This article was originally published in 1995 before Mugabe’s 1999 land grabs spiraled Zimbabwe into today’s disastrous economic 
collapse. It is now reported the only whites left in Zim are those who can’t afford to leave or their bones rest in a cemetery plot. However Mugabe doesn’t always play favorites. He, reportedly, is rapidly filling the rest of Zim’s vacant cemetery plots with blacks.
I was invited to Zimbabwe Africa in 1995. courtesy of an assistant to Zimbabwe’s Minister of Tourism in President Robert Mugabe’s cabinet. John Gould also owned travel agencies in Zimbabwe and South Africa. Gould was white - a rarity in Mugabe’s government even in 1995. I am told John no longer resides in Zimbabwe. I often worry whether he is safe somewhere in the world accompanied by his wonderful family. Their kindnesses to me were many.
By some counts, Zim’s black population decreased since 1995 from about 13,000,000 to less than 10,000,000 today. Mugabe is quoted stating 6,000,000 would be about right. His policies seem geared towards such a population implosion.
“Murambatsvina” (”Throw the Trash Out”) made about 750,000 of Zimbabwe’s poorest blacks homeless. Police and army personnel cast them into an unforgiving bush utterly destitute and without appreciable resources of any kind to sustain life. Harare’s Mbare residents and open-air entrepreneurs such as this “boot cobbler” were reportedly bull-dozed into oblivion. Authorities now report poaching of Zimbabwe’s world class wildlife pool is now rampant by starving multitudes seeking nourishment anywhere they can find it.
Why republish this article? So readers can appreciate what Zimbabwe was as I saw and photographed it. So that all of us outside Zim might weigh what little or how much we have against Zimbabwe’s destitute and maligned in what once was proudly tagged by all of Africa as “Africa’s Breadbasket.” More importantly, so that we become more vocal in questioning why global politicians, from Johannesburg to any western capitol you might want to name, continue to tacitly allow the carnage and genocide to continue in Zimbabwe, Sudan, The Congo and other similarly oppressed African nations.
Millions of Africans of various nationalities suffer immeasurably today for no other reason than to feed with their blood the political ambitions of tyranical despotic leaders practicing brutal tribal chieftain mentalities inherited from Africa’s bloody past. Millions of orphaned children, from babies in swaddling clothes to teenagers, survive day-by-day hand to mouth without mentoring of any kind other than survival-of-the-fittest.
Sudan and Zimbabwe’s current “democracies” are laughable - until you tour their morgues, drive through the acres upon acres of fresh graves in their cemeteries, visit their homeless cast randomly into the bush and deserts, observe Zim’s refugees streaming into Botswana and South Africa. Some say the luckier ones bonded with crocs when fleeing across the Limpopo River’s border (Limpopo means “crocodile” in the Shona dialect).
Until ancient tribal mentalities are eliminated from the mindset of Africa’s governing leaders, Africa, as a whole, is effectively and hopelessly quarantined from the rest of a free-enterprize globe - economically and culturally. In large part, the damage is inflicted by their own governance. Yet, now it is black Africans suffering the most and dying horribly by tens of thousands daily/weekly while the rest of the world numbly looks on - or more tragically, merely looks away.
I’ve tasted of Africa in better times - drank deep from it culturally and physically. Now, I hunger for lost friends. Heart and mind remain bonded to the emotional nourishment fed by a magical but now forbidding land. The whole world is a loser during this insane broad-based African genocide inflicted by various African tyrants’ ruthless suppression of their citizens’ basic human rights.
“Zim” in particular has tragically become the world’s:
“Lost Garden of Eden.”
A lioness exited the shade of a solitary albida tree on the Zambezi flood plain somewhere in Zimbabwe’s Mauna Pools National Park. It headed toward a narrow opening passing to the other side of a 20-yard belt of head-high drought-yellowed saw grass. After negotiating what my guide called “adrenalin grass,” I prepared for the “shot.” Moments earlier, I virtually acted out the same scenario on a magnificent eland bull accompanied by his breeding herd.
Focusing on the anticipated opening the lioness was expected to cross left the rear door open for what happened next. It sounded like Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s on-screen pet but about 10-times louder. A barked command from my personal bodyguard, Paul Rhodes (from Harare - Zimbabwe’s capitol), turned me to him. Together, we faced down a male lion’s charge - with a High-8 10X Sony camcorder. Damned knees shook so hard, I never got the lens focused properly.
To panic and run invited certain attack. So, we just panicked while “standing” in place. (I use the word “standing” somewhat loosely considering how fast the knees were knocking.) Confused, the great cat held his full charge until our guide ran to us from some distance away. Holding a .416 Rigby rifle high in the air, he charged around us directly at the lion.
Then, it simply vanished. Vanished! Never saw another hair after it leaped to one side into adjacent head-high grass.
The above incident was one of several adventures incurred filming a month long travel adventure across Zimbabwe - Africa’s former Southern Rhodesia. The trip materialized through a chance encounter. I covered the Zimbabwe B.A.S.S. fishing team when they won the B.A.S.S. Central Regional title at Missouri’s Lake of the Ozarks’ in June of 1994. Through Zim’s team members, I connected with a major tourism bureau in Harare. Its owner, John Gould, attended high school with five members of that fishing team. I was in a close-knit group’s reassuring hands. Zim’s B.A.S.S. team was Gould’s idea of creating traveling ambassadors to advance Zimbabwe’s outstanding tourism potential.
