The Last Resort

by Douglas Rogers

  ‘So near to riches and yet so far!’ wailed my mother.

  ‘I knew it!’ cried Speros. ‘For years I was telling Piet de Klerk Jr, “There are diamonds in our area. It’s the right geology for it. Let’s forget this farming game and try out mining.” But of course, we didn’t.’

  Mienkie de Klerk just grinned.

  ‘It’s not the first time. My parents sold the farm I grew up on in South Africa, and the new owner found gold on it a year later. That’s how it goes.’

  Everyone knew about the discovery of the field, but few knew what effect it was going to have.

  Rumours spread fast and wild: It was richer than the great mine at Kimberley! Marange’s dusty earth shimmered with emeralds the size of marula berries! The area was the site of biblical Ophir, that great city of treasures, the very legend of which had first attracted so many white settlers to the country a century ago! One rumour, less breathless, sounded more plausible: the field had been mapped out decades earlier by De Beers, which had sat on it, biding their time, not wanting to flood the world diamond market, which they already controlled, with 40-carat gems.

  The facts, however, were that in September 2006, a ten-hectare field of alluvial gem and industrial diamonds was disclosed by a British-registered mining company, Africa Consolidated Resources, who had the concession to operate it. But in December 2007, in yet another echo of the land invasions, the state-owned Zimbabwe Mining Development Corporation revoked the licence and seized the property for itself.

  A fence was erected around the field, and soldiers and police were sent in to guard it. Vice President Joice Mujuru (who had failed to get Hammy’s farm back for him) claimed a section for herself. The mining company took the government to court, but what could they do? When the regime smelled easy pickings, they descended like vultures. And yet the Zimbabwe of 2007 was a far cry from that of 2000. In 2000 the country at least had a semblance of a functional society. Now it was bankrupt, and eighty percent of the population was unemployed; people were starving, desperate. There was no way a mere fence in a remote rural area patrolled by poorly paid soldiers and policemen would keep out the masses.

  And so began the great Manica diamond rush of 2007.

  Tens of thousands of Zimbabweans converged on Marange, pockets empty but heads full of dreams – much like those white pioneers of yesteryear. They included teachers, nurses, bus drivers, farmworkers, goat herders, schoolchildren and street kids. The panners hid in the bush during the day and burrowed under the fence at night, and from dusk to dawn they moved in ghostly columns through the field, hunched as pilgrims, sifting the sand for the precious gem that could change their lives forever. To the rural people of Marange, thousands of whom had lost their livelihoods when the De Klerks’ farm was seized, the discovery of diamonds literally under the soles of their feet seemed like a gift from the ancestral gods, just reward for their long suffering.

  News of the find spread around the world, and soon buyers from Belgium, Lebanon, Israel, Nigeria, South Africa, Russia and China descended on Mutare. They lay low in the hotels and suburban guesthouses of town since, as foreigners, they were easy for local intelligence agents to spot. Indeed, by February 2007 the Reserve Bank estimated the state was losing US$50 million a month in smuggled stones, so soldiers and spies – Walter among them – were sent out to make arrests. ‘We must protect the nation’s riches from crooks and scoundrels!’ railed one minister. But a fish rots from the head: in March 2007, William Nhara, an official in the president’s office, was arrested at Harare’s airport with a Lebanese associate in possession of 10 700 carats of diamonds. Soldiers sent in to guard the field, meanwhile, made merry with the loot. A newspaper quoted an unnamed officer: ‘You don’t stand in a pool of water and go thirsty!’

