Allister Sparks, author of First Drafts, and regular columnist for Business Day, has come out with guns blazing after President Zuma’s pleas to Gordon Brown to “drop” sanctions against Zimbabwe. Of course it might have helped had England actually imposed sanctions against Zimbabwe. Sparks tackles this and other inaccuracies as well as suggesting what steps the President might well insist upon being taken.
Whatever President Zuma may have gained for our country during his state visit to Britain, the sad thing is he failed to seize the one opportunity he had to transform his international image completely — which was to come out strongly with a decisive new policy to resolve the protracted mess in Zimbabwe. To show that he is not just a continuation of Thabo Mbeki on this morally definitive issue.
Instead he tried to persuade British Prime Minister Gordon Brown to scrap what he called the European Union’s “sanctions against Zimbabwe.” This was dumbfounding. He must have known it was a non-starter.
Douglas Rogers, author of The Last Resort, is a man who’s been places – he’s been to over 50 countries at last count, and still traveling. Lisa from the Globe Corner Bookstore – “the largest and one of the oldest travel book and map stores in North America” (it’s in Cambridge, Mass.) – caught up with Rogers between travels to find out how he does it, which places he still wants to visit and to chat about his book and the story behind it.
1. First, a preliminary travel preference question: do you take the aisle or window seat? (Please explain.)
Aisle – for stretching and proximity to wine trolley.
2. Also, according to your biography you have traveled to over 50 countries. But there is always that tiny Baltic Island whose ferry is never running or that pueblo in Taos that is always closed for an indigenous ceremony – we’ve all got a place where fate won’t let us go. Is there a destination that still eludes you?
Yes, any island off Maine. This will sound pathetic to someone from Boston, but I’ve been planning to visit Maine ever since moving to the US seven years ago and it’s never happened, usually because of poor organization on my part. It’s not easy to get my head around that state because it’s so huge, and the idea of going to the wrong island and being stuck there for a week terrifies me. So a request – can any of your readers advise me on a cool, remote island hideaway to visit in June with my family, how to get there, and where to stay?
The world has been bombarded with horror stories from Zimbabwe; stories about food shortages, land claims, corruption and intimidation. What the world could do to hear more of are the stories of those who still live there and who are surviving, eking out a living through ingenuity and guile. People like Douglas Rogers’s parents who love Zimbabwe and are fighting to stay.
Vivien Horler recently caught up with the author to discuss his memoir, The Last Resort, and the “big-hearted people” who have remained behind:
In my copy of The Last Resort, Douglas Rogers has written on the title page: “Great speaking to you. Glad you enjoyed a little story about some big-hearted people.”
There are a lot of big-hearted and rather zany people in his book. But the stars are his parents, Lyn and Ros Rogers, who have a farm in Africa. Well, Zimbabwe, and they’re not entirely sure they still own it, but they’re still living there, hanging in and hanging on.
Rogers has done something extraordinary with this book. Yes, it’s another story about Zimbabwe by an exile who grew up there, but it’s not what you think. He doesn’t wax lyrical about Rhodesia or growing up in the bush – in fact, he hated being on the farm and couldn’t wait to leave. Nothing ever happened. It was beyond boring.
In his new book, The Last Resort, Douglas Rogers tells an unusual tale of Zimbabwe – one centred on how, exactly, his parents have contrived to survive Robert Mugabe’s roller coaster ride. Here’s an excerpt from a section entitled “My Parents’ Brothel”:
I went to bed early but was woken at 11 that night by the distant thud of music drifting through my window. For a second I thought I was back in Brooklyn and panicked that Grace had turned on our iPod speakers and was about to wake our landlord, who lived two floors above us. Then I smelled the mangos on the trees outside and felt the lumps in the mattress.
I was very much at home.
The music was indistinct at first, a faraway muffled sound with a repetitive bass line. But soon my ears, like eyes getting used to the dark, began to make out the sound. It became clearer as I lay there: the unmistakable, funky, low-down dance beats of New York rapper 50 Cent’s hit song “In da Club.”
