Tag: Coming to Zimbabwe

How I Survived the Road of Death

A Zimbabwean Adventure

What is the Road of Death? It was a stretch of highway that went from the city center of Harare to an upscale suburb called Borrowdale.

Zimbabwe Flag

In 2013, I returned to Zimbabwe for the second time for a couple of reasons. First, I had been invited to present the world premiere of my one man show, Coming to Zimbabwe at the Harare International Festival of Arts (HIFA), and secondly, to help create a rural teaching program for drama with the National Institute of Allied Arts, Drama Division whose artistic director was Gavin Peter. 

Harare, Zimabwe

Gavin had hired me in 2012 to come to Zimbabwe and be the first American judge or adjudicator of their national drama contest. The month that I spent in Zimbabwe during 2012 was a life changing experience. The opportunity to work with almost 8000 kids over a three-week period had been exhausting but also exhilarating as I watched these talented African kids do monologues and scene work, recite poetry, do improvs and work in many other performance styles. Plus, the two-week tour that NIAA sponsored for me to travel around the country to different historical sites in the company of the Republic of Ireland’s representative, Gary Killilea and his family was a joy and wonder, and helped cement Zimbabwe is one of my favorite places in the world. The beauty of the country and the hospitality of the people was unmatched, and I had resolved to return as many times as I could. 

Countryside of Zimbabwe

The chance to return came very quickly for me. As the adjudicator of the drama festival, I watched as the dedicated volunteers of NIAA kept meticulous records over where students came from and in what performance categories they had participated. Some students would only be in one area while others might be in 9 to 11 different areas of competition. At the debriefing at the end of the festival and working with Gavin, we managed to streamline some of the requirements for the participants and the number of areas they could participate in. We also found out that the students from the cities mostly focused on drama presentations while the students from the rural or country areas focused on poetry. Now Zimbabwe is mostly an agricultural country so that made sense, but this was primarily a drama festival and if most of the students in the rural areas were participating in poetry that meant there was a disconnect somewhere in the education system.

Robert Mugabe

Zimbabwe had become a poor country over the 40-year reign by their former dictator Robert Mugabe, and one of the fallouts of his terrible economic policies was that teachers in the countryside hardly made any money whatsoever. It was hard to retain teachers who taught English and drama although it was required as part of their education requirements to graduate. We found in our research that the rural teachers who were instructing the drama students were science and math teachers, or physical education teachers or soccer coaches. Well-meaning individuals who had no idea what they were supposed to do for the festival, but they had been ordered by their principal to get the kids ready. These poor individuals having no knowledge of what the contest required just did what the teacher of the year before had done which was recite poetry. 

So, Gavin and I came up with an idea of creating a training program for the teachers in the countryside to help them understand what dramatic literature was, where to find it, how to direct a play or a scene and best practices in terms of how to get their students motivated. During the year while I was back in the United States, I also recruited other Americans to come and work in Zimbabwe with NIAA to help move the program forward. 

Poster for Coming to Zimbabwe

Yet when it came to providing me with air flight back to Zimbabwe, they just did not have the money. Gavin concocted an unusual solution. That year, he was also the Artistic Director of HIFA and said if I could come with a show, he would ensure I got a superior performance slot. The idea of a one-man show based on my experiences in Zimbabwe had been floating around my head for about six or more months and now I put it down on paper. I workshopped it a few times at my theater in Los Angeles, the Attic Theater and knew I had a good show. Because Zimbabwe was a dictatorship, I had to send the script to a government office there to make sure it was not offensive in any way to Zimbabwe or President Robert Mugabe. To their astonishment there was an American who was writing wonderful things about their country and proclaiming it a wonderful place to visit. Gavin true to his word gave me a wonderful time slot and the show sold out before I even got on the plane to go to Zimbabwe, and extra performances were added. It was that money that allowed me to buy a round trip ticket to Zimbabwe.  

