The Last Resort Read online

  I drank another Zambezi and smoked a last cigarette. Then I complimented Sydney on his music and said good night.

  The gazelle followed me to the door.

  ‘Fifty thousand?’ she asked.

  She was going down in price, much like the currency itself.

  ‘I’m sorry, I can’t.’

  ‘Come back next week?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  Walking past a chalet on the way home, I heard the moaning of people humping. For some reason I thought of Lonely Planet. The Bible for international budget travellers had written glowingly of Drifters over the years and had helped make it the hot spot it became on the Cape to Cairo backpacker trail. I wondered what a new edition might make of the current scene: Pizzas have given way to prostitutes at this rustic lodge in the beautiful Eastern Highlands. Comfortable chalets are ideal for coupling, even if the beds are a bit narrow, but the women in the bar are friendly and charge a bargain rate. Good music, too.

  My parents would be horrified.

  At breakfast the following morning, sipping the rich, fresh-brewed coffee Mom always made, I gently broke the news to them about the night before. I told them what I had seen: the goings-on at the bar, the women. I didn’t tell them about the two settlers. I knew they’d be appalled as it was. So much for the dignified and leisurely retirement they’d always dreamed of: a life of golf, bridge games, garden parties, holidays to visit their children abroad. Instead, their beloved backpacker business had become a brothel, an informal knock shop.

  They listened, nodding, as I spoke.

  Then they blurted out together: ‘Yes, we know! It’s bloody unreal. Been going on for months!’

  My mouth fell open. ‘What do you mean, for months?’

  ‘Well, since we leased the place out,’ said Mom.

  ‘You leased out the lodge?’

  ‘Yes, darling. It was no use to us. No tourists. We got this great guy in to take over.’

  ‘Who leases it?’

  ‘Black guy called Dawson Jombe. Lovely fellow. He was a manager on the De Klerk farm.’

  ‘Why isn’t he managing that farm?’

  ‘Darling, you’ve got lots to catch up on. That farm was taken. Dawson lost his job there, so he approached us about renting out the restaurant-bar. We agreed.’

  ‘So you get rent for the lodge and income from the chalets?’

  ‘Well, we hardly charge him anything at all, but yes, we get money from the chalets.’

  They looked at each other and giggled.

  ‘Business is booming!’ said Dad.

  ‘So, the new fence, the computer, the TV? You paid for that with …’

  Suddenly any initial embarrassment they felt gave way to gales of laughter.

  ‘Yes,’ said Mom in amazement. ‘The place is bringing us in some money at last. It’s been a bloody lean few years, I can tell you.’

  I still couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

  Under my parents, Drifters had been mostly a white hangout. Under Dawson, it had become a black joint. He’d installed the new hi-fi system and the secondhand TV, and hired his cousin Sydney as bartender. Word got around town: a quiet place in the bush, just over the pass. At first, well-to-do black professionals – businessmen, lawyers, accountants, civil servants – would just drive out for a few evening drinks. Soon they began bringing mistresses and hookers with them, able to spend time unseen by wives or prying neighbours. Then local prostitutes in Mutare caught on. When public buses were running, they would ride out to Drifters and stand at the bar waiting for trade.

  That afternoon we walked down to the camp and I saw that it wasn’t only evening trade. John Muranda was giving a chalet key to a man standing beside a Toyota Hilux, who then handed over a fat wad of dollar notes. An attractive young woman sitting silently in the passenger seat of the Toyota got out of the car and followed him into the chalet, closing the door behind her.

  Muranda wandered over to us, his faded floppy hat low over his bloodshot eyes, awkwardly carrying a small red metal money box as if it was a school lunchbox. It was great to see the old man again. Just hearing that saxophone voice and seeing the lopsided smile made me laugh.

  He greeted me effusively.

  ‘Douglas! So, you are here. Very good. How is United States?’

  ‘How’s business, John?’ Mom interrupted, getting down to business.

  ‘It’s okay,’ John told her with a grin. ‘Little busy.’

  He handed her a wad of Zimbabwe dollar notes. He was an unlikely Heidi Fleiss, this wise old headman from the Honde Valley, hardly as glamorous as a Parisian brothel madam. But this was remote rural Zimbabwe. He fit the part. My mother took the money and counted it with excessive thoroughness.

