The Last Resort: A Memoir of Zimbabwe

The geographical distance of Douglas Rogers from the unrest in his native Zimbabwe in the year 2000 seems to reflect a dislocation from the country he was born and raised in. There is a TV on in the corner at this party in Berlin; the sound is down but Rogers recognises what he sees.

“There’s something about rich, red earth the colour of blood that you can never wash away, no matter how far you’ve travelled, or how long you’ve been running.”

The first white farmer to be murdered, David Stevens, owned a farm an hour’s drive from where Rogers’ parents had a game farm and backpacker lodge. President Robert Mugabe was threatening to confiscate the land owned by the country’s 4,500 white farmers. The brutal and very violent campaign had already begun.

Humour runs through The Last Resort as an antidote to the terror and brutality it documents. When Rogers frantically phones home concerned for the safety of his parents, the response is not what he expects.

“What’s happening, mom?” “What’s happening?”, she replies; “we’ve already lost four wickets ... four wickets, darling. Not going very well at all.”

While disappointment at the scores of a cricket match is not what one might expect under such circumstances, as the book progresses there is a sense that Rogers’ parents cope by creating a semblance of normality in the chaos and fear.

“My mother always laughed when she was anxious. It was her shield. Laughter and cigarettes protected her.”

One of her pursuits is a cookery book called Recipes for Disaster, which has creative menus for times of conflict – even that has a satirical twist.

Rogers talks early on in the book about having left Zimbabwe behind, barely feeling like a Zimbabwean anymore. Yet he is also envious of his father’s sense of purpose in becoming very involved with the MDC (Movement for Democratic Change), the thorn in Mugabe’s side. Rogers’ parents were resolute in their quest to hold onto their land but not feeling a very strong affinity with his homeland, he does not fully understand it. At his wedding in New York he stands with his brother-in-law Rob looking onto the Hudson River.

“Do you ever think it was all a big mistake?” Rob asks him “Do you ever think our ancestors got on the wrong boat?”

This is a poignant question, an indication of the fallout of colonisation for white Africans, many with “their backs to the godforsaken continent, their feet on the edge of the ocean”, as Rogers puts it. His father, with ancestry in Zimbabwe dating back 350 years, has no doubts about his “inalienable right” to his land. While defiant, he is clever, adaptable and creative in how he executes his strategies for circumventing the Mugabe regime. His mother Rosalind is as resolute, intuitive and crafty.

There are suggestions of the colonial class divide in how they live and how they socialise, his mother playing bridge and sipping brandy with white lady friends.

As the land invasions intensify, the humanity of all Zimbabweans affected by it becomes increasingly evident. Despite some disorientating movements of time, the book flows more as the danger closes in on Rogers’ parents and their friends and as the stories unfold.

The increasing flow of the book as it progresses perhaps also reflects Rogers growing interest in what was happening in Zimbabwe and his quest to walk around his country and among his people to understand the dynamics of its past and present, to understand the hold it has on his parents. As he does this, the lines blur. It is not a story of black and white, but of belonging and survival. ‘Drifters’, the backpackers’ lodge owned by his parents, becomes the last resort for some white farmers driven from their land. Once recommended to foreign visitors on the Lonely Planet guide, ‘ ‘Drifters’ becomes a home to some of the refugees of the Mugabe regime, white and black.

Hundreds of thousands of black farm workers and their families were driven off the land, accused of supporting the MDC. Many activists were tortured and killed. Many black farm workers fought against Mugabe’s henchmen to protect the farms of their white bosses, many satisfied with their access to land, food, money and agricultural training.

Aids and diamonds are two searingly prominent characteristics of Africa’s present and they intersect with Rogers’ story. And not just close to home but at ‘Drifters’ on the doorstep of his parents’ home. These are touched on, not delved into in very great detail and for that a little distracting given their prominence in western perceptions of the continent, its plagues and struggles.

For all that, there is a richness and depth in the account of life that is shared. There is a clarity about Rogers’ writing that is perhaps aided by his journalistic experience. The stories are compelling, of the white farmers, their ancestry, many from South Africa, many who played rugby for the Springboks and Rhodesia, including one who scored a try against the All Blacks.

The same man, Piet de Klerk, was a cousin of South African apartheid leader FW de Klerk, a fact Mugabe used to suggest that he had instigated a campaign to bring back white rule. De Klerk employed 6,000 people directly on his farm, Kondozi. His sons had teams of agronomists and technicians training black peasant farmers to grow peas, beans and vegetables which were supplied to the likes of Tesco and Sainsbury’s. Kondizi earned $15 million a year for Zimbabwe and the black farm workers fought to protect it in 2003 against their better armed invaders.

These stories and those of his parents’ survival are punctuated with information on the state of the general destruction of the Mugabe regime. Diminishing food supplies brought starvation and, as Rogers points out, rural black Zimbabweans suffer the most.

There are many stories shared in this book and Rogers manages to get across the complexity of Zimbabwe and its people.