On the Marque at Reps Theatre, Harare

So, that is how I got to Zimbabwe, but the title of this article is ‘I Survived the Road of Death.’ What is the Road of Death? It was a stretch of highway that went from the city center of Harare to an upscale suburb called Borrowdale. This road was a four-lane highway and was one of the major thoroughfares in the city. It also ran right by the Presidential Palace. In fact, you could spit out the car window as you went past and hit the building. It was that close. Following an attack on Mugabe’s residence in 1982, a 6pm curfew was introduced to prevent any traffic passing in front of the Palace. This curfew was in place from 1982 till 2017. During this time, if you traveled down that road after 6:00 PM you could be shot in the head by one of the army soldiers that patrolled that area of the highway, and that is why it was called the Road of Death. Now the Presidential Palace by 2013 was only used for ceremonial reasons and President Robert Mugabe had a huge house/complex on the outskirts of the city where he lived. Yet, the standing law was that at 6:00 PM every evening this four-lane road would be blocked off next to the presidential palace until 6 AM in the morning. If you were trying to drive to Borrowdale from downtown or vice versa you had to find an alternative route because there were soldiers with rifles everywhere. In fact, there was an army barracks right across the street from the Palace where the security guards lived. 

Presidential Palace, Harare

After I completed the successful run of my one-man show, it was going to be about 10 days before Gavin could meet with me to discuss this educational tour that was being sent out into the rural areas. While I had friends in Harare, they could not constantly keep me entertained and I had no transportation, so I was often stuck in a hotel room or in a guest room of some kind person who let me share their house. After about a week of this I was bored, so I rented a car and drove up into the Nyangani Mountain area near the Mozambique border to stay at a little inn for three or four days and explore that part of Zimbabwe. That is a whole different adventure, but I had rented the car for several days. When I arrived back in the capital city, I was invited to a social function at the house of my good friends, Keith and Jeanette Nicholson who had kind enough to be my hosts for the first two weeks that I was in in Zimbabwe during 2012. 

Harare at night

Harare is an exceedingly difficult city in which to travel during the night. The reason for that is there are almost no street signs or working streetlights, because they have been stripped of all their copper wiring. Why is that you ask? Because the economy is in ruins, and no one has any work. So, some people steal what they can steal just to be able to put food on the table. So, I had to be careful in plotting my route to the Nicholson’s home is Borrowdale to avoid the Road of Death. I found an old map of Harare and laid out a route that I felt confident would avoid the Palace. At 6:30 PM, I walked out to my car and started driving towards the Nicholsons. It was winter and already dark. As I got close to where I was going to turn left and head out towards Borrowdale, I recognized that I was right next to the presidential palace and about to turn on to the Road of Death. 

From my car, I could see a large blockade and there were armed guards everywhere. I freaked out. There were two lanes of traffic to my right which were turning toward the city center, but it was rush hour and there was no room for me to cut in. If I turned left, I was sure I would be shot. I was terrified. The only other direction I could go in was straight so that is what I did. 

Zimbabwe army barracks

I drove straight and ended up in the parking lot of the army barracks that protect the presidential palace. It was extremely dark, so it was impossible to read my map. Being the only white man in a parking lot full of black soldiers with rifles made me feel very uneasy. No one bothered me or even said anything to me, but they gave me strange enough looks that I knew I was not supposed to be there, nor was I welcome. I quickly called Keith and explained the situation. I must have seemed a little hysterical because he told me to calm down and gave me explicit instructions about how to get around the presidential palace and follow a road that would lead me toward Borrowdale. Following the explicit instructions of my hosts I drove around the presidential palace and ended up approaching the Borrowdale highway. At this point I was supposed to turn left and go towards the suburbs, however I mistakenly turned right and headed back towards the Presidential Palace. 

I went about half a mile when I realized that the street in front of me was blockaded and that I was back at the Palace. I was so rattled by now that I did a quick U-turn in the middle of the highway, hit the gas, and bolted down the street. The entire time I was driving I thought a sharpshooter was going to blow off the back of my head. I was sure because I was the only car on the highway that I was breaking some law and that the entire Zimbabwean Defense Force was following me. Every tank, every Jeep, every helicopter, and every soldier was hot on my tail, and I was going to end up either dead or in a Zimbabwean jail which would be the same thing. 

