High tea and cakes to the strains of a grand piano. Rooms with names such as Balmoral, Edinburgh, Windsor, Mirabelle and Edward & Connaught. An oak-panelled grill that recalls a gentlemen’s club on Pall Mall.
Yes, it must be Zimbabwe again.
The Meikles in Harare claims to be the country’s best hotel, and it certainly seems to have dodged the economic bullets of recent years. Its colonial aura, with regal tapestries and framed black and white photos of Harare a century ago, would probably console the establishment’s founder, Thomas Meikle, a Scottish immigrant.
To me too it felt reassuringly, and alarmingly, like home. One night there I switched on Zimbabwe state television to discover, amid controversial jingles extolling President Robert Mugabe, a developing crisis for Siegfried and Tristan in a rerun of All Creatures Great and Small.
Only a few buildings from the era of empire survive in Harare, formerly Salisbury, but there are also parks and tree-lined avenues that feel somehow familiar. In the east of the country, near Mutare, the best place to stop to admire the scenery is Prince of Wales View.
It might be 30 years since independence, but Britain remains in the cultural DNA. O-levels and A-levels are still studied. St George’s College and Prince Edward are the leading schools, with much that evokes Harry Potter’s Hogwarts or Billy Bunter’s Greyfriars. English, the official language, is not only widely spoken, but spoken very well.
I have attended public events where black Zimbabweans deliver speeches with an ornate eloquence, or sometimes grandiloquence, that seems more Victorian literary salon than oppressive African dictatorship. Theirs is a language no longer spoken by the British.
Mugabe, self-declared nemesis of the evil former empire, is no exception to this. His speeches are finely polished and buffed in the colonisers’ tongue: “If yesterday I fought you as an enemy, today you have become a friend. If yesterday you hated me, today you cannot avoid the love that binds you to me, and me to you.”
British sense of humour
Heidi Holland, author of Dinner with Mugabe, recalls being handed tea in an exquisite English porcelain cup by a waiter in white gloves and tails while waiting at the State House to interview the president in 2007.
Last year in a speech entitled The Britishness of Mugabe, she spoke of how he has dressed all his life in austere suits of the stereotypical English gentleman, polished his vowels self-consciously and developed something of a British sense of humour.
Holland said: “What most revealed Mugabe’s fragmented identity to me, though, were the tears glistening in his eyes when he talked about Britain’s royals. The Queen and her four children, her sister and her mother had all stayed with him at State House, he told me. ‘And now, to this day, we treasure those moments, and we have nothing against the royal family,’ he continued — using the royal ‘We’.”
His love for Savile Row tailors is matched by a love for that most English of games: cricket. Mugabe, patron of Zimbabwe Cricket (ZC), once declared: “Cricket civilises people and creates good gentlemen. I want everyone to play cricket in Zimbabwe; I want ours to be a nation of gentlemen.”
Now, after years in the doldrums, there are signs of the sport coming back to life here. A recent domestic Twenty20 tournament was televised and brought in multiracial crowds of more than 7 000 and corporate sponsors otherwise starved of entertainment. A Pop Idol-style contest toured the country inviting all comers to prove they could be Zimbabwe’s fast bowling star of the future.
The national team is also on the up. Alan Butcher, a former England batsman, is now the coach of a side, no longer dominated by white players, that has claimed the one-day scalps of the West Indies, India and Sri Lanka. Zimbabwe is looking to return to Test cricket for the first time since 2006 with a home series against Bangladesh next year.
Catalyst for recovery
Some hope this could be the catalyst for wider social recovery. But there’s no escaping politics. In 2003 two of Zimbabwe’s finest players, Andy Flower and Henry Olonga, wore black armbands at the World Cup to mourn the death of democracy. The men in charge of the game have notoriously had ties with Mugabe.
Ozias Bvute, managing director of ZC, is on the EU’s banned list owing to alleged associations with Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party. Recently I found Bvute in a freshly painted office, complete with satellite TV and wi-fi internet access, that some may find suspiciously plush for a country in which many government buildings are shabby and threadbare. But he insisted he is no tool of Mugabe.
“I woke up one day and was told I was on the sanctions list,” he said. “I read, ‘These are the people responsible for the tragedy of Zimbabwe.’ I read that cricket is a political instrument. This is a myth. I do not hold any card from any political party. It’s like the ANC in South Africa: 70% of individuals here have had associations with Zanu-PF. It’s a small society. We know each other.”
Certainly David Coltart, the Movement for Democratic Change’s sports minister, and a cricket fanatic, seemed untroubled. He told me: “There are people in the administration in influential places who are aligned with Zanu-PF, but I’m in a Cabinet chaired by Robert Mugabe.
“In the first four or five years post-Nelson Mandela’s release, there were many people in the South African government who I’m sure the ANC had difficulty in dealing with. But it was part of the process. It was the price you paid for a peaceful transition. The same applies to cricket.”
The return of Test cricket would give the appearance, at least, that Zimbabwe is almost back to normal. Alistair Campbell, a former captain and now chairman of selectors, said: “I’d like to see England and Australia touring here again. I’d like to sip chardonnay on the opening day of a Test at Harare Sports Club.”
At the sports club’s Maiden or Red Lion pubs, a summer’s day on the playing fields of England can seem eerily close at hand. Whereas South Africa, that big and brash power of the continent, often reminds me of America, it’s Zimbabwe, the quieter, ironic and perhaps cripplingly introspective cousin, that makes me think of Britain.
I wonder if this is why, like many of my compatriots, I fall head over heels for this beautiful country, both strange and familiar, satisfying a lust for African adventure but leavened by a comforting, nostalgic scent of home. And I worry how healthy that is. – guardian.co.uk