  The real engine of the trade, the fuel behind it, were the diamond dealers: young black middlemen from Mutare, many of them the same desperate street dealers from whom my parents had often bought sugar and flour. Now they had a new trade, and it made them wildly rich overnight. Every morning they would drive 48 kilometres out to Marange, bribe their way through security checkpoints, purchase stones from those dusty, dishevelled panners, known locally as gwejas, then race back to sell to the foreign buyers at their hideouts in town. Within months, unbeknown to much of polite Mutare society, the town was transformed. Flush with easy money, pockets bulging with fat wads of American dollars, young men and women were suddenly buying houses, cars, cellphones, suits and designer shoes. They splurged on imported food and drink – the kind of luxuries they had watched the chefs gorge themselves on for years. There was a lurid democratic justice to it all: brick houses started springing up beside straw huts in Marange; men who had only ever ridden donkey carts turned up in their rural villages in Toyota twin-cabs; peasants tramped the bush with the latest Nokia cellphones (phone camera flashes were used to distinguish real gems from fool’s diamonds). It was of course diamond dealers to whom Sandra, the passport lady, had taken my mother to change her US$100 note that day; and it was diamond dealers who, thirsty during the great beer crisis and food shortages that followed the price control debacle, fell upon Drifters and made it their playground, their hideaway. Those men who took turns guarding the cars parked on the lawns of the lodge? They were protecting the suitcases and backpacks laden with the stacks of American dollars in their possession.

  My father couldn’t believe what the soldier was telling him in that phone call: ‘Come on, Walter, what do you mean they’re diamond dealers?’

  ‘Mr Rogers, let me be certain: our town is overrun! There are thousands! I have arrested many! Some are drunk, and when I ask from where they are coming they all say that secret place, that place in the bush where they have beer, that place they call Drifters!’

  Dad felt a flush of outlaw pride – followed by something approximating panic. The last thing he needed was Walter and his CIO comrades raiding his lodge. But Walter must have sensed his concern.

  ‘Don’t worry, Mr Rogers,’ he said quietly and conspiratorially. ‘I instruct them to keep very quiet about your place. Very quiet…’

  It wasn’t hard to meet a diamond dealer at Drifters. You just had to walk into the bar.

  I took a corner stool next to a tall thirty-something black guy in a red Liverpool Football Club shirt. He had on brand-new Timberlands the size of cement slabs and a Fidel Castro-style military cap worn jauntily to the side.

  It was 27 December 2007, and although it was the Christmas holiday and beer was back in the bars of Mutare, Drifters was on the map now and doing brisk business. There were about twenty customers at the bar, drinking beer, smoking cheap cigarettes and talking loudly over a hip-hop DVD playing on the new colour TV Tendai had installed. Kanye West was performing ‘Diamonds from Sierra Leone’ – an improvement on the president’s fist. I ordered a Zambezi from Freedom and cigarettes from Lancelot, who were manning the bar.

  Was it really only four years ago that I had sat on this exact stool, ordered a beer from a handsome stranger named Sydney and been propositioned by a leggy hooker in skintight jeans? I’d felt nervous here, then, a little out of place. But now the camp was like a second home to me, an extension of my parents’ house on the hill and the land around us.

  Up at the house, meanwhile, my wife, Grace, and baby Madeline were fast asleep. We had flown in from New York four days earlier, spent Christmas with Stephanie, Rob, Mom and Dad in Harare, and then driven down to the valley. Stof ’s beautiful home had been the perfect African introduction for Grace, the lulled luxury before the storm of my parents’ life. I worried how Grace would react to it: the fruit bats, frogs and bugs in the bathroom. Our friends had been horrified we were taking our eight-month-old to Zimbabwe for Christmas, and Grace had made sure we took out life insurance before we left, but more than anything I wanted my parents to meet their granddaughter in their home, on their farm, in their country, before it was too late, before they lost it forever. So far Maddy seemed to have adjusted well: slathered in mos
quito repellent and wrapped in netting, she grinned and gurgled from her Pack ’n Play travel cot and dreamed milky dreams.

  Drifters was warm and cozy, and down at the camp we huddled close to the counter, as if to a life raft, for outside it rained ferociously, hammering the thatch with a thudding percussion. It had rained across the country for two weeks now and it would do so well into the New Year: not the short, sharp thunderstorms that I recalled from my childhood and previous visits but something much bigger – a continuous downpour so relentless that it seemed to seep through the skin, drench the bones, turn everything to damp and mud. It was as if the Zimbabwean earth itself needed to be cleansed.

  I’d come down to speak to Tendai, but Lancelot told me he wasn’t around that night.

  I put my notebook on the counter, lit a Madison, and sipped my beer. The man in the Liverpool shirt introduced himself.

  ‘My name is Fatso,’ he said.

  We shook hands.

  ‘Howzit, I’m Douglas. You’re not that fat.’

  He patted his small potbelly and laughed.

