The Last Resort Read online

  Now, those days seemed a lifetime away. John Matinde and Thomas Mapfumo regularly denounced Mugabe from their respective exiles in Britain and America. Mapfumo now lived in Eugene, Oregon, and I’d interviewed him once, too, over the phone at 4:00 pm New York time while he sat in a bathtub and railed against the president who had betrayed a nation.

  As for Matinde, John Agoneka beamed: ‘What a DJ! He would play all the greats!’

  The radio aerial was strung up in the twisted branch of a msasa tree above us, but the batteries were getting weak and the reception was hopeless. The government scrambled the signal, too – it was like trying to listen to a Second World War broadcast in a bunker during the Blitz.

  One night, after we’d given up trying to get the signal to work, I was shocked when John Muranda pulled out a twist of newspaper filled with dried marijuana leaves and began to roll the fattest joint I’ve seen in my life. He used the pages of the Herald and the Manica Post, both government mouthpieces, as rolling paper. He had a whole pile of them next to him. So this was why John always had that slightly dazed look: he was stoned half the time.

  I picked up one of the newspapers. It had an absurd piece of propaganda on the war in the valley and the great ongoing success of the ‘agrarian revolution’: The area, which is known for its high agricultural productivity, has of late been turned into a political minefield, thanks to some gun-toting and bloodthirsty white commercial farmers. To most farmers, Odzi is like the biblical land of Canaan promised by God to the children of Israel. Some of the white farmers’ being of Boer origin speaks volumes. These white farmers know there is no life after Odzi and they cannot just leave it without a fight.

  I passed the page to John to smoke next.

  Mrs John sat on a reed mat laid out on the packed red dirt yard in front of the shack, her legs stretched out toward the fire, her head wrapped tightly in a bright red scarf. She looked like a shy, retiring grandmother. She turned out to be the biggest dopehead of us all. When handed the joint she would close her eyes, inhale for a minute until her face seemed about to explode, and then exhale in short bursts, like a puffing dragon, finally letting out a loud cackle with the last of the smoke, scattering the fruit bats from the trees. Her perfect white teeth flashed in the dark.

  ‘I am old woman,’ she coughed from behind billowing cumulus clouds in the gloom. ‘Dagga is good for my blood pressure.’

  I couldn’t help loving the woman.

  John Agoneka didn’t touch the weed, either, just as he didn’t drink. I asked him how he’d come to speak such good English, and he told me he’d taught himself by reading a dictionary in a library in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second-largest city, and from speaking to his older brother, who was a successful soapstone sculptor in Cape Town.

  As Mr and Mrs Muranda and I passed the joint between us, Agoneka told me how he used to take backpackers on daylong hikes up the Chikanga Mountains on the other side of the valley to see Bushman cave paintings and refuge ruins, stone sanctuaries where the Manyika used to hide from raiding Matabele war parties long before whites came to the valley. The hills also held the remains of ancient Shona gold-smelting works that dated back to their trade with Arabs and Portuguese on the East African coast as early as the seventeenth century.

  The name Mutare comes from the Shona for ‘place of metal’, and it was not farmland but gold – dreams of El Dorado and the jewels of Ophir – that first attracted British pioneers to the valley in 1891. It was no coincidence that Cecil John Rhodes, the great British imperialist and mining tycoon, founder of the De Beers corporation, who would give his name to this country and his money to the scholarship that would later send the likes of Bill Clinton and Kris Kristofferson to Oxford, first set foot in Rhodesia in this exact valley. Rhodes trekked in from Mozambique to oversee mineral contracts his emissaries had signed with the Manyika chief Mutasa, outmanoeuvering the Portuguese. It was 9 October 1891. There were already 160 gold reefs in the valley. Rhodes stayed only twenty-four hours, although he would later have a home in the Nyanga Mountains to the north that is still there today. He was thirty-eight years old, a self-made billionaire, prime minister of the Cape Colony, with an entire country soon to be named after him.

  I took a drag of the joint. I was about to turn thirty-seven. What the hell. I could still make my mark.

