rows of Jesuit priests from the last century lie buried, including the founding fathers of my High School; the Anglican Cathedral in town; and just yesterday, to St Augustine’s in New Hatcliffe township.

Churches tend to congregate in Harare, usually along prominent roads like Enterprise/ED Mnangagwa, of which Nazareth House is only one of at least half-a-dozen along a two-kilometre stretch. The Hatcliffe Church, St Augustine’s is of personal interest because we fund-raised for its construction for several years back in the 1990s, when my family were active members of the congregation.

My mother had thrown herself into the project, teaming up with a prominent architect, Julian Conrad, and one or two others, to make it a reality. I recalled that she was particularly active in the decorative aspects, consulting the parishioners on whether they wanted a white or a black-hued Mary statue (white, they insisted), the stations of the cross (a black Jesus was tolerated but not everyone was pleased), the layout of the pews and so-forth. I was shown around by a smiling caretaker, Mrs Chimombe, and her husband.

Inside the church was spacious enough to seat several hundred people. I had last visited shortly after completion thirty or so years ago, and my recollection was poor. Together with the Chimombes, we walked up and down the pews looking for my family name amongst the donors inscribed on little brass nameplates. We weren’t amongst them but there were many names I recalled from St Gerard’s: the artist Arthur Azevedo and his wife; the Casson family; Mr Stokes, my O-level physics teacher, amongst others.

Strangely enough, there was no evidence of a foundation stone commemorating the opening of the church as one would expect. We even looked in the sacristy, but to no avail.

“I know that name,” Mrs Chimombe said of my mother, “I have seen it here somewhere.” However, somewhere was to prove nowhere, and I was a little disappointed.

I was interested to learn that there was no priest on site. He came on Tuesday, Thursday and Sundays from Alexander Park, nine or ten kilometres away in Harare proper. Furthermore, the church was oversubscribed and they themselves were now fundraising for a second church at another location in the sprawling township.

“Does the Diocese provide supplementary funding?” I asked Mrs Chimombe.
“Oh no,” she laughed, “we must pay them for being affiliated to them.”

I couldn’t quite get my head around that, although she admitted that there was some money coming in at certain times of the year to help with schooling the children in the parish. Meanwhile, several stacks of bricks sat unutilised between the church building and an open area of land within the grounds. I could see that foundations had been dug but it was overrun by grass and weeds.

“We are hoping to build a hall here,” she informed me, “but we have run out (of money)” she continued with a bashful laugh and a shake of her head.

Before I departed, I was shown to the Marian shrine or grotto in the opposite corner of the church yard. Mr Chimombe obliged by switching on the fountain to a little pond in front of the shrine.

“We used to have goldfish,” his wife explained, “but the wild cats have eaten them all.” It took me a moment to understand that she was referring to the feral cats of the township.

In some regards, the law of the jungle permeates even the urban fabric of Africa. Eat or be eaten. That is not to say that there is no compassion, but life was hard, and people could only do so much. The roads in and out of the neighbourhood were potholed and crumbling, the street signs long gone, and the old electric utility boxes vandalised and gutted. Nevertheless, a diesel generator chugged nearby within a steel palisade and razor wire enforced perimeter, powering a NetOne telecoms mast. The municipal power was down.

A few doors down from the church in one direction was a Salvation Army Hall, and right next door to the church in the other direction Mrs Chimombe informed me was a mosque. She must have seen the incredulity written on my face. “Come on, I will take you there,” she said with another broad smile.

We made our way a short distance along the road to the neighbouring gate, a solid black-metal structure, which she slid open a yard and beckoned for me to follow.

“Gogogoi” (excuse me) she shouted through the front door of a small brick house nearby, announcing our presence. A moment later a tall African woman with a blemished but kindly face appeared. She was dressed in a brightly-coloured, close-fitting garment which extended up and over her head to conceal her hair. She had a toddler slung about her waist. She in turn called to her husband, a medium-sized man with a cropped, jawline beard who introduced himself as the imam.

Imam Jabir took me on a little tour of the unassuming building, which one would never have known to be a mosque from the outside. Within, however, it had been partitioned into three parts. One part was a prayer room for the women, another, slightly larger, for the men, and behind that, an area for the children to be instructed in Arabic and Islam. The main difference between the men and women’s sections was that the men’s section had an alcove of sorts where the Imam could hold forth. Jabir obliged me by picking out an Islamic song or prayer book and reciting some lines. I have recorded it below.

https://youtube.com/shorts/4lno1r9NYjY?feature=share

I was surprised, again, to learn that there was another centre of Islam – a school or mosque – at another location within the township.

“What are your origins?” I asked Jabir. “Are you originally from Malawi or further north?” He certainly didn’t look like he had any Arab blood flowing through his veins.

“My family I from the Kadoma area,” he replied, but I still assumed he had ancestry from beyond Zimbabwe. You may recall my mention of Amadu from a prior post, the foreman at Oban Farm, a descendant of Malawian Muslim parents.

Once again ignorance, and perhaps just plain prejudice, had prevented me from appreciating that this major world religion has a very real and concrete presence in Zimbabwe today.

