The Tau of Zimbabwe

                                Random hitch-hiking pic.

SIHETHWE, Botswana – This trip did not include Zimbabwe. A virtual coin-toss decided that we would transit through Zambia instead and stop on that country’s side of Victoria Falls. Zimbabwe, though, famous recently for its multi-trillion-dollar notes and political violence, has followed us throughout this journey.

It seems that every other bus ride my neighbor is part of the growing diaspora of educated Zimbabweans who have fled the country in the past decade as economic conditions have deteriorated and along with political freedom.

I met one of these exiles on a hot dry day that started bleakly in Maun, Botswana with the announcement that the only bus to our destination had been mysteriously canceled. Connie and I instead took another bus to what we were promised was an ideal destination for hitch-hiking - we had 500 miles to go to reach Windhoek, Namibia, so it was a crucial gamble.

An hour later we got off at a place reputed to be a town, but which appeared to be little more than a snack stand, a collection of noisy, traffic-dodging goats, and a few slothful cows hogging the precious shade under the acacia trees. Sihethwe was notable one thing: a distinct lack of traffic.

Car after car drove down the shimmering, sun-drenched highway only to turn at the last minute down a road that must have gone to some Valhalla vastly superior to Windhoek, where a cool sea breeze gently tickled the lucky traveler’s feet and the Windhoek Lager never ran out.

I looked at the crowd of hopefuls waiting patiently for a ride. There were about 15 of us and I wondered how many days it would be until the snack stand ran out of food. Then, a van approached in the distance. It passed up the first turn, then the second; now, it just had to pass Endless Windhoek Lager Road and we might get a ride – if we could duke it out with the other hopefuls. Improbably, the van pulled up and, even more improbably, it was empty, but there weren’t 15 seats and it was no time to be timid, so Connie and I jostled our way on. One poor bastard was left on the side of the road. He may still be there.

Our luck continued when we found out the bus would go all the way to the Namibian border and became ridiculous when every passenger save Connie, myself, and a bespectacled fellow in the back exited halfway to the border. We stretched out, relaxed, dug into some side of the road stop nshima* and chicken, and watched the Botswanan bush fly by at 90 mph.

I introduced myself to our fellow rider and we didn’t stop talking for the next 400 miles – all the way from northern Botswana to Windhoek. His name is Tau,**which he says means “talkative” in his native Shona, and his parents had some sixth sense when naming him. Tau has a professorial look, talks a mile a minute and has lots to say about his native Zimbabwe, which he fled in the mid-2000s.

He had just returned from a trip to Harare, where he was rewarded for his three-day overland journey from Namibia (his current home) by having to pay a $200 bribe to renew his passport. On the bright side, he doesn’t have to repeat the exercise for another ten years – “A lifetime, especially in this time of HIV,” as Tau put it wryly.

Once a booming crop exporter with an education system that was the envy of Africa, Zimbabwe, as has been exhaustively reported, has taken a nose dive in the past decades, as invasions of White-owned farms have mutilated the agricultural sector and political violence directed at the opposition MDC party and its supporters has turned the country into an international embarrassment.

Inflation got so bad at one point, that people had to bring wheelbarrows of cash to the grocery store as prices rose by the hour and the mint had to print a 100 trillion dollar note – the largest denomination in the history of money (now for sale as a souvenir on both sides of Vic Falls).

Zimbabwe has since dumped its currency for U.S. dollars and, by most accounts, is slightly less disastrous than before, though still far from functional.

All the Zimbabweans I spoke with have issues with the ruling ZANU-PF party and leader Robert Mugabe, an erstwhile liberation hero turned international pariah, but the bottom line in their decision to leave is always the same: no jobs, no money. None of them had any looming plans to return.

Tau, who has a university degree, has managed ok in his self-imposed exile, teaching in Namibia and supporting his family, albeit in a cramped house in a rough neighborhood. Others are not so lucky and tales abound of college-educated Zimbabweans working as housekeepers and guards.

Tau bemoaned the corruption that has metasticized in his country, leading to a hustler economy.

“Even if you ask directions, they want a dollar.”

Those with street smarts can manage, but many honest people suffer, Tau said. If Tau had not figured out who to bribe and with how much, he would have been made to wait months for his passport and may have lost his job in the meantime.

“If you follow the rules, you won’t survive.”

The Botswana-Namibia border was the van’s last stop and so Connie, Tau, and I were back to hitchhiking. Soon I saw the perfect ride pull up – a large SUV whose sole occupant was the driver, a burly, bearded Afrikaner. I made a terribly unfair judgment – I thought having a black man with us would prove an issue.

Connie went to do the talking – let’s face it, it’s much harder to say no to her – and, not for the first time this trip, one of my snap judgments made me look the fool. Stephen, a safari guide and fourth-generation Botswanan whose ancestors fled British oppression in South Africa, took us with little hesitation, took us all the way to Windhoek and refused our money (even dropped Connie and I at our hostel).

Along the way we talked more about the demise of Zimbabwe - “He is like a child who does not want to give up his toy,” Tau said of Mugabe, though he’s not convinced even the death of the 87-year-old ruler will be enough to turn the country around. We discussed the various quarrels, past and present, some quite bloody, between Southern Africans both black and white, as Stephen chain-smoked cheap, Stuyvesant cigarettes.

“Everyone fights each other. No one is clean,” Stephen said.

We puzzled over how to stem deep-seated corruption that is ravaging southern African states, horrific poverty, and ultra-violent crime (Stephen is terrified of his ancestral homeland, South Africa) which makes most African cities no-man’s lands after dark. Of course we came to no conclusions before changing to the cheerier subject of the bush and African wildlife. One thing Stephen said about lions rang a bit too true for many human predators in Africa.

“If you walk at night, they will eat you.”

*The ubiquitous corn meal peasant grub of Southern Africa.

**First name only and no photo or detailed description of what he does, due to ongoing political intimidation in Zimbabwe.