'War Vets' or Wildlife...?

The walls of Guy Hilton-Barber’s office are covered with painstakingly accurate wildlife paintings by his artist son. They are the sort of portraits that could only have been done by someone with a profound love and understanding for Africa’s animals.            In stark contrast to the noble heads and alert postures in the paintings were the heart-breaking photos that were fanned out across the desk: a zebra carcass left to rot with just one miserable shoulder steak removed; a black rhino that died of thirst with its leg mangled by a wire snare; a baby rhino incinerated in deliberately-set bushfires.
Many of the animals in the paintings are now rare sightings at Barberton Lodge and within a short time their kind could become almost extinct throughout the entire 160,000 hectare Bubiana Conservancy area in Southern Zimbabwe. A South African newspaper had recently quoted overall statistics on the depletion of Zimbabwean game but, with few journalists even entering the country, the figures carried more weight as headlines than they did as the fruits of a serious nation-wide survey.
The situation at Bubiana, while far from unique, was a particularly tense one and there were many lodges that still claimed to be operating as normal so, with more than usual pre-trip trepidation, I hid my press-card and set out to try to get a look at the story behind the headlines. Travelling as a ‘tourist’ I joined game-drives and visited some of Zimbabwe’s most attractive lodges, and as a ‘backpacker’ I crossed much of the country on local transport and slept at downtown hostels.
As a journalist I met with lodge owners from various parts of the country and it was typical of the feeling of helplessness and the unpredictability of the situation that each was convinced that his was the only sensible way of outlasting the threats: “Stay politically neutral but step up community works,” said one; “Batten hatches and wait out the storm”; “Get the hell out and come back when it’s over”; one, from Lake Kariba, had actually made a conscious decision to step-up their marketing drive. “Now’s the time to push,” he said. “Anyone who sticks it out will be in a very strong position when this is over.”
And the only thing that they could all agree on was that the nightmare will be over one day; and they still share a faith that Zimbabwe will work its way back to the celebrated position that it once had when people were lining up for a chance to get in, rather than scouting for an exit. The very fact that things had deteriorated so quickly through the increasingly desperate tactics of the Mugabe regime has bred a sort of fatalistic optimism throughout the nation: “Let it rain down,” Zimbabweans seemed to say, “this can only last so long.”
While there are still a few clients to go around there is a possibility of riding out the storm. There are some who say that tourists should boycott Zimbabwe because visitors are lining the pockets of the Mugabe regime but many others (especially from the Southern African region) are deliberately returning in a conscious effort to do what they can to ease the country through. MDC MP Lovemore Moyo (a respected ‘freedom-fighter’ himself) told me of his hopes for promoting cultural tourism and stressed that tourists should not abandon the country.
Heading out towards Matobo Hills one day we drove into the first rain in four months and lodge-owner David Waddy eased the Toyota pickup over to pass a cyclist who was pedalling stoically along with an umbrella over his shoulder. David’s family has lived in the area for longer than anyone can remember and the cyclist’s smile widened as he saw who was driving the bakkie. He clamped the umbrella tentatively into his neck in order to make a salutary wave.
            “That’s my old builder from Big Cave Camp,” smiled David, “– he’s now the leader of the war vets in this area.”
A pre-trip diet of increasingly sensational press-reports describing the Mugabe-inspired racial hatred that is supposedly prevalent throughout the country had left me totally unprepared for this cheerful greeting. The Zimbabwean man-in-the-street had apparently not read those reports and remained un-swayed by power-crazed propaganda. In the previous historic year I had visited the country three times and never did I experience even the slightest hostility anywhere in Zimbabwe. In fact it seemed to me that, with so few of us around, the Zimbabwean welcome was perhaps warmer than ever.
But their patience is wearing thin: “Let it rain down…”

The End