Invoking Zimbabwe at the Launch of The Last Resort

November 26th, 2009 by Claire

Douglas Rogers, author of The Last Resort: A Memoir of Zimbabwe, was in conversation with Max du Preez at the Book Lounge last night. This event was the third in a series of launches scheduled for the book, beginning in Joburg on Monday.

Du Preez acknowledged Rogers’s memoir as the third in a line of remarkable Zimbabwean memoirs, joining Alexandra Fuller’s Don’t Lets Go to the Dogs Tonight and Peter Godwin’s When a Crocodile Eats the Sun.

Du Preez was adamant that Antjie Krog’s Begging to be Black, with its alternative perspective on Zimbabwe, should not be read too soon before or after Douglas Rogers book.

In her latest work, Krog seeks to understand Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe from a non-Western perspective, specifically the perspective of black Zimbabweans. Du Preez said that instead The Last Resort should be given to Krog and so that “she reads and sees that a thug is a thug, is a thug.”

The Last Resort is filled with anecdotes of life on Rogers’s parents farm in Mutare, Zimbabwe – at one point a backpackers, at another an informal brothel. With experiences like these, the content of The Last Resort cannot help but be humorous.

Yet Rogers deals with topics like the Zimbabwean land grabs with a kind of optimistic humour too. When David Stevens was shot in April 2000, marking the start of the attacks on white farms, Rogers phoned home from Berlin (Complete scene here):

‘Mom, it’s me, Douglas. Jesus, what’s happening? Are you guys all right?’
‘It’s terrible,’ she said.
I pictured her and my father barricaded in the house, a mob rattling their gates.
‘What’s happening? Mom, what’s happening?’
‘We’ve already lost four wickets.’
‘Four what?’
‘Four wickets, darling. Not going very well at all. It’s ninety-one for four…’

Rogers kept the Book Lounge crowd entertained well into the evening. And his sense of humour is what makes the The Last Resort remarkable; its ability to transform the narrative of Zimbabwe from one of loss and despair into one of hope and healing.

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