The Last Resort: A Memoir of Zimbabwe
Thrilling, heartbreaking, and, at times, absurdly funny, The Last Resort is a remarkable true story about one family in a country under siege and a testament to the love, perseverance, and resilience of the human spirit.
Born and raised in Zimbabwe, Douglas Rogers is the son of white farmers living through that country’s long and tense transition from postcolonial rule. He escaped the dull future mapped out for him by his parents for one of adventure and excitement in Europe and the Un
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(out of 51 reviews)
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Review by Alan Brody for The Last Resort: A Memoir of Zimbabwe
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You might want to wait for Robert Mugabe and his henchman to exit Zimbabwe before you visit this resort, but you won’t be able to put down this riveting book about a spunky senior couple and their story of survival. Set at the edge of a country that has descended into economic disaster and official thuggery, this is about people who just want to hang on – and they do!
Part adventure tale, part family memoir and trip into the mind of post-colonial Africa, this amiable but gripping story is a also compelling business case study of sorts – a bush version of Who Moved My Cheese? The Rogers family, a white Zimbabwean couple with roots going back several generations, retire to a craggy estate near Mutare in the East which they turn into a backpacker lodge with chalets, a swimming pool and al fresco bar.
They thrive for several years during the early benevolent period of the Mugabe regime when whites were welcome and the struggle against the old supremacist Rhodesian government forgotten. White emigrants even returned, many encouraged to buy and build in the new majority African-ruled Zimbabwe. That all began to change around 2000 when Mugabe saw his lifetime presidency challenged and he turned to sacking white farms as a way to maintain support.
This took the life out of the economy and with it, the tourist business. Luckily for the Rogers, their craggy estate had little farm value – especially after poachers took out their modest game stock – so the shambling estate avoided the expropriation list. But that still didn’t pay the bills, so the author’s Dad, Lyn Rogers kept coming up with one survival scheme after another in a way that could make for a third-world-dictator version of the Harvard Business School case study. These included: subletting the premises to a brothel manager, running a marijuana operation and then, most famously, the resort becoming a hang-out for illegal diamond dealers. All along, as their food options dwindle, his mother Ros, punctuates these chapters with a scheme of her own: improvised meal ideas for her proposed cooking book, Recipes for Disaster.
At the same time, the resort serves as a refugee camp for displaced whites, government officials’ mistresses, Power Company engineers and political outsiders of several stripes. As for the illegal mining section, it is a relatively small a part of the book but thanks to the Blood Diamonds phenomenon and the kind of money at stake, this is what the media likes to talk about.
Written as a kind of family journal by our affable traveler, Douglas Rogers, we get drawn into many adventures in this troubled place. With a gentle inquisitiveness, he drinks and tokes with the locals who quickly recede from typical African stock characters into real people with their own unique drives, personality and logic. From the amusingly over-articulate John Agoneka to the savvy diamond dealer Fatso and his sidekick No Matter, this is the real Africa you don’t find in a tourist package or your typical bwana book where the white explore and the blacks carry. Likewise, his portraits of the diehard whites who somehow adjusted from white domination to African majority rule and then suffer their disillusionment is matter-of fact yet compelling. When the whites go native such as when the matronly Miss Moneypenny, their “private banker” dances naked at the instruction of a witch doctor to settle a score, it seems perfectly reasonable under the circumstances.
While less lyrical perhaps than Peter Godwin’s Mukiwa: White Boy in Africa or Alexandra Fuller’s Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight and the near hypnotic Scribbling the Cat, it more than makes up for it as a page-turner, eye-opener and to the pin-striped set, an entrepreneurial cliff-hanger. This is an African journey by way of a survival plan B, C & D where good doses of bribery and connivance fill in for Drucker and Due Diligence. All along, you feel like you’re one of them, talking to these folks and listening to their stories in one of their own African languages.
Considering how dark the situation in Zimbabwe became with over 10,000% inflation, the book is almost optimistic. Compared to Godwin’s When a Crocodile Eats the Sun it makes you feel like keeping an eye out for Mugabe’s one-way ticket out of there so you can visit this unsinkable lodge and its irrepressible owners and staff. In the meantime, you could just read the book and breathe in a sigh of democratic relief.