  The two Johns had an amazing grasp of much of this history, and I knew some of it myself, but mostly they spoke longingly of the recent past: the glory days at Drifters.

  ‘Pizza night!’ said Muranda. ‘You should have seen it, Douglas. So many people. They would come from Mutare in their cars, a hundred, maybe two hundred people every Friday. Aish, it was too busy. Madam used to get very angry if we didn’t make pizzas fast enough. Back then, we were thriving.’

  They told me how they’d loved meeting foreign backpackers. Agoneka had met, and I suspect fallen in love with, a young New Zealand girl whom he had taken on one of his tours, and he had kept in touch with her for a while before stamps and envelopes got too expensive and he had to stop writing. He and Muranda said they missed the stories about England and America and Australia that the backpackers told them.

  ‘In America I hear everyone has two televisions and a digital watch,’ Muranda said.

  ‘Not me,’ I told him. ‘You know how much rent I pay in New York?’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Eighteen hundred dollars per month. One room with a garden. Smaller than yours.’

  ‘Zim dollars?’

  ‘No. Usas. American.’ Usas was the local term for US dollars.

  Aish! Eighteen hundred usas? For that sum of money we can buy this whole farm.’

  ‘Easy, John,’ I said.

  I passed him more propaganda to roll another joint. This was a story about the De Klerk family, Dawson’s former employers, farmers in the valley whom my parents knew. We had gone to the De Klerk farm for a lunch in 2002, just before the elections. It turned out to be more of a clandestine meeting than a lunch: the De Klerks funded the opposition party, and the meeting was to discuss transporting MDC agents to polling stations. The article quoted a government minister saying that the family were related to South Africa’s former president FW de Klerk and that they wanted to bring apartheid back to Zimbabwe and ‘enslave blacks’.

  Muranda looked at the story before he rolled it.

  ‘Mr de Klerk, Cottage Six,’ he said.

  ‘What’s that, John?’

  ‘Mr de Klerk live in Cottage Six. With wife.’

  I knew the De Klerks had lost their farm. I didn’t know the family patriarch was living on my parents’ land. He must have been one of the new tenants Mom mentioned.

  I looked up at the night sky, light-headed and dizzy.

  Satellites and shooting stars pinballed the black velvet. Around me, the bush started to come alive. I wasn’t hallucinating. First I heard voices approaching from the trees, floating clearly through the night air, and then, out of nowhere, a man would appear in front of us, stop and talk to the two Johns, and disappear back into the shadows. It was another world out here, away from the comfort of the big house.

  Muranda said these were staff of the new residents in the cottages. I didn’t realise the cottages had this many new tenants.

  Two shadows emerged from where the game fence used to be by the road, and passed silently to our left, toward the bar: the kid with the Saddam Hussein T-shirt, and his pal with David Beckham on his chest.

  ‘New farmers from Mr Frank,’ said Muranda. ‘They like to watching the television in the bar. Then they go back.’

  ‘I know,’ I told him.

  It was incredible to think that some of the settlers who had raided my father’s friend’s home now spent the night at his bar watching TV. Perhaps they hated being stuck on that farm without TV. I wondered whether they wanted to move to town as desperately as I had when I was their age.

  I asked Muranda where he’d scored the weed. It was strong stuff.

  He took a long
drag of the joint, closed his eyes, and said matter-of-factly, ‘I get it from Youfada.’

  ‘Youfada?’

  ‘Yes, Youfada.’

  ‘Where’s Youfada, John?’ I’d never heard of the place. I figured it must be somewhere in the Honde Valley, his tribal area.

  ‘Youfada!’ he said, exasperated with me. ‘Mr Rogers! He grow!’

  Mrs John cackled loudly again. Agoneka clapped his hands in glee. More bats flew off.

  ‘What did you say, John? My father?’

  ‘Yes. You fada! He grow it up at house. I teach him!’

  ‘You what?’

  ‘I teach him.’

  I took an extra-long drag of the joint when it came round to me the next time. The things that happen when I’m not around.

  It was apparent to me by now that John Muranda was far more than just an employee at Drifters. He had become my father’s right-hand man, his ear to the ground, the reason my dad knew so much about the politics in the area and had, so far, been able to stay one step ahead of the game.

