Day 4 – 14.03.2018
Today was mainly going to be about driving around, so we packed up our campsite and headed to Bulawayo, the former capital city.
Even though it is a full fledged city, its buildings are mostly from the 70s / 80s as the British left in 1980 after having claimed Zimbabwe, formally known as Rhodesia, since 1923. . From then on there hasnt really been any renovations or new buildings built, since there is plainly no funds to do so and frankly no interest from the leading party.
Here is a little video from Prasanna Patange explaining the history of Zimbabwe:
Bulawayo is the second largest city in Zimbabwe after the capital Harare. The majority of Bullawayo’s population belongs to the Ndebele ethnic and language group, whereas in Harare the majority belong to the Shona ethnic and language group. This tribal separation still remains today, where people from one tribe will not interact with the people from the other tribe, let alone marry. Some wont even eat in the same places. That is how deep this separation is rooted into the Zimbabwean history.
"„The city was founded by the Ndebele king, Lobhengula, the son of King Mzilikazi who born of Matshobana who settled in modern-day Zimbabwe around the 1840s after the Ndebele people's great trek from Nguniland. The name Bulawayo comes from the Ndebele word KoBulawayo meaning "a place where he is being killed". It is thought that, at the time of the formation of the city, there was a civil war. A group of Ndebeles not aligned to Prince Lobengula were fighting him as they felt he was not the heir to the throne, hence he gave his capital the name "where he (the prince) is being killed".
In 1943 Bulawayo received city status.
In recent years, Bulawayo has experienced a sharp fall in living standards coinciding with the severe economic crisis affecting the country. The main problems include poor investment, reluctance by government to improve infrastructure and corruption and nepotism leading to most original dwellers of the city migrating south to the neighbouring South Africa. Water shortages due to lack of expansion in facilities and supplies have become steadily more acute since 1992. Cholera broke out in 2008. Though the city is the centre of the southern population generally categorized as the Matebele, the composition of the city is made up of people from all over the country thereby making it the friendliest city in Zimbabwe as it is built on a foundation of tolerance and acceptance of different cultures. The Central Business District has the widest roads which were deliberately made so to accommodate the carts that were used as a primary means of transport back when the town was planned and erected."
I love this architectural mismatch side by side – one really colonial building, one quite modern left of it.
We then moved on a statue of the „father of Zimbabwe“, not quite the „founder of Zimbabwe but a leading part of its formation. Joshua Nkomo, the late prime minister is depicted in this statue. He is not quite the father of Zimbabwe, but the leader of the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU) and a member of the Ndebele people. He was a trades-union leader, who became president of the banned National Democratic Party, and was jailed for ten years by Rhodesia's white minority government. After his release, ZAPU contributed to the fall of that government, but then feuded with the rival ZANU group led by Robert Mugabe. Fearing for his life, Nkomo fled the country, before controversially allowing ZAPU to merge with ZANU. Please excuse me quoting some of Wikipedia (Zimbabwe, Bulawayo, Robert Mugabe, Harare) here, but I want to get the history sort of right, and a lot has slipped my memory...
„During the elections of February 1980, Robert Mugabe and the ZANU party secured a landslide victory. Prince Charles, as the representative of Britain, formally granted independence to the new nation of Zimbabwe at a ceremony in Harare in April 1980. After the declaration of independence, Robert Mugabe, leader of the ZANU party, was the country's first Prime Minister and Head of Government. Opposition to what was perceived as a Shona takeover immediately erupted around Matabeleland. The Matabele unrest led to what has become known as Gukurahundi (Shona: "the early rain which washes away the chaff before the spring rains"). The Fifth Brigade, a North Korean-trained elite unit that reported directly to the Zimbabwean Prime Minister, entered Matabeleland and massacred thousands of civilians accused of supporting "dissidents"
Estimates for the number of deaths during the five-year Gukurahundi campaign ranged from 3,750 to 80,000. Thousands of others were tortured in military internment camps. The campaign officially ended in 1987 after Nkomo and Mugabe reached a unity agreement that merged their respective parties, creating the Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front (ZANU–PF).
Elections in March 1990 resulted in another victory for Mugabe and the ZANU-PF party, which claimed 117 of the 120 contested seats.
