The Last Resort Read online

  I told them I never ate half so well at home, and we decided one night they needed a Food Network show of their own, with a cookbook tie-in.

  We came up with a title. It would be called Recipes for Disaster: Adventures in the Kitchen of a Failed State. In it they would be filmed buying produce from those informal traders on the road, asking them about their lives, how they got those heavy bags down the mountain. Did they own the orchards or steal the fruit?

  My parents would also have to be filmed buying food from the new farmers in the valley who were trying to make a go of it.

  ‘Oh, Christ,’ said Mom. ‘Will I have to jump up and down chanting ZANU-PF slogans in exchange for a maize cob?’

  My father loved the idea.

  ‘Yes, Rosalind, I can see you doing that. And just think of the appeal to a Western audience: ethnic dancing and an organic maize cob. These buggers have no fertiliser.’

  Another episode, we decided, would be dedicated to the miracle of Zimbabwean cheese. My father had discovered that due to a shortage of one vital ingredient (or perhaps the loss of skilled staff), the usually tasteless Gouda that the state Dairy Marketing Board manufactured had now turned into a delectably rich and creamy Brie – as tasty as anything you might find in Provence. He bought several wheels of it at a time at the DMB warehouse in Mutare, worried that they might discover and correct their mistake and it would go back to tasting awful.

  Finally, we decided that each episode would show them cooking up some masterpiece on that gas stove by candlelight on the kitchen floor during a power cut.

  ‘We need more atmosphere,’ I told them. ‘A sense of place.’

  ‘I know,’ said my mother, warming to the theme. ‘We could fire up the generator and eat each meal in front of the TV, watching a speech by Mugabe ranting about us “white imperialist running dogs of capitalism,” or the “homosexual government of Tony Blair.”’

  We burst out laughing.

  ‘You know what?’ Dad guffawed. ‘It could work. I reckon that Anthony Bourdain chap would come out here and present it. He goes to some really wacky places.’

  My mother’s eyes lit up at the thought of the dashing Kitchen Confidential star coming out to visit them.

  SEVEN

  The Refugees

  THE WIDER SITUATION wasn’t all fun and games. The country was still heading straight to ruin. My parents lived in constant fear that the car coming up their driveway would be the Top Man, a general or a ruling party chef arriving to inform them: ‘This is my farm. You have 24 hours to leave.’ The shotgun was always ready, just in case.

  My parents rarely heard the howls of the poachers’ dogs any more, but that was small consolation: their game fence had been dismantled, and they were resigned to the fact that all their animals had been slaughtered. Only a handful of settlers remained on Frank Bekker’s land across the road, but judging by the look of Saddam and Becks, they were desperate. I still didn’t have the heart to tell my parents about the two young settlers who spent their evenings in the lodge bar watching TV. They probably knew it anyway.

  The lodge’s becoming a knock shop had shocked me. Discovering my Dad was growing weed came as a surprise. But I was in no way prepared for what they would show me in the cottages on the back of the land during an afternoon walk a day later.

  As a child I used to hate farm walks. They bored the hell out of me. I would rather be hitting cricket balls or sitting in the house watching videos. My parents always made us come along: Sunday afternoons, five o’clock, after coffee and pancakes with Golden Syrup on the veranda. Off we would troop – me, Stof, Zaan and Hel behind them, trudging through fields of stinking cowpats where the weed grass scratched our legs and ticks attached themselves to us like limpet mines. ‘Isn’t nature wonderful?’ Helen would say sarcastically, but always under her breath so Dad wouldn’t hear. ‘Isn’t nature wonderful?’ became our catchphrase, code for everything we hated about being on the farm.

  But recently I had begun to enjoy these ritual ramblings. Perhaps it was living for so long in cities – Johannesburg, London, New York – hemmed in by buildings, riding subways beneath the earth. I felt I could breathe out here. I loved the views of the valley from the top of the hill, and the smell of the earth after it rained, vapour rising up like the steam from a Manhattan manhole. It made me giddy, drunk.