  They had formed an unlikely partnership, the patrician white farmer and the Honde Valley kraal headman, but they were in many ways similar personalities.

  When I’d first seen John twiddling the dials of my dad’s old radio, determined to find the right station and furious when he couldn’t, he reminded me exactly of my father. They were both headstrong, determined and intellectually cunning: they could play the game.

  From his years as a lawyer, my father knew how to read and judge people: he knew when to charm and when to attack. John was similar, a chameleon, able to fit in anywhere in the valley. The young settlers across the road who sat at the bar and stared at the TV screen respected him as an elder, yet he could also drink beer with the authentic war veterans who occupied two of the larger estates in the valley, and he more than held his own with the more sophisticated urban clientele who checked into the chalets with their hookers and small houses.

  They also both realised that John had just as much to lose if Drifters was taken as my parents did. Here, he and Naomi had a house, a job, a salary, regular food. Hell, they even had cheap beer and a marijuana supply. Who could beat that kind of deal? John must have known that if the war vets took over, all that would go. It was just as much in his interest for my dad to hold on to the farm, and he therefore kept my father abreast of the more important developments in the valley so he could plan ahead.

  And yet in my wildest dreams, I never would have imagined John Muranda teaching my father how to grow marijuana. So the following morning, half jokingly, I said to my dad that I had heard a wild rumour down at the camp that he had become a dagga farmer.

  ‘Oh,’ he replied, looking up suddenly from his book.

  He fidgeted in his chair. I could tell he was embarrassed. Which meant one thing: it was true.

  ‘Muranda told you that, did he?’

  ‘Actually, yes. He said he gets his dagga from you.’

  There was an awkward silence. I suddenly felt sorry for my father. He was like a kid caught doing something naughty, worried about what to say next.

  ‘Well,’ he eventually replied, ‘it’s more his plantation than mine.’

  ‘Come on, Dad. Are you growing it or not?’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said guiltily. ‘Your mom and I don’t smoke the stuff.’

  ‘I believe you, but where is it?’

  I felt like I had become the parent, that some strange generational inversion had taken place in which my parents had become the irresponsible children I had to keep checking up on. Fooling around with weapons, running a brothel, experimenting with drugs. It suddenly occurred to me that my dream life in New York City was rather pedestrian in comparison.

  ‘Okay, I’ll show you,’ he relented.

  I followed him through the kitchen to the back of the house. I expected to find a few leaves on a potted plant. Instead, in my mother’s herb and vegetable garden, cleverly hidden behind the laundry outbuilding, was a large bed of pungent green marijuana blooming wildly among her mint and basil and tomatoes.

  ‘Behold!’ Dad grinned. ‘The Rogers cartel!’

  It was an incredible sight. I had never seen so much marijuana in my life. When I was at Rhodes University I’d known students who would drive to the Transkei, fill up the boot of their car with sacks of Transkei Gold grown by rural farmers, and bring it back to sell on campus. In my squat in London I’d had a housemate who grew dope hydroponically in our laundry closet. But

  he had just a single pathetic plant. This was on an entirely different scale.

  Then, in the laundry building, Dad showed me dozens of bunches of drying leaves hanging from the beams, like burley in a tobacco barn. They’d been stashed there by John Muranda, who, it turned out, once cultivated dagga in his village up in the Honde Valley, where the weed was said to grow as strong and wild as poppies in Afghanistan.

  ‘How did you get into this?’ I asked.

  Dad explained to me that he’d come across the plant down at the camp one afternoon. He’d seen some strange green weeds growing in the flower bed below the restaurant-bar balcony. He was about to pull them out when Muranda, in a mild panic, rushed over from his ‘office’ – the picnic bench by the swimming pool – and explained to him that this was a very valuable ‘traditional vegetable’ and it would be better not to uproot it.

  ‘A valuable vegetable, John?’

  I could imagine Dad’s sarcastic voice.

  ‘Yes, sa, this very valuable.’

  ‘Rubbish. It’s just a weed.’

