May 2001
T
HE LAST TIME
I was at Victoria Falls, ultralights and hang gliders, small planes and helicopters, hot-air balloons and bungee jumpers, gorge swingers and rappelers and cable sliders were jostling for the air space above the falls and the canyons that slice through the black basalt below them. Launches, rafts, jet boats, riverboards, kayaks, and canoes tussled for Zambezi River space. It had become the biggest commercially run river in the world.
I have pitched the place to
Men’s Journal
as having all the raucous feel of a frontier souk simultaneously servicing different fantasies — from the top-dollar Edwardian silver-service safaristas in their designer khakis, reliving the glory days of the African Raj in a town that still bears the name most redolent of the British Empire, to Generation X jungle junkies in neoprene, Velcro, and
kikoyis,
striped cotton sarongs; a world heritage site that has been transformed into a Babylon of adrenaline that conservation purists see as merchants running riot in the temple of Nature.
I check in at the Kingdom, a new hotel that echoes the style of Great Zimbabwe — the soaring drystone palace built in the southwest of the country by Shona-speaking Rozwi people in the fourteenth century. Here it is rendered in rococo riff by a camp designer from Cape Town. Its thatched towers are crowned with fiberglass elephant tusks. Its rooms open onto a decorative lake, fringed with reeds and slung with rope suspension bridges and signs warning, “This lake is a natural water habitat and could contain small crocodiles. Children playing around the lake need parental guidance.”
But as soon as I venture into the usually riotous town, it’s clear that my “adventure capital of the world” story is going to require some fundamental retooling. The place is ominously quiet.
I go over to see Rita, one of Georgina’s bridesmaids, who works here organizing safaris through the Zambezi Valley. She tells me that because Vic Falls is an opposition stronghold, war vets have recently been bused in to teach the locals a lesson. On Monday, militants from the ruling party marched through the city center singing liberation songs, scaring the tourists and beating up opposition supporters.
“They’re still around,” she warns, “frightening all the tourists away.”
As I walk back, a crowd of people sprint around the corner past me, yelping and squealing. I flatten myself against the wall, expecting a column of party thugs to come marauding down the dusty street brandishing weapons. Instead, a massive red-bottomed baboon lopes into sight, clutching a bag of groceries it has stolen. It scrambles up onto a roof and examines its haul, looking up occasionally as the locals throw stones.
Things are quiet too down in the Backpackers Bazaar. Usually there would be a line out the door of people waiting to book for rafting, jumping, viewing, paddling, flying, sliding, swinging, but today the agents are idle. On the table in the waiting area, among the sports magazines and the fliers, is a huge jar with a label that reads: “AIDS Kills So Don’t Be Silly, Put A Condom On Your Willy.” Inside is a single foil wrapper. Years too late, Zimbabwe has launched an AIDS education campaign.
“They take them by the handful,” says one of the agents without looking up from her magazine.
I have arranged to meet Rita later at the Croc and Paddle pub, known variously by the locals as the Crotch and Straddle, the Crap and Piddle, the Crook and Fiddle, and the Clit and Nipple. From there, we embark on what they call here a “booze cruise” on one of the boats that chug leisurely up the Zambezi River above the falls. The trip is always laced with the frisson of what would happen should the engines cough and die. Will you get sucked down the biggest drain in the world and spat out a thousand feet below in the so-called boiling pot, the deep pool carved out of the black basalt bedrock by the staggering force of the water?
Up here, though, the great Zambezi is lazily benign, palm-fringed and gentle. We glug our gin and tonics and palm our roasted nuts and gnaw our buffalo wings while the setting sun struts its stuff. A hippopotamus’s snout and eyes break water alongside the boat, and the small contingent of elderly French tourists applaud wildly — not necessarily a good way to welcome a proximate hippo. As any Africa hand will tell you, the hippopotamus, though a bona fide vegetarian, kills more people here than any other mammal.
Of all the theories for the hippo’s antisocial behavior, my favorite is the one offered by the San, the Bushmen with whom I have recently spent so much time for
National Geographic.
They believe that the hippo was the last animal to be created and was made of parts left over from the construction of other beasts. When the hippo saw its reflection in the water, it was so ashamed of its ugliness that it begged the creator — Kaggan — to allow it to live underwater, out of sight. But Kaggan refused, worried that the hippo would eat up all the fish with its huge mouth. The hippo promised that it wouldn’t eat any living thing from the water, and Kaggan relented. A deal was struck that the hippo must return each night to the land to eat and to shit so that the other animals could examine its dung to ensure that there were no fish bones in it. The regular humiliation of public fecal inspection could well account for the hippo’s irascibility.