  The new direction Drifters had taken was a messy business.

  Mom shook her head in disgust when she told me that the drains regularly got clogged with condoms, and the sheets had to be washed twice a day. For all the new financial benefits, she felt queasy just being down there, seeing what it had become. Dad pointed to the back of the Toyota Hilux. A bathing towel had been draped over the licence plate. Many of the men who drove out were government officials, civil servants, businessmen in town. They had jobs, wives, families, and could easily bump into someone they knew.

  According to Muranda, one man arriving with a mistress encountered his own daughter exiting a chalet. So the men covered up car licence plates and even drove their vehicles into the thick bush behind the chalets, somehow squeezing them between rocks and trees.

  In what was a vague attempt at morality, my parents had at least decided not to rent the chalets by the hour. Not that my father hadn’t thought about it.

  ‘You should see this hotel in town,’ he told me. ‘One of those big colonial houses at the top of Herbert Chitepo Road. A budget place like ours, but no more tourists, of course. The owner started doing rooms by the hour at lunchtime. Now all these buggers go there to screw around. The place is packed. Guy’s making a killing!’

  Only half jokingly, Dad had suggested to Muranda that they offer hourly rates, but John advised against it.

  ‘You can try, sa, but in three months, I promise – Manica Post first page.’

  The Mutare newspaper loved salacious stories, and the scandal of a white farmer running a brothel, however informal, would make for banner headlines.

  A new world opened up when you read the pages of the Zimbabwe press. I’d seen some gems over the years. ‘Prostitutes Demand Payment in Diesel’ was one that wasn’t made up. There were also ‘Police Run Away from Goblins’ and ‘Marondera Man’s Penis Erect for Five Days.’

  ‘Unlikely,’ was my father’s response to this one. ‘You can’t get any Viagra out here.’

  But I could hardly judge my parents for cashing in on the trade. Prostitution appeared to be the only growth industry in the country. For the first time in five years they were making money from their business. And it dawned on me now that they weren’t facing up to their own mortality at all. They were adapting, surviving, hanging on.

  Not all the new clientele at Drifters were punters or prostitutes.

  John Muranda told me that the men who drove out with mistresses or hookers usually did so Mondays to Thursdays, because those were the days they could tell their wives that they were at work or away on business. And among these men were some who were simply having a quiet time alone with their second or third wives. Traditional Shona culture is still polygamous.

  ‘They call it “small house,”’ Muranda explained to me one afternoon as we sat at a picnic table beside the pool – a spot he liked to call his office. ‘First wife is big house. Second wife is small house. Drifters, this place, is for small house.’

  In such tough economic times it appeared that keeping a second or third wife in the comfort she might usually be accustomed to – her own home, for example – was no longer financially viable, and would also infuriate the first wife, who had a hold on the tightening purse strings. Many of the men who
were coming to Drifters were just downgrading their second wives to a shared afternoon in a budget chalet in the bush – a small house.

  Small-house culture is in fact a huge social problem in Zimbabwe. There’s even a successful soap opera about it on ZTV, Small House Saga, about the secret lives married men are leading with other women, and the attendant health hazards.

  Ironically, a health study in Zimbabwe had reported that as the economy got worse, the HIV infection rate dropped, since men had less money to spend on ‘small houses’. Drifters could not have been helping lower the infection rate. It was cheap to get a room out here. No more than US$8.

  Weekends, meanwhile, tended to be a far more wholesome scene. Families, couples and husbands and first wives would come out. Sometimes a school would rent Drifters for a dance, or the university near the Methodist mission would book it for a graduation party. There had even been a wedding with a live band on the lawn where the camp site used to be.

  My parents had grown fond of Dawson Jombe, the man responsible for this new scene, and I discovered that he was not only leasing the lodge from them, but also living in one of the cottages on the property, their very first black resident. I met him one evening at the bar. He’d come to take stock before rejoining his wife, Patricia, a schoolteacher, in Cottage 1.

  He took the opportunity to ask Sydney to keep the music down.

