The Last Resort: A Memoir of Zimbabwe [Hardcover]

Douglas Rogers (Author)

Book Description

Release date: September 22, 2009

Thrilling, heartbreaking, and, at times, absurdly funny, The Last Resort is a remarkable true story about one family in a country under siege and a testament to the love, perseverance, and resilience of the human spirit.

Born and raised in Zimbabwe, Douglas Rogers is the son of white farmers living through that country’s long and tense transition from postcolonial rule. He escaped the dull future mapped out for him by his parents for one of adventure and excitement in Europe and the United States. But when Zimbabwe’s president Robert Mugabe launched his violent program to reclaim white-owned land and Rogers’s parents were caught in the cross fire, everything changed. Lyn and Ros, the owners of Drifters–a famous game farm and backpacker lodge in the eastern mountains that was one of the most popular budget resorts in the country–found their home and resort under siege, their friends and neighbors expelled, and their lives in danger. But instead of leaving, as their son pleads with them to do, they haul out a shotgun and decide to stay.

On returning to the country of his birth, Rogers finds his once orderly and progressive home transformed into something resembling a Marx Brothers romp crossed with Heart of Darkness: pot has supplanted maize in the fields; hookers have replaced college kids as guests; and soldiers, spies, and teenage diamond dealers guzzle beer at the bar.

And yet, in spite of it all, Rogers’s parents–with the help of friends, farmworkers, lodge guests, and residents–among them black political dissidents and white refugee farmers–continue to hold on. But can they survive to the end?

In the midst of a nation stuck between its stubborn past and an impatient future, Rogers soon begins to see his parents in a new light: unbowed, with passions and purpose renewed, even heroic. And, in the process, he learns that the "big story" he had relentlessly pursued his entire adult life as a roving journalist and travel writer was actually happening in his own backyard.

Evoking elements of The Tender Bar and Absurdistan, The Last Resort is an inspiring, coming-of-age tale about home, love, hope, responsibility, and redemption. An edgy, roller-coaster adventure, it is also a deeply moving story about how to survive a corrupt Third World dictatorship with a little innovation, humor, bribery, and brothel management.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Born in Zimbabwe, New York-based travel writer Rogers moves between two worlds with wit and grace while telling the dire-straits story of his childhood in Zimbabwe and his recent return. Zimbabwe's extremes of beauty and corruption will lure readers into the everyday struggle to preserve property and life against punishing weather, astronomical inflation, and the threat of other people. Angst, humor, beauty and terror mingle freely in his narrative: returning home he finds the family's backpacker lodge has become a brothel, and estates of "irises and tulips and acres of pruned white roses" have disappeared. He marvels at the "untamed roots of blazing flamboyant trees... buckling the city's pavement," the metamorphosis of the hardscrabble poor into diamond dealers, and his own parents: "instead of being crushed by this struggle, beaten down, they had been buoyed by it." This rousing memoir should win over anyone with a taste for exotic can't-go-home-again stories.

Review

"This vibrant, tragic and surprsingly funny book is the best account yet of ordinary life—for blacks and whites—under Mugabe’s dictatorship."
—The New York Times Book Review

"A nuanced, funny, and heartbreaking story."
—The New Yorker

"A gorgeous, open-hearted book.  Rogers manages to do the vital work of taking race out of Zimbabwe's story and putting the heart and humanity back into it.  A must read for anyone who really wants to understand the extraordinary decency of ordinary Zimbabweans."
—Alexandra Fuller, author of Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight

"I read it in one sitting. I loved it.”
—Rian Malan, author of My Traitor's Heart

"Do we really need another memoir by a white Zimbabwean? The surprising answer is yes, if it's as good as Douglas Rogers' THE LAST RESORT….A ripping yarn….[moves] beyond memoir to become a chronicle of a nation. There is black and white, yes, but much more in the shades and tones of their mix—and it is in exploring them that Rogers, too, find his art."
—Time

"Zimbabwe in vertiginous decline is the backdrop for Douglas Rogers’s corrosively funny THE LAST RESORT, in which Roger’s parents, among the country’s last remaining white farmers, attract everyone from prostitutes and diamond dealers to their backpacker lodge."
—Vogue, featured in "The Season's Best Memoirs"