Much of the tourism scared away from Zimbabwe is migrating across the border to Zambia, where new hotels are rapidly being constructed. The two sides are joined by the Victoria Falls Bridge, which was supposed to be the crowning jewel of Cecil Rhodes’s Cape to Cairo railway, but the line never got farther than the Congo frontier before the onset of imperial fatigue syndrome.
From the middle of the bridge you get a stunning view of the main falls, and usually there are dozens of tourists milling around there waiting to bungee jump, and a boom box whose bass riff can be heard even above the roar of the falls. But this morning there is only one jumper, a middle-aged German in a denim suit who insists his name is “OK.” He emits a Teutonic yodel and dives with arms outstretched into the circular rainbow below, and the bridge is empty of tourists again.
At dawn the next day, I go for a walk along the footpath that follows the lip of the falls. As I approach the gate, the curio sellers and the money changers, frenzied by lack of customers, descend on me like mosquitoes on warm flesh. “The tourists, they have all flown away,” they complain when they realize I am local. “It is bloody Mugabe’s fault. Give us a gun, and we will shoot him!”
As I wait to pay my entrance fee, a large black man patiently hoes the edges of the path. He wears a torn T-shirt with a logo that announces “I have AIDS — Please hug me — I cannot make you sick.”
I walk along the riverbank until I reach the Devil’s Cataract, where the flow of the falls is greatest, a huge frothy torrent churning over the edge of the fault line. The normally taciturn Scottish explorer David Livingstone raved in his journal in 1855: “On sights as beautiful as this Angels in their flight must have gazed.” He carved his initials into a tree trunk here, the only place, he later admitted, that he had ever surrendered to such vanity.
Prince Charles, whose visit here I once covered for the London
Sunday Times,
was not so poetic. When first presented with this wonder of the natural world, which Livingstone named after his great-great-grandmother, Prince Charles peered at the spume, then turned to his host, the Zambian minister of tourism, and asked, “So how many people commit suicide by throwing themselves over here?” But Africa later wrought its revenge on the House of Windsor. At a formal dinner in the recently postapartheid South Africa, Prince Philip, presented with a menu choice of duck or beef, apparently asked his waiter, “What’s the duck like?” The waiter is said to have pondered a moment and then replied: “It’s like a chicken, only it swims.”
Dr. Livingstone is my only companion here today, sculpted in a twice-life-size bronze, greened by the constant spray. He gazes sternly down at his “wondrous sight,” with a Foreign Legion–style peaked cap and kepi on his head to protect the back of his neck from the African sun. His boots are planted apart, and puttees are bound tightly around his ankles. One hand clutches a Bible, and the other grips a walking stick. A pair of binoculars hangs from his shoulder. A bronze plaque bolted to the massive granite plinth on which he stands is inscribed with three words: “Liberator. Explorer. Missionary.”
When he finally succumbed to malarial fever nearly 130 years ago, dying on his knees in prayer, Livingstone’s two faithful bearers, Sussi and Chuma, carved his heart out and buried it under a banyan tree, as he had requested. Then they dried and cured the rest of his corpse and lugged it fifteen hundred miles across the African interior to the east coast port of Bagamoyo (a trip that took them nearly a year) where it was loaded onto a ship and taken to be entombed at Westminster Abbey.
Today, Livingstone — his efforts to end the African slave trade notwithstanding — has many detractors. Revisionist historians say he failed as a missionary, actually converting only one African, who later lapsed. They say too that he was a failure as an explorer, misidentifying the Congo as the Nile and wrongly believing the Zambezi to be a commercially navigable river. The epithet “liberator,” in particular, galls President Mugabe, who views Livingstone as a pious hypocrite who cast a cloak of moral respectability over early colonialism. He has threatened to have the statue uprooted.
The fact that Victoria Falls still retains the name that Livingstone bestowed on it is hardly due to nostalgia on Mugabe’s part — he has changed virtually every other colonial name in Zimbabwe. It’s due rather to a lack of African unity: Zimbabwe and Zambia can’t agree on a new one. The inhabitants on the Zambian side, the maKololo, call them
Mosi oa Tunya
— “The Smoke That Thunders.” The Ndebele, on this side, call them
aManzi Thungayo
— “The Water Which Rises Like Smoke.” But tourism consultants warned that neither exactly trips off a midwestern tongue, and that in Victoria Falls they have a universally recognized brand name.
