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In front of me, cutting across the trail, marched a column of black ants.
“Blow,” said Ant Kaschula, my guide at Gonarezhou National Park in the southeast of Zimbabwe. Intrigued, I put my lips together and blew as if it were my birthday and the insects were candles. They hissed back at me, a defensive mechanism to ward off predators. We watched them hastily re-converge and continue back to the nest, each carrying a bounty of termites in their clutches.
“The most I’ve had is 19,” Kaschula continued, as he picked up one insect that looked particularly heavily laden. He shook it above his open palm. Termites sprinkled down; we counted 23.
“It’s a record,” he said, his eyes shining.
This is what safari is all about, surely. Not wedged in the back of a vehicle target-fixated on predators, hoping to see the flickering ears of a sleepy lion in the inconvenient shadow of a tree. The Swahili word safari means “journey” and on foot is the best kind. Matabele or hissing ants can be more scintillating than the Big Five, I swear. That said, the guide must be dazzling. Kaschula is one of the best — brimming with bush knowledge and boy-scout wonder. Once, when it rained, we took shelter under a tree and he pulled out of a pocket shredded baobab wood for us to chew, soften, stretch and plait into bookmarks. At other times he mimicked the squeaks of a distressed mouse to attract carnivores — from dwarf mongoose to wild dog — who I witnessed come bounding towards our hiding places.
When we saw bull elephant, we moved closer in, using the bush as cover and staying upwind. They were oblivious. Crouched behind the very tree an elephant moved towards to start stripping, I could smell its sweat. When it spotted us, Kaschula soothed it by impersonating the rumbling sound they make.
Gonarezhou is an extraordinary undiscovered place, north of the border with South Africa, marked by the “great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River, all set about with fever-trees”, as Rudyard Kipling described it. Managed in partnership with the Frankfurt Zoological Society, this national park is a rare positive story in the world of underfunded conservation and over-funded poaching. There are estimated to be more than 11 000 elephants here, a record since counting began in the mid-1970s; that translates to one of the highest densities of these animals on the African continent. The authorities are now considering reintroducing rhino.
“What’s the secret?” I asked Hugo van der Westhuizen, Gonarezhou’s committed director-general.
“The community,” he replied.
“I spend a lot of my time under the shade of trees talking to people. When I leave here, I hope they say, ‘They were good neighbours. They were willing to listen.’ That, of course, is the only way forward.”
The magic of the place is not the volume of game, but the volume of tourists. Nobody is here — in an area more than three times the size of the Maasai Mara. We left the sandy banks of the winding Savute River, hiking along game trails used for hundreds, probably thousands of years, Kaschula said, following patterns of hooves and paw prints intermittently heaped by dung and droppings. The trail took us up the Chilojo Cliffs, made up of layers of pink sandstone. Catching my breath at the top, I looked out across the forested landscape.
There wasn’t a man-made sign of life. Instead, I noticed the frisky wind, the feathered cloud formations, the faraway escarpments, and heard the descending notes of a spectacled weaver followed by a melancholic tropical bulbul, and the loopy whistle of a pearl-spotted owlet, all punctured by an aggressive male impala whose rutting noises sounded more like a monster. Even in the flat, fading light, the bark of the gigantic baobabs had a polished metallic sheen.
To see the boundaries of the park, Van der Westhuizen and I took off in a canary-yellow single-engine Super Cub. We coursed the charging Runde River, flanked by gigantic trees — African ebony, Nyala berry and wild mango — before banking through a gorge and skimming over the floodplain to soar above cliff faces and sculpted rock formations. The sense of space was immense.
“There are few protected areas of this size left in Africa,” van der Westhuizen said, “and they’re the best shot we’ve got to safeguard biodiversity”.
Zimbabwe is ready to be discovered again. And for the first time in 37 years, it is ordinary people who might be setting the tone for the future. Last November, Robert Mugabe, one of Africa’s longest serving leaders, stepped down. There was a dance party in the streets of the capital, Harare. Some who I met on this trip said it was the most important day of their lives. There is hope now, but also fear to hope. Everyone has a story.
