A Paradise in Freefall

1st June 2002

'By this time next year we might all be dead," Tuesday Nkhoma, a Zimbabwean opposition leader, tells me at the entrance of the Kingdom Hotel, his country's biggest tourism development since independence at its main resort - Victoria Falls, one of the UN's Seven Natural Wonders of the World, straddling a mile-wide stretch of the mighty Zambezi River.

At this time of year - southern Africa's mid-winter - the brilliant Vic Falls days are the kind that any Scot would kill for: cloudless, the sun hot, the air clear and as fresh as chilled Champagne, the evenings so cool and invigorating that every mosquito is hibernating.

In a normal year there would be many tens of thousands of tourists milling around the tiny town of Victoria Falls, just a short walk away from the Falls themselves. But this month as a tourist in the Kingdom - foreign journalists are banned from Zimbabwe and have to enter Robert Mugabe's de facto dictatorship clandestinely - I see only two diners in the hotel's 370-seat main restaurant overlooking lakes lined by baobabs, bougainvillea, flame lilies and fig trees. No-one sits around the circular lakeside bar. The two diners are outnumbered by smartly clad chefs tending the buffet, the maître de maison and a dozen or so waiters straightening the cutlery and unfolding and folding napkins and surely hoping their jobs would survive, unlike those of countless thousands of other tourism workers who have been laid off in the past two years.

My new friend Tuesday Nkhoma is chairman of the local Youth League of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) which claims, almost certainly correctly, that it was cheated of victory in the March presidential election because of massive rigging by Robert Mugabe's ruling ZANU party. MDC graffiti plaster the walls of the poverty-stricken black township of Chinotimba, a short walk from Victoria Falls town but where no genuine tourists dare to venture - which is a pity, because I am treated like a long-lost pal by the residents who, like most ordinary Zimbabweans, remain some of the nicest people on the African continent, despite the cruelties and rapacity of Mugabe and his henchmen.

The people, who two years ago voted in an MDC MP for Victoria Falls by 14,000 votes to 4,000, proudly wear T-shirts that proclaim "The Power is in Our Hands."

Actually not, says Nkhoma: "We've got a big, big problem. We've got no maize coming from the farms, because the white farmers are not ploughing. People are already starving, and the government has no foreign exchange to import maize.

"It's got worse since the presidential election. Look at your hotel. It should be full, but it's empty. It won't go much longer. It's only surviving using money it banked a long time ago. There are no tourists, and no tourists mean no jobs. And it's all because of Mugabe."

Nkhoma has a small open-air patch in the centre of Victoria Falls town where he sells stone carvings spread out on a canvas on the ground, alongside many hundreds of other crafts sellers. Or at least he tries to sell things. His last sale was many weeks ago. And to make life worse he was evicted after the presidential election from his township house by local government officials dependent for their jobs on Mugabe's ZANU. Nkhoma, his wife Beauty and their seven-year-old daughter, Future, now live in a 40sq ft, one-room shack made of asbestos and black plastic with no water or electricity, along with thousands of other internal refugees who share three repellent waterless toilets.

"Because I was a senior MDC official I was refused credit to pay for my rent, water and electricity," he says. "To get credit you have to produce a ZANU membership card. I'm frightened. I'm not free. We live in a police state where hospitals have no supplies and shops have no basic foods. But I'll never support ZANU until I die."

Nearby, another MDC official expelled from his home is digging a deep trench in which to bury rubbish. "We're going to put Mugabe in here," he laughs. 

Nkhoma smiles weakly, with good reason. "Even criticising President Mugabe and his appalling wife, who we call the First Shopper, now carries a jail sentence," he says. Then he recalls how his grandmother, sister and a cousin were killed by Mugabe's North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade, which in 1983 slaughtered some 30,000 "dissidents" in Matabeleland, of which Chinotimba and Victoria Falls are part. "They were forced to dig their own graves and then they were shot on the edge of them," says Nkhoma. "People here have never forgotten. It is still in their hearts. ZANU's spirit is just for killing."

May-August is normally the height of the tourist season in Zimbabwe, with Victoria Falls, one of the Seven Natural Wonders of the World, the main drawing card. Overlooking the Falls is the magnificent Kingdom. Opened by Mugabe in 1999 and built at a cost of nearly 20 million pounds, it's Zimbabwe's biggest tourism investment since independence 22 years ago. Elephant herds nudge against it perimeter fence directly beneath bedroom balconies and kingfishers, coloured like magnificent jewels, skim across the lakes in the Kingdom's spacious grounds. Warning notices tell of small crocodiles who might just nip off small children's fingers if they dabble in the water. Mongooses scurry through the grounds and monkeys and baboons chatter in the baobabs and figs.

Cleverly modelled on buildings of ancient central African empires, the Kingdom's decor is superb, consisting of natural woods, local stone and thatch. At the entrance stands a 15ft metal sculpture of feathered Ndebele-Zulu warriors clad only in skimpy skins, spears and shields raised. Waterfalls tumble throughout the hotel grounds.

But Mugabe's disastrous land invasion policy, the massive slaughter of the country's once magnificent wildlife and his crackdown on political opponents have made it a paradise lost. The past two years of political and social turmoil have scared visitors off. The British Foreign Office, most other EU countries, the US State Department, Canada, Australia and New Zealand warn their nationals not to travel to Zimbabwe. The official British Foreign Office advice is: "The leaders of the ruling ZANU party regularly single out Britain for fierce criticism, alleging British interference in Zimbabwe's internal affairs. British travellers may therefore be exposed to particular risk." Also, companies have stopped selling travel insurance for Zimbabwe.