“Have you been to the East” I asked Jabir.

“Only to Qatar,” he replied, but then seemed to remember that his trip had also encompassed Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. I should have asked him if he had made the Haj or pilgrimage to Mecca, but I forgot to. Besides, it was Qatar that seemed to have left the strongest impression on the man.

“Ah that is a good place,” he continued. “Many new buildings. People can be prosperous there.” He lapsed into silence.

I thanked him and his wife and departed shortly thereafter. On my way out of the township I glimpsed an enormous warehouse with a prominent nameboard marking it out as a ‘Cash and Carry’ department store. Gazing through the entrance I perceived the interior cloaked in darkness, illuminated rather weakly by fluorescent lights above the isles.

Turning onto the main road I reflected on the tension between the system embodied by the imposing capitalist structures – the Cash and Carry, adjacent Liquor Store and Pick n Pay supermarket complex on the opposite side of the highway – and the informal economy of the open air marketplace a few hundred metres away where I had been shopping with Ant and Dirk just a few days earlier. Which would prevail in the fullness of time? Who can say for sure.

One thing can be said with conviction, however, which is that everyone recognises the power of advertising. While the street signs were non-existent, signboards for businesses, schools, garages and so forth crowded the T-junction intersection with the main road. Billboards too have proliferated around Harare advertising products and businesses, digital television subscriptions, tourism and even political events.

Stapled to trees and tacked onto walls one finds numerous handwritten signs, accompanied by phone numbers, also for goods and services of various kinds, but operating within the grey zone of the informal economy. Alliance Media was certainly making a small fortune on constructing highway-spanning advertisement gantries. I assume the tree-trunk advertisers had far lower overheads, but the competition appeared equally fierce.

Zimbabwe today, a land of opportunity and contradictions… 

At the beginning of June, I house-sat for this same friend, Ant, in Helensvale, a few doors down from the Borrowdale Country Club; a brief stay of several nights, back and forth between his place and Chisipite. Juggling two balls, both grateful for the high-speed internet connection at the Gaynor Rd house, whilst happy to escape to the outskirts of town close to where I grew up in Greystone Park.

I was due to house-sit for six nights, but Ant returned two days ahead of schedule. I was knocking myself back into shape in a fast way, cycling back-and-forth between the two places on my MTB. Door-to-door the quickest route is a little shy of 12 kms and I consistently did it between 29 and 30 minutes, with some vertiginous hills in-between. It took me back three decades to my teenage years with the Greystone Grasshoppers, a Triathlon Club of which my father was a fellow member, and co-founder, along with Wolf and Cheryl Fabiani, who were building a place just off Glen Helen Way, an up-and-down road with a V-like profile and a 100+ metre altitude differential, running between Enterprise Rd to the south and Helensvale Rd to the north.

It later transpired that my father and Cheryl, his secretary, had been in a protracted affair for many years, producing two offspring, both boys. Poor old Wolf passed away in the mid-90s, paving the way for my father to become the de facto father to the boys. His marriage to my mother ended rather messily in 1999 when she discovered the affair and demanded a divorce. It was a difficult time for all his boys in the midst of the adult drama, but I’m glad to say that I’ve come through the worst of it and I’m actually on good terms with the elder of my stepbrothers, Max.

The past has never been very far away as I’ve mentioned in prior posts. Not long after my return, Max contacted me, and I invited him over to the cottage in Gaynor Rd for a cup of tea and catch-up. He’s a cheerful and upbeat sort of person, and the fact that he’s the very image of my father doesn’t bother me at all. Recently married to his university beau, a sweet girl called Lauren, they are expecting a baby in a few months’ time. I subsequently visited them on their small-hold farmstead just within the limits of Greater Harare, near the town of Norton, where he is growing sweet peas and peppers for export. He gave me a tour of the premises.

Max is one of a new generation of aspirant commercial farmers. It hasn’t been easy going for the young man. After working under a more experienced white commercial farmer for several years, he struck out on his own in partnership with another chap in a similar position to his, on the shores of Lake Darwendale nearby. A third partner, a close friend in need of a lifeline, joined them at some point.

“That’s the first and last time I’ll ever participate in a three-way partnership,” Max told me. “Someone’s always going to lose out, and that person was me. I can’t understand how a friend could do that,” he continued without elaborating on the details.
“And has that spelt the end of your friendship?” I inquired.
“Absolutely,” he replied with a dark look. But it wasn’t in his nature to dwell on these things.

We approached the barn behind the house, brimming with farm equipment of various ages and degrees of disassembly. The best of them were a newish-looking tractor with a complex seed-tank assembly attached.

“Probably from the Command Farming days,” Max informed me, the title referring to an official strategy of top-down provision of equipment and inputs to the new owners of commercial farms seized under the controversial Fast Track Land Resettlement Program.

It was incredible to realise that this all began twenty-five years hence. Max didn’t even know who the original owner of the farm had been, except that it had become the possession of General Zvinavashe, Zimbabwe’s first four-star General Max informed me. How successful the late General had been as a farmer I can’t say, except that the metal frames of several large polytunnels lay naked in the neighbouring fields. His surviving wife had no interest in the farming game and was building a school on the other side of the main road (Harare-Bulawayo).