Karen Paolilla lives in the Savé Valley Conservancy in a house she and her gallant French husband built, full of books on aviation and faded photographs, set on the high banks of the Turgwe river. They are visited daily by troops of baboons and droves of snuffling bush pigs. The animals are wild but habituated, she says — and she’s named some, such as Winnie and Wolfgang the warthogs and Squiggle the Slender mongoose. She’s most famous for a pod of hippos she has been saving for the last 25 years — through drought and violent farm invasions, standing up to men armed with machetes, even guns.
We walked together along the river at dusk. The hippos rose out of the water as we approached, gaping as Paolilla called out their names. Their eyes trained upon us, their ears twitching away water droplets; one mother showed us her baby. Paolilla seems to be the hippo whisperer. She might not have a degree in animal behaviour but she has studied this family so long that researchers are interested in her observations, such as witnessing weaning at two-and-a-half years, 50 percent longer than the books say. She’s watched hippos and crocodiles groom each other, scoffing at the idea that the two species are adversaries.
I drove north up to the Chimanimani Highlands, a range of quartzite mountains rich in prehistoric gold and diamond deposits, with a high plant diversity and endemism. In between the peaks, grassland is strewn with lichen-splattered white sandstone crags, sloping east to Mozambique. From the top of Binga, the highest mountain, you can see the blue of the Indian Ocean.
I explored the area with Collen Sibanda, a Rastafarian passionate about politics, with a penchant for cycads, who swears like he has a tic. Sibanda pointed out blooming protea, tree orchids, the Msasa trees known for their red flush of leaves, and the critically endangered Munch’s Cycad, which grows up to five metres. We found the “cave squeaker”, a tiny frog that gave away its location by its call, a shrill whistle. Thought to be extinct, it was rediscovered last year after not being seen for half a century.
Taking shelter from a shower, we crouched beneath an overhang at Bailey’s Folly. Above us, there were paintings of fantastically endowed figures, perhaps fertility symbols. Sibanda didn’t know when they were drawn but there is rock art in Zimbabwe dating back 20 000 years.
“I don’t think anybody knows these paintings are here, except me,” he said.
Earlier he had shown me a ritualistic clay pot buried in the earth. We splashed our faces with the rainwater inside and made a wish. His was for better times. If the politics falters again, he told me he will leave the country: “I’ve lost the last 20 years of my life. I won’t lose any more time.”
Wet through and hungry, I retired to the comfort of Lord Tyrone Plunket’s Rathmore Estate, which looks out at the very peaks I’d just climbed. With a twinkle, the very tall, slightly awkward, ravishingly eloquent Plunket called himself “an anachronism” without me having to point it out.
And then he called me “a quaintrelle”, which, after looking it up in the dictionary, I cached, before I looked up another word, “equerry”, when he told me his uncle had been one. Plunket’s recently deceased uncle and aunt have a special place in Zimbabwean history. Robin (from whom he inherited the farm and title) and the fiercely activist Jennifer were early members of the Capricorn Africa Society and campaigned hard against white minority rule in what was Rhodesia — not popular behaviour among colonials. Jennifer founded a women’s chapter of the organisation and drove a Land Rover called Kalahari Kate donated by the writer Laurens van der Post.
As I sat drinking mead around a crackling log fire in a drawing room filled with books about local birdlife and national politics, Plunket spoke about others who had come before me — back in the day when Rathmore had been a refuge for blacks and whites to discuss openly the future of Rhodesia. Politicians, writers and journalists visited, such as Ndabaningi Sithole, the founder of the Rhodesian liberation movement, and his colleague Herbert Chitepo, later assassinated; Leopold Takawira, who died in prison, as well as the country’s first black judge, Enoch Dumbutshena. Some say it was the company the Plunkets kept that allowed their estate to be spared during the wave of land seizures; Jennifer used to take Mugabe food parcels in prison in the 1960s when he was jailed by the British-appointed Prime Minister Ian Smith.