  ‘No, sa, it’s very valuable.’

  ‘It’s dagga, isn’t it?’

  John thought for a while. ‘Ah …’

  ‘It’s dagga, isn’t it, John?’

  ‘Ah … yes, sa! Yes. This dagga. But very valuable, sa! Very valuable.’

  He kept mentioning the value of it, which had the desired effect. Muranda knew my father well. Dad could use a valuable vegetable. He got John to dig it up and replant it up at the house. Within a few months it had blossomed into a ripe plantation.

  I thought back to the time Drifters had been such a hit on the backpacker trail. Some Ivy League Peace Corps volunteer or British gap-year students must have smoked a joint on the

  balcony and dropped a few seeds in the flower bed below. Either that, or Muranda had actually brought some of his crop down from the Honde Valley and started cultivating it in my mother’s flower bed. Who cared? My father now had a dope plantation.

  ‘But what are you going to do with it, Dad?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ he chuckled. ‘There must be money in it somewhere. But of course your mother’s getting all jittery. She keeps asking me to burn it.’

  ‘Don’t do that,’ I said. ‘Give it to Mrs John. She says it’s good for her blood pressure.’

  ‘I believe it does have certain medicinal qualities,’ Dad said.

  I had to confess, though, that I was with my mother in wanting him to get rid of it. Their security situation was tenuous enough, what with the squatters across the road spending nights in his bar and the camp becoming a brothel frequented by government officials. Growing marijuana might be going a little too far.

  ‘What if the police find out?’ I asked, sounding like the square I’d perhaps become.

  ‘The police? The police are bloody useless. They’re good at breaking the law, not much good at enforcing it. I’m more worried about the Americans.’

  ‘What do you mean, the Americans?’

  I followed him to his study. In two months’ time he and Mom were due to come to New York for my wedding. It would be their first-ever visit to the United States, and they needed tourist visas. On his desk he showed me the visa forms they had to fill out. Have you ever grown or sold illicit substances? read one question. Have you ever solicited women for the purposes of prostitution? read another.

  ‘Of course we’ll say no in both cases,’ Dad chuckled. ‘But do you think they’ll check up on us? The
Americans have really sophisticated surveillance systems. They could see all our goings-on from a satellite.’

  Mom walked past and heard us laughing.

  ‘So he’s telling you about our drugs and prostitution visa problem, is he?’ she said with a grin.

  ‘Yes, Ma,’ I told her. ‘And we’ve decided that when you come over to New York you’re going to be the mule. You’re going to stash all the marijuana in your suitcase. At JFK they’ll never suspect you. The street value’s going to be enormous – it’ll pay for the rehearsal dinner.’

  Mom ran off to the kitchen screaming, ‘Not on your bloody life!’

  We ate like kings. There was more than marijuana growing in those former flower beds. I discovered now why my parents looked so healthy.

  There was a famine looming in Zimbabwe in early 2005, but if you could eat avocados you’d never go hungry in this neck of the woods. Every few days, scores of young black traders would make their way down from the orchards in the surrounding mountain valleys with huge hessian sacks filled with bananas, oranges, lemons, pawpaws, mangos and avocados. Mostly avocados: smooth green oval-shaped gems the size of cricket balls. The traders would wait at the bottom of Christmas Pass for transport to Harare, 290 kilometres to the west, where they hoped to sell the fruit at market, but there was no fuel, and the buses weren’t running. Instead, they’d just sit for days, sleeping by the roadside, while their crop rotted away in the sun.

  My father was outraged with this state of affairs. These were innovative, hardworking young entrepreneurs, trying to make a living. People were starving in Zimbabwe, yet here mountains of food rotted away. The state couldn’t even get buses to work.

  My parents had already begun growing most of their own vegetables, but now they started buying what they didn’t grow from these informal traders, and it helped account for their excellent health. They ate fruit salads every morning, drank fresh-squeezed lemonade during the day instead of Coke or cordials, and cooked elaborate meals at night from recipes they got watching the Naked Chef, Nigella Lawson and Anthony Bourdain on their new satellite TV.