Just to confuse things I’m going to take a detour from my trip around Asia :S It’s just that my Asian adventure was last year and I’m trying to transcribe my journal onto the blog, RIGHT NOW I have just arrived in Africa and I’m very excited so I want to write a little entry about that.
I flew Air Zimbabwe from London to Harare, one-way and on my own – starting another leg of another (unplanned) trip around the world. The vague idea is to get from the bottom of Africa, all the way to the top by land over 6 months or so – taking in the World Cup, climbing Kilimanjaro and trekking with Gorillas in Uganda – all depending on the common constraint… cash :S
So I arrived in Harare on my own and to be honest I was pretty scared, never been to Africa before and I was all on my lonesome. The backpacking Gods were shining brightly on me though and I ended up meeting a Zimbabwean girl who asked me to help her lift her excess luggage off the conveyor belt onto her trolley. A little bit of chat ensued and to cut a long story short, within 90 minutes I was at her extended families place with her cousin getting fed breakfast by the maid!
Really, they were so nice. I spent my first day in Harare getting driven around by these 3 girls, shown the sights, introduced to the highend of society ( I gathered their social class early on, firstly by their massive house, security guests and 2 full-time ‘help’ and swcondly by the virtue of the fact that President Robert Mugabe went to her cousin’s wedding because she was married to the Secretary of Defence for Zimbabwe!!) so I landed on my feet and my African fears were quickly dissipated. That combined with the fact that Air Zimbabwe made a mistake with my flight so I was comped a 5* hotel in the city centre for my first night’s sleep in Africa made my initial experiences all the sweater!
Harare, as a city, is pretty nice – open, spacious roads punctuated with palm trees, but the poverty and disparity in wealth is there for all to see. The average monthly salary is around $150 but the cheapest accommodation there is $100 per night!!! It is NOT a cheap place to travel, consider yourselves warned 
but it is interesting, and race/colour/creed or whatever you want to call it is never far from people’s tongue. The family took me out for drinks and I was having a conversation with one of their (black) friends about their group’s relative wealth. She began to tell me about the farm her family owned and she was so quick to insist it was nothing to do with Mugabe’s ‘reallocation’ of farms that I didn’t even have time to crack a joke about it
The next day, by a turn of fortune the ODI (One Day International) cricket final was on in Harare, featuring Zimbabwe (Zim to the locals) against Sri Lanka, by new-found, awesome friends soon had us in the corporate boxes section watching the final for free and a great day was had until I had to rush for my flight to Zambia.
In the airport I managed to obtain a couple of remnants from Zim’s recent turbulent economic past:
Anyways, awesome time was had, with awesome people met and I’m off to Zambia, a little scared all over again albeit not so much after such a positive opening experience to this beautiful continent.
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wow it’s hard to follow a comment after that long one from chipo. i just wanna say congratulations for being a trillionaire even for just a few days.
haha – thanks mate =) although i dont think my trillions will afford me much anywhere else in the world!
lol!Im sorry guys..like I told Johnny,once I start typing I can’t help it -it’s like verbal diarrhoea!:)
Ah..the complexity that is zimbabwe …There was no way you could have made sense of it all in just 24hrs. In fact,it’s quite easy for a visitor to be misled…the maids (everyone has a maid here, even those who can barely pay their rent!)…the cars (most of them are not ours,they’re company cars- you lose the job, you lose the car)…the 18bedroom mansions (many,but not all…but many lol, funded by questionable means)….remember what i told you Johnny-fur coats,no knickers!
About our house, lest people get the wrong impression!!!:)it’s actually quite small, by zim standards. We have a lot of space, i mean you saw how everything was spread out,so houses are generally bigger than where you come from. Therefore the average MIDDLE-CLASS family here (us
),living in a MIDDLE-CLASS suburb, has a 4bedroomed house with a fulltime maid & a gardener (the latter’s not a result of geography of course- that’s just how we roll lol!).
&as for the farm issue (&i wont speak for that girl you spoke to in the pub,i have no idea what her family situation is or how they went about “owning a farm”), but my dad was a farmer, he BOUGHT his farm in the 80′s from a white farmer who wanted to move to SA after Independence.I grew up on that farm, worked there most holidays,still do now, &it bugs me to bits when people, &mainly fellow zimbos (zimbabweans) assume that because we’re black,we only “acquired it as a result of the land invasions”. What happened was a tragedy really. Our neighbours, good family friends, hardworking people like my own dad, who had put their whole lives into their farms were forced off their land,&we got to keep ours by virtue of being black (plus my dad had a rep for being a..err..”no-nonsense man/a bit of a hothead” so no one dared even approach our farm lol!)-but no, seriously though,basically, it’s revesre racism&it’s a sad sitiation.
What makes it worse is right now there are people who are jobless& going hungry, some as a direct, & others an indirect result. In terms of production,there’s nothing close to what the white farmers were doing!The state of our economy is what we have to show for it.It’s mostly tiny ‘just enough to feed my family’ fields,or rather, gardens- but who’s feeding zimbabwe now?!As in people left their rural homes to settle on more arable land (in some cases state-awarded&in others randomly taken),only to grow the same 3bags of maize they were growing before they became supposedly “new farmers”. Apparently, if you’re found to not be doing anything constructive with your land it’s taken away&given to someone more productive, but the truth is, there’s not much order or accountability.
Hey, i wont pretend people here have not been through a lot,&it was beyond inhuman how black people were treated…Yes, land redistribution was/ is necessary to some extent but when it becomes a game of tit for tat, &motives&methods are so messed up that in the end its a lose-lose situation for most people on both sides, then where’s the sense in that?!
I remember when things started getting really bad,my dad used to say “Kana nguva yaSmith yaive nane” (Even the days of Ian Smith were better than this) &this is coming from a man who fought in the so-called Liberation Struggle &even went to prison for it!Now that says a lot. &quite frankly i don’t feel too “liberated” myself! So maybe we’re not a war zone,& im allowed to walk freely down any street&on any side of that street i choose- i thank God for that& belive me im very grateful…maybe it’s just me but- can you really call it freedom if its not absolute?
Anyway, what was my point again?Belive it or not,i did have one lol…um,yes-
1. Zim’s a really cool place..now i realise not too much of that came across in my ranting& raving (hehe!) but it’s true! & the people here are the nicest, most genuine& welcoming people in the whole wide world! BUT, if you Johnny are anything to go by, i think the irish could give us a run for our money, new currency that is:D ;
2. It may LOOK like some of us are just livin’ it up up in here, but that’s actually only true for a minute percentage- most people are struggling to get by,big house or small, one maid or two ; &
3. Not every black person who owns a farm here TOOK it:)