“I’m going to cordon off all this equipment to one side,” Max informed me, “and Mrs Zvinavashe can do whatever she wants with it.”

I was surprised that he wasn’t interested in negotiating with her to either buy or lease the tractor, which looked fresh and hardly used. Perhaps he knew something I didn’t or was being understandably cautious in the early days of this new arrangement.

“I’m going to get all the equipment from another commercial farmer which has been lying unused in Harare for many years,” he said.

I was astounded to learn that the farmer in question was Hamish Turner, now resident in Australia, and the property on which the stuff was lying was the very property I had co-rented with my friend Fergus seventeen years prior, in the suburb of Mt Pleasant! Centred on it was an old, corrugated-roof house dating back sixty or seventy years, allegedly the original farmhouse in the area. Later the area became a prominent suburb in northern Harare, today dotted with houses and shopping centres. What I remembered most about the place, other than the house itself, were the piles of irrigation pipes and other farm paraphernalia, in addition to several old land rovers parked in one corner of the yard.

“No way. So, you’re inheriting all old Hamish’s farm stuff,” I exclaimed. “How did you manage that?”

Once again, the answer lay in the convoluted relationships between members of our family and others in the so-called white community. Hamish was a step-brother to Steen, his mother’s third husband, the one with which she seems to have finally settled down for the long term. Today, the house is occupied by another friend of mine, Richard, married within the last five years and father to a little girl.

Back in the present, Max and Lauren gave me a quick tour of their house-to-be. They were renovating an existing building, allegedly little more than a cattle-shed for the previous twenty years or so. While keeping the shell of the building, they had knocked down several internal walls and put a ceiling beneath the corrugated asbestos roof, for obvious reasons. A concrete slab had been thrown down which would encompass the open-plan living room and kitchen, and outside a sprinkler was irrigating the incipient lawn.

“It was a complete wilderness out there,” Lauren told me with a laugh. “We had to cut and burn the bushes and thicket to make space for a garden,” indicating beyond the perimeter fence to where the remnants of the dried bush had been pushed back. I remarked on their good fortune to have several lovely trees, a spreading Natal Mahogany amongst them.

They would renovate the house as cheaply as they possibly could, being mindful of all their outgoing expenses at this stage of the development of the farm. However, in my mind’s eye I could see the farm and garden blooming in the years ahead. Abundant groundwater coupled with the flat terrain and deep soils suggested that they could make a success of whatever they wanted to grow. One edge of the farm was defined by the main Bulawayo-Harare Rd, another by the flanking hills of the Lake Chivero National Park, of which I had fond memories from growing up.

In-between the farm and the city centre, the intervening suburbs were rapidly developing and urbanising. It was the first time I had driven that route for fifteen years or more – although I passed through on public transport on previous visits from abroad. However, to drive a particular road is to appreciate all its various aspects: the state of the tarmac; the development of the adjacent businesses, houses and industry; the intersections and traffic circles; and the quality of one’s fellow drivers.

While the road itself was in reasonably good shape for most of the way the same could not be said of the drivers! The commuter omnibuses as well as the private cars being used for the same purpose are a law unto themselves. The commuter buses had always pushed the limits of the law, but now they did so with apparent impunity, as they did everywhere: driving on both the inside and outside of queues of cars, backed up at intersections. As with elsewhere in the city, the taxis and commuters and those with the biggest cars – pick-up trucks, SUV’s and the like – simply pushed and bullied their way to the front of the queue.

One further note, on Lake Chivero National Park, which speaks volumes about the state of the nation. The lake has long been the principal source of municipal water for the City of Harare. That is to say, to those limited parts of the city which are still supplied. Many parts of the northern suburbs have not received municipal water for the last twenty years, perhaps longer. Latterly, the water in the lake has become highly polluted by raw effluent discharged from the proximal townships like Glen Norah.

In a fascinating talk delivered by Mrs Julia Perini of Birdlife Zimbabwe on the wetlands of Harare, she mentioned how Lake Chivero has become significantly shallower due to siltation. I imagine this has also limited its ability to absorb the raw sewage as well. It all came to a head quite recently when the anoxic conditions prevailing in the lake coupled with the high level of nitrates led to a bloom of toxic cyanobacteria. Very sadly, four or five rhinoceros, an endangered species, died from drinking the contaminated lake water. The survivors have been relocated to other Parks and Reserves.

Probably not many people realise it, but Harare is built on its water source. It is underlain by an extensive network of interlinked wetlands which sustain life above and supply the aquifers below. Laws to protect these wetlands from development, exploitation and agriculture are being circumvented or ignored, out of expediency to the needs of the public or via corruption. I have highlighted the “one law for thee, another for thou,” in my video on the GNP (following this post). Boreholes are drilled deeper and deeper (currently averaging 140m according to Julia) and dams and watercourses now run dry. Again, I refer to my firsthand observations in Greystone Park.

On a brighter note, my stay at Ant’s place revealed an area very close to my heart, a nature sanctuary of sorts. Once more, the video I made does more to explain the beauty and rarity of such a place, than I can do in words (see below). That said, I’ll try!

