Keeping a dream alive …

Matabeleland is suffering its second drought in a decade. But here, amidst the dust and sun-bleached grass of the bush, is the sound of birds and the sweet smell of water.

A large white man greets me on the steps. ‘It’ll cost you fifteen Zimbabwe dollars to look around,’ he says, smiling broadly. ‘The cheapest museum in the world.’

The entrance fee is about 3 pence.

Rows of old steam locomotives gleam in the African sun. One of them bears a proud brass plate: ‘Rhodesian Railways No 1’.

Inside a shed is an older relic of the past: Cecil Rhodes’ personal carriage.  The interior is wood-panelled.  A silver dinner service is laid out on a white tablecloth.  You can peer in at the financier’s empty bathtub, and at the shining brass teleticker that kept Rhodes in touch with his immense wealth all around the world.

The faded grandeur in this carriage seems unreal. It seems almost absurd to remember that Zimbabwe was once Rhodesia – an entire country named after a single man and his lust for conquest.

Outside in the bright sun are rows of carriages 1st, 2nd, 3rd, even a 4th class – a crude cover for racial segregation.  Whites travelled in 1st and 2nd, blacks in 3rd and 4th.

Back in the museum office, the caretaker sits down behind a wooden desk.  The heat inside the small room is stifling.  ‘We don’t get many tourists nowadays,’ he tells me.  ‘You’re the third person to visit the museum in a month.’

‘People are frightened to come to Zimbabwe,’ he tells me.  ‘I don’t know how I’m going to keep this museum going.  We don’t get any money from the government.  And now people come almost every night to steal.  They take the brass name plates off the engines.  They steal the rubber off the carriages to make sandals.  People have got nothing in this country anymore.  They’ll take anything to find a way to survive.’

As he speaks his eyes shift away from me.  It takes me a moment to understand.  It is the shame of admitting to a younger man that after a lifetime of work, you have nothing.

He is one of the whites who stayed on, after Rhodesia disappeared, and now, many years later, the privileges that his white skin guaranteed him have finally evaporated.  His savings, like those of his fellow black Zimbabweans, are worth nothing.

‘You know it was the British who stabbed Rhodesia in the back,’ he says, glaring at me.  ‘Them, the Americans and the Afrikaners.  They told the South Africans to stop giving us guns.  Then the gold price went up – to $400.00 an ounce for a whole year.  That was Kissinger paying the Afrikaners for betraying us.’

His voice is angry as he talks of his vision of the future.  ‘I’m a Christian.  I believe in God’s will.  But I tell you there’s definitely going to be a civil war here. The tribes will never live together.’

It’s an old white man’s prophecy.  There is ethnic resentment between Shona and Ndebele, and the memories of the killings in of 9000 Ndebele in 1982 are deep and bitter – but I have never once in all the years I have visited here ever heard a black Zimbabwean talk of civil war

For a moment we sit in silence.  Despite his resentment, I can’t help finding something to respect in this man.  He stayed on, prepared to live under a black government – something not even the most liberal of his European or North American counterparts have ever experienced.

In his own lonely, even reluctant way, he had started down the road to becoming an African.  And by keeping this museum going, he was contributing something to the country he lived in, to the country that had become Zimbabwe.

Yes, the exhibits are largely an anachronism.  But colonial nostalgia is what the Western tourists in their pressed khakis are looking for when they come to Africa.

An old steam engine that still works – Hamilton Wende

This museum is his dream, and in his own way he has been fighting for something larger, something more lasting than himself and his own human limitations.

‘This country,’ he says, shaking his head and looking out over the rows of locomotives.  ‘It’s finished.  But I can’t go anywhere now.  It’s too late.’

For a moment, the unspoken question hangs between us.

‘Why didn’t you leave?’ I ask finally. ‘When you could, at independence?’

His eyes hold mine without flinching. ‘It may sound funny to you. But I believe it was God who told me not to go. He told me everything would out for the best here.’