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Travel After driving through Botswana . . .
I Continued on to Zimbabwe
by Doug Casey
I've been to Zimbabwe quite a few times since the mid-'70s. Earlier, of course, the war between the ruling white government and the ZANU-ZAPU rebels was going full tilt. When you flew into Salisbury at night on an old Air Rhodesia 707, the plane would be blacked out to reduce the risk from antiaircraft fire. If you flew during the day, the plane would come in very low, with a different approach each time, for the same reason. Bus rides in Zimbabwe were never eventful for me, but they always had the potential to prove most exciting. | | Doug Casey is a contributing editor of Liberty. |
| I don't necessarily recommend visiting war zones, but it has its advantages. Absolutely everywhere I went — the Zimbabwe ruins, Lake Kariba, Victoria Falls — I was the only person there. In fact, the first time I saw Vic Falls, totally alone, it was only a week after a white woman had been killed by a sniper (who was apparently a hell of a shot) from across the Zambezi, in Zambia.
In the subsequent 30(!) years, I've seen lots of ups and downs for the former Rhodesia. In the '80s and early '90s, it looked quite good for a while, even as neighbor Zambia was still a backward people's republic treading an African road to socialism. Now the roles are completely reversed, with Zambia actually rather vibrant, but Zimbabwe hitting bottom. In Africa, the long trend is down; you do well to sell during periods of optimism and only think of buying when there's a resource boom and local conditions look as if they couldn't possibly get worse.
| | When I bought gas, 50 gallons of diesel cost
about $100, which equated to a stack of Zimbabwean
currency roughly two feet tall. We
had to carry the bills in a small backpack.
|
| You've probably followed the current disaster, at least out of the corner of your eye. Things really started falling apart in 1998, when President Robert Mugabe decided to involve Zimbabwe's army in the Congo's civil war, for reasons which even then made no sense to anyone. By the time the army pulled out in 2002, the hundreds of millions of dollars that adventure cost effectively bankrupted Zimbabwe.
The Congo disaster may have been the catalyst for Mugabe's land redistribution plan in 2000, supposedly intended to compensate veterans. The plan's actual result was roving mobs of thugs attacking white-owned farms all over the country: destroying machinery, burning buildings, and stealing everything that wasn't nailed down. Many farms were simply handed to government ministers and other thugs loyal to Crazy Bob. In any event, redistribution prompted a final white exodus. During the Rhodesia days, whites, most of them born in the country, numbered over 250,000. Current guesstimates are about 5,000. Commercial agriculture, which once made the country the breadbasket of Africa, is now in ruins. No capital, no management, no labor. Nothing.
Partly as a result of the disaster in farming, tens of thousands of blacks moved to Harare and Bulawayo, looking for work. Most were hostile to Mugabe, for obvious reasons. So in 2005 Mugabe initiated Operation Murambatsvina, which translates as "Take out the trash." The army bulldozed the homes and businesses of an estimated 750,000 people in the hope of forcing them back to the bush, where they'd disperse and be unable to organize a resistance — although the official reason was "urban renewal and slum clearance."
That brings us up to the present, with the Zimbabwe dollar suffering runaway inflation. When I was there, before they knocked off three zeroes in a moronic and pointless effort to "fight inflation," the official exchange rate was about 100,000 Zimbabwe dollars to one U.S. dollar, although the street rate was near 600,000 to 1. When they exorcised the three zeroes on Aug. 1, they gave citizens 21 days to exchange their old money for new. Of course many of the really poor people living out in the bush either didn't hear about the change or couldn't afford to get to a city to make the swap. And the army set up roadblocks to confiscate any sums above the equivalent of about US$400 (all they could steal of any amount, in fact) on suspicion of money laundering.
When I bought gas, 50 gallons of diesel cost about US$100 at the conveniently and idiotically price-controlled level, which equated to a stack of bills roughly two feet tall. We had to carry them in a small backpack. Merchants inspected currency visually, then ran it through a mechanical counter; nobody could count that many bills manually in any reasonable amount of time for a transaction.
| I don't necessarily recommend visiting war
zones, but it has its advantages.
|
| My South African friends were leery of going through Zimbabwe, feeling we might encounter serious problems. I won the day, however, arguing that most fear in today's world is media-engendered hysteria. Sure, there are places where you have to be careful, and for some places that's more true than others. But my thought was that if it were really dangerous, there wouldn't have been trucks lined up for several miles trying to get into the country, many just transiting Zimbabwe to South Africa. There are, in any event, few things as chaotic as an African border crossing in the dead of night. Interestingly, traveling by car, we were waved to the front of the line. Then, customs again moved us, as the only whites, in front of the others. Did we have any trouble? None whatsoever. Customs tore apart the pitiful belongings of fellow Africans, looking for contraband and bribes; we were waved through.
The roads were in excellent repair, although cars were exceedingly rare. But I loathe going where all the tourists are going. What do they know? Nothing. A word to the wise: if you're looking for a vacation spot, don't ask your travel agent. Go to the U.S. State Department website and pick out a place with one of their hysteria-based "travel advisories." Be prepared for friendly people happy to see a foreigner, hotels eager for a visitor, low prices, and unusual experiences.
One lesson Zimbabwe teaches is that even during an economic catastrophe of the first magnitude, life somehow goes on. Restaurants are still open (notwithstanding food shortages), hotels provide service (despite almost no guests), merchants buy and sell (despite the fact that toilet paper is more prized than the currency), and people still go about their lives in an orderly way. Zimbabwe has a great climate, is mostly a very pretty country, and, now that there's a dearth of white people, the European will no longer be seen as a threat or oppressor. He'll be viewed as a source of capital and expertise, a resource to be cultivated.
That said, other than on a strictly individual basis, the white man is basically toast in Africa. Despite the good things that Europeans brought to Africa (actually, there are only two: capital and technology), the way they did it, colonialism, set the continent back massively. The capital and technology could have, and would have, arrived through trade. The wars of conquest, forced colonization, forced imposition of all manner of European beliefs and customs, and establishment of artificial borders blind to tribal realities are what caused the political disaster that Africa has become. And, I predict, will remain. No, it's likely to get worse.
That's because of one additional wild card: the Chinese. They're making a determined effort all over Africa to buy resources, and governments (read: ministers who will see very large sums deposited in their offshore accounts) are happy to sell. That certainly includes mining properties in Zimbabwe. There may be something like a recolonization of the continent over the next few generations by the Chinese, an event that is likely to be just as problematic as the long visit by the Europeans. Could we one day see the Chinese sending large numbers of troops to Africa to defend their property and nationals? And the U.S. counterintervening to impose "democracy," or some such flavor-of-the-month nonsense? I wouldn't bet against it.
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