For as long as I can remember growing up, I was aware of the fact that the bulk of the city lay in one direction (to the west) while farmland and open countryside lay in the opposite direction (to the east). With my brothers and a few mates we made forays into this ill-defined fringe area – along the Mubvinsi River and the neighbouring grasslands – although our mothers prohibited us from sleeping out, except on the one occasion they allowed us  to camp on a smallholding by prior arrangement.

Glen Helen Way demarcated a boundary beyond which I felt some sort of trepidation. Perhaps it was a mental thing, but the rank grass and riverine thickets made for hard going. In addition, there were boundary fences, sometimes marked by gum trees, and the occasional squatter living rough down by the river. I was vaguely aware of a farm belonging to a Mr Newmarch which swept down into the valley from the terminal end of Carrick Creagh Rd. On this visit to Ant’s I would get to walk and explore both the river and the adjacent hillside.

You see, he’d lived in this area since the early 1980s and knew all the adjacent land-owners. One of them was a naturalised Englishman who owned a fifteen-hectare plot extending on it western edge from Carrick Creagh Rd down to the Mubvinsi River below, and along the crest of a ridge across to its eastern boundary. From above it forms a lopsided triangle extending to the southwest with its northern apex at Carrick Creagh Rd. He had later, according to Ant, been compelled to sell it to Mrs Grace Mugabe, wife of the late president, Robert Mugabe. She is a significant player in the real estate market in and around Harare.

A few months earlier the place had allegedly been overrun by squatters. They had been expelled by Mai Mugabe, or representatives thereof. What her intentions are I have no idea, except that it is about as wild an area of land in eastern Harare as you’re likely to find in this day and age. I was told by Ant that I might encounter a security guard at the main gate called Prince. I was advised to give him a dollar for ease of access. It proved unnecessary: neither Prince nor anyone else materialised.

In the several walks I’ve taken subsequently I’ve seen upward of forty species of birds including franklin (spurfowl), guineafowl, buzzards and goshawks. On my most recent walk with Ant we even saw a pair of duiker, a variety of small antelope, or perhaps klipspringers. We only got a flash of greyish hide as the dogs pursued them across the path and into a thicket of grass and bushes.

I hadn’t seen antelope in the valley since I was a young boy. Even Ant professed that he hadn’t seen any in the last decade or more, so it was a special sighting. Judging by the occasional pile of faeces, rich in hair and fragments of bones there are other creatures inhabiting that area too. Up on the ridge Ant pointed out an extended spur of rocks beneath which there were several caves and crevasses. Allegedly, in the not-so-distant past a pair of leopards would sun themselves on these very rocks. I have an old oil painting of a hillside much like this one which I always thought of as the Umwindsi/Mubvinsi Valley. Take a look and judge for yourself.

In one of my earlier posts, I mentioned an elderly man who lived next door by the name of Tom van Graan. He was born somewhere close to the beginning of the twentieth century and could recall a time when herds of buffalo and antelope roamed this very valley, a time when the modern city was only a decade or two old, and probably only a nucleus of early structures and early habitations fifteen kilometres hence at the foot of a rocky hill known today as The Kopje, an Afrikaans translation of the words. Old Tom is long gone, as is that version of the early city, but I think he’d be pleased to see this remnant of the valley as he would have known it back then, in the 1910’s or early 1920’s.

My hope is that Mai Mugabe will consider the preserving this area for posterity, perhaps by creating a nature sanctuary. I’m going to give this some thought. What do you think?

This one I made for my kids:

I recently visited an exclusive Chinese retail centre on Glenara Ave, about 4 or 5 Kms from where I’ve been staying. The range of products was quite astounding.

A testament to how little I have REALLY travelled in my own country, only for the second time in living memory did I travel the main road through to Centenary in Mashonaland Central Province, about 150 km north of Harare. I had travelled to Mazowe Dam many times in the past but beyond that I could count the number of times on one hand. The only time I had gone as far Centenary had been to visit the lovely Mavuradonha Wilderness Area when I was still at high school, and that was about thirty years prior.

Mashonaland Central spans an area of about 28, 000 km2 with a fairly sparse population density of just under 50 people/km2 (Wiki). Compare this to Harare Province, spanning the area of the capital, which covers only 872 km2 but has almost 2800 people/km2 as of 2022. Therefore, Harare’s population is some 3/4 again that of Mashonaland Central despite being 32x smaller!

So, as you might expect of a province with a relatively low population density, there were plenty of open spaces en route to our destination, Oban Farm. I was in the company of an old friend, Keith Andrews, at sixty-two years, a relatively young patron of Athol Evans Home in southern Harare. Keith had no family left in Harare and his only brother, Neil, was deceased. Fortunately for him, his father had the foresight to set up a trust from which the monthly fees for the retirement home were paid.

He received a very modest $50 pocket money or less per month he told me, which he usually spent in-house on snacks/haircuts etc. He had sold his car previously so wasn’t able to leave the premises, except when someone like me came along. I was obliged to speak to the Chief Matron, simply referred to as Matron, in order to secure an exit pass for Keith.