During the 1990s, students, trade unionists, and other workers often demonstrated to express their growing discontent with Mugabe and ZANU-PF party policies. In 1996, civil servants, nurses, and junior doctors went on strike over salary issues. The general health of the population also began to significantly decline; by 1997 an estimated 25% of the population had been infected by HIV in a pandemic that was affecting most of southern Africa.[
Land redistribution re-emerged as the main issue for the ZANU-PF government around 1997. Despite the existence of a "willing-buyer-willing-seller" land reform programme since the 1980s, the minority white Zimbabwean population of around 0.6% continued to hold 70% of the country's most fertile agricultural land.
In 2000, the government pressed ahead with its Fast Track Land Reform programme, a policy involving compulsory land acquisition aimed at redistributing land from the minority white population to the majority black population. Confiscations of white farmland, continuous droughts, and a serious drop in external finance and other supports led to a sharp decline in agricultural exports, which were traditionally the country's leading export-producing sector. Some 58,000 independent black farmers have since experienced limited success in reviving the gutted cash crop sectors through efforts on a smaller scale.
President Mugabe and the ZANU-PF party leadership found themselves beset by a wide range of international sanctions. In 2002, the nation was suspended from the Commonwealth of Nations due to the reckless farm seizures and blatant election tampering. The following year, Zimbabwean officials voluntarily terminated its Commonwealth membership.
Following elections in 2005, the government initiated "Operation Murambatsvina", an effort to crack down on illegal markets and slums emerging in towns and cities, leaving a substantial section of urban poor homeless. The Zimbabwean government has described the operation as an attempt to provide decent housing to the population, although according to critics such as Amnesty International, authorities have yet to properly substantiate their claims.
On 29 March 2008, Zimbabwe held a presidential election along with a parliamentary election. The results of this election were withheld for two weeks, after which it was generally acknowledged that the Movement for Democratic Change – Tsvangirai (MDC-T) had achieved a majority of one seat in the lower house of parliament.[
In a surprising moment of candour at the ZANU-PF congress in December 2014, President Robert Mugabe accidentally let slip that the opposition had in fact won the contentious 2008 polls by an astounding 73%.
In late 2008, problems in Zimbabwe reached crisis proportions in the areas of living standards, public health (with a major cholera outbreak in December) and various basic affairs.
In September 2008, a power-sharing agreement was reached between Tsvangirai and President Mugabe, permitting the former to hold the office of prime minister. Due to ministerial differences between their respective political parties, the agreement was not fully implemented until 13 February 2009. By December 2010, Mugabe was threatening to completely expropriate remaining privately owned companies in Zimbabwe unless "western sanctions" were lifted.
A 2011 survey by Freedom House suggested that living conditions had improved since the power-sharing agreement. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs stated in its 2012–2013 planning document that the "humanitarian situation has improved in Zimbabwe since 2009, but conditions remain precarious for many people".
"On 17 January 2013, Vice President John Nkomo died of cancer at St Anne's Hospital, Harare at the age of 78. A new constitution approved in the Zimbabwean constitutional referendum, 2013 curtails presidential powers.
Mugabe was re-elected president in the July 2013 Zimbabwean general election which The Economist described as "rigged." and the Daily Telegraph as "stolen." The Movement for Democratic Change alleged massive fraud and tried to seek relief through the courts. After winning the election, the Mugabe ZANU-PF government re-instituted one party rule, doubled the civil service and, according to The Economist, embarked on "...misrule and dazzling corruption." A 2017 study conducted by the Institute for Security Studies (ISS) concluded that due to the deterioration of government and the economy "the government encourages corruption to make up for its inability to fund its own institutions" with widespread and informal police roadblocks to issue fines to travellers being one manifestation of this.
In July 2016 nationwide protests took place regarding the economic collapse in the country, and the finance minister admitted "Right now we literally have nothing."
In November 2017, the army led a coup d'état following the dismissal of Vice President Emmerson Mnangagwa, placing Mugabe under house arrest. The army denied that their actions constituted a coup. Mugabe resigned on 21 November 2017, after leading the country for 37 years. Although under the Constitution of Zimbabwe Mugabe should be succeeded by Vice President Phelekezela Mphoko, a supporter of Grace Mugabe, ZANU-PF chief whip Lovemore Matuke stated to the Reuters news agency that Mnangagwa would be appointed as president.