  The front of the property was now wildly overgrown and impossible to walk on, but the back of the land with the cottages in the hills was still immaculately maintained. Agoneka wasn’t doing such a bad job in his new role as groundskeeper, really. We would take the dirt road past the cottages, all around us a wilderness of wind-bent trees, exotic plants and brightly plumed birds. Crimson wildflowers and flaming creepers splashed the hills with bursts of red. Paradise flycatchers, hoopoes and robins fluttered between the branches. All that was missing were the zebra and antelope.

  Each of the sixteen cottages was numbered and named for a species of tree on the land – mahogany, cassia, knobthorn, acacia – the names painted by my mother on round steel plough discs that she hung on wooden poles outside the front gardens. The houses were all built in the same simple way: two bedrooms, open-plan living room and dining area, a carport to the side, a tidy front porch leading out onto a garden. A year ago only four had had tenants, but now I saw something extraordinary.

  Cars, battered trucks and even a tractor were parked outside the cottages or in those carports. Furniture was strewn on front lawns. I watched an elderly white man haul a rocking chair into number 9. Boxes of books and crates of clothing were piled high on porches or spread out in backyards like in a scene from The Grapes of Wrath. Old white people I had never seen before were watering plants or sipping tea on porches. They waved as we walked by. Mom and Dad waved back and said hello if they were within earshot. They asked them how they were doing, whether the water and lights were working.

  ‘Jeez, who are all these people?’ I asked my mother, a little spooked.

  ‘They’re white farmers. People who lost their land. We’re the only place left in the area they could come to after they got booted off.’

  ‘What, so it’s like a refugee camp?’

  She chuckled.

  ‘I suppose you could say that. But don’t worry, we charge them rent.’

  Apparently, word in the valley was that if you lost your home and needed a roof over your head, Lyn and Ros Rogers at Drifters, the old pizza place, had cottages, good for short stays or long. They received regular phone calls about availability. One elderly widow turned up in the middle of the night at their front gate in tears with a harrowing story of a violent eviction, a mob running through her home. My parents took her in. They had become low-budget bushveld versions of Oskar and Emilie Schindler.

  Eight farming families had found sanctuary at Drifters over

  the past year, and more would do so in the years ahead. Most stayed just a few months, trying to sort out passports, visas and property shipments before leaving the country to start over again.

  Others stayed longer, determined to fight to get their property or livestock back, or simply because this was home. They were Zimbabweans. There was nowhere else to go.

  ‘You should interview them,’ Mom suggested as we got down to the camp, where Agoneka was slashing the grass in a flower bed around Cottage 6, accidentally lopping the heads off some geraniums. ‘You think we’ve gone a bit weird, but these people really are the last of a dying breed. The stories they could tell you …’

  Right from the beginning my mother had encouraged me to write about their life and the farm. Originally, I suspected, it was the only way she knew to get me to come out and visit. But now, I realised, she was as amazed by what was happening around them as I was. She wanted a document of this time, a record, and who better to make it than her son, the writer, who was desperately looking for a story of his own?

  And so now, just as I had started going down to the camp at night to hang out in the bar and to talk to the two Johns, i
n the afternoons I started visiting these old white farmers with a notebook and a tape recorder to hear about their lives.

  They painted an extraordinary picture of a long-lost era in the valley that I knew nothing about, of a time dating back, in one widow’s case, to the 1920s, and my maternal grandmother Evelyn Eggleston’s era in Southern Rhodesia. They were bookends on a disappearing world, the last of a lost white tribe. Yet they seemed to recall the old days with extraordinary clarity and the current chaos with a remarkable stoicism and, believe it or not, humour.

  The most recent arrival was an attractive, slightly built

  Afrikaner, a widow named Unita Herrer. She was in her mid-to-late sixties, but spry as a teenage girl. She called herself ‘one of the greatest cattle farmers in the valley’. I joined her on her porch one dusky evening in Cottage 2, Mahogany. She had dressed up specially for the occasion: bright red frock, silver slippers, a pastel blue scarf covering her head. A tiny pair of blue eyes darted from her pale, sallow face. She sat among a pile of wooden crates.

