Over the roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, the talk is of business, the free-falling Zimbabwe dollar, aids, popular unrest and the uneasy mantle of power worn by President Robert Mugabe. By the time coffee is served, diners are as usual drawing the distinction between the black nouveau riche and disillusioned whites who feel they are in the sunset of their days in Africa. Harare seems calm enough after riots during the week of Jan. 19, when thousands of black demonstrators raged against soaring food prices. Soldiers no longer patrol the streets, and across the road from the Harare Club, in Africa Unity Square, flower sellers and curio dealers are again setting up their stands beneath the thick, green shade of jacaranda trees. In Chitungwiza, the sprawling industrial township south of the capital where the mayor, Joseph Macheka, reportedly shot dead a looter in his liquor store, the Paramount Disco and the Ghetto Blues nightclub are open for business again.
People are hungry and have no money to buy food.
They get so desperate they just have to take it. Smith is still around, still railing at Britain's treachery in handing Rhodesia over to Mugabe's Marxist-backed liberation movement and accusing Mugabe of ruining the country. Some of my workers are saying they want him to come back to politics. The white settler population of Rhodesia once exceeded 280,000. Now there are about 60,000 white Zimbabweans, mostly in the industrial, retailing and farming sectors, who generate most of the country's revenue.