“No-one’s ever offered to take him out for a holiday,” Matron told me over the phone. “Who exactly are you?”

I put on my warmest voice and it seemed to mellow the old duck.

“You’ll have to put his eyedrops in. Twice in the morning and twice in the evening”.

“No problem,” I informed her.

Therefore, on Sunday 18 May at around 1300 hours Keith and I were on our way northwards in a modest, unassuming Toyota Carina (kind thanks to my friend Roy Durand for availing me of the vehicle). It was a pleasant drive, firstly down an escarpment towards Mazowe Dam, along which road agency workers were attempting to expand the previously single carriage road into a dual-lane highway. This had been achieved as far as the large traffic circle which connected the new parliament at Mt Hampden to the Mazowe Rd. Most people from my generation still think of this formerly quiet stretch of highway as the Golden Stairs Rd, and it may even maintain the name officially. I’m not really sure. Certainly, you won’t find it on Google Maps.

I cast my mind back to the 00’s when I would quite regularly cycle out along that road as far as Mazowe Dam and back, sometimes with a group of other local road cyclists, once or twice with my friend Matthew. No chance of doing so this time around without risking one’s neck. Not long after coming back to Zim I’d heard that a recreational cyclist had been killed in a collision with a combi (taxi) somewhere along this road, just to underscore the risks associated with the sport today. Tragic.

The hills flanking Mazowe Dam are very scenic: the Iron Mask range on one side topped by banded ironstone, and the jumbled granite hills of the Mazowe Botanical Reserve on the other. We turned off just beyond the dam towards the farming districts of Concession, Mvurwi and Centenary, in that progression. For the most part it alternates between a landscape of granite kopjes (jumbled boulders of various heights) and gomos (hills), with flatter areas more prospective for agriculture. The only farm of any size I could make out was Forrester which appeared to span a sizeable area, probably well over a hundred hectares. Desiccated maize stood ready for harvesting, while other fields showed signs of winter planting, though of what I couldn’t say.

I’m going to post a little video of the return trip to give you an idea of the countryside through which we were driving, only in reverse!

After passing through Centenary itself, a small town, we needed to make two left turns before coming to the turnoff to Oban Farm, our destination. The view on the approach to that turnoff is very scenic. Distant granite hills are framed against a middle-ground occupied by a long stretch of water around which green farmland stretches up into the flanking woodlands, as per the header image to this post.

My friend Bryant had extended the invitation to us to farm-sit for the week. Her husband, Derek, managed the day-to-day operations of the farm, representing a banana-growing consortium based in Harare, but with operations elsewhere in the country. They were taking a fishing holiday in Chewore on the Zambezi River, perhaps a similar distance to Harare but in a north-westerly direction. We were entrusted with locking up the house in the evening and providing some loving company to their surrogate children: six dogs and seven cats! One of these cats was a mere kitten which we kept in the master bedroom most of the day when were elsewhere.

It would be easiest to share the video I put together from various clips rather than labour on with the text. After all, if a picture speaks a thousand words, how much more so a video?! I’m proud to say that my skills with the video-editing software, Capcut, have progressed in leaps and bounds, and I’m quite proud to share the following videos, and somewhat ashamed of my earlier unedited efforts (with the exception of the visit to Lake Conemmara in Nyanga).

As far as I am concerned, the main attractions of the stay were being able to enjoy the natural environment, alongside a cursory look at the farming operations. As I elaborate upon in the video, I really did aspire to be a commercial farmer in my childhood and teenage years. Of course it is one thing to visit a farm for a day or a weekend, and quite another to run it. That said, I imagine it could be a very satisfying way of life, given all the attendant risks and challenges. As most of the white commercial farmers discovered in the almighty upheaval which succeeded the implementation of the Fast Track and Resettlement Scheme of 25 years ago.

The Dollars’ Farm, Oban, is about a quarter of its former extent. The former owner, Mr Dollar has passed on, but his wife remains on the farm with one of their children. I had the pleasure of speaking with her for half an hour or so. She is hopeful that she will be compensated for the subdivision of the farm into four separate entities and it seems the issuance of new title deeds for the subdivisions, hers included, will finally be forthcoming. The current government is allegedly keen to resolve the issue of land compensation as a precondition to receiving infrastructure and development loans from the IMF and World Bank.

Another benefit of being on the farm was entertaining my love of bird-watching. I took several early morning walks in the miombo and grassland south of the farmstead and along the edge of the dam and probably saw upwards of thirty different species. There were a few smaller, so-called LBJs (little brown jobs) which I could not identify, but I got a fix on most of them thanks to my very handy Merlin App supplemented by an old edition of Newman’s Birds of Southern Africa (1992).