"Born in Zimbabwe, New York-based travel writer Rogers moves between two worlds with wit and grace while telling the dire-straits story of his childhood in Zimbabwe and his recent return....Angst, humor, beauty and terror mingle freely in his narrative....This rousing memoir should win over anyone with a taste for exotic can't-go-home-again stories.
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"As President Mugabe's regime turns belligerent toward white farmers, journalist Rogers witnesses the struggle of his family and others to hold on to their land....Rogers' decision to write about his parents' lodge and the people who find refuge there as violence erupts and the economy turns catastrophic brings him close to all kinds of people, black and white, from war veterans and politicians to farmers and squatters. Scrupulous in his documentation, Rogers talks to everybody about the way things were and what might come next....Brilliantly funny and wry."
—Booklist

"Pitch-perfect, undeniably real, and, most important, achingly funny, Rogers deftly reminds us that after wiping away tears and even burying the dead, a good antidote to the violent, poignant, and completely absurd place that Zimbabwe has become is to throw arms wide to the undaunted African sky and simply laugh."
—Wendy Kann, author of Casting with a Fragile Thread: A Story of Sisters and sAfrica

"Travelogue, adventure yarn, political intrigue, tragedy, and high-wire journalism, The Last Resort is a love story about the author and his homeland, Zimbabwe. She is by turns ineffably beautiful, unspeakably hideous, insanely rich, desperately poor, democratic, brutally autocratic, violent, corrupt, and dysfunctional, even though, in person, her people seem to be, one and all, hardscrabble heroes and survivors. Rogers tries to leave her and doesn't even want to write about her, but, in the end, her charms are irresistible. He can't help himself and neither can we."
—Richard Dooling, author of White Man's Grave

"With breathtaking talent, wry wit, and abundant heart, Douglas Rogers tells the compulsively readable tale of his parents' daily struggles to hold on to their land in the nightmarish landscape of present-day Zimbabwe. With every turn of the page, you fear for the Rogerses' survival, as well as the survival of the country they love so much. But even as they face the most difficult of challenges, their indomitable spirit shines through, revealing the ordinary heroism of people in extraordinary circumstances."
—Anne Landsman, author of The Rowing Lesson

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Crown; 1 edition (September 22, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0307407977
• ISBN-13: 978-0307407979
• Product Dimensions: 6.6 x 1.1 x 9.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (113 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #753,270 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #78 in Books > History > Africa > Zimbabwe

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

49 of 50 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars When Africa Moves Your Cheese October 17, 2009

By Alan Brody

Format:Hardcover

You might want to wait for Robert Mugabe and his henchman to exit Zimbabwe before you visit this resort, but you won't be able to put down this riveting book about a spunky senior couple and their story of survival. Set at the edge of a country that has descended into economic disaster and official thuggery, this is about people who just want to hang on - and they do!

Part adventure tale, part family memoir and trip into the mind of post-colonial Africa, this amiable but gripping story is a also compelling business case study of sorts - a bush version of Who Moved My Cheese? The Rogers family, a white Zimbabwean couple with roots going back several generations, retire to a craggy estate near Mutare in the East which they turn into a backpacker lodge with chalets, a swimming pool and al fresco bar.

They thrive for several years during the early benevolent period of the Mugabe regime when whites were welcome and the struggle against the old supremacist Rhodesian government forgotten. White emigrants even returned, many encouraged to buy and build in the new majority African-ruled Zimbabwe. That all began to change around 2000 when Mugabe saw his lifetime presidency challenged and he turned to sacking white farms as a way to maintain support.

This took the life out of the economy and with it, the tourist business. Luckily for the Rogers, their craggy estate had little farm value - especially after poachers took out their modest game stock - so the shambling estate avoided the expropriation list. But that still didn't pay the bills, so the author's Dad, Lyn Rogers kept coming up with one survival scheme after another in a way that could make for a third-world-dictator version of the Harvard Business School case study. These included: subletting the premises to a brothel manager, running a marijuana operation and then, most famously, the resort becoming a hang-out for illegal diamond dealers. All along, as their food options dwindle, his mother Ros, punctuates these chapters with a scheme of her own: improvised meal ideas for her proposed cooking book, Recipes for Disaster.

At the same time, the resort serves as a refugee camp for displaced whites, government officials' mistresses, Power Company engineers and political outsiders of several stripes. As for the illegal mining section, it is a relatively small a part of the book but thanks to the Blood Diamonds phenomenon and the kind of money at stake, this is what the media likes to talk about.

Written as a kind of family journal by our affable traveler, Douglas Rogers, we get drawn into many adventures in this troubled place. With a gentle inquisitiveness, he drinks and tokes with the locals who quickly recede from typical African stock characters into real people with their own unique drives, personality and logic. From the amusingly over-articulate John Agoneka to the savvy diamond dealer Fatso and his sidekick No Matter, this is the real Africa you don't find in a tourist package or your typical bwana book where the white explore and the blacks carry. Likewise, his portraits of the diehard whites who somehow adjusted from white domination to African majority rule and then suffer their disillusionment is matter-of fact yet compelling. When the whites go native such as when the matronly Miss Moneypenny, their "private banker" dances naked at the instruction of a witch doctor to settle a score, it seems perfectly reasonable under the circumstances.

While less lyrical perhaps than Peter Godwin's Mukiwa: White Boy in Africa or Alexandra Fuller's Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight and the near hypnotic Scribbling the Cat, it more than makes up for it as a page-turner, eye-opener and to the pin-striped set, an entrepreneurial cliff-hanger. This is an African journey by way of a survival plan B, C & D where good doses of bribery and connivance fill in for Drucker and Due Diligence. All along, you feel like you're one of them, talking to these folks and listening to their stories in one of their own African languages.

Considering how dark the situation in Zimbabwe became with over 10,000% inflation, the book is almost optimistic. Compared to Godwin's When a Crocodile Eats the Sun it makes you feel like keeping an eye out for Mugabe's one-way ticket out of there so you can visit this unsinkable lodge and its irrepressible owners and staff. In the meantime, you could just read the book and breathe in a sigh of democratic relief.

Alan Brody is the author of White Shaka Boy on Amazon

21 of 21 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A great read October 2, 2009

By M. H. Kirvan

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

I was able to read an advanced copy and I really enjoyed it. It is an easy read and a remarkable story of the author's family in Zimbabwe. His family lineage goes back 300 years on the African Continent. His family is one of the last white land owners in Zimbabwe and the story is of his immediate family living through the transitions from Rhodesia to Zimbabwe to the last 10 years of "Land Reform". His parents ran a well regarded backpacker lodge in the eastern mountains of Zimbabwe all through the 1990's. In the last decade, despite inflation in the million percent range, as well as brutal and murderous land seizures, his parents are still miraculously on "their" land. It is their LAST RESORT! Douglas Rogers is quite the raconteur. His writing makes you ache to visit and see for your self the raw and natural beauty that is Zimbabwe. I recommend this book.

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Small Gestures Between Ordinary People February 21, 2010

By Jo-Anne Green

Format:Hardcover

I can't stop thinking about this book. I recently visited my family in South Africa (I left in 1983), and I was struck -- yet again -- by their amazing sense of humor, despite all of their difficulties. This book reinforced the feeling of awe I have for them. It is the same feeling I now have for all of the people depicted in The Last Resort. Their lives are tragic, yet heroic; difficult beyond comprehension but full of determination and courage. What makes the book so powerful is how Rogers compels us to empathize with everyone, regardless of their race, ethnicity or political affiliation. They are simply human, born into circumstances not of their own making, swept up by events they can't quite control. Their actions, though sometimes unethical or immoral, are driven by an evolutionary will to survive. They are unapologetic, yet their ability to adapt and even change gives one hope in the human race. Ultimately, it is not power or money that allows Rogers' family to endure; rather, it is the small gestures -- of respect and kindness -- that keeps them on their land in their beloved Zimbabwe; their encounters with individuals, long forgotten, whose connections suddenly mean everything. This is a tale that teaches us that lives can be changed by tiny, seemingly inconsequential interactions between ordinary people, and reminds us to strive to be better every day.