Douglas Rogers, a Brooklyn-based journalist and travel writer, recounts his experiences growing up in Zimbabwe in his memoir, "The Last Resort: A Memoir of Zimbabwe." His parents, Lyn and Rosalind Rogers, who were both born in Africa, still live there and run Drifters, a popular game farm and backpacker lodge in Mutare, in the eastern mountains.
After President Robert Mugabe ordered the seizure of white-owned farms in 2000, many of the Rogerses’ friends and neighbors began to move away amid loss of property and escalating violence, but Lyn and Ros chose to stay.
When Douglas visited in 2002, and in the years that followed, he was astounded by what he saw.
Rogers’s recently published book is a nuanced, funny, and heartbreaking story of one community’s experience of survival in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe.
The story begins when the author’s parents are totally upended in 2000 due to President Mugabe’s government’s granting veterans (from the country’s liberation war) the right to invade and take over white-owned farms. Rogers’ parents loved Zimbabwe and, unlike thousands of others, were determined to stay in the country.
Read also: Common Nigerian Surnames
Rogers describes the amazing and often shocking ways they and others, both black and white, coped.
The Story Behind the Story
Rogers had avoided writing about or even visiting Zimbabwe for most of the nineteen-nineties, even though he was a travel writer and his parents had a tourist lodge. When, in 2000, they got caught in the crossfire of the land war I could hardly avoid visiting them, but even then I was still writing the generic African story: my parents were these sad, tragic figures.
It was only in around 2005, when I found out about the brothel, the marijuana crop, the fact that their land had become a safe haven for all these white farmers, that it dawned on me that my parents were in fact the opposite of sad and tragic. I came to see them as heroic. And outrageously funny. I knew then that I had a story.
Characters and Perspectives
Rogers' book includes an impressive range of characters in the story of contemporary Zimbabwe, from black farmworkers and M.D.C. supporters to moneychangers, ZANU-PF officials, traditional healers, diamond smugglers, and elderly white landowners-one of them a relative of F. W. de Klerk. And most of them are closely connected to your parents’ lives.
There are several formidable black women lawyers and activists in Zimbabwe-Beatrice Mtetwa, for example-who are among the most vociferous opponents of the regime, risking their lives day in and day out, often to defend white Zimbabweans, many of them farmers. It’s amazing to see these women march into a Zimbabwean court and explain the laws of the country to corrupt state prosecutors and judges who have utterly no regard for the law.
Read also: The Story Behind Ugandan Names
President Mugabe has in fact achieved something quite remarkable in Zimbabwe, and the exact opposite of what he set out to do: the establishment of a post-racial African society. Women like Beatrice Mtetwa are the embodiment of that.
Humor Amidst Hardship
Rogers notes his parents’ ability to laugh at the absurdity of their situation as things around them are falling apart, and there’s no shortage of absurdity-an albino frog lives in the kitchen, M.D.C. activists show up at the bar disguised as priests, the much-feared Commissar across the street regularly hitches rides into town with your father.
Zimbabweans laugh at things because otherwise they would have to shoot themselves. Some overly earnest people have criticized the book as supposedly making light of such a serious situation, but I’ve not heard this from any Zimbabwean who has read it and lives there.
The only reason he stays in Zimbabwe is because the place is so absurdly funny, and that it made him feel alive just being there.
Meeting Morgan Tsvangirai
Rogers interviewed him and his wife, Susan, in a run-down rural hotel on a riverbank in southeastern Zimbabwe. It was twilight, and I was very nervous. I had no media accreditation and I knew we were being watched. But he had no fear. He had survived so many assassination attempts by then it had just become part of life. Susan, of course, was killed in a suspicious accident not far from that hotel two years later.
Read also: Meaning Behind East African Last Names
Many “analysts” and supposed African “experts” still openly deride him, but in ten years he has done what no African political leader has ever achieved: come closer and closer to winning power over a violent totalitarian state through entirely nonviolent, democratic means. He should have won the Nobel Peace Prize.
Changing Perspectives
In the beginning of the book, you write, “Since going to university I had come to see my parents as typical white landowners in Africa”-hardworking, tax-paying people who, “despite being Zimbabweans, lived a life apart, a privileged minority behind their high walls and sports clubs.”
Toward the end of the book, you write, about your father, “For the first time in the three hundred and fifty years that his people had been on this tormented continent, they were-at last-on the right side of history.”
Researching the book, however, I came to realize that these figures, swallowed whole by much of the world’s media, were in fact a lie. I also came to realize that more than seventy per cent of white-owned farms in Zimbabwe, including my parents’ land, had in fact been purchased after independence-with permission from Mugabe himself.
One of the most important lines in the book is uttered by the M.D.C. activist, now M.P., Pishai Muchauraya. Pishai gets irate with the callers and says, “Mrs. James was an African just like you-sing what you normally sing.” The arc of the book in some ways is the discovery that it is possible to be a white African.
Reception in Zimbabwe and South Africa
There are very few bookstores left, so I only know from people who have read it and who tell me it captured something about Zimbabwe they all recognize, and that it made them laugh. I did make sure to get a personal copy to Morgan Tsvangirai. I’m hoping will give it to President Obama when he next meets him.
The book is generating a lot of publicity and selling well there. So many Zimbabweans live in S.A., and of course white South Africans always look to Zimbabwe as a portent for what may happen to them.
Synopsis
Born and raised in Zimbabwe, Douglas Rogers is the son of white farmers living through that country's long and tense transition from postcolonial rule. He escaped the dull future mapped out for him by his parents for one of adventure and excitement in Europe and the United States.
But when Zimbabwe's president Robert Mugabe launched his violent program to reclaim white-owned land and Rogers's parents were caught in the cross fire, everything changed.
Lyn and Ros, the owners of Drifters-a famous game farm and backpacker lodge in the eastern mountains that was one of the most popular budget resorts in the country-found their home and resort under siege, their friends and neighbors expelled, and their lives in danger.
But instead of leaving, as their son pleads with them to do, they haul out a shotgun and decide to stay.
On returning to the country of his birth, Rogers finds his once orderly and progressive home transformed into something resembling a Marx Brothers romp crossed with Heart of Darkness.
Rogers soon begins to see his parents in a new light: unbowed, with passions and purpose renewed, even heroic. And, in the process, he learns that the "big story" he had relentlessly pursued his entire adult life as a roving journalist and travel writer was actually happening in his own backyard.
Popular articles:
tags:
