AND ONE HUNDRED BILLION DOLLARS THAT ARE WORTH NOTHING
Peter Gava stops the Land Cruiser in the middle of a grand Savanna clearing. We lumber our way off the open 4×4 as Peter races around the vehicle to open a small rear baggage compartment and pulls out a carefully folded table and a neatly packed outdoor cocktail set. It’s six o’clock in the afternoon, 18 degrees south of the equator, and the sun is just about to set. The timing couldn’t have been better. As we absorb the beauty of the moment, he hands each one of us an ice-cold glass of perfectly made Gin and Tonic. “Very few things can get better than this,” says my inner voice as the last rays of Sun baths this particular clearing somewhere on the eastern edges of the Kalahari Desert.
Then Peter tells us something about the 2018 Zimbabwean presidential elections that makes our jaws drop.
The road to nowhere
We took the long route to Hwange National Park, located in the Northeastern corner of Zimbabwe, to celebrate a “big birthday event” (at our advanced age, we no longer say how big) of one of our gang members. You can read about different sections of the same trip in my post about Victoria Falls. Boarding an Ethiopian plane in Tel Aviv (quite a dreadful airliner that still manages to be “Africa’s best”) and swapping into a small propellor-powered Beechcraft, we ended up landing at a makeshift airstrip narrower than a bike trail. Kudos to the pilot!
The soft landing (pun intended) continued with the essential ice-cold glass of Gin and Tonic at the airport terminal. Don’t get your hopes too high; all in all, it’s just a 5 by 5-meter tent. While it didn’t score high on feature comforts, it scored never-the-less a perfect 10 for experience. “Well done, ol’chap,” we tell the local mixer in a fake British accent as we head out of the airstrip “terminal”. Happy to have landed safely and a bit light-headed from the exquisite, Gin-rich cocktail, we boarded the Safari van and headed straight to the Linkwasha Lodge.
Straight in these parts of Southern Africa is a 45-minute bumpy ride through numerous herds of Zebras, Elephants, Wildebeests, and just a few lazy Crocodiles to boost. Being the snobbish, hard-to-please, discerning tourists we are, we find ourselves slightly peeved at having absolutely nothing to complain about. Getting into the lodge doesn’t improve things at all. It’s perfect!
Love Africa? I do. Here are some more posts from the Sub Sahara:
* 7 Tips to Climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro
* Heart of Dampnes
* On the Spice Route to Zanzibar
* 28 Hours Later
* The Hardest Thing
* Hungry Like The Wolf?
* Killing your Brunch
* The Most Common Rare Bird
Down at the lodge
The tiny Linkwasha Lodge is strategically located next to a large water hole popular with the local wildlife population. Two large tents serve as mess halls, with another eight guest tents scattered around the premises. One must admit that the term “tent” does poor service to what can surely rival any executive suite at the Ritz-Carlton. The only thing that surpasses this is the level of service and attention of the local staff. What more can I say. Amazing!
Things only get better with sunset when the “locals” come in for a late afternoon drink. On the first night of our three-night stay, one of the Huange elephants even braved its way to the guest pool for a sip. After a splendid dinner accompanied by an armed ranger, we stride back to our tents, lest one of the local lions pick us as a late-night snack. A magnificent canopy of southern constellations engulfs us as we enter our five-star tent, hit bed, and fall into a dreamless slumber.
One hundred Billion Dollars!
Doctor Evil might have felt at home in the failed state that Zimbabwe had become under the rule of no lesser of an evil Doctor – Robert Mugabe.
The once charming intellectual turned radical revolutionary, Mogabe has led the country to independence and then ran it into the ground. In 1980, the all-white apartheid regime of Ian Smith raised the white flag (no pun intended this time) after years of international sanctions and crippling guerilla warfare. Prosperous Rhodesia (prosperous, if you happened to be a white settler) was renamed Zimbabwe. The capital Saulisberry was changed to Harare, and Robert Mugabe and his revolutionary party came into power, democratically.
The world cheered the sounds of the decolonization marching band. With Mugabe in the lead, Zimbabwe was all but poised to be the posterchild of a new and emerging Africa. Things, however, would play out differently.
In power, Mugabe lost no time in consolidating the economy along socialist lines with strict governmental controls on all aspects of the economy. Free market dynamics were replaced with planned policies, prices, and exchange rates. A massive increase in government spending resulted in an enormous budget deficit. Not surprisingly, the experiment in third-world economics has resulted in third-world performance as the country fell behind and unemployment soured.
Hitting a brick wall
As Zimbabwe slid into poverty, Mugabe spiraled into totalitarianism. In a string of events that would have made Putin proud, Mugabe’s hold on to power became ever more assertive, corrupt, and violent. In the 2000s, Zimbabwe’s economy hit a brick wall when Mugabe’s (now a full-on dictator) shameless plutocracy met with economic sanctions by Western countries led by the United Kingdom. Like any well-deserving absolutist, Mugabe’s solution was to print money until there was no more space to put zeros.
The old fart is now dead. But Zimbabwe has yet to recover, if it ever will. Street pedlers hagle tourists for worthless paper money. I insisted on the relatively rare 100,000,000,000 Dollar note. Finally, after much deliberation, I bought it for $3 US. I added Dr. Evil’s quote and hung it in my office. It reads: “One Hundred Billion Dollars!”
Twilight Zone
I sip a splendid ice-cold Gin and Tonic. Ahead of me, a perfect orange sphere slowly makes its way to the horizon. A flock of birds appears out of nowhere and settles on a lonely Acacia tree some 50 meters away. It’s all very tranquil and serene, which makes Mr. Gava’s revelation all the more shocking. “You must be joking!” says my inner voice in disbelief. I dare not utter a word so as not to offend a 2018 presidential candidate, who Peter Gava apparently was. “Yes,” he explained proudly, “I was a presidential candidate and competed for the title in 2018”.
What, for god’s sake, does a Zimbabwean presidential nominee do guiding a bunch of spoiled tourists in the middle of nowhere? We discuss the matter further over dinner and drinks. With no real internet connection (we’re in the middle of nowhere, remember?), we could not find an answer. We could only have assumed the obvious: old Peter Gava suffers from an over-creative imagination. Still, the story is nice, and the damn Gin and Tonic he made really hit that spot.
A few months later, while working on the photo album of the tour, I was reminded of our Hwange guide and went online. Well, the guy wasn’t lying. Remarkably, Peter Gava was indeed a presidential candidate during Zimbabwe’s 2018 elections. But so were 33 others. Apparently, it doesn’t take much to officially become one. He got 2,858 votes.