  ‘I’m getting there, my brother.’

  He had a friendly round face and spoke in a fast, articulate, scattershot style with some American slang; I guessed he either watched a lot of TV or had gone to a good school. He introduced his friend, who sat drunk and wobbly on the stool to his right.

  ‘This is No Matter, my business partner.’

  No Matter raised his head from the pine counter and smiled lazily at me, revealing a single neat gap in the middle of a handsome row of perfect white teeth.

  He was a bullet of a guy, stocky as a boxer, dangerously good-looking.

  ‘His name’s No Matter?’

  ‘Yes, nothing matters to him!’ Fatso laughed.

  There were only two women in the bar, and they were with Fatso and No Matter: pretty twenty-somethings, all lip gloss, perfume and curls, arms draped over their men. They swigged beers and texted on Nokia cellphones the whole time. I wondered whether they were girlfriends, prostitutes, mistresses or small houses. Fatso said they were their wives.

  He saw my notebook.

  ‘Are you a writer?’

  ‘Yes. I’m writing a book about this bar, this farm. My parents own it.’

  He seemed intrigued.

  ‘So if you’re a writer, have you seen a film called Blood Diamond?’

  ‘Of course. I liked it. DiCaprio did a great Zimbabwean accent.’

  Fatso shrugged.

  ‘Maybe – but he knew fuck-all about diamonds.’

  I knew then that he must be a ngoda – a diamond dealer. I wondered how many others around the bar were dealers. Everyone was in the right twenty-or thirty-something demographic except for one middle-aged man in horn-rimmed glasses who sat hunched, tortoiselike. and alone against the wall. He drank his beer quietly and occasionally glanced over at us.

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘Because I have a much better film to write,’ he told me.

  ‘About what?’

  He leaned in close. I smelled beer and sweat. A black moth flapped in my face, and I slapped it away.

  ‘About our business,’ he said softly. ‘The game we’re in.’

  ‘What game are you in?’

  He smiled, and the red seemed to clear from his bloodshot eyes.

  ‘Stones,’ he whispered. ‘Stones. Only stones.’

  ‘You mean diamonds?’

  ‘Of course. It’s what we do. Everyone in town is doing it. Making good money.’

  ‘So what’s your film going to be called, then?’

  He took my notebook and scribbled six words on the back page: Filthy Way to Riches in Marange.

  ‘It’s a good title. Better than Blood Diamond. So, are you from Marange?’

  He was. His parents still lived in the area, which was how he was able to get past the tight security cordons set up on the road to the field: he could tell them he was simply visiting his family. He had worked at a timber company for many years, lost his job in 2002, and moved to Johannesburg. But he didn’t like South Africa. ‘Too much crime there,’ he said. He returned to Mutare in 2006, and a friend who knew that he was from Marange asked him to drive him out there soon after the diamond rumours started.

  ‘It was hard for outsiders to get in, but I knew the area. I watched him buy a pile of stones and sell them to a Nigerian at the Wise Owl Motel. To me they looked like sand and rocks. But they were industrials. He got lots of cash. I was just watching, learning.’

  He learned quickly. He started buying stones from the gwejas who dug them up, sifting through everything he could get hold of. And he watched the buyers – ‘Jewish guys, Lebanese, Belgians. I learned what they wanted. I saw how they looked at a stone. Every day I learned.’

  He met No Matter, who had been a gweja at the start of the rush and had graduated to dealing, and together they had formed a syndicate with an Indian in Mutare, who knew the foreign buyers, and a retired National Army soldier who had some security connections.

  Now they spoke like geologists: about flaws, cut, cloud, clarity, light, weight. He said he paid on average about US$50 a carat to gwejas and got twice that, sometimes more, from buyers.

  ‘What’s the most you’ve made on a stone?’ I asked.

  ‘We sold a twenty-four-carat to a Lebanese for US$75 000. For the buyer it’s still below market value, but it made us guys rich – very rich!’

  Fatso grinned, and he and No Matter clinked beer bottles at the memory of that sale.

  ‘Zhulas!’ they toasted, over the music.

  ‘Zhulas?’ I asked. ‘What’s zhulas?’

