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World Tour II Postcards, Page 17:
Excerpts from postcards sent in EARLY JUNE, 1996
|
Zimbabwe
|
Victoria
Falls, Zimbabwe
and Zambia
|
Maputo, Mozambique, 02
June 1996 – Bom dia
(Portuguese “Good morning)! -- Aside from being among the poorest
nations on Earth, Mozambique currently has the highest population
growth rate, likely to double its size in less than a generation. There’s
nothing like poverty and the end of war to create a baby boom. Virtually every young woman, many who make
their homes and small businesses on the street, has a child at their breast and
slightly larger children in tow. Their
small business may consist of just several cans of Coca Cola for sale out of a
Styrofoam cooler, and they’re competing with a
couple dozen other young mothers selling the same thing on the same block
– capitalism at its best.
The children are
perhaps lucky to have mothers. Some
other kids I met today claimed that their parents died or abandoned them during
the war. Whether or not that was true,
it was clear that these barefoot, poorly clothed kids were making their lives
day and night in the street, and their only family seemed to be other street
kids.
A USAID official
told me here that they are using the term “child spacing policy”
almost as a substitute for “family planning policy” to make it sound
more palatable both locally in Mozambique and with a conservative
U.S. Congress.
Streets here are
named after Communist leaders and other dictators, such as Ho Chi Minh, Vladimir Lenin, Kim Il Sung,
etc.
Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, 06 June 1996 – I am in Zimbabwe now, but I have a few more
things to say about South Africa.
It’s no surprise to hear
firsthand the differing opinions about the direction that South Africa is headed. Predictably, of the people with whom I spoke,
the blacks are mostly optimistic, the English-speaking whites are cautiously
hopeful, the so-called “coloreds” (mixed race) are skeptical and a
little fearful for their possible loss of status on the economic-class ladder,
and the Afrikaans-speaking (as a first language) whites think that the country
is going to hell in a hand basket.
The white Afrikaaners fluctuate between aggressive bravado and
doomsday paranoia, or between fighting and fleeing. English-speaking whites are naïve, the Afrikaaners say, and in any case, they can probably return
to relatives in Mother England, since many hold duel citizenship. There’s no
homeland that a tenth generation Afrikaaner can
return to.
The thing they all
talk about most is how the crime rate, already the highest in the world, is
getting completely out of hand. In one
breath, they talk about setting traps for criminals and using mob justice
against them, and in the next breath, they talk about emigrating
to a remote island of Madagascar. Afrikaaners feel terrified and backed into a corner, and they believe
more guns will help them. Meanwhile,
white out-migration is many times higher than it was a year earlier.
South Africa is complicated to describe
in a single postcard.
Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, 06 June 1996 – Mhoroi
(“Hello” in Shona)! Zimbabwe is one of Africa’s most pleasant
countries to visit. Prices are low, the
people are very kind and friendly, the infrastructure for tourism is good, and
unlike some of its neighbors (notably South Africa and Zambia), crime is not such a
problem.
As usual, people in
rural areas are relatively poor, but people in the urban areas are generally
doing quite well and have Westernized middle class lifestyles. Only 2% are white and the country never
suffered from apartheid, though the Portuguese and British colonized it. Racism didn’t
take on the dimensions it did in South Africa, and it’s noticeable
in how open the people are towards each other and how friendly they are to
strangers of another race.
Robert Mugabe has enriched himself with millions, violently
suppressing opposition movements and making himself President for life, but he’s also been somewhat egalitarian and has tried to
assure that the people get a basic education and have other minimal needs
met. Calling himself a Marxist, some of
his policies have also been racist, such as confiscating half of each white
farmer’s land and turning it over
to larger numbers of subsistence farmers.
(Note that since I first wrote
this, he has become a more flagrant tyrant and an international pariah for his
policies evicting white farmers from their lands).
I’ve replace most of the items
lost since my backpack “disappeared” from the luggage storage
facility of the Pretoria railway station. Luckily, I had kept most irreplaceable items
on me or in my daypack. No one claimed
to know exactly what happened, but I suspect it was just a casual
redistribution of wealth. I’m expecting compensation from the railway and my
insurance company.
Victoria Falls, Zambia, 08 June 1996 – Mhoroi
(“Hello” in Shona)! Doctor Livingstone, I presume, inadvertently
stumbled over these waterfalls (figuratively speaking) on one of his
exploratory journeys across Africa and named them for the Queen of England in
1813. Someone asked me
yesterday if I had just discovered the waterfalls, would I name them Clinton Falls?
These days, this
place has changed from a remote exotic location into a small-scale Disneyland, with overland truckloads
of tourists doing rafting, helicopter rides, bungee jumping, ‘60s rock
‘n roll, you name it. Many people I
meet seem to run into folks with whom they did safaris weeks ago and a thousand
miles away.