  ‘Listen, Syd, less volume, hey, people are trying to sleep on this farm.’

  Sydney, bashful, apologised profusely. That night he managed to play it even louder.

  I liked Dawson instantly. He was the same age as me, mid-thirties, with a permanent toothy grin and a cackling laugh like a hyena’s that could go off at any second.

  If John Muranda was no Heidi Fleiss, Dawson was no brothel keeper. He wore a typical Zimbabwean farmer’s uniform: khaki shorts, khaki shirt, rolled-down khaki socks and bush boots, out of which poked two skinny, hairy legs like matchsticks.

  He came from the Honde Valley, the same area as Muranda, and had attended the College of Horticulture in Chipinge, south of Mutare, before becoming a senior technical manager on Kondozi, a highly successful horticulture farm owned by the De Klerk family in the west of the valley. That farm had been invaded, and he and six thousand others had lost their jobs.

  Clearly he saw running the bar as a stopgap. He wanted to get back to agriculture.

  ‘I am a farmer, Douglas. This game is temporary.’

  I asked him what he thought of the goings-on down here, the prostitutes.

  ‘When did you realise what was happening?’

  ‘The first day. A man and woman came in. I thought: Good, some business.’ He clicked his fingers and whistled. ‘They took one beer, then went to bed.’

  A male customer walked in just then, accompanied by a woman half his age.

  ‘And how’s business now?’ I said softly.

  ‘Put it this way,’ Dawson cackled louder than ever, ‘they don’t stay for breakfast!’

  He seemed as amazed by what was happening down there as my mother.

  I was surprised to discover, however, that my parents had made black friends down at the camp now, people every bit as interesting to them as their formerly all-white clientele. Dad spoke in amazement of an electrician he had met named Brian Ndlovu, who stayed for a week while fixing the wiring in the lodge soon after Dawson took over.

  ‘He seemed like an ordinary bloke,’ Dad told me. ‘Matabele guy from Bulawayo, in his forties. Anyway, I go down to check on things one afternoon and I find him giving a lecture to the staff and a dozen guests by the pool. They’re all sitting on the grass, listening to him talk. I’m thinking, What’s this bloody bugger up to? Turns out he’s teaching them about HIV/AIDS – how it’s killing so many people, how to prevent it, using protection, et cetera. I’m impressed. I thought he was just some cheapo electrician.

  ‘When he’s finished I say, “Brian, that was interesting, how do you know this stuff?” He tells me he’s a member of Rotary! He did a course. He volunteers all over the country.

  ‘Anyway, I offer to buy him a drink. We walk into the bar. We sit at the stools by the dartboard. I get him a beer, and before you know it he pulls out this silver box from his jacket pocket. It’s got three darts in it. He says, “Excuse me a moment.”

  ‘He goes to the dartboard and throws three triple twenties first go. Top score. I say, “Bloody hell, Brian, that’s good.” He says, “Ja, thanks. I play in the big leagues. We have a tournament coming up in South Africa in two weeks and I need to practise.”

  ‘I tell him that your mom and I are driving down to Joburg around that time, and maybe he wants a lift to the tournament. I mean, he can’t have much money for transport. He says, “No, thanks, Mr Rogers. I was an electrician for Zimbabwe Railways before I went freelance and they always give me and my team a private first-class carriage to travel to South Africa. That way we can sleep in comfort and practice on the way.”’

  Dad beamed as he remembered the electrician. ‘Brian Ndlovu – Renaissance man!’

  But it was another group of black guests at the newfangled Drifters that had made the biggest impression on him. He told me that a few weeks into the New Year he received a phone call up at the house from a man wanting to book six chalets for a weekend.

  ‘That’s fine. What are your names?’

  ‘We are priests,’ the man said.

  ‘Okay. But what are your names?’

  ‘Just priests.’

  Dad shrugged and made the reservation anyway.

  Zimbabwe is a deeply Christian country. Missionaries were proselytising to the Shona and Matabele, Zimbabwe’s second tribe, as early as the 1850s. There are Roman Catholic, Anglican and Methodist missions all over Zimbabwe today. Indeed, in 1979, the first black leader of the country, in the brief interim between white rule and Robert Mugabe, was a United Methodist bishop named Abel Muzorewa. Even President Mugabe, a graduate of a Jesuit school, claimed to be a devout Roman Catholic.