  Suddenly the power went out. The bar turned black. A collective groan went up. The rain became our soundtrack – like the rhythmic percussion of a samba band. Freedom started lighting candles set in empty beer bottles lined up along the counter, and soon a flickering yellow glow returned to the bar, bringing us all back to life at a lower volume. Fatso moved his stool closer to mine, picking up one of the candles as he did so and casting a glance over my shoulder at the tortoise-man in the glasses sitting hunched and alone against the wall in the dark. Did Fatso think he was CIO? A plainclothes cop? The regime was lashing out at the dealers, trying to plug the dyke.

  He held the candle just below the counter and tapped my arm. And for the first time I saw that between his thumb and forefinger, just above the flame, was a tiny off-white stone.

  ‘A zhula is a gem, my brother,’ he whispered. ‘A pure gem. Clear and clean. No flaws.’ He twirled it, and it glinted in the candlelight. ‘I can tell just by looking at it how many carats. I don’t need a loupe. Just my bare eyes. I have trained myself. One day I want to get a licence, but now I am freelance. Stones. That’s our game.’

  My mind was racing. I wished I had met him years earlier: it was a much bigger rock than the engagement ring I’d bought for Grace in New York’s diamond district.

  ‘How much for that?’ I asked.

  ‘I have a buyer from China. I can get maybe US$6 000.’

  It was cheaper than Grace’s, too.

  I was horrified to realise that it also looked a lot like one of the pieces those desperate young dealers had offered me when I dropped Walter off at the bus stop earlier in the year. Had I turned down a genuine gem back then? Fatso calmly slipped the diamond back in his pocket and went back to his beer.

  ‘So, Fatso,’ I said. ‘I have an idea. I told you about my book. I am writing about this place and the people who drink here. Can I mention you in it? Maybe if you introduce me to your syndicate and the other dealers in town and take me out to the fields to meet the gwejas, someone will read what I write and help you make your film.’

  Fatso grinned widely.

  ‘We can! Of course! Let’s meet in the New Year. I will take you in.’

  He gave me two cellphone numbers.

  ‘Let me tell you,’ he said, ‘we are the most feared syndicate in town.’

  And still it rained.

  Gre
y clouds gathered like cavalry over Mozambique at dawn, turned to dark infantry battalions above the valley at noon, and let loose in the early afternoon, drenching our world. The bush on the property, already dense, turned to jungle before our eyes – a vivid monsoon green of twisted vines and creepers. With it came mutant life-forms: creepy scarlet beetles exploding against the veranda walls, flying ants rising in dark clouds from the front lawn. The albino frog returned to the copper coffeepot in the kitchen after a six-month absence. Mom was delighted: ‘He’s back! He’s back! I missed the little guy!’ I had grown rather fond of him myself. I had once thought him so odd and out of place, but I saw now how he adapted, blended in. The house would have felt empty without him.

  Dad showed Grace and me where he’d shot an eight-foot-long black mamba on the roof under a branch of the giant fig tree a month earlier: its blood was still splattered on the wall. I shuddered and quietly suggested to him that he not tell Grace about the scorpion he said he’d squashed in the passage outside our bedroom a week ago.

  And yet, apart from a few scares – a giant hawk moth dive-bombing her at dinner; stepping on a pile of fruit-bat droppings in the pantry – Grace took to local conditions like a frontierswoman, while Madeline continued to sleep and grin and gurgle, very much at home. Perhaps the pioneering gene skips a generation: she had it like her grandparents.

  Just as my parents had adapted to the outside political world, the house had adapted to internal realities. The kitchen now resembled a museum of medieval implements. Since electricity worked for only a few hours a day by this point, my father had built a sawdust stove out of a cylindrical tin can and a rusty pipe. Sawdust burns for much longer than firewood and is good for slow cooking. ‘You’ll find we do a lot of slow cooking because the meat we get hold of is so poor now it’s only good for stews,’ Mom explained to Grace as she seasoned a beef casserole simmering on the rusty device. Grace blanched, but the dish was as delicious as ever, and good enough for Recipes for Disaster (which Mom had nearly finished writing). Dad cooked us a spicy prawn Thai curry one night on a wok placed over his gas grill, the grill fashioned from an old car part. At the age of seventy-two my father could still make a canoe out of a crocodile.