(See Arno Kopecky’s first post about Zimbabwe.)
As Ralph drove me to his rose farm in Enterprise Valley, some thirty kilometres outside Harare, he explained how anyone with access to foreign currency and local credit can become a Rockefeller in the new Zimbabwe.
“I bought my farm in 2000 for the equivalent of $150,000 US dollars,” he said. “Paid for it in Zimbabwean currency, of course. Borrowed the whole lot from a local bank.” The bank charged thirty percent interest on the loan, which would be a lot if inflation weren’t outpacing it by several thousand percent. A year and a half later, Ralph’s debt had shrunk to the equivalent of USD$18,000 and he paid it off with the proceeds from a single truckload of flowers.
“Now I’m in a moral dilemma,” he went on, scratching his chin. “I’m thinking of taking out a loan, maybe fifty thousand dollars worth of local currency. I’d spend it straight away on farm equipment, and six months later I’d only owe a few hundred dollars. But I know if I do that it means someone else is suffering. I talked to my accountant about it. He said I shouldn’t worry because it wasn’t me who created the system, I’m just taking advantage of it. But I can’t decide.”
We passed the hulking, smokeless cement towers where Harare’s main power station lay dormant. “Takes em three days just to get going,” Ralph snorted, “they use up all their fuel just to get going and then power back down on day four. Zimbabwe’s got more coal than anyone else in Africa, but they can’t organize a way to make use of it.”
Soon there was nothing but barren fields all around us, punctuated by a few derelict greenhouses, their plastic roofs shredded and flapping in the day’s stiff breeze.
“I hate the wind,” Ralph said, eyeing the fluttering wrecks.
We pulled in to Ralph’s farm, where six prim greenhouses around half a hectare each stood in good form, their tarpaulin roofs battened firmly down against the boisterous air. Some eight million stems a year came out of these grow rooms, I was told; not bad when the going rate is 65 cents a stem. “The market’s cheeky,” Ralph said with a wink.
Black farmhands strolled about—pulling wheelbarrows, adjusting water lines, hauling crates of roses into the walk-in storage cooler. Ralph spoke to them the way a principal might address a potentially troublesome child. Not cruel, but quite a ways from friendly. “They see kindness as a weakness,” he told me later. “Some guys you go out of your way to lend a hand to, but nine out of ten times it backfires. Promoting ‘em doesn’t work either. Most of the guys I promote end up spending the extra money on good times; then they get AIDS and disappear.” In one shed, eight women sat around a stone table, trimming their way through a heap of roses. They giggled shyly when I entered, stared at their gloved hands when I asked a few questions, and broke into gales of laughter when I left.
Ralph took me to his show room, a smallish greenhouse where his prize strains stood in meticulously marked and tended rows. I saw white Cameos, red Wild Calypsos, pink Ti Santos (“not a baby pink but not too strong either—just right”) and Ralph’s personal favorite, the Enigma. To my eye it seemed a washed-out shade of purple, but Ralph guided my fingertips to the petals’ rich, velvety interior. “Growers don’t see a rose,” he said, “they feel it.”
The Blue Curiosa, Ralph told me, “is very popular with the gays.” I laughed and said they (the gays, not the flower) probably weren’t doing so well in Harare these days, imagining the compounding effect a dictatorial regime was likely to have on Africa’s endemic homophobia. “Actually, there’s a very strong community here,” Ralph countered. “It’s one of the few things I agree with Mugabe on. We both think they shouldn’t be promoted and spread amongst our children.” I didn’t press him further.
On our way back to Harare, Ralph took me on a detour through Borrowdale Brook, the richest neighborhood in Zimbabwe. It’s a sumptuous community—gated, of course—with a golf course running through the middle. Ralph pointed out a four-storey marble-white mansion perched atop a hill: The home of a general. “He made his money off the war in the Congo,” Ralph explained. “A lot of generals did; they’d go in and get into the precious metals—you know, take over a gold mine, haul out a fortune, then head home.”
The Borrowdale grocery store was by far the best stocked in the country. The others I saw had little more than a few cans of beans, some bananas and long bars of homemade soap, and perhaps the odd stale pastry. But this one was owned by the local governor, to whom price controls didn’t apply. Fruit bins brimmed with glowing apples, oranges, plums and grapes; the shelves were stocked to the hilt with everything from children’s toys to Jamaican Rum; the deli offered an impressive assortment of European cheeses, cold cuts and freshly tossed salads. I’d been in Zimbabwe less than a day, but already this felt obscene; it was as though eating a single bite would invoke a Narnian witch who might turn you to stone.
But a look at the bakery proved that even here, in the depths of Borrowdale, the greater reality could not be entirely held at bay. A small line had formed by the ovens, and one by one the well-heeled elite of Zimbabwe waited for their turn at a single loaf of bread.
“But at least,” noted Ralph, an optimist to the end, “the line is moving.”
Sky Goodden: This is startling, refreshing, overdue, and damn good. Thank you, Shary.
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