Alan Brody is the author of White Shaka Boy on Amazon
Review by M. H. Kirvan for The Last Resort: A Memoir of Zimbabwe
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I was able to read an advanced copy and I really enjoyed it. It is an easy read and a remarkable story of the author’s family in Zimbabwe. His family lineage goes back 300 years on the African Continent. His family is one of the last white land owners in Zimbabwe and the story is of his immediate family living through the transitions from Rhodesia to Zimbabwe to the last 10 years of “Land Reform”. His parents ran a well regarded backpacker lodge in the eastern mountains of Zimbabwe all through the 1990′s. In the last decade, despite inflation in the million percent range, as well as brutal and murderous land seizures, his parents are still miraculously on “their” land. It is their LAST RESORT! Douglas Rogers is quite the raconteur. His writing makes you ache to visit and see for your self the raw and natural beauty that is Zimbabwe. I recommend this book.
Review by C. A. Mccarthy for The Last Resort: A Memoir of Zimbabwe
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Douglas Rogers has written a brilliant and compelling book, The Last Resort, about life in Zimbabwe in the 21st Century. His story is a personal memoir and love story of the land, the people, and most importantly, his stalwart parents, Lyn and Rosalind. One wonders why Rogers’ parents or any white farmers have remained in Zimbabwe since most of the 4,500 white farmers have been forced off their farms through land invasions or the “resettlement program.” The Rogers’ and most white farmers in Zimbabwe are descendants of Afrikaners or Britons who came to Africa as long as 350 years ago, and settled in Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia) or migrated from South Africa. Since being forced off their land in the past decade, most whites have left and moved to South Africa, Mozambique, Zambia, or wherever someone will take them in. But his parents choose to stay on their game farm in a river valley outside the city of Mutare. They are determined to keep hold of their home and once popular backpacker lodge resort, although no tourists come through anymore.
As the drama unfolds in the warp and woof of his parents’ world, Rogers reveals how life has changed in Zimbabwe and how the Last Resort has become a microcosm of the tragedy in Zimbabwe. He has the eye of a journalist and portrays life for Zimbabweans (black and white) with a wry wit since the thirty year rule of President Robert Mugabe where AIDS has spread to about 20% of the population, 80% of the population is unemployed, a loaf of bread costs Z$1 million dollars, and there is a black market for everything. He manages to find humor in the daily grind and especially with the albino frog who visits and may be an omen.
As he weaves his story, one realizes that it is not only the white Zimbabweans who are struggling, but also blacks who are in the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) (about 50% of the population). Rogers reveals his parents’ passion for their country and their desire to live out their lives in their homeland while most of their friends have given up the fight and left. Rogers admits that while writing their story he is “now filled with admiration for my parents. What they had built out of virgin bush fifteen years ago had become central to the events of the country.” Zimbabwe, once the breadbasket of Africa, has become the poorest country, lacking food or staples to feed its population as the land has gone fallow.
The reader moves from awe and disbelief, to admiration for Lyn and Rosalind in their struggle to survive on this mountain top. The “Last Resort” where they live, includes 12 cottages and a lodge called “Drifters,” and has become a beehive of activity including a brothel, a drug spot, a political center, and even a connection to the blood diamonds. The Rogers, in their seventies now, are fighting to stay on as they watch from their front lawn the drama of the land invasions and political intrigue in the valley below. Their home has “become a stage set, a metaphor of the state of the nation.”
Rogers’ parents never say die and refuse to leave along with a cast of characters (black and white) living in the 12 cottages. These settlers represent both worlds (new and old). Rogers invites the settlers in the cottages to tell their stories while they hang on waiting for their next move. In a journalist’s attempt at balance, Rogers also listens to black “war veterans” tell their stories and the ZANU-PF party members who control the lives and the future of Zimbabwe. The drama unfolds with Mugabe and the ZANU-PF party creating a “cultural netherland” and a people “caught between the trappings of the modern world and the traditions of the tribal.”