In Harare, Plunket introduced me to Raphael Chikukwa, head curator at the rather forlorn, infrequently visited National Gallery. But Chikukwa has plans. He called the effort of an “African pavilion” at the Venice Biennale in 2007 “very questionable” and is determined to get everyone thinking about Africa not as a continent anymore.
“We’ve been slowed down in Zimbabwe, working without art materials for a long time, instead doing printmaking, and using found objects and local soapstone for sculpture. The creative community never gave up. Now we have another chance and we have much to do.”
The lack of resources was felt across the country and those memories are still raw. At Tony’s Coffee Shop in the Bvumba Mountains, east of Harare, this war-weary, gentle, talented pastry chef serves me featherweight cheesecake, balanced by a dense cup of hot chocolate. Ingredients weren’t always easy to come by, Tony Robinson said, but in 24 years he never shut shop for that reason. The kitchen equipment may be rudimentary, but the bone china is splendid — inherited wedding gifts of his parents, some from farmers who had fled, other pieces from junk shops. As he spoke, he sometimes had tears in his eyes.
On a previous visit to the country, I remember bank notes worth 100 000 000 000 000 Zimbabwean dollars. I didn’t even know how to pronounce that figure (100 trillion?). Everyone bartered and smuggled, or both. Even up till a few months ago, Robinson said he knew parents paying school fees in goats.
Now there’s investment, aid and loans available. The infrastructure is improving. Direct flights are slated to start from Europe. The visionary African Parks, a private, non-profit organisation with a reputation for rigorous park management, is taking on Matusadona National Park, almost guaranteeing a positive future there in tourism. Safari operator Great Plains Conservation has opened three lodges on the former Sapi hunting concession and there are other new camps, as well as notable renovations, such as Singita’s Pamushana Lodge built on the exceptional Malilangwe Wildlife Reserve, bordering Gonarezhou.
On my last night I headed to Lake Kariba, where Bumi Hills Safari Lodge, one of Beks Ndlovu’s properties, had also just had a shot of investment. Ndlovu was one of the region’s first black safari operators when he founded African Bush Camps more than 10 years ago. But business was so slow he was forced to diversify into Zambia and Botswana.
“I was waiting to transfer back to Zimbabwe when things turned around,” he says. “That’s now.”
Lake Kariba is for me a symbol of carefree old Zimbabwe. The world’s largest man-made lake, created by the damming of the Zambezi in the 1950s, became a popular weekend destination for travellers — to hire a houseboat, cruise between the Zambezi escarpment and the Matusadona Range, and watch the sun go down with that otherworldly light so emblematic of this place.
Binoculars in hand, I looked out at the still blue waters punctured only by the long snouts of crocodiles; there was a panicked guinea-fowl flapping low over the water, followed by four serene sacred ibis in formation, as a pair of fish eagles took flight against the unclouded sky. In the harbour, there are boats abandoned by farmers long gone, but also some newly launched vessels. And out on the water a regatta was in full sail, the first time, locals said, they had seen such an event. It felt like fresh winds a-blowing.
But it is what’s not changed, as much as what’s changing, that gives reason to return to Zimbabwe. For the wildlife, the wilderness and the persistent sense of wildness — from the hot dry lowveld to the rugged peaks, schists and faults of the highlands, to the deep basalt gorges, which the Zambezi tosses and tumbles through to create Victoria Falls; and for the resolute people — including some of the best naturalists and guides in Africa — whose hopes may have risen and been dashed, time and again, time and again, but still they hope, because they cannot not.
“In spite of, or perhaps because of the last 20 years, there might be even more passion and imagination and determination here,” Ndlovu says of his fellow Zimbabweans.
“The human spirit has actually become stronger.” — vanityfair.com