  ‘My guns,’ she sighed in a high-pitched, flat-vowel Afrikaans accent. ‘I have to get rid of my guns. I have so many. An old Bruno. A twenty-two for hunting. My son Bredell’s Beretta, a beautiful little pistol. I have to sell them to Africans. Whites don’t buy anything any more.’

  She sounded like an arms dealer, an Afrikaner Annie Oakley. Was Unita one of those ‘bloodthirsty, gun-toting Boer farmers’ the local paper wrote about? She seemed an unlikely candidate. As soon as she sold her guns, though, she was trekking back to South Africa, where she was born, outside Cape Town, in 1942.

  She poured me a glass of vinegary white wine that tasted as if it had been bottled around that time, and she spoke in dramatic theatrical cadences – soft whispers followed by rising crescendos – like a 1930s screen star preparing for her close-up.

  ‘I came to Rhodesia in 1962 to join my husband, Japie,’ Unita said. ‘I didn’t really know him. He was the brother of a girl I worked with in Parow. He asked me to marry him after eight hours. Said he was going to get rich doing tobacco in Rhodesia. Tobacco was like gold then. I was engaged to a Hollander at the time. Not an Afrikaner, a man from Holland. My parents didn’t like this Hollander. He wasn’t a proper Dutchman. Back then us Afrikaners thought like that. We thought we were the really pure Dutch. Japie said he knew if he didn’t get me to marry him I would go straight back to that Hollander.’

  So Unita hitched her wagon to Japie and moved north.

  But it turned out, as these things sometimes do, that her new husband knew little about farming and less about tobacco, which is a very difficult crop to grow.

  She leaned in close to me, as if afraid her late husband would hear. ‘All he wanted to do was play rugby. I was the farmer. But I had to be. My husband was a good man, but he wasn’t a provider, or a worker, or a planner. I was a Maserati always pulling a Toyota.’

  Suddenly something stirred under a blanket in a corner chair beside the crates. I leapt off the porch. The blanket fell to the floor, and I saw that an old man with glazed eyes and wispy shocks of white hair had been sitting there all along. He looked like a ghost. Drool was running down his shirt; there was a scrapbook open on his lap. I knew Unita’s husband had passed away years ago in South Africa, and I was relieved to discover this wasn’t his spectral presence but rather Frans, an old friend of Japie’s, and Unita’s farming partner for the past twenty years. Japie and Frans had bought the farm in the valley, the one she ended up doing all the work on, in 1963.

  She looked at Frans and rolled her eyes.

  ‘You know, all they wanted to do was play rugby. Rugby this, rugby that. People said to me, ‘Unita, you are never going to make it with these guys. You will go bankrupt.’ But I said, ‘I am going to try.’ So I went to get the loan from the Standard Bank. I decided we would do maize and cattle as well as tobacco. I pulled it up. And you know, in three years the whole farm was paid for. We did not owe anyone a cent! Let me tell you: I am a go-getter. A doer. I never give up. My husband was a good person, but he wasn’t a – ’

  Frans stirred again. A bat flew onto the porch and back out. The scrapbook fell open. I saw it was filled with faded news clippings and photographs of old rugby matches. But I wondered what rugby had to do with this remote farming valley in eastern Zimbabwe, over six hundred kilometres from South Africa.

  Frans raised his head. A smile crept across his face. Unita’s eyes lit up.

  ‘Don’t you know why there are so many Afrikaners in this valley?’ she asked. ‘The first tobacco farmers here loved rugby.

  Back in the 1950s they had so much money from tobacco they would travel all over South Africa to get the best rugby players to come up here and play for their clubs. The players would be given jobs as managers on farms, but they couldn’t farm anything at first. They were here to play rugby!’

  Unita looked at Frans.

  ‘These two’ – she spoke of her husband as if he were still alive, sitting in the chair next to his old mucker – ‘they couldn’t farm at all. They were here for rugby!’

