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Welcome to Zimbabwe - Please will you go home now
Sean Christie, Mail and Guardian (SA)
December 23, 2010

http://www.mg.co.za/article/2010-12-23-welcome-to-zimbabwe-please-will-you-go-home-now

A bunch of newspapers that have denigrated the Zimbabwe situation for years have recently been asking a rather righteous question: whether it isn't time, as tourists, to go back.

It's a question that lags some way behind Zimbabwean Minister of Tourism Walter Mzembi's latest revenue figures; those show a surge from earnings of US$560-million in 2009 to US$770-million in 2010, which puts his sector on a par with mining.

As a regular traveller to Zimbabwe I was thinking about writing an appraisal of these figures, when a helpful email from Zimbabwean author Douglas Rogers dropped into my inbox. Subject line: join me for The Last Resort Zimbabwe safari.

"Friends, readers, critics, explorers and spies," it began, 'if you've seen one elephant, you've seen them all. This African trip is different from all the others. I've teamed up with US/UK-based safari company Aardvark to guide a 12-day tour to Zimbabwe next year that includes meeting all the characters in The Last Resort. Or at least the savoury ones."

The Last Resort, for those who haven't encountered Rogers's delightful book, is a true-to-life account of his parents' efforts to cling on to their tourist resort and home in the country's eastern highlands by any number of colourful means, including growing cannabis and allowing the bar and lodge to become a brothel and alcoholic refuge for illicit diamond dealers from the nearby Marange diamond fields.

The book is an excellent case study of the indirect effect land reform had on tourism enterprises in the first decade of the century, but history moves fast and it is Rogers's idea for a gonzo-style literary safari that makes a more relevant comment on the sector's current challenges and prospects.

On the one hand the enthusiastic reception of his idea affirms the minister's claims of a revival in overseas interest in Zimbabwe. On the other hand, the very reason for the tour - to keep Drifters Lodge from going the way of every other Zimbabwean small-to-medium-scale tourist enterprises in the past 10 years - demonstrates how incomplete the recovery is.

The struggle

The continuing, almost impossible struggle to survive of the few remaining privately owned tourism enterprises is something the minister has not mentioned in his end-of-year statements. But that's the art of the sale. Rogers is guilty of a bit of selective salesmanship himself - after promises of encounters with the eccentric settings and characters in his book, his pitch goes on to say, "Rest easy, you will also get to see Victoria Falls, and go on a proper [italics mine] safari to check out that elephant."

The implication seems to be that, far from the madness of the eastern highlands, tourist meccas like Hwange National Park and Victoria Falls are still serving up "proper" tourism experiences. While this is true to the extent that a trickle of tourists continued to move through these sites even during the very worst of times, it would be wrong to overlook the fact that the rigours of economic collapse didn't fundamentally upend life in these destinations, too.

An illustration: I remember being terribly excited to find the doors of the Wimpy bar in Victoria Falls still open in the tumultuous period after the 2008 elections, before the elections authority released the results.

"Sorry sir, we have no cheese burgers," I was told when I stabbed at the laminated menu I'd been handed. "A plain burger then."

"Ei, we have nothing on this menu," said the waitress, taking the menu from me and shaking it until a grubby A4 page fell out. "We have only these things."

On the parallel menu were sadza and beans, sadza and kariba bream, sadza and beef stew, sadza and chicken stew, grilled tigerfish and smoked barbel.

The Wimpy looked like a Wimpy but wasn't; Victoria Falls looked like the boomtown of the Nineties but wasn't.

Today tourists returning to Victoria Falls will find that burgers are once again being flipped in the Wimpy kitchen, but those previously acquainted with the river frontage above the falls will be disappointed to find that brand-new lodges and tented camps peek through the foliage at every turn.

'Roar of a lion'

Old-time rivermen shake their heads and rub their fingers together meaningfully if you ask how such developments came to fruition. They'll also tell you that poaching is the reason you're not seeing much game. At night, if you're camped on the riverbank, you're twice as likely to hear the report of a rifle as the roar of a lion.

To first-timers, though, the grandeur and bounty of the area is such that the depletions of the decade are unlikely to register. I am reminded of the anecdote of a well-known Victoria Falls raconteur, who was asked by some wealthy Texan clients to set up a five-course dinner deep in the bush.