I’m still trying to breathe some air into my flagging Adventure Capital story, so I meet Rita for supper at the Boma. We are almost alone there. A sultry black waitress named Temptation talks us through the menu: smoked crocodile, tiger fish mousse, roast mopani worms, ostrich terrine, impala stew, warthog steak. While we eat, a woman offers to braid my hair with extensions, and a man in a loincloth declares that he is PingePinge, a witch doctor, and would like to tell my fortune. The beating of drums interrupts his pitch as an Ndebele troupe launches into a vigorous tribal dance, rustling the thatch and the leaves on the overhanging mopani trees.
I wander back despondently to the casino at the Kingdom. The sunken pit of slot machines, roulette, and blackjack tables is surrounded by a rotunda of fast-food outlets, shops, and bars. Beneath a giant TV screen and a spinning disco ball, suspended dugout canoes and an inflated raft, a handful of people — young overlanders who have been trucked down east Africa, Birmingham secretaries and bookkeepers from Melbourne, Canadian physical therapists and German students — already giddy on cheap dope are now getting smashed on tequila shots, cane spirit, and Zambezi lager. A tall Nordic girl in flared jeans, spaghetti-strapped tank top and a flaxen bob nudges an anxious black boy onto the dance floor.
Down in the gambling pit, I take up a position at the green baize of the blackjack table, flanked by two giggling Chinese businessmen mainlining Fantas. My funds hemorrhage steadily until I’m down more than $8,000. But these are only Zimbabwe dollars, so my losses are less than US$200.
I try to recoup them at the one-armed bandits. The most highly rewarded icon in the spinning windows is the serpent-headed Zambezi River god, NyamiNyami, highly revered by the local baTonga people. You know when he has swum by you, legend goes, because the water is stained red with blood.
B
ACK IN
H
ARARE
, 2 St. Aubins Walk looks unchanged. I give an intricate series of honks at the gate: short, long, long, short — a gap, then — long, long, short. It is the Morse code for my initials, something my father has requested each visitor do so he can identify us, as a security precaution. My mother comes limping out.
“Where’s Mavis?” I ask while she fiddles with the padlock on the gate.
“We finally persuaded her to retire,” says Mum. “She was getting so frail that we were doing all the heavy work anyway. She’s part of a housing cooperative — Dad used to drive her to their meetings every Sunday — and she’s renting a nice little co-op house with her nieces. She’s got a good pension annuity, and I’ve arranged for her to be supplied with hypertension drugs. She left a card for you and a little good-bye gift.”
As I lug my bag to the front door, I see that my father’s Peugeot isn’t in its usual parking place.
“Is Dad out?” I ask.
“No.”
Then I see him sitting in his chair, but he doesn’t rise. As I get closer, he lifts his glass of faux cane-spirit-based scotch and toasts me. “Welcome home, son.”
He takes a sip and only then, as he rests his head back against his antimacassar and into the pool of light cast by his reading lamp, do I see him clearly.
I drop my bag to the floor. “Christ, Dad, what the hell
happened
to you?”
“Oh, it’s not as bad as it looks,” he says, smiling his lopsided smile. His left eye is swollen shut, and a scab covers that cheek. There are deep cuts in the bridge of his nose and forehead, and his broken glasses are taped together at the bridge and the earpieces, one lens cracked. There is an angry gash along his left forearm.
“He was hijacked,” says Mum, handing me a drink.
“Where?”
“Right here, at our front gate.”
“It wasn’t very late,” says Dad, “just after dark. I drove up to the gate and I got out to unlock it, and then suddenly there were all these armed men, about eight of them. They’d blocked my car in with some big vehicle — a Toyota Land Cruiser, I think — I never saw the license plate. You know, it all happened so quickly. Of course, I realized what was happening — there’s been a spate of them recently — so I was just about to say, ‘Take whatever you want,’ when . . . Well the next thing I knew I’d been hit from behind and I was on the ground. Someone wearing a big boot kicked me in the chest, my glasses were knocked off and stomped on, and I couldn’t really see what was going on. They took my wallet, ripped off my watch, and stole the car. End of story. The whole thing was over in a few minutes, and there were no witnesses.”