A review by liralen
The Last Resort: A Memoir of Zimbabwe, by Douglas Rogers
4.0
Rogers grew up in Zimbabwe, in a position of not inconsiderable privilege: the son of white farmers, he eventually left the country for the Global North; his parents stayed on, eventually settling into a life running a game farm and backpackers' lodge.
But Zimbabwe was headed for intense turmoil, and nobody was entirely spared. The young and disenfranchised—and disenfranchisement in Zimbabwe was no joke—took up arms; farmers were booted from their land, often violently; opposition parties were silenced, also often violently; the value of the currency spiralled, and spiralled, and spiralled some more. For Rogers, it was reminiscent of the 70s, when each radio station told a slightly different story: was it 1200 refugees who had been killed, or 1200 guerillas, or 1200 terrorists? It all depended on your point of view. By the 2000s, Rogers was long since out of the country, but he returned again and again to write stories—and to visit his parents. Of his father, Rogers writes:
It is worth noting that Rogers portrays his parents as being sympathetic to the people around them—again, they benefit from a life of relative privilege, but this is a mercifully far cry from books I've read that frame it as 'us' versus 'them' (and in which 'us' is white and 'them' is black). But in no small part because of his parents' widely varied contacts, Rogers had access, throughout the events he writes about, to many sources and perspectives, and he's in and out as the lodge shifts from a foreign, white clientele to a local, black clientele, and as...well. As the landscape shifts and shifts and shifts again. With the fate of Zimbabwe, the farm, and Rogers' parents uncertain throughout, it's a gripping bit of history and human interest.
But Zimbabwe was headed for intense turmoil, and nobody was entirely spared. The young and disenfranchised—and disenfranchisement in Zimbabwe was no joke—took up arms; farmers were booted from their land, often violently; opposition parties were silenced, also often violently; the value of the currency spiralled, and spiralled, and spiralled some more. For Rogers, it was reminiscent of the 70s, when each radio station told a slightly different story: was it 1200 refugees who had been killed, or 1200 guerillas, or 1200 terrorists? It all depended on your point of view. By the 2000s, Rogers was long since out of the country, but he returned again and again to write stories—and to visit his parents. Of his father, Rogers writes:
He had grown a thick grey beard and was starting to resemble some of the rugged armed men in the sepia-tinted photograph of his Afrikaner grandfather's commando unit in the Second Boer War that he had hung in his study. Taken in 1902, two months before the end of that bloody conflict, the photograph shows my great-grandfather, the dashing Gerrit Gauche, in his veld hat and khaki uniform, rifle at his side and a bandolier of bullets across his chest, standing directly behind the white-bearded leader of the commandos, Jan Smuts, the legendary Boer general who later would become prime minister of South Africa.
I wondered aloud: Was the beard his own last stand, a sign of atavistic Boer resistance?
He looked at me like I was an idiot.
'No,' he said. 'There's a shortage of razor blades.' (51)Despite the challenges, Rogers' parents stayed. They knew the risks—farmers around them had been beaten or worse when their land was taken over—but this was also all they knew...and by the time they started to think that maybe Mozambique wouldn't be so bad, the little cash savings they had was more or less worthless.
'...There is a way to work out what the value to the dollar should be.'
'What's that?'
'The egg rate.'
'The egg rate? What, like a local equivalent of the Dow or the FTSE?'
She cackled loudly. 'No, darling. Go to a street dealer and ask him for seven boiled eggs. The price he charges is the rate of the Zim dollar to the US dollar on that day. It's highly scientific.' (181)I wish I'd been more aware of the turmoil in Zimbabwe when it was happening, because only now are some things put into context for me. I remember a college classmate from Zimbabwe telling some of us that her parents were excited for her next trip home and were already saving up petrol to be able to pick her up—this was 2007 or 2008, maybe, and now I wonder how much this all affected her life, and her family's. Not that I knew her well enough to ask, but...privilege of the West, I guess; I was just blissfully unaware.
It is worth noting that Rogers portrays his parents as being sympathetic to the people around them—again, they benefit from a life of relative privilege, but this is a mercifully far cry from books I've read that frame it as 'us' versus 'them' (and in which 'us' is white and 'them' is black). But in no small part because of his parents' widely varied contacts, Rogers had access, throughout the events he writes about, to many sources and perspectives, and he's in and out as the lodge shifts from a foreign, white clientele to a local, black clientele, and as...well. As the landscape shifts and shifts and shifts again. With the fate of Zimbabwe, the farm, and Rogers' parents uncertain throughout, it's a gripping bit of history and human interest.