Following the government-sponsored farm invasions and violence, tourist bookings to Zimbabwe dropped dramatically and foreign airlines, including Qantas, Lufthansa and Australian Airlines, cancelled services to the country. The Air Zimbabwe Boeing-737 that once shuttled 120 passengers several times between Harare and Victoria Falls has been taken off the route and replaced by a 14-seater plane, says the airline's spokesman, David Mwenga. British Airways still flies into the country, although it refuses to accept Zimbabwe's now worthless and unchangeable currency as payment.

The 700-bed Kingdom was designed to build upon a thriving tourist industry that drew nearly 2 million visitors in 1999 and generated some 300 million pounds in foreign currency earnings. But the Kingdom this month, at the height of what should be the tourist season, is a symbol of an industry and national economy in freefall as dramatic as the thundering cataract stretching across the Zambezi's myriad rainbows and spray rising 500 feet.

My attempt to book a Zambezi sunset cruise on a 60-seat boat in midweek is unsuccessful. "You're the only client, it's not really worthwhile," says Heavenly Tshuma, a local tour guide. "Zimbabwe has become a no-go place. We can thank Mugabe for that."

One morning at breakfast a chef asks, "Is it a nice day?" It is, of course. Then the chef confides: "Ah, we are suffering," leaving much unsaid. When I suggest he at least has the comfort of a job, he grimaces and says: "But 80 per cent, they have no jobs."  

"We are suffering," has become the people's slogan in Victoria Falls and elsewhere in Zimbabwe. I hear it every time I step outside the Kingdom to be importuned by legions of street-traders, saying they are hungry and offering to exchange money at several times the official rate. An absolute, determined refusal to do business inevitably brings the plea: "OK, then give me one dollar US or one euro for good luck."

"We are suffering," has become the familiar cry of people in Chinotimba, laid off in their thousands from the game lodges and hotels that once thrived around Victoria Falls. Their money has either run out or is running out, and the shops have no staple supplies such as mealie maize, sugar, cooking oil and soap. At the Victoria Falls Hospital, in Chinotimba, the district medical officer laments that five of his nursing staff have left recently to take jobs in the UK. In outpatients a big notice warns: "Due to nursing shortages, the hospital will not be able to attend to all cases except emergencies."

The medical officer, who says only five of his fellow 90 graduates from the School of Medicine at the University of Zimbabwe remain in the country, says: "People are suffering. They have no jobs and there is little food. And 90 per cent of the people we admit test HIV-positive."

So much for the warning sign in outpatients, warning: "Casual Sex Means Formal Death."

The local monthly newspaper, Vic-Falls News, reports that counsellors at an AIDS workshop have agreed that evil spirits called "tokoloshes" probably spread the HIV virus by sexually abusing women during the night. Tokoloshes exist, in one guise or another, in the minds of the people throughout Africa. Africans raise their beds on bricks to prevent tokoloshes, tiny spirits less than three feet tall with only one buttock and an extraordinarily long penis slung over the shoulder, climbing up and getting under the sheets beside them. Frigidity in a woman is claimed to be the work of a tokoloshe lover. As an explanation for the 4 million Zimbabweans who are HIV-positive, it takes some beating.

Everywhere the tourist industry is taking a severe beating. The Victoria Falls Anti-Poaching Unit - which patrolled the game reserves surrounding Victoria Falls and which include the town itself, where elephant and lion roam at quiet times - is disbanded during my visit because of lack of funds. The unit had been very successful in deterring poachers in the four years of its existence. It had removed 4,620 snares and captured 60 poachers, including four illegal elephant-hunters. It also removed dozens of landmines planted by the white Rhodesian Army during the 1970s war of independence.

Ceiling fans still revolve at the elegant Edwardian-era Victoria Falls Hotel - along with the Kingdom, one of only two big hotels still trying to operate. The Falls Hotel is as empty as the Kingdom, but courtly waiters in tuxedos still hover and serve me tea and scones one sunny afternoon, as I watch the Zambezi surge down the deep gorges below the Victoria Falls. Local safari guide Breeze Dlhamini joins me, the lone scone-eater, and shares my pots of tea. "There are not many who come to look any more," says Breeze. He confides that he voted for Morgan Tsvangirai, the MDC leader, in the presidential election. "We all did. We can't go on like this. Soon this place will just close down."

At the Victoria Falls Safari Lodge, outside town, general manager Andy Conn says: "We are only just surviving. We've cut prices to rock-bottom to maintain some kind of cash flow and keep a few jobs. We are just keeping things ticking over. There are no profits. I've retrenched several staff, put the rest on short time, and we have all - starting with me - taken a 30 per cent pay cut. I hope eventually we'll get back to normal, but I'm not terribly optimistic."

Back in town, soft drink seller Oi-Oi complains: "I have been here since dawn. No-one has bought anything. It has been like this all year."

And before I leave at the end of my clandestine visit, I browse in an upmarket curio shop in the small Elephants Walk shopping mall. "We have invented a game," says owner Jeanette Taylor. "It's called spot the tourist." She says that until two years ago her business had been increasing annually by 600 per cent. Since then it has been in freefall. "Now it's about survival, pure and simple," says Jeanette. "I just hope we can hang on."

The Scotsman UK