Zim side street not far from Palace

I quickly saw a road off to the right and with screeching tires I made the turn. I found myself in a housing development. I took the next right and the next left and I parked in the first driveway I could find. Turning off my lights, I crouched down in my seat hoping that they could not find me. I quickly called Keith and tried to explain the situation to them. Just as I began talking to him there was a knock on my window, and I turned to find a Zimbabwean soldier with a rifle standing next to my car. 

Zimbabwe Soldier

 I exclaimed to Keith, “Oh my God, they found me already.” I told him to stay on the phone and put my cell phone down on the car seat and rolled down the window. I immediately started babbling to the soldier trying to explain why I had turned around and driven away from the Palace. I gave him my passport, my international driver’s license, my work visa, the contract that said I was there to work with NIAA and all the official paperwork that I had to carry around with me all the time. He took each document and looked them over. I just kept babbling the entire time telling him I was sorry. I made a mistake, and please do not arrest me. That I was an American citizen and at least give me a chance to call the embassy. On and on and on until finally he had all my documents and I had nothing left to say. I just knew he was going to shoot me now. The waiting felt like an eternity. 

He quietly handed me all my documents back and just looked at me for a moment, then he asked me, “Do you have a smoke?” 

“What!?” I asked? 

And just like any American tourist who has gone to a foreign country and do not speak the language, the cliche is that we always talk slow and loud as if that is going to make someone understand, he did the exact same thing to me. In a very loud voice speaking very slowly, he went, “Do you have a cigarette?” 

“No, I don’t smoke,” I stated 

Zimbabwe soldier walking

“Ok,” he said, then turned and walked down the driveway headed towards the main road. It was then that I realized there were no jeeps back there. There were no tanks, there were no helicopters, there was no one. No one had followed me. This lone soldier was walking to the Palace to go to work. Most soldiers are so poor they cannot afford a car. Here was an immaculately dressed soldier carrying his automatic weapon walking through the neighborhood to the main road, and then he was going to walk the mile or so to the presidential palace to check in. And the whole time that this was dawning on me that this had just been a strange confluence of my fear and the weirdest of circumstances, loud laughter poured from the cell phone on the seat next to me. Keith thought this was the funniest thing he had ever heard. 

Laughing, not Keith Nicholson.

Now red faced with embarrassment, I picked up the phone and told him that everything was ok, and I would be there in 10 minutes. Keith repeated one more time how I was to get there, and I followed his instructions to the letter. I arrived at their house where there was a big wine celebration going on and of course all the Zimbos laughed at me because they thought it was very funny that the American who traveled around the world got lost and scared driving around the Presidential Palace. 

Well, the joke was on me. I took the good-natured ribbing for the rest of the night, had three or four glasses of wine to calm down and so that I would not get lost or die on my way back home my friends were kind enough to let me crash in their guest room. 

And that is how I survived the Road of Death in Harare, Zimbabwe. 

Below are photos from the NIAA school tour that we took after this adventure happened. Shots of myself and good friend Musa Saruro teaching improv and acting technique in and around Bulawayo 2013.

All opinions expressed are the personal opinions of the author. Tripswithjames.com is a copyright of Carey On Creative, LLC. 2023. Atlanta, GA.

Tom Cruise of KweKwe – Zimbabwe 2012

(This is part of an ongoing series of stories about the first visit I ever had to Zimbabwe or Africa in general. All the stories are true and based on my own experiences. They are also part of my one-man theatre production, Coming to Zimbabwe which was published in Germany, and has toured the USA and parts of Africa.)

First days in Zimbabwe

After my day in Imire Game Preserve, this was the first day of my new job. (You can find the story Imire Safari Ranch – Zimbabwe 2012 in the monthly section menu) I woke up the next morning and met Gavin. We loaded into his incredible small car and we headed out toward the small city of Gweru located in the Midlands section of Zimbabwe. This drive should have taken about 3 hours but the engine was so small and tired in Gavin’s car, we were in for a 5 hour ride.