Lacking a camera other than that built into my phone, I have pioneered a way of getting close-ups of distant subjects. Nothing like the sort of photos I see on Facebook posted by amateurs and professionals alike, but satisfactory. My technique is crude and simple: I simply hold up one barrel of my binoculars and press the camera aperture of my mobile phone to the ocular of the binocular barrel. It takes a bit of practise to coordinate getting the subject in focus while pressing the camera button, but it works after a fashion. Here are the results for two larger birds:

Again, I am proud to present my cinematic efforts in form of a video to highlight the natural attributes of the farm:

Like almost everywhere in the world today, there is a competition for natural resources and unprecedented challenges lie ahead. In the instance of Oban Farm, the land resettlement initiatives of the Zimbabwe government over the last quarter century, have had a direct impact on the operations of the farm which I did not elaborate on in the first of the two videos above. Besides the reduction in absolute size from over 1, 000 hectares to something closer to 250 ha, the newly apportioned subdivisions now host resettled farmers who have families to feed and operations to run. Mrs Dollar implied that her husband had done his part to help where he could.

The main problem that both Derek and the farm foreman, Ahmadu, a sturdy, amicable Muslim of Malawian ancestry, alluded to, was that of theft of the banana fruits. This was usually a seasonal issue, correlated with the period after the harvest of the tobacco, when the crop had been sold and the proceeds spent. Policing the 78 ha currently under cultivation is no mean feat!

Another issue, indirectly related to the resettlement program, was aging pubic infrastructure, principally provision of electricity by ZESA, the Zimbabwe power authority. We did not have any power for the majority of our stay, having been cut off, allegedly for lack of payment. When the power did finally come back the following Saturday, Ahmadu was loathe to switch on the ZESA-reliant irrigation system, on which the plantations are dependent in the dry months, until he could be satisfied that the power supply was stable.

“We burnt out four motors last year because of low voltage and it cost us a lot of money,” he told me and Derek confirmed it.

From an environmental perspective probably the biggest challenge exists within the immediate environment of the plantations i.e. the woodlands which extend up and over the flanking hills. They are being deforested at quite an alarming rate by small-scale tobacco farmers who use the dried wood to fire the flues in the tobacco barns, used to dry the harvested tobacco leaves. They are allegedly contracted to supply the big tobacco corporations which operate in the country.

These same companies are allegedly charged with provision of coal (of which we have abundant resources) to fire these flues, but it is inadequate in amount, according to Derek, and sold for profit rather than used for the intended purpose. With the proceeds they can buy other provisions – either cheaper hardwood from the surrounding woodlands, sold per chord, or simply used to sustain them while they harvest the wood directly. We saw evidence of this a thirty minute walk from the homestead, where we found a Mr Mbofana and member of his family eking out an existence on a hilltop area overlooking the farm.

The phenomenon is not new, although I was just learning about it. It doesn’t take a scientist to deduce that harvesting slow-growing trees year in and year out without a long-term plan is not sustainable. Trees like the mountain acacia, Brachystegia glaucescens, the stumps and limbs of which I’ve photographed above, take decades to grow to maturity. It’s sad and I’m not sure what can be done to prevent it. Already, observing the hills surrounding the farm, one immediately notices the dearth of big trees. Even scanning the hills through my low-powered 10x binoculars from a distance reveals old stumps. If you prefer to take your information in via YouTube, I’ve cobbled together another video especially for you:

Well, that’s a lot of information to absorb so I’ll leave it there. A muchos gracias if you’ve read and watched through to the end!

We stayed just outside the boundary of the Park at a cottage situated on Lake Connemara, the largest of three man-made dams near World’s View and the renowned Troutbeck Hotel. I was accompanying my two brothers and their respective families.

Nyanga is a place which featured prominently in my childhood and adolescent years. I caught my first fish there (a rainbow trout), and had many memorable outings with my friend Ben and his mum, Barbie, ensconced in a cosy National Parks lodge at either Mare or Rhodes Dams. We also went there as a family, a little less frequently. The one thing that became a fixture was fly-fishing. The dams were generally well stocked and we often caught the bag limit of 5 or 6 fish.

I hadn’t been trout fishing for twenty years, but Dan had been smitten by the bug once again, and was very involved with fly-fishing, going so far as to involve himself in the breeding and release of hatchlings into some of the major rivers and streams in the area.

Besides fishing, I walked the perimeter of the dam and enjoyed the abundant birdlife and lush vegetation and grassland flanking the largest of the lakes. Remarkably, it didn’t look like anything had changed since I’d last visited fifteen years earlier.

With reference to the video above I apologise for my geographic confusion: Connemara is in Ireland NOT Scotland!

While it was fun to reconnect with family and do a spot of fishing it would have been nice to spend a few more days up there. Ivan’s son, Hugo, especially enjoyed the canoe and kayaks one could take out on the water. He was far more interesting in having a paddle than going walking or fishing!

The birdlife was prolific along the edges of the dam: bronze sunbirds, pin-tailed whydah birds, warblers and boubous all frequented the exotic bushes and shrubs, as well as the pockets of shrub and grassland in-between. It was good to reacquaint myself with them after so many years of being away. I loved birds and birding when I was a young(er) boy. Another joy of being back hoe in Zimbabwe is rediscovering the various bird books, children’s tales and other books with my name inscribed within the covers, on the occasion of a birthday or at Christmas time.

The journey to-and-from Harare was also interesting, in so far as much had changed since I’d last travelled that hallowed high way. For a start, the road has been widened to a dual-carriageway for the first thirty or forty kilometres, before reverting to a single lane highway for the rest of the way. This is a big deal because the urban growth in this region stretching out east of Harare has been rapid over the last two decades or so.