The Political Commissar is a perfect example of power and the contradictions of Zimbabwe. The Commissar mixes his dreams with reality while telling his stories about ancestors, spiritual healers, and his own interpretation of history. Rogers’ ability to trust him and learn from him provides an insight into what has been, what is now, and what is to come for Zimbabwe.
Rogers admits, “Things could rise or fall depending on what happened right here” at his parents’ resort and it is not an optimistic picture since the election of 2008. President Mugabe, age 85, remains President with the ZANU-PF party in power despite losing the first election of 2008. The ZANU-PF party wreaks havoc on the opposition party MDC, especially during the 2008 election with murders, muggings and falsifying election results. (Since this account, Morgan Tsvangirai, President of the MDC, in a power-sharing agreement was sworn in as Prime Minister in 2009, but Mugabe still rules.)
This riveting story is both a personal love story and a journalist’s record of a 21st Century dilemma in Zimbabwe. At Rogers wedding reception on a New York city roof top watching a cruise ship easing down the Hudson, Rogers’ brother-in-law, who still lives in Zimbabwe, says to him; “Do you ever think our ancestors got on the wrong boat?”
Rogers’ style is refreshingly honest as he attempts to not only tell the story of the white farmers in Zimbabwe, but also capture the spirit of the people and the politics. This is a brilliant read for both the personal love story about Rogers’ parents struggle at The Last Resort in Zimbabwe and the political fallout from Mugabe rule since independence in 1980.
I give the highest recommendation for this book because it is not only a fascinating read, but also a riveting account of life in Zimbabwe. It should become one of the most popular book discussion club books of 2009 as we keep an eye on Africa and Zimbabwe. Douglas Rogers writes from his heart while revealing the soul of his beloved Zimbabwe and his parents’ struggle to survive.
Review by Jo-Anne Green for The Last Resort: A Memoir of Zimbabwe
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I can’t stop thinking about this book. I recently visited my family in South Africa (I left in 1983), and I was struck — yet again — by their amazing sense of humor, despite all of their difficulties. This book reinforced the feeling of awe I have for them. It is the same feeling I now have for all of the people depicted in The Last Resort. Their lives are tragic, yet heroic; difficult beyond comprehension but full of determination and courage. What makes the book so powerful is how Rogers compels us to empathize with everyone, regardless of their race, ethnicity or political affiliation. They are simply human, born into circumstances not of their own making, swept up by events they can’t quite control. Their actions, though sometimes unethical or immoral, are driven by an evolutionary will to survive. They are unapologetic, yet their ability to adapt and even change gives one hope in the human race. Ultimately, it is not power or money that allows Rogers’ family to endure; rather, it is the small gestures — of respect and kindness — that keeps them on their land in their beloved Zimbabwe; their encounters with individuals, long forgotten, whose connections suddenly mean everything. This is a tale that teaches us that lives can be changed by tiny, seemingly inconsequential interactions between ordinary people, and reminds us to strive to be better every day.
Review by Davis A. for The Last Resort: A Memoir of Zimbabwe
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Douglas Rogers’ riveting account of present day Zimbabwe provides an honest, frightening and eye-opening perspective of life in the crumbling nation.
As an American who has traveled to Zimbabwe recently and has witnessed the plight of all Zimbabweans, both black and white under Mugabe’s reign, I am thrilled that the world now has an accurate glimpse of what’s really happening inside the country’s borders.
With a total media blackout hiding the government’s malicious rule, Douglas’ account is incredibly valuable. We don’t hear enough about Zimbabwe – all Americans should read more and become aware of the government’s unending brutality.
Look no further for an incredibly riveting and current account of a crisis that more of us should be discussing.
And this book is not just about the troubled state, it’s also about Zimbabwean families who are struggling to survive and carry on. They live by the famous Zim saying: “we’ll make a plan.” You’ll get angry, but you’ll also laugh. Every day, Douglas’ family faces incomprehensible challenges and threats but also occasional success.
Thank you Douglas, for your insight, candor and phenomenally descriptive story-telling. I can’t wait to visit your parents at the now famous Drifters guest house.