  My mother, a decidedly lapsed Anglican, was horrified about the pending arrival of the priests. She was convinced they had heard about the ‘den of iniquity’ and were coming to cleanse it, to ask my parents to seek redemption. Instead, Dad walked into the restaurant on the Saturday afternoon and saw something remarkable.

  ‘They were sitting at the far corner table in full robes and dog collars. But their Bibles were piled on a chair, and they weren’t talking about God. They were holding a political meeting. They were MDC activists in disguise! They travel around with their notes and campaign documents hidden in hollowed-out Bibles or under their robes.’

  Belonging to the opposition was as dangerous as ever. The government, to prevent the MDC from meeting or holding rallies, had invoked a law dating back to Rhodesian days banning gatherings of more than three people. The MDC got around it by holding ‘prayer meetings’. But the state soon caught on. It would be at a prayer meeting that the young MDC activist Gift Tandare would be shot dead by police in March 2007, setting off a wave of state violence that included the beating of Morgan Tsvangirai with a metal pipe.

  My father kept his political sympathies well hidden these days. The backlash from the last election had been brutal. But I could tell how proud he was of these brave men in liturgical vestments in his lodge, underground activists of the party he had joined, the party he hoped would one day come to power and get the country back to normal.

  SIX

  The Rogers Cartel

  FUEL WAS HARD to come by, and if buses weren’t running or petrol was too expensive, the men and the hookers didn’t drive out over the pass. Often I would buy a case of beer from Sydney at the bar and take it over to the Murandas’ small brick house by the swimming pool. There we would sit – John Agoneka, John and Naomi Muranda and me – around a wood fire, drinking, eating sadza and talking in stilted English about the doomed, depressed country.

  The two Johns told me they supported the MDC, but they made sure to keep membership cards from t
he ruling party in their pockets in case they were confronted by soldiers or the feared youth militia. There was a militia training camp, Magamba, just up the road, and occasionally you could see these Green Bombers, squadrons of up to thirty uniformed youths in their teens and twenties, running in formation on the main road past the farm, chanting ZANU-PF slogans: Pamberi nehondo, izvozui – Forward with war, right now! Pasi na Tsvangirai – Down with Tsvangirai! Magamba once had been a farm school; now it was an indoctrination centre.

  Dad had given the Johns a new radio in order to listen to secret nightly broadcasts of their favourite station, SW Radio Africa, run by Zimbabwean journalists and music DJs who had been expelled by the regime. I was proud to tell the two Johns that I’d recently written about the station for a British newspaper, the Guardian. It was the Johns, after all, who had first introduced me to it that night around the bar three years ago. I told them I had met the staff, including John Matinde, the legendary DJ who, in the 1970s, had secretly played the resistance music of the great Zimbabwe Chimurenga (revolutionary struggle) singer Thomas Mapfumo on Rhodesian airwaves before the Rhodesians found out and banned him. On 18 April 1980, Matinde had the honour of introducing Bob Marley to the crowd at Rufaro Stadium in Harare in front of the newly inaugurated Robert Mugabe at the delirious independence celebrations. Prince Charles was there, awkward and gawky in a safari suit among a band of Third World revolutionaries. It was Bob Marley’s last-ever live performance.

  I often wish I had been there that night, but I was eleven years old at the time, a white boy terrified of the future. Besides, I was unable to move. I had been in a serious car accident up in the Nyanga mountains on Easter Sunday, two weeks earlier, and spent all that month in Mutare General Hospital, in a bed next to my friend Brian Goble, whose father, Barry, had driven the car over a cliff and whose mother, Beryl, was killed in the crash. My parents, my sisters and Brian’s brother, Mark, were in a car behind us. Mom and Dad dug us out of the wreck. ‘It still makes me sick thinking about it,’ my mother always says when I ask her about the crash. ‘It’s a miracle any of you survived.’ All I remembered about Independence Day 1980 was being confused as to why all the beautiful black nurses who took such good care of Brian and me were so excited about it.