Here is a video of the area in the vicinity of Ruwa on the dual cariageway stretch, once a rather sleepy outlying township, now a thriving growth point with much roadside commerce:

The next major urban centre between Harare and Nyanga is Marondera. It was the town where my father grew up. It is still very much recognisable although the painted sign above his father’s general store is long gone and many new shops have emerged. It appears that a renewed farming sector has boosted the flow of money and commerce to the area.

Another forty-five minutes to an hour in the direction of Mutare brings you to the town of Rusape, where the roadside informal sector is particularly prevalent. I heard it alleged that the wholesalers and some of the retailers in the buildings set back from the street have been unable to compete with these pop-up stalls and tables selling everything from bananas to battery chargers.

This is possibly one of the biggest challenges the incumbent government faces: how to incentivise the formal economy and entice people to participate in it from the informal sector. The advantages of not paying taxes or rents apparently outweighs whatever advantages a formal status would bring, and that has to change if the government wants to maintain a consumer tax base and protect legal businesses.

As you will have gathered from previous posts, I recently regained my Zimbabwean citizenship, and with it a certain sense of pride and belonging that I had, for a long time, done my best to ignore, worse still, bury.

And there it is: My nice shiny new Zimbabwe passport flanked by my old ID card on the left (with a big A for Alien) and my new card on the right (with a big C for Citizen). It feels good to have The Green Mamba back in my travel pouch.

So where else have I been in the intervening weeks and days? What else have I achieved?

For one thing I’ve done what people have expected of me, and quite frankly what you must do when living here, which is network. I’ve talked to recruiters, I’ve talked to schools, and I’ve talked to hoteliers.

I had an offer of part-time work from the Greek secondary school, Hellenic Academy, opened in the late 00s. Perhaps I’ve mentioned this already, I’m not sure. But part-time doesn’t pay the rent in this place so I declined. My friend Cath is the administrator for the Association of Trust Schools which co-ordinates the activities of all the major Private Schools: St Georges (my almer mater), Arundel, Chisipite, The Dominican Convent, St John’s College etc. I saw her yesterday at the local farmer’s market. She shook her head and apologised for the lack of interest.

“Going direct to the department is the best way,” she proclaimed, and promised to keep trying on my behalf.

I’ve also resolved to start looking at international jobs again and have immediately had some interest from Central Asia. That’s where my friend Sofian is working. It is best to keep all options on the table.

Thanks again to those of you who have donated to me financially. It has really helped tie me over while I make onward plans. I’d like to visit friends and family in RSA but I don’t think it’s possible right now.

Livelihoods:

So, let’s return to Harare, my place of residence – what’s new and what’s not. The material changes aside of which I’ve said much already, the discrepancies in wealth continue to gnaw away at me. Not a day goes by when I don’t see tramps sidling down the edges of Enterprise Rd (yes, I’m still calling it that) with woven plastic sacks over their shoulders while luxury cars and 4x4s zoom past in either direction.

Yes, everyone is hustling for a dollar, even the tramps.

“Boss, please can you help me,” came a familiar refrain from a down-and-out sort intercepting me en route to the vegetable store.

Allegedly diabetic and in need of medication, I’d heard this story before. I’d previously done my best to help Mr Robert Dambudzo, similarly afflicted by various ailments, begging assistance from the roadside, but his story kept changing and in the end I said enough and blocked him when he phoned me one time too many.

The funny thing there was that he materialised at a bus stop in Chisipite whilst I was awaiting a taxi or bus out to Mutoko. He was as surprised as I was. Dressed in neatly ironed trousers, a collared shirt and decent shoes, he was a far cry from the man of six weeks prior. I bore him no malice and he greeted me respectfully. He asked me where I was going and nodded thoughtfully when I told him.

“How is your leg, Robert?” I asked him.

“It is better boss,” he replied.

He waved me farewell and without looking back he settled down on a seat in front of the prefab wall of the roadside property and paid for a plate of sadza and gravy from a woman cooking on an open fire.

I hope you can better understand the complexity of dealing with people and their needs in the current economic climate. And to be quite fair the vast majority of people do not stop me and ask for help while I walk these paths and roads. Most go about their business with barely a glance in my direction. For those walking at a more leisurely pace, or the vendors by their little stalls and cooler boxes of soft drinks, a friendly greeting is usually exchanged.

In the instance of the beggar by the vegetable store I bought him a loaf of bread, a few oranges and a couple of eggs.

“What about ten kg of mealie-meal and some cooking oil boss?” he implored me.

I declined. We are talking ten dollars or more that I couldn’t afford. But he was persistent and when he saw that I wasn’t to be pushed he thanked me while looking over my shoulder and continued on his way.

The Stables Market:

As for the Stables farmers’ market, so-called because it is located by the horse stables at the Borrowdale Racecourse, this is a cash economy for local artisans, home produce and green grocers. You can find all sorts of lovely creations from hand-crafted rugs to polished minerals (we have many deposits) and colourful curios. The food is also enticing: chicken on the spit, wood-fired pizza, brownies and fudge, pure honey, biltong, Dutch waffles (made by a genuine Dutch lady and her Zimbabwean husband) and much more besides.