In December 2017 the New Zimbabwean, calculating the cost of the Mugabe era using various statistics, said that at the time of independence in 1980, the country was growing economically at about 5 per cent a year, and had done so for quite a long time. If this rate of growth had been maintained for the next 37 years, Zimbabwe today would have a GDP of US$52 billion. Instead it has a formal sector GDP of only US$14 billion (2016), a cost of US$38 billion in lost growth in the formal sector. The population growth in 1980 was among the highest in Africa at about 3,5 per cent per annum, doubling every 21 years. Had this growth been maintained, the population today would be 31 million. Instead it is about 16 million. The discrepancies were believed to be partly caused by death from starvation and disease, and partly due to decreased fertility. The life expectancy has halved, and death from politically motivated violence sponsored by government exceeds 200,000 since 1980. The Mugabe government has directly or indirectly caused the deaths of at least 3 million Zimbabweans in 37 years."
After our short stay and walk around tour in Bulawayo, we drove to a shopping center where we stocked up on supplies, including smores material, and stayed for lunch. I had a salad with lemon chicken strips. It just seemed like I needed some more greenery in my diet – it was delicious!
We then continued to tonights campsite, the big cave campsite. Here we set up our tents (we are getting so much quicker at doing it!)
We then were led by the manager of campsite up the hill, to demonstrate to us why the campsite was called big cave campsite.
On our way up, we were shown some cavemen drawings that originate from the bushmen and some of them are carbon dated back 6000 years! You can definitely call that an acient civilisation!
At the campsite we had noticed several small round yellow balls, that seemed like fallen fruit on the ground. We were soon taught that they were edible. Apparently its the fruit that elephants get drunk on if they lie out in the sun for enough time and start fermenting... They are a bit like lichis, but with a bit of apple mixed into it.
We continued climbing upwards a reached a plateau where there were more sand more rock formations.
As we continued on, we found a lodge built inside the rocks, which was just beautiful!
And the views from the reception area! Aparently there have been sightings of a leopard drinking from the little water hole.
We were led to more caveman drawings. It is quite remarkable as to how long they truely last. They are said to have been used as maps or shopping lists rather, so they would depict the animals „on offer“ in that region, so that travelling bushmen would know what they could hunt but also which predators they could expect.
We „climbed“ up further and were able to have a great view from a terrace of the owner. Imagine waking up, drinking your tea in the morning looking out onto that!
We were now ready to see the big cave. And we werent disappointed!
We climbed up into the „cave“ and were able to enjoy the views of the area from way up there.
As we move on even higher, we were shown special corn storages that the refugees of the Matabele rebellion used to store crop, food or seeds in case of emergencies. The mud and clay that was used is still very sturdy and we were told a story that our guides grandfather found one of these corn or storage bins, took out some of the grains that were still in the bin, and planted them back in 1950-60. He said they were still good as new and had kept all these years!
In 1893 an armed column raised by Rhodes' Chartered Company had driven Lobengula from his royal headquarters at Bulawayo. In 1896 the Mlimo convinced the tribe the white men were responsible for the drought, locust plagues and the cattle disease rinderpest ravaging the country at the time. He decreed they should be attacked and driven from the country through the Mangwe Pass on the Western edge of the Matobo Hills, which was to be left open and unguarded for this reason.When the rebellion erupted the white settlers gave no thought to leaving the area. A laager was built in the centre of Bulawayo and mounted patrols under legendary figures such as Baden-Powell and Selous rode out to suppress the revolt. It is estimated that up to 50,000 Matabele took refuge in the Matobo Hills, which were the scene of fierce fighting. A great deal of the pottery and artefacts found on cave floors and most of the clay grain bins in the hills are remnants from the rebellion era. There are other reminders too - bronze plaques dotted here and there in the bush mark the location of armed forts or brief skirmishes.
We climbed up again to an even higher look out point.
In order to watch the sunset, we climbed up onto the final large boulder and waited there until the sun had gone down and we were recollected by the manager (who had to close a gate somewhere else in the meantime).
Once the sun had set, we headed back down to the campsite and enjoyed some lovely stirfry including some fancy worms, Mopane worms, that I was ready to try. They can be described as having a bit of a liver or pate taste, but unfortunately they had been prepared with heaps of salt, so it was quite difficult to properly enjoy them. They live on a tree that is really common especially in the National Parks, and during the rainy season, they can be harvested from its bark.
We were looking forward to having a bit of a lie in, as our next activity at Matobo Hills was only starting at 09:30.