August 1995 found me touring Zimbabwe on photo safari, canoeing the Zambezi River and exploring its floodplain on foot. We fished for tiger-fish the length of the Zambezi on Zimbabwe’s western border, while dodging hundreds of hippos and the occasional crocodile.
We visited Zim’s major cities, as well as its native African subsistence villages in the bush and ancient World Heritage Site ruins such as “The Great Zimbabwe.” Many of the latter have as much historical significance to southern Africa as the pyramids represent to the northern part of that continent.
Nightly, armed camp-security guards huddled fireside till dawn preventing a pride of lions, or similar potential predatory disasters, from rescheduling the breakfast hour. The final week’s tour of cities, ruins and medical facilities offered absorbing perspectives of a Third World country’s modern culture.
Several sobering first hand incidents dramatically portrayed a subsistence culture struggling to bridge the gap to a cash economy: A Harare hotel porter struggled to forcefully take a piece of luggage out of my hands on departure day: “This is my job! You would rob me of my paycheck!”
Lastly, as we drove to the airport, the hotel shuttle passed workers at a downtown excavation project shoveling dirt into a dumptruck’s bed - one shovelfull at a time.
About the size of California, Zimbabwe strives to feed more than 13,000,000 blacks (reportedly down to 10,000,000 today) living in what westerners will view as extreme poverty. The African black subsistance-villager practices a way of life reaching back a millennia if not beyond that. Historically, the subsistence culture is short-circuited only by nature’s droughts, pathological diseases, and human conflicts of one sort or another.
Their way of life very nearly resembles what history records of pre-European Mandan Indian settlements scattered along the Missouri River where it borders Nebraska and Iowa today. Mudhuts or “rondavels” for permanent housing, multiple marriages, women and children providing the workforce to sustain the practice of intensive agriculture depended on to feed both cultures. The demands of the environment steering the evolution of two cultures so widely spaced around the world lends credence to the success of the process independently arrived at by both.
Because Zimbabwe has (had) a strong national commitment to programs enlisting its natives’ protection of wildlife instead of poaching them, the country successfully preserves large populations of numerous wildlife species. Particularly in National Parks where agriculture is virtually impossible due to soil deficiencies, adverse climatic conditions and the presence of tsetse flies - a murderous bane to domestic livestock as well as the dreaded carriers of “sleeping sickness.”
Conversely, the tsetse’s presence preserved large segments of the bush’s wildlife herds. By virtually eliminating domestic stock through disease spread by the tsetse, native wildlife, immune to the insect’s threat through millenia of evolutionary adjustments to it, avoids competition from domestic stock for scarce drought-restricted brouse. In these parks, established on about 13% of Zimbabwe’s surface acreage, elephant populations have, reportedly, ballooned dramatically since 1990. My tours of Mauna Pools and Hwange National Parks offered visual proof of this assessment.
I filmed herds of elephants at water holes in the midst of desert-like terrain just north of Botswana’s Kalahari Desert. They grazed sections of Mauna Pools’ mopani forests (similar in height to Ozark wooded terrain) down to knee-high shredded-toothpicks. These latter sites resembled an artillery barrage’s aftermath on the shattered landscape.
Hwange National Park (northern fringe of the Kalahari) has a projected carrying capacity of 12,000 elephants. A 1993 survey tabulated 33,000 there. Unchecked, this herd increases about 5%-per-annum and doubles every 15 years. Southern Africa’s elephant solution is politically volatile, yet culling is necessarily 
inevitable. (Severe poaching since this article was first written in 1995 is alledged to have dramatically changed the latter situation in some Zim areas.)
When Nellies (an affectionate Zimbabwe nickname for elephant) ingest an African village’s entire crop of maize overnight, it is a disaster of dire proportions to those affected natives. Some children may starve eventually. It is not difficult to accept that many black-African farmers have an entirely different concept of the elephant question than well-meaning western “greenies” or “bunny huggers” as frustrated Zimbabweans are wont to call the breed.
Africa humbled me. I am not so cock-sure about a “western world order” as before. There, native lifestyles resist conforming to our concept of democracy. A black-African husband claiming six or more wives (each producing six to 10-children of which half are female and earn cattle for dowries) lives a far more liberalized form of democracy than any westernized version. These precepts have been practiced virtually since Lucy left her relics scattered down Olduvai Gorge on this oldest of continents.
Besides the lion charge, an elephant kicked a wall of water over the camera while the photographer (me) was in the viewfinder. Then, a disquieting charge from a bull hippo the last day of the Zambezi canoe trip barely preceded hauling a lively 11-1/2-pound tiger-fish into our canoe. Immediately after boating that contribution to the evening’s “starter table,” an eight-foot croc took exception to my beaching a canoe on its back as it lurked on a sandbar just under the Zambezi’s opaque caramel-colored surface.
Tea-time and “starters” were an unusually welcome break after the canoes finally beached safely in front of camp that evening.
In spite of life’s harshness in a steroid environment (at least in the bush), a proliferation of life - beasts, birds, insects, flora (innumerable blooms and flowers!) created the illusion of a lost Garden of Eden the length and breadth of Zimbabwe. Bird plumage and hide markings ranged from gaudy and iridescent to camouflaged but in radical blends of light and dark shades. The emotional connection was electrifying if not mind altering.
All life in the African bush is methodically expendable for the benefit of the whole. That is as ethically pure and wild as nature gets. Part of me roams there yet. I pray some time in the future I may again experience the incomparable thrill of an African night’s banal cries issuing from just beyond the dark shadowy curtain drawn by a campfire’s flickering circle of light.