I am sitting now on the Zambia side of the 330-foot high
falls. I have a sunny spot with a view
of a full double rainbow. The spray
extends far higher than the falls and can be seen from
some distance away. Angel Falls
(Venezuela) is the highest falls and Iquazu (on the
Argentina/Brazil border) has the most water going over it, but the claim here
is that Victoria Falls has the most beautiful single “curtain” of
water. The entire falls, not fully seen
on this postcard, is over a mile wide.
The water falls over a huge natural fault that opened millions of years
ago. It is truly an awesome spectacle!
I just arrived at
the right time to avoid the malaria season this year. Cool nights have put the mosquitoes to
rest. There was a huge malarial outbreak
this year, and other folks I met acquired it here just two weeks ago.
The ferry that sunk
in Lake
Victoria recently was probably the one that I was on nine years ago.
In Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, near the railway station
there is a fancy old building that says, “Great Northern Hotel,
1912”. I wonder if the railroad
magnate James J. Hill (founder of the
Great Northern Railway in the U.S) or some such person helped build the
railway here.
Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe, 09 June 1996 – Mhoroi
(“Hello” in Shona)! All around the developing world, rural women
work hard all day while their idle men, unable to find adequate employment,
drown their sorrows in the local brew. Amon the many tasks expected of women is gathering firewood
and carrying water from the village well.
Sometimes, they must carry wood and water weighing 80 pounds or more
over many kilometers on their heads, and they must have the strength to put
that weight up there. Meanwhile, the
muscles of their men grow flabby.
As the population
grows and the demand for firewood and water increases in areas where these
things are scarce (much of Africa), wells must be dug
deeper, and the women must walk further and further to find the wood. The lower water table and the fewer trees to
block the wind and hold the poor soil in place causes it to be washed away
during the rainy season and blown away by the wind during the dry season. Even local or regional temperature and
rainfall amounts can be affected by human
activity. All this is causing the
world’s deserts to expand at an alarming rate, sometimes at an average of
miles per year. Raising animals speeds up the destruction. Even free ranging animals eat the short, dry
grasses to their roots and cause soil erosion; and their demands for water are
huge. It takes far more firewood to cook
meat properly than to cook grain.
Enough lecture for
one postcard.
Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe, 09 June 1996 – Mhoroi
(“Hello” in Shona)! I received a personal tour of a local village
today from a man who called himself a traditional healer. He claimed that some of his traditional
methods and medicines have been shown to be affective in the treatment of everything
from poisonous snake bites and malaria to cancer and
AIDS … and that some Western researchers have concurred.
Whatever is the
case, Mr Ndiovu (whose
nickname is hyena) seemed very broadly educated and an influential man in his
village of 143 families. He built the
village well that supplies water to those families with aid received from a
Danish rural development organization.
Although he has seven children, he has become very active in promoting
family planning (child spacing) in the region.
The men, more resistant to the idea than the women at first, are buying
it now, he says. He has also worked hard
locally on AIDS prevention.
He learned many
things orally from his grandfather that he has since put to paper and
translated into English and Latin medical and biology terms.
His family and the
community live in traditional African circular homes made of clay and sometimes
cow dung with thatched roofs of dried grass.
They subsist on corn, sorghum, millet, beans and various African plants
and vegetables. Drought has been a big
problem here for several years, but this year there is adequate rainfall.
It’s time for me to catch a
train. The first class compartments are
very old, but very cheap and comfortable.
Victoria
Falls, Zimbabwe, 14 June 1996 – Manguanani (Shona “Good morning”)! I’ve been
staying for several days in Harare, the clean modern, pleasant
capital city of Zimbabwe (formerly Salisbury, Rhodesia). Since Victoria Falls, several days ago, I’ve been traveling with Erin, a woman working on her
doctorate degree in art education at the University of Iowa; consequently, we’ve
been taking in a few galleries, craft centers and art schools. Here in Harare, we’re
visiting her childhood friend Ann, who married a Zimbabwan,
Charles, a Coca Cola Company executive.
They live in a large house with a swimming pool and four servants,
including two maids, a gardener / handyman and a night
watchman, whom they pay adequately at about $60 a month each for their full
time labor. At first, I thought I was
taking advantage of their kindness, but then, I figured I should get something
out of my allegiance to Coke for so many years.
My time here in Harare has been
partly occupied by doing battle with bureaucrats to acquire visas for Kenya, Zambia and Mozambique (for transit to Malawi). The process can sometimes be a pain in the
butt.
The train company
that lost my backpack is compensating me adaquatedly
with $700 U.S.
Well, I’m off to Malawi tomorrow via Mozambique, and Erin is returning to Botswana. I was going to do a Zambezi River safari, but they’re priced for up-market folks, and I figure I can
do better on safari prices in Malawi.
Happy summertime,
Deano
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