My wife and I both recently finished a book by Douglas Rogers, called “The Last Resort: A Memoire of Zimbabwe”. This in itself is a rare event – we both seldom finish the same book, within a few days. Douglas Rogers is a Zimbabwean journalist, living in New York, and has written about his parents’ lodge, Drifters, just outside Mutare in Zimbabwe.

It is an easy read and it is material with which most South Africans will be familiar with, although not in the detail that the book goes into. His parents’ lodge has been a home to a variety of people ranging from backpackers, and when they dried up, to farmers who had been thrown off their farms and then onto prostitutes and diamond dealers. They have had encounters with war veterans, and hopefully will not have any more as a result of the publication of this book, because they still live at Drifters and are revealed as MDC supporters in their son’s book. Amongst other things that I would not have published if I were his son, includes the father’s knowledge of the marijuana crops that are growing in the back garden at Drifters, instead of maize! It is an unusual read, describing the rough decade Zimbabwe has been through recently and perhaps the back cover puts it best when it says, “An edgy rollercoaster adventure, it is also a deeply moving story about how to survive a corrupt Third World dictatorship with a little innovation, humour, bribery and brothel management.”