Douglas Rogers is a journalist who’s written frequently about the situation in his home country of Zimbabwe. But when regaling a colleague with some of his experiences there, he realised that he needed to take a look from a different perspective – the result of doing so was his gripping account of his parents’ late-Mugabe-era lives, The Last Resort: A Memoir of Zimbabwe.
Rogers elaborates on this and more in the following Q&A:
Q: The book is very funny, despite the harrowing subject matter. How did you come to write it this way.
A: I was in a restaurant in Manhattan one night in early 2005 with the writer Melanie Thernstrom and I told her the tragic story of my parents’ lives, how their once beloved backpacker lodge was now a brothel, how my Mom was reduced to cooking meals on a portable gas cooker, that my Dad was cultivating a marijuana crop to earn a little money. Tears were rolling down her face. But she wasn’t crying, she was laughing. She said something like, “I’m really sorry but what you just told me is actually quite funny.” I realized then that I had to look at it in a completely different way.
When Douglas Rogers was in his early teens, one of his sisters returned to the family farm from the nearest town, Mutare, in eastern Zimbabwe, with a videotape of Out of Africa. As the film started and Meryl Streep’s incarna-tion of Karen Blixen drawled, “I had a fa-a-rm in A-afrika,” the Rogers kids, in unison, said, “Oh, God, not this s**t,” and switched it off.
But that farm in Africa which he and his siblings so passionately hated when they were young, and which they could not leave fast enough once they had grown up, has haunted Rogers mercilessly over the past decade. It has yapped at his heels and, as Zanu-PF unleashed the full horror of its violent persecution of the millions of Zimbabweans who oppose its regime, it started growling and biting.
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 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.
Jonathan Ball Publishers have the great pleasure in inviting you to the upcoming series of launches for The Last Resort: a memoir of Zimbabwe by Douglas Rogers, in Johannesburg and Cape Town.
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.
Rogers’ set of five launches begins with Exclusive Books Hyde Park, Johannesburg, on 23 November and culminates at Wordsworth Books, V&A Waterfront, Cape Town, on the 27th.
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The Last Resort: a memoir of Zimbabwe 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 escaped the dull future mapped out for him by his parents for one of adventure in Europe and the US. But when President Robert Mugabe launched the violent programme to reclaim white-owned land and Rogers’s parents were caught in the cross-fire, everything changed. Owners of Drifters, a popular game farm and backpackers lodge in the Eastern Highlands, Lyn and Ros found their home under siege, their friends and neighbors expelled, and their lives in danger. But instead of leaving, as their son pleads them to, they haul out a shotgun and decide to stay.
On returning to the country of his birth, Douglas finds his once orderly home transformed into something resembling a Marx Brothers romp crossed with Heart of Darkness: marijuana has supplanted maize; prostitutes have replaced college students as guests; and soldiers, spies, and teenage diamond dealers guzzle beer at the bar. Beyond the farm gates, meanwhile, rogue politicians, witch doctors, and armed war veterans circle like hungry lions.
And yet in spite of it all, Rogers’s parents – with the help of friends, farm workers, lodge guests and residents, among them black political dissidents and white refugee farmers – continue to hold on. In the midst of a nation stuck between its stubborn past and an impatient future, Rogers begins to see his parents in an entirely new light: unbowed, with passions and purpose renewed, even heroic.
The Last Resort is an inspiring tale about home, love, hope, responsibility and redemption. An edgy roller-coaster adventure, it is also a deeply moving story about how to survive a corrupt dictatorship with a little innovation, humour, bribery, and brothel management.
Allister Sparks, author of First Drafts, and regular columnist for Business Day, has come out with guns blazing after President Zuma’s pleas to Gordon Brown to “drop” sanctions against Zimbabwe. Of course it might have helped had England actually imposed sanctions against Zimbabwe. Sparks tackles this and other inaccuracies as well as suggesting what steps the President might well insist upon being taken.
Jonathan Ball Publishers have the great pleasure in inviting you to the upcoming series of launches for 