The operator drove the Texans to the outskirts of Victoria Falls town and coasted in broad circles for a while to ensure they were decently disoriented, before coming upon a large clearing in the bush where the tables were neatly laid out among browsing warthog and tooting Scops owls. In all respects the Texans' expectations of the African bush were satisfied, when in actual fact they had unwittingly dined on the sixth fairway of the Elephant Hills golf course.

But the forgiving naiveté of some travellers aside, if the recovery in tourism is to continue apace the sector various products will have to be scrutinised and, in most cases, drastically overhauled.

In the Chimanimani Mountains to the east of the country, for example, one shares the trails with gold panners heading for the rivers on the Mozambique side of the range, and the sleeping caves are littered with their leavings. In Gonarezhou National Park, which forms part of the Limpopo Transfrontier National Park, the government has allocated small parcels of land to approximately 700 families, and one sees no game as a result.

In Hwange National Park, coal mining and the development of access roads ruins any sense of sanctity, and game viewers earlier in 2010 might well have chanced upon an animal holding area established by presidential decree, for pairs of endangered animals destined for a North Korean zoo. Fortunately "Noah's ark", as Mugabe's "gift" to the Koreans was dubbed by the press, was undone by lobbying.

Minister Mzembi is not easily drawn into a discussion of such specifics, though he acknowledges that tourism's products have not seen any development in 10 years, which leads him to conclude that capital is the sector's most pressing problem.

"As you know we are a cash society and there's very little money anywhere," he recently told the Mail & Guardian. "What we need now to get the sector back to where it was is investment; not much, because when inflation was at 241-million percent and destroying other sectors we were invoicing in forex. I'd say we need between US$200-300-million to get back to the same number of bed nights and the same standard of service as we offered before."

'Mixed messages'

In pursuit of this crucial investment the government is sending out mixed messages, however. Until recently the Zimbabwean government was not obstructive to development within the tourism industry.

They encouraged investment to the extent that any foreigner could acquire up to 70% of a tourist business - a stipulation set by the Investment Authority and the Reserve Bank. Against this, however, has been the establishment of the Indigenisation and Economic Empowerment Act, which provides that the government will "endeavour" to ensure that no less than 51% of any company, in any business, is owned by indigenous Zimbabweans. There are many who believe that this single draconian law is holding back a much fuller recovery.

Mzembi is a determined leader who has worked hard to get American and European travel advisories lifted. At the same time, he clearly struggles to contain his impatience with Western expectations of his sector.

Take, for example, his comment to me when quizzed on a recent fracas with environmentalists regarding the establishment of a five-star restaurant in the Victoria Falls rainforest.

"Our loudest critics from the West would like to see the pristine nature of the Victoria Falls forest maintained, but they must obviously, on an opportunity-cost basis, first compensate us for doing so. Take what has happened at Niagara Falls, for example - a repositioning has taken place that has enabled operators to capitalise more fully on natural endowment. Here, because we have agreed to keep things pristine, we have to wait for a grant from UNESCO for maintaining Victoria Falls."

The following excerpt from a recent ministerial memo makes it clear that becoming less dependent on traditional Western markets is not just frustrated talk, but actual policy:

"Historically the tourism sector was a preserve of a minority sector [whites] of the society. Against this background tourism policy thus envisages diversification and a new initiative towards making tourism the catalyst for economic development. It will guide the opening up of the sector to new source markets, diversifying the product base and, above all, encourage participation by the majority of the Zimbabweans.'

Quite how the government intends "opening up the sector to new source markets" is unclear. Mzembi recently advocated the adoption of the yuan "alongside the South African rand and the United States dollar" as a recipe for attracting "nothing less than 100-million Chinese tourists by 2015?. But nowhere does he acknowledge as important the fact that almost all tourist infrastructure in Zimbabwe currently caters for Western tastes and expectations.

Case in point

I had an interesting chat with a black Zimbabwean electrician I met in a Hwange hide recently. Nelson Ghimire explained he was a big fan of the park, but casually lamented the fact that Zimbabweans tended to see animals as food and not as heritage. His wife, he said, slumbering in the car below us at that moment, was a case in point.