We headed out of Harare on the A5 Highway or Gweru-Harare Road. This was really the first time that I was going to see the real countryside of Zimbabwe. Of course on my journey to Imire, I had seen country. But that was in such a rush and I was so on edge from Kathy’s driving, that I did not pay much attention to the scenery.

Now because the slow nature of our drive through the mountains toward Gweru, I could very much see the lovely country, yet I could also see that field after field and farm after farm nothing was growing. There were no crops in the fields that I passed on this major road through the heartland of Zimbabwe.

Farmland sitting fallow

Whether is was the outcome of Mugabe’s land reforms or for some other reason, it was plain to see that this part of the economy was hurting. Zimbabwe during the Ian Smith years, during the civil war for independence, and even during Mugabe’s first years in power, was known as “the bread basket of Africa”. The farms were so successful and abundant and Zimbabwe grew so much food that it exported it surplus food stuffs to countries all around Africa. Now they had to import food items just to be able to eat.

As we drove south, we passed through the village of Chegutu and the small city of Kadoma. We drove through beautiful mountain areas, over rivers and across savannas where the sky seem to stretch on forever. After driving for a couple of hours, we stopped in Kwekwe to stretch our legs and get some coffee.

City Marker for Kwekwe

Kwekwe is a city of about 100,000 people located right in the center of the country. At one time, it was a very lovely little town, but it is very poor there now. Unemployment in the area is about 80% or more. The town has become very dusty and dirty, the gutters are filled with trash and there are 100’s of men standing around with no work and nothing really to do.  As we pulled into the town and went around the roundabout, I was wondering where we were going to stop. We passed the beautiful but very tiny Mosque on the right as we enter Kwekwe. About 3 blocks passed that on the same side of the road, we stopped in front of this seemingly brand new building made of chrome and glass. It was like an illusion in the middle of this rundown town. The place was buzzing as people came and went from the double glass doors.

Kwekwe main drag

As we walked inside, Gavin told me the place was called Ripperz and that is was a fairly new place. The place seemed to be a combination of a restaurant, bakery and food market. Gavin and I walked in and went over to a coffee bar. And to be honest, I was surprised at the thought of a coffee bar in a rundown city in the middle of a 3rd world country. As I was to learn my first world impressions of Zimbabwe were going to be radically altered in the next month in this surprising and lovely country.

Ripperz bakery and cafe

As I sat down at the bar, I realized that I was the only white in the place. For just a moment, I experienced a momentary disquieting feeling that I was truly alone in this country. I did not know one person in Zimbabwe or this part of Africa. Further, that I was truly a minority in this country. You can read tons of information about a place and hope you understand it on an intellectual level, but the feelings that you get on the ground in a place are what truly define your experience and attitudes. Not that I was in fear for my safety because of my race; on the contrary, everyone so far in Zim had been very friendly and helpful. Yet, at that moment, I realized how different I was from anyone in the room. I had only experienced that feeling once before while standing at a bar in a nightclub in Mazatlan, Mexico trying to get a drink, and not even the bartender would speak to me because I was the only Angelo there. Both of these moments were profound for me, and reminded me that I was “the stranger in a strange land.” That I had so much to learn about this country, her people and her culture, and that was on me to do. So many times as I have traveled in the world, I have found Americans who are visiting a place and act like it is still the United States. They forget that they are visiting a new place, yet they expect the people there to treat them like they are still in the US. As the visitor, you are the one that needs to adapt to the new place, because the new place is not going to adapt to you. And that has always been my guiding principle when traveling. As Mark Twain once said, “…traveling doesn’t lead to a new destination, but to a new way of seeing things.”