I made this video at the end of day. While it does not do justice to the range of commerce it at least provides an idea.

At most retail outlets one can pay by card for purchases, but here, cash is king. An informal economy, much like those hawking their wares from the roadside, I can’t imagine that any of them will declare their sales to the tax authorities. Renting a table is relatively cheap at $20 for the day

Sadly, I couldn’t afford anything much more than a beer from the local drinks stall. Yes, it sucks to be cash-poor in a place like Harare today, but socially-speaking, it was fabulous. Trestle tables and benches were laid out beneath awnings and by 9.30 they were almost at capacity, only emptying out slowly four or five hours later.

The truth if the matter is that I made a point of using cash for the first couple of months on my brother’s advice to avoid bank charges, but ultimately the convenience of not having to carry cash, coupled with the impossibility of finding small change, has convinced me to go back to using my foreign debit cards.

Retail:

For those not bold enough to use a runner from South Africa to bring in goods at an affordable price, the next best thing is Caterwise, a little further down Enterprise Rd. More like a packing shed or warehouse than a retail outlet, it offers a selection of dry goods and a few perishables, the vast majority imported from neighbouring South Africa. Nonetheless you can find some local products like ground Arabica coffee from the Tanganda Tea Company (surprisingly good),  Olivine refined vegetable oil and Changamire peanut butter.

It’s amazing how quickly word gets around when somewhere more affordable opens up. I’ve seen scores of people there, some known personally, some not. I guess it’s good for the consumer to have more competition, although certain things are expensive wherever you go. So-called luxury goods like ice-cream and imported chocolate will cost you several dollars for the very least amount. My diet is simplified but quite adequate.

Infrastructure:

Now that the rains have ended, I see pothole repairs being carried out in earnest. Not using asphalt mind you, but with bricks, rubble and gravel. In the last instance especially the difference is immediately evident. Driving is no longer a case of bouncing over ruts and descending into craters on the worst affected stretches. Oftentimes a young man, sometimes two, will be seated in the middle of the road, near a filled hole, begging contributions from the passing traffic. No job is too trivial or inconsequential for these modern-day entrepreneurs.

Six weeks ago or so I lauded the efforts of our local council after they filled in all the many holes in my street. I mentioned it to my brother a few days later.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he retorted with a frown, “it was the local residents who paid for that.”

So what do people get for their rates? Oftentimes no municipal water, certainly not in the northern suburbs, no road repairs and no rubbish collection. Piles of garbage accumulate on street corners and many people have taken to burning their trash, although private garbage collection is now a “thing.”

As my friend Thomas, an ex-Zimbabwean now resident in yonder Amsterdam, commented, “it seems as though you are living in the Wild West.”

Resilience:

And yet, for all its problems and corruption, Zimbabwe still maintains a small but resilient middle class, of all ethnicities. I witnessed it when listening to the Eistedford Highlights Concert at the Hellenic Academy last month, when I went on a birding walk with the Mashonaland Bird Society, while walking around the Stables Market, and while reading all the event listings on one of the many WhatsApp groups promoting local cultural and musical events.

Zimbabwe is an incredibly resilient place. I think it’s principally a combination of the following things: proximity to South Africa and its industrial productivity, a well-educated middle class, both black, white and mixed/Asian, and a very large diasporan populace remitting large amounts of foreign currency.

As regards the last one, The Insider, an online Zimbabwean publication, reports that,

As of 2024, Zimbabwe received approximately US$2.2 billion in diaspora remittances, marking a significant increase from US$1.8 billion in 2023.  These remittances accounted for about 16.2% of the country’s total foreign currency receipts, underscoring their vital role in Zimbabwe’s economy.

Almost half of that is coming from South Africa, underscoring the mutually beneficial, some might say symbiotic, relationship between the two countries. We provide cheap and plentiful labour, investing in the local South African economy and boosting productivity and revenue, whilst the remittances finance building homes and supporting families in Zimbabwe. It has been this way for the past twenty-five years and it is unlikely to change any time soon.

The Future:

“And so the predatory elites are there to stay,” says my friend Thomas.

In a sense he is correct, but in another sense, not. You see, the old political class is getting older – our President is 82 – and their children do not have the Liberation Struggle credentials of their forefathers.

While ED may have pledged to step down in 2028 after his constitutional two 5-year terms of office, there are rumours that his party, Zanu PF, want him to stay on until 2030.

He may do so and he may try to continue until the following elections in 2033, at which time he would be ninety. There is precedent in Africa: Museveni of Uganda, still in office since 1986, having scrapped age and term limits; Mobutu of the DRC, Bouteflika of Algeria; and, most strikingly, Robert Mugabe, his predecessor, who ruled for 37 years until being deposed by ED and the army in 2017.

But times are also a-changing, and the appetite for democratic change has increased rather than diminished down the years. Rulers for life are no longer in vogue, and as the Liberation Struggle recedes ever further back, beyond the memory (and appreciation) of the struggling youth, the clamour for change and representative democracy becomes ever louder.