He saw no hope at all in encouraging Zimbabweans to visit their own parks, and in wondering why I was immediately reminded of both the poem that leads this article and of South African thinker Njabulo Ndebele's excellent essay "Game Lodges and Leisure Colonialists", in which he records feeling out of place in a colonial-style game lodge, and describes how this leads to feelings of solidarity with the black workers, though this too soon becomes problematic.

"As it [solidarity] plays itself out, you lose out on the quality of the service. When they think you're just friends, you don't get the service you paid for! As the days go by, you feel a sympathy for the animals being viewed. You get the sense that you should be there, being viewed alongside them. It's an existential quandary . . . In relation to other Africans you feel you're better off, but in a fundamental way, you're not."

Zimbabwean tourist authorities are clearly working up a sweat over some of these same existential quandaries, though no clear policy determinations have emerged. I had hoped that at the ruins of Great Zimbabwe, which the ruling party has in the past interpreted and reinterpreted so as to suit its ever-evolving character, I would get a clearer sense of what the purpose and future identity of Zimbabwean tourism might be, beyond mere money making.

Alas, my visit coincided with a power cut, and when the beefy soldier guarding the museum where the symbolic soapstone birds are kept under lock and key tried to fire up the generator, he stripped the cable clean off the pulley. Not to be done out of a tip, the museum guide hauled me around by torchbeam and actually delivered a very good and informative history of the ruins, though I suspect the bit where she motivated for the repatriation of the last remaining stone bird sculpture in the Cecil Rhodes collection at (Groote Schuur) must have been awkward in the face of failed basic services.

But an important observation remains to be made as far as the resurgence in tourism is concerned. Is Zimbabwe safe?

On my annual trip by car from Johannesburg to Harare I always brace for a gauntlet of police roadblocks but this time, pleasingly, these institutions had apparently moved on. I was stopped by police outside Masvingo, but only because a sergeant urgently required a ride to Chivhu, where he hoped to arrest a man who had stolen two bullocks.

"How long will it take to arrest the thief?" I asked, tickled.

The 27-year-old replied with great conviction that the criminal would be in custody shortly after lunch. His informers were waiting at the Chivhu police station, and would take him directly to the thief. They would then, cop and robber, hitch a ride back to Masvingo "with a well-wisher", whereupon the sergeant fully expected the magistrate to hand down the mandatory stock-theft sentence of nine hard years.

The sergeant had hardly concluded this startling assertion when a figure dashed out of a thicket beside the road ahead and held up his palm.

"Ah, sheet, you have been caught speeding," said the sergeant, who had time to faithfully mutter: "Take your money out of your wallet and say you have nothing", before the higher-ranking cop leaned in with an apparatus not seen on this stretch of road for a decade, the small ticker screen glowing red with the figure 121. "This is a 60 zone, and you have incurred a fine of $20. Please follow me," said the officer.

Follow I did, but I also adhered to the sergeant's advice and the hot-and- bothered speed cop eventually grew bored and let me go. The sergeant earned himself a fried chicken lunch that day and I learned that both official friendliness and effective policing endure in Zimbabwe in spite of what press reports can lead one to think.

That was the beginning of the trip, however. By the end of it, I realised I had gleaned too much positivism from too small a puddle of guts. Almost every one I spoke to believed that Zanu-PF was getting ready to unleash another wave of beatings and killings ahead of the 2011 elections. Zimbabwe War Veteran Forum leader Wilfred Mhanda quite elegantly described to me why it is inevitable.

"Now that vast mineral wealth has been discovered in the east of the country, we have a situation where the Zanu-PF leadership has so much to lose, in the form of all this mineral wealth, and on the other hand they have nothing to lose, no legacy, no human rights standing, nothing. So now you tell me whether the election is going to be free and fair?"

For this and other reasons mentioned, and many I have not, I do not fully believe in Minister Mzembi's vision of a tourism revival powered by locals and new markets, which he expects will contribute 15% of GDP by 2015.

For now, and for the next year at least, Zimbabwe (the country as a whole, not just the north-western corner from which one can come and go by plane experiencing nothing of the country's broader problems) will remain a magnet mainly to that breed of traveller who, like Rogers, is stimulated by life carrying on in beautiful settings regardless of tyranny and ruin.

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