BOOK SA – Magazine

A whole host of launches for The Last Resort by Douglas Rogers will take place this week, including tonight’s launch at the Book Lounge in Cape Town. Start the festivities at home with the following excerpt:

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I was eight thousand kilometres away, drunk and happily unaware at a friend’s birthday party in Berlin, when I learned that the first white farmer had been murdered. Someone had left a television on in the corner of the apartment. I knew, even with the sound off, that it was a news report on Zimbabwe.

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. It was a Sunday afternoon, 16 April 2000.

For the previous month back in Zimbabwe the government of President Robert Mugabe had been threatening to take away land from the country’s forty-five hundred white farmers. Gangs of armed men – said to be veterans of the liberation war that had ended white rule twenty years earlier – had begun invading white-owned land, assaulting black farmworkers, looting homes, burning tobacco barns and stoning dogs, pigs and cattle to death. Still, it was a shock to discover that a farmer had now been murdered. His name was David Stevens. He had been savagely beaten, and then shot in the face and back at point-blank range with a shotgun, after a mob abducted him from his farm in the district of Macheke.

I had been out of Zimbabwe for seven years, travelling, writing, drinking away my late twenties and early thirties in the rootlessness of London, but I knew that Macheke was only an hour’s drive from my parents’ game farm and backpacker lodge in the eastern mountains of the country, and that they were in terrible danger. If they didn’t leave fast, they would surely be murdered as well, and it would be a brutal, bloody, all-too-African end. They would die like this man Stevens.

I frantically dialled their number and waited for what seemed like hours to get a connection. My mother finally answered.

She sounded on edge, her voice high-pitched through the static.

‘Hello, yes, who’s this?’

‘Mom, it’s me, Douglas. Jesus, what’s happening? Are you guys all right?’

‘It’s terrible,’ she said.

I pictured her and my father barricaded in the house, a mob rattling their gates.

‘What’s happening? Mom, what’s happening?’

‘We’ve already lost four wickets.’

‘Four what?’

‘Four wickets, darling. Not going very well at all. It’s ninety-one for four …’

Christ. She and my father were watching a cricket match. I could hear the crackle of the commentary on the TV in the background. I wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or horrified.

‘Jeez, Ma. Not the cricket. The farm. Have you any idea what’s going on? This guy has been murdered up the road from you. Are you sure you’re okay?’

There was a long pause, as if I had sucked the air out of a balloon. I heard her take a drag of her cigarette. She would have a drink nearby. Bols brandy on the rocks. She’d switched from Gordon’s gin years ago. Said it gave her headaches.

I could picture my father clearly now, too, down the passageway, around the corner in the living room, feet up in his leather recliner. The remote would be in one hand, a mug of Coke in the other, and he would be cursing at the new batsman for playing a loose shot: ‘Move your bloody feet! Get into line! Ag, hit the ball, for Chrissake!’ Dappled late-afternoon sunlight would be streaming through the arches of the veranda, illuminating the purple crests of the mountains behind and setting on the wheat fields of the farms in the valley below.

Those farms could have been on fire for all my parents knew.

‘Oh, that,’ my mother finally said, her voice fading through the static.

‘Yes, well, it doesn’t look very good, does it? I guess we’re just going to have to wait and see.’

Wait and see didn’t seem a wise option to me.

I told her I thought it best they pack up fast and lie low, whether in Mutare, the closest town, in another valley over the mountain pass nineteen kilometres away, or, even better, across the border in Mozambique. Mozambique. It sounded absurd just suggesting it. Mozambique had been at war for most of my childhood. People fled Mozambique for our side of the border. But like the seasons, in Africa the state of nations turns and occasionally comes full circle. Yes, Mozambique. Anywhere would be safer than Zimbabwe.

But my parents, I discovered on that phone call, were not going anywhere.

‘Darling,’ my mother said, ‘don’t be ridiculous. We are Zimbabweans. This is our land.’

And then I heard steel in her voice, fury rise in her throat.

‘Over my dead body will they take this place. Over my dead body.’

By the time I put down the phone my mother was asking me how I was, and when I was going to come and visit again. She had the stoic, breezy air of someone who had lived through a lot and expected to live through this, too. She had seen worse.

‘How are they?’ my friend asked when I returned to the party.

‘They’re watching cricket,’ I said. ‘They have no idea what’s going on.’

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• The Last Resort is published by Jonathan Ball
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• Jonathan Ball @ BOOK SA

Book details

• The Last Resort: A Memoir of Zimbabwe by Douglas Rogers
  Book homepage
  EAN: 9781868423620
  Find this book with BOOK Finder!

Now that the Cape Town Book Fair has come and gone, we can get back down to the business of shaking the tree of SA Lit.

The juiciest item to fall at our feet in the past many weeks was the announcement, by Umuzi, of the publication of James Kilgore’s We are All Zimbabweans Now – a novel that tells the story of Ben Dabney, a young American who falls in love with Zimbabwe, but finds the scales falling from his eyes as he penetrates the darker areas of the country’s history.

The plotline alone qualifies the book as “juicy” – but it leaps to the fore of juicincess when you add the author’s own history with southern Africa into the mix.

BOOK SA has been given permission to reproduce the complete text of the pdf excerpt that’s available on the Umuzi homepage (see link below). Here you go:

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Chapter 2

‘Which hotel, sir?’ the taxi driver asks as he closes the trunk of his gleam-ing yellow Datsun. The latch catches on the third try.

‘King George the Sixth,’ I reply.

‘The King George, sir,’ he answers as if he hasn’t heard correctly.
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The title of Moeletsi Mbeki’s new book, Architects of Poverty: Why Africa’s Capitalism needs Changing, has a progenitor: namely, the phrase architects of apartheid, which is deployed at the drop of a hat (a fedora from the 1950s, no doubt) whenever the bad old days come under rhetorical fire.

We’re used to hearing architects of apartheid, and thus Mbeki has done a neat trick here, forcing our minds to recalibrate the notions that inhere in the phrase – of powerful men doing wrong in Africa, for instance (they are black, suddenly, not white) or of the scale of the wrong (which now extends beyond South Africa’s borders).

Mbeki’s book is designed to posit “what needs to be done to break the stranglehold of the African elites on political power and to set sub-Saharan Africa once more on the road to development”. BOOK SA is pleased to bring you both the complete preface and a section of Mbeki’s chapter on BEE:

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Preface

The curator pointed to a large musket hanging on the wall – one of the items sold to Africans as part of the infamous Triangular Trade whereby manufactured goods were shipped from Europe to West Africa and exchanged for slaves, who were shipped to the Americas to grow sugar, cotton and tobacco that were then shipped back to Europe. This was mercantile capitalism in action.
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Valerie Tagwira’s The Uncertainty of Hope, first published by Weaver Press in Zimbabwe, has just been released in South Africa by Jacana.

The novel won a Nama Award earlier this year, and has been described by Charles Mungoshi – Zimbabwe’s unofficial novelist laureate – as “an astonishing debut”.

Tagwira’s storyline captures how precarious the future is for the inhabitants of Mbare, a township of Harare, Zimbabwe, in 2005 – and makes for lively, engaging and sobering reading in 2008. BOOK SA is pleased to bring you an excerpt:

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