Hints to Lady Travellers: In Hot Water

Since I came back from Zimbabwe, lots of people have asked me about the trip and been surprised that I didn’t have more to say about human rights abuses, corruption and suffering. But I can only write about what I saw. And so mostly I’ve written about my experience of how, in the face of corruption, brutality and privation, people still carve out their own kind of normality. Did you catch that ‘mostly’ there? Because I did have one brush with the kind of story that keeps Zimbabwe in the headlines for all the wrong reasons.

On our way back to Harare from the Vumba, Robbie decided that I really couldn’t leave Africa without seeing a baobab tree. He proposed taking a detour via a place called Hot Springs were there are, in fact, hot springs and also lots of baobabs.

Here’s where I put up my hand and say that I really wasn’t very enthusiastic about the hot springs plan. I would like to claim that I had a premonition, but it was more that it was a very hot day and I wasn’t wild at the idea of broiling myself like a lobster. But Robbie was very convincing, so off we went.

Between Mutare and Hot Springs we went through perhaps ten sets of road blocks, though neither of us gave this much thought: we’d passed lots of road blocks on our trip. The police were friendly, only stopping us to ask for water. We paid more attention to trying to work out the signs being made by locals on the side of the road: they joined their fingers to make a kite shape. Looking for money? Food? A new political symbol?

We got to the Hot Springs Resort where there was fencing around the perimeter and a sign up saying ‘closed for Ren Ovations’. A security guard asked if he could help us and Robbie explained that we had been hoping to go to the hot baths. And here’s where the story gets very strange. This super friendly and super confiding guard explained that the resort was now a diamond mine: ‘very good diamonds, very big, lots of miners from South Africa, Russia.’ He proposed hitching a life with us down to the office where he would check if it was okay for us to use the baths. (Please imagine just how keen I was to go ahead with the bathing plan at this point.)

But it seemed that there was no way out. The security guard went into the office and came back to say that there was no problem, we could use the baths for $3 apiece, and pointed us to the changing rooms. The ladies’ was bad enough – peeling paint, flooding toilets – but Robbie came out of the men’s saying it was being used as the miners’ changing room and smelled like a latrine. I caught a waft as I walked past – he wasn’t exaggerating.

The two cold pools were green with algae, but the hot pool was moderately clean. We got in, carefully, and