After ordering our coffee, one of the two white owners came from the back and walk over to us. He was from Canada and had settled in Kwekwe to work the farm that his family had owned there. They later had lost it to the Mugabe land reforms which consisted of the government taking legally owned land away from the professional white farmers and giving it to black citizens of the country. Many of whom did not know how to farm or did not want to work that hard or were not capable of running those large farming concerns, so the farms began to fail in record numbers and the food production bottomed out for Zimbabwe.

Zimababwe’s President Robert Mugabe chants Zanu PF slogans with supporters gathered at the Harare International Conference Centre in Harare, Wednesday May 3, 2000. Mugabe launched the Zanu PF’s election manifesto which bears the slogan “Land is the Economy and the Economy is Land”. (AP Photo/Christine Nesbitt)

Now please do not take this that I disapprove of the idea of the original people of a country that had been colonized by white Europeans getting their own country back. But to remove at gun point and in several cases by death at the hands of gangs of Mugabe thugs, farmers who had worked that land for at least 3 to 4 generations, who provided jobs and about one quarter of Zim’s GNP seems wrong on any scale. Plus the farmers did not do themselves any favors when they made the mistake of thinking that Mugabe was running a democracy. They provided funding to the rural party (MDC) in government elections against Mugabe’s ZANU-PF and thus provoked Mugabe to actions against them. This whole misadventure that resulted in poor food production, lost jobs, ruined communities and families, and in many cases death could have been done better and gotten the same results without the ruin and bloodshed. Mugabe took an ax to a situation that needed delicacy and the resulting decline in food production and lost economy is proof of its failure.

Marquee with my play, Coming to Zimbabwe, Harare.

We are soon joined by his partner, who was from Greece (I believe). In my play, the second owner is from Greece but to be honest I do not remember where he was from. The following conversation is what truly happened at the moment of introduction:

Gavin – (to the Greek owner) “This is James from Hollywood, CA.”

Owner – (to me) “You are from Hollywood?”

Me – “Yes, I am.”

Owner – “Do you know any famous people?”

Me – “Yes, I know some famous people.”

Owner – “Do you know Tom Cruise?”

Me – “No, I don’t know Tom Cruise.”

Owner – “You don’t know Tom Cruise?”

Me – “No I don’t. Never had the pleasure.”

Owner – “I love Tom Cruise. I have seen all of his movies. Risky Business, Top Gun, Rain Man…” (at this point the Greek owner continued to name several more Tom Cruise movies and talked about how much he liked the movies and Tom Cruise himself.)

Mr. Tom Cruise

I should also point out at during this entire time, the owner never asked why an American was sitting in his store, what I was doing or how I liked Zimbabwe. It was Tom Cruise 24/7 with this guy, or so it seemed. Gavin realized that the conversation was going south and asked for “take away” coffee for us, and it was provided. We left and had a good long laugh about Tom Cruise and the Greek owner.

Yet, two days later, as we returned toward Harare, we stopped again at Ripperz for coffee. As I walked through the front door, the Greek owner who was working the front counter greeted me with, “Hey, Tom Cruise.”

I would go through Kwekwe about 8 to 10 more times over the next 4 weeks as I traveled around with Gavin or Gary, the Irish consulate and his family as they took me around Zimbabwe to places like Great Zimbabwe, Victoria Falls, and Matopos National Park. I would often stop in Kwekwe as a mid-point for several of these journeys, and every time I would eat and shop at Ripperz. And every time I walked through the door, the Greek owner would greet me as “Hey, Tom Cruise.”

Reps Theatre, Harare. Where my play debuted 2012.

Now in my one man show, I make this part of the story a comedy high point of the show and enlarge the number of people who began to call me Tom Cruise including great numbers of people on the street. Yet in truth by my third visit, a couple of employees started to refer to me as Tom Cruise. I was also greeted one day as I walked down the main street in Kwekwe with Gary’s son to the local internet cafe by a perfect African stranger, someone that I had never seen before as… “Oh you are the Tom Cruise guy.”

So that is my 15 minutes of African fame being called “Tom Cruise” in a small city in the middle of Zimbabwe – Kwekwe. For a month, I was known as Tom Cruise of Kwekwe.