Postcard from Zimbabwe

Postcard from Zimbabwe, by Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, is not as horrifying as his reports of genocide in Sudan or obstetric fistula in Ethiopia. But to anyone who has spent time in Zimbabwe, it is deeply discouraging.

“Zimbabwe is one of my favorite countries,” writes Kristof, “blessed with friendly people, extraordinary wildlife and little crime.” It is still safe enough (at least for tourists) that Kristof chose to bring his family, “and they found the scenery, people and wild animals quite magical.”

Kristof’s article is datelined Hwange, and it’s a safe bet that the Kristofs spent some time in Hwange National Park, a game preserve bigger than the state of Connecticut. On a visit there in 1990, I had the thrill of watching zebras, giraffes, wildebeest, and warthogs not from a jeep but in a small group on foot, accompanied by a ranger with an antiquated rifle in case anything more dangerous appeared.

Zimbabwe was doing a good job protecting its wildlife. Along the Zambesi near Victoria Falls you could see a particular kind of palm tree lining the Zimbabwean side of the river but not the Zambian side. The seeds of that palm would only germinate after passing through the bowels of an elephant, and the trees were the living symbol that Zimbabwe had prevented poachers from destroying its elephant herds.

Robert Mugabe’s government hasn’t done as good a job looking after its people.

Zimbabwe has come very far downhill over the last few decades (although it has risen a bit since its trough two years ago). An impressive health and education system is in tatters, and life expectancy has tumbled from about 60 years in 1990 to somewhere between 36 and 44, depending on which statistics you believe.

Western countries have made the mistake of focusing their denunciations on the seizures of white farms by Mr. Mugabe’s cronies. That’s tribalism by whites; by far the greatest suffering has been endured by Zimbabwe’s blacks.

“Over and over,” Kristof writes, “I cringed as I heard Africans wax nostalgic about a nasty, oppressive regime run by a tiny white elite.”

Even in 1990, some black Zimbabweans told me things were better in the days of Ian Smith and Rhodesia, and I cringed too. It wasn’t true then, I think, but unhappily it may be true now.

One mango at a time

In 1996, a relatively peaceful time in Haiti, I traveled there with Global Exchange and was struck—despite the deforestation, despite the outbreaks of violence—by what a vibrant, welcoming, and even beautiful country it was. I wrote an article about the trip called Haiti as a Tourist Destination.

About a year later, I came upon a book of photos from Haiti that made me wonder—beginning with the seeming village idiot pictured on the cover—whether the photographer had been to the same place. “Steeped in Voodoo and brutalised by its rulers,” the book’s description read, “it is a country where human life is cheap and animals hardly worth life.”

Along with a surprising amount of help and compassion after the earthquake in Haiti, there has been a strong undercurrent of contempt and condescension. Once the compassion has faded, I’m afraid the contempt will continue. Long-term assistance and development requires a recognition that Haiti is worth developing.

For that reason I was pleased to see an op-ed in the New York Times called Building Haiti’s Economy, One Mango at a Time. Here’s an excerpt:

Haiti is by far the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, and yet it need not be so, because unexploited economic opportunities abound there. Some of the best mangoes in the world grow in Haiti — though too many of them rot, offshore from the world’s largest market, for want of adequate roads and well-governed ports. Excellent coffee is grown in the Haitian mountains, but much of it is sold informally across the border to coffee producers in the Dominican Republic, who reap most of the profits.

Haiti also has many qualities attractive to tourists: a warm climate; magnificent white-sand beaches and turquoise water; Tortuga, the famous pirate island off the northern coast; and the Citadel, a mountain fortress erected after Haiti’s independence in the early 19th century to fend off colonial powers, now a World Heritage site. Still, it is one of the least visited places in the Caribbean.

Popular pages

A Natural Curiosity isn’t one of the most popular blogs on the great series of tubes that makes up the Internet, but I do get visitors from some surprisingly far-flung places, and I notice some surprising patterns among the pages that people look at.

A few of my book reviews pop up again and again, and they are mostly reviews of some fairly obscure African works — including my review of And Night Fell, a South African prison memoir that I wrote about way back in 1984.

Maybe there just isn’t much else on the Internet about some of these books. Too bad.

