Newsflash: Zimbabwe Traumatizes Carpetblogger

To steal from Tolstoy, all functional countries resemble each other, but every fucked up country is fucked up in its own way.  Pakistan has a substantial population of medieval warlords locked in a  struggle to return the country to the glories of the 14^th century, only with nukes.  Afghanistan has never really wanted to enter the 20^th century and the Taliban will ensure it never will. Qat-addled Yemen operates according to its own ancient principles. Turkmenistan is a cartoon.

Zimbabwe blows them all out of the water.

On arrival, my South African Airways flight descended from rainy clouds, only to abort the landing twice within a couple hundred feet of the ground. After sharply ovaling for 20 minutes, the pilot announced that he was waiting for the runway lights to come back on. The hotel – the 13-floor Crown Plaza in the center of the city – not only did not have internet or air conditioning, it also had no phones – as in “unable to call down for room service” no phone.  Not that it mattered; there really wasn’t much on offer in the restaurant, just gristly meat and starchy vegetables.

Lots of African cities look like they don’t work but they do. Harare looks like it works but it doesn’t. It’s attractive and organized with long straight, carefully signposted thoroughfares, edged by (albeit poorly maintained) cycle paths. Its wide avenues are lined with hundreds of mature jacarandas and flame trees, planted with British colonial precision 50 or 60 years ago. “Tree Cutting Available” signs posted on their trunks looked ominous.  As they dripped their purple and red blooms on the pavements, it was easy to imagine them hacked apart for firewood when cooking fuel becomes impossible to buy.

One of the benefits of a deprived middle class with no access to consumer goods and no money to buy them is very little trash. This is good because there’s no collection. The parking lot of the country’s largest public hospital was empty. All hospitals and clinics have shut their doors, which hasn’t done much to improve the cholera situation. I was told it’s a crisis if one percent of cholera cases die. Rumors are that in Zimbabwe, 10 percent of Cholera cases die. Now that it’s rainy season and the sewers overflow into water supplies, the coming outbreak should be particularly vivid.

Unlike Afghanistan or Somalia, Zimbabwe isn’t lawless. People queue politely at the ATMs, for buses and for fuel. Traffic laws are carefully obeyed, even when there’s no electricity to run the robots (south African for traffic lights, a term I absolutely adore and will use from now on. When a South African says it, it sounds like “rabbit”). People still throw their trash in bins, even though it won’t be collected. Harare has a substantial middle class population, which makes what’s happening here even harder to understand.

 I didn’t really believe it when colleagues said there is no food in the shops. It’s not 100% accurate. The situation has improved somewhat from six months ago when there really was nothing to buy. Since then, US dollars have been legalized as tender in certain shops. Now, there is some food in supermarkets but it's priced in US dollars. There’s absolutely nothing if you have Zimbabwe dollars, which is what most people have. With its dairy shelves filled with leaky bottled water, one market serving a middle class neighborhood reminded me of Moscow in 1991. The staples aisle stocked nothing but Mezoe Orange Crush, a Fanta-like soft drink that is definitely a Zimbabwean staple, but isn’t terribly nutritious. In the checkout line, I stood next to a man who had a rusty shopping cart filled with lunch box-sized bags of potato chips.

In an ordinary national chain, a loaf of Wonder-type white bread was $1.20. Two pounds of flour cost more than $3, payable only in USD. The typical wage in Zimbabwe? About 5 million Zim dollars, or about 10 USD, depending on the inflation rate. Should bread be available in Zim dollars, it cost 1.2 million.

Prices are bad enough, but accessing one’s money is next to impossible. There’s a daily withdrawal limit 500,000 Zim dollars from ATMs. That’s about 50 cents, or enough for bus fare home from work. All day long, lines of thousands of civil servants, office workers, teachers, police and military curve around buildings and down city blocks, waiting to use ATMs that will probably be out of money before most people reach them. Yet people continue to wait.

The whole visit was a lesson in macro-economics. If you want to understand why it’s like this, the short answer is nationalization of the farms and price controls. Other people can explain it better than I can. But it's critical to understand that Zimbabwe isn’t like it is because of war or natural disaster or the tragedy of history. It’s a predictable result of intentional economic policies made by people who should know better.

It’s one thing to see typical African or Asian poverty. Children shitting on train tracks in Delhi, spectacularly maimed beggars in Sana’a and AIDS victims sleeping on the streets in Addis are shocking but classifiable as foreign and other. Middle class people rely on electricity and mobile phone and ATMs to manage their lives. They expect their paychecks to be able to cover their rent and their food and their children’s education. That they can suddenly find their salaries worthless overnight, their health care and education systems shut down, their trash piling in the streets and their water fouled by sewage is fundamentally understandable. You know it could happen to you.

Comments

[strudel]

I hope you can give more reports about Zimbabwe. The roots of its economical and political drama are quite atypical. Not less unusual is its bipartisan governement.

In case, we are ready to support Carpetblogger by trading spaghetti for granadilla juice.

[Shannon]

Awesome post. Thank you.

[Bea]

You have more guts than anyone I know, and people always thought I was adventuresome. Bravo and hail to the goddess of experiential travel!

[officebashi]

to call turkmenistan a cartoon....is being very, very generous.

[Sean]

Amazing. My aunt lived in Africa for quite a number of years, working in rural sociology and ultimately landing very high-level US gov't work dealing with the AIDS crisis. She was in Burindi during the coup, and most recently in Zimbabwe during the Mugabe coup. She has little nice to say about the place, despite her enduring love of Africa on the whole. She's back stateside now.