  I was amazed to hear that from the 1950s through the 1970s several legendary Springbok and Rhodesian players lived in the valley. Two tiny farm districts, Inyazura and Odzi, were among the best rugby clubs in Africa. It was like a team of Yankee all-stars moving to grow beans and play baseball in a pueblo in Mexico. Unita reeled off famous names while Frans gleamed approval: ‘Ryk van Schoor, Salty du Randt, Tienie Martin … Piet de Klerk? Him in Cottage Six? Him, too. He was captain of Rhodesia! Go ask him.’

  My parents had confirmed to me that old Piet de Klerk and his wife, Mienkie, were now living at Drifters. I knew that De Klerk was a famous rugby player who’d once scored a try against the All Blacks. I hadn’t known he’d come to Rhodesia to play rugby. I was even more interested in speaking to him now, but he’d been hard to pin down.

  Unita grinned and whispered again.

  ‘You know, there were so many of us Boers here back then that when an English person came into a bar after a rugby game we would speak Afrikaans. And if they could speak Afrikaans we would speak Shona. Us Afrikaners thought we were the real Africans!’

  I laughed.

  Bad blood between the Afrikaners and the British lasted long after the Second Boer War. When my dad’s mother, Gertruida Gauche, married his father, Kitchener Rogers, in 1923, her mother, Johanna, refused to speak to either of them for years: not only was her daughter marrying a hated Engelse rooinek, of the kind her own husband, Gerrit, had fought against as one of Smuts’s commandos, but she was marrying one named Kitchener, after the notorious Field Marshal Horatio Herbert Kitchener, whose scorched-earth policy and chain of concentration camps across the veld (Johanna having been an inmate of one of them) had crushed and humiliated the Boer nation. My father – of half British descent, half Boer – straddled both sides of this divide.

  In 1980, after independence, like so many white Rhodesians, Unita and her husband joined the stampede to South Africa, afraid of what would happen to them under a black government after the war. But Unita didn’t feel at home in South Africa.

  ‘I realised I wasn’t a South African anymore. I was a Rhodesian. I decided I had to come back and become Zimbabwean. But Japie stayed down south. Soon we got divorced.’

  Japie would pass away several years later.

  Unita returned to the valley in 1986. Frans was still there but the farm was in disrepair. So she did it all over again.

  ‘I pulled it up by myself. It was hard in the 1980s. This country was communist then. You couldn’t get tractors or equipment. But I never give up. Frans was still on his part of the land. We did tobacco and cattle again. But you know, his cattle were always terrible. He wouldn’t look after them. I told him: “If you are not in the field in the morning, your cattle will get pinched, they will get sick, and they will die.” And of course they did. His cattle had ten horns and one eye! Man, they were terrible! But mine? I was one of the greatest…’

  F
rans stirred again. He wanted to speak but couldn’t get the words out. Unita went into a misty-eyed reverie at the thought of her herd. She’d still been farming alongside Frans in 2000 when the land invasions began. What she had feared would happen in 1980 instead happened exactly twenty years later. And yet by 2004 she was still there, untouched. She reckoned it was because of her guns. Which was when, she said, she made her fatal mistake.

  ‘You know what I did? I decided to give my farm to the government. I was so tired by then. I had been working hard all my life. At that time they were killing white farmers. My son Bredell told me: “Ma, don’t keep the farm for me. Sell it, enjoy your later years.” He was never a farmer. He’s mechanical. He lives in Michigan, there in America, working with engines. These young people don’t want to farm any more like the old days. And so I decided: before they kill me, let me offer it to them because I am old.’

  She went to the Ministry of Lands in Harare and cut a deal. In exchange for her giving her farm to them they would allow her to harvest her final crop and pack her belongings unmolested. They agreed to protect her. She would leave by early in the new year.

  Her voice grew softer, graver as she spoke now, her eyes watery blue pools.

  ‘And of course they broke their word,’ she whispered. ‘They broke their word …’

  Unita was attacked in her home just before midnight a week before Christmas. A truckload of militia arrived, locked her and Frans in a bedroom and began to ransack the house. They were held captive for a day and a half. A black friend of Unita’s came to plead with the gang leader, a ZANU-PF official from the local rural council. The leader gave Unita three more days to pack everything.