And Night Fell by Molefe Pheto
Mission to Kala by Mongo Beti
A Woman in Her Prime by Asare Konadu
The Sand Child by Tahar ben Jelloun

Through the Dark Continent by Henry M. Stanley

Through the Dark Continent is a book I wish I’d had a chance to read before I reviewed Tim Butcher’s Blood River. Butcher’s book recounts his adventures crossing the Congo in the footsteps of Stanley, and although I’d read Stanley’s How I Found Livingstone, I hadn’t read his book on the Congo.

Through the Dark Continent is a substantial work: 800 pages long in the two-volume Dover edition. Like other Dover books, this one is a photoreproduction of a 19th century original, and the antique type and engravings add to the pleasure of the text. Having set type by hand in the past, I noticed the increase in typographical errors in the second volume as the typesetters grew weary (and perhaps, according to stereotype, drunk).

The first volume is devoted to Stanley’s explorations around the Great Lakes region of eastern Africa, including a visit to the emperor of Uganda. It is not until the second volume that he sets out on the Congo River, which he refers to throughout as the Livingstone — a name that didn’t stick.

Several times during his journey, Stanley found villages decorated with skulls that he was puzzled to identify. Some he believed were human, left over from cannibal feasts, but others he was told belonged to an ape called the “soko.” Sometimes he thought he heard this creature: “The grey parrots with crimson tails here also first began to abound, and the hoarse growl of the fierce and shy ‘soko’ (gorilla?) was first heard” (p. 60).

In a village called Kampunzu (p. 111) he found “two rows of skulls, ten feet apart, running along the entire length of the village, imbedded about two inches deep in the ground, the ‘cerebral hemispheres’ uppermost, bleached, and glistening white from weather.” The skulls looked human to him, though with “unusually low and retreating” frontal bones. He asked the villagers what they were.

“They replied, ‘sokos’ — chimpanzees (?).”

By now Stanley had apparently decided that chimpanzees were what the locals meant by sokos — but if these skulls were large enough to be mistaken for human, then they were probably not those of chimpanzees. He pressed for a description.

“It is about the size of this boy,” pointing to Mabruki, my gun-bearer, who was 4 feet 10 inches in height. “He walks like a man, and goes about with a stick, with which he beats the trees in the forest, and makes hideous noises. The Nyama eat our bananas, and we hunt them, kill them, and eat them.”

The description would seem to fit a large chimp or a small gorilla — but when Stanley took two soko skulls to England and showed them to Professor Huxley (presumably Thomas Henry Huxley, the Darwinian) he was told they were human.

Perhaps Huxley was right, or perhaps he was not familiar enough with gorillas to tell the difference. It was only about twenty years before that Paul du Chaillu, author of the neglected Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa, was apparently the first Western to see gorillas in the wild.

Cruising with Patrick O’Brian

Unhappily it is no longer possible to take an ocean cruise with Patrick O’Brian himself. But Annemarie Victory did just that, and now offers the next best thing through her specialty tour company. Here’s how she introduces it:

When Patrick O’Brian agreed to sail with me on the SEA CLOUD in April 1999, it resulted in perhaps the most fascinating and memorable of my over 40 charters of this glorious ship. Urbane, charming, witty and surprisingly gregarious, Patrick quickly fell into the wonderful shipboard life aboard SEA CLOUD. Indeed, as he disembarked after the cruise (which was almost the same as the one described in this brochure), he told me that he definitely wanted to sail with us again, and would really look forward to it. This possible reunion ended, of course, with his unexpected and tragic death just a few months later.

It is rather charming that Ms. Victory could see the death of an 85-year-old man as “unexpected and tragic.”

The cruise aboard the Sea Cloud runs from April 23 to May 2, beginning in Barcelona, stopping at Minorca (where Captain Aubrey rescued Dr. Maturin from torture at the hands of the French), then proceeding to Port Vendres, Bandol, Aix-en-Provence, St. Tropez, and St. Florent on Corsica. There are lectures by Count Nikolai Tolstoy and Brian Lavery, the authors of books on O’Brian, and an optional extension to Nice. Prices start at $6,600: too rich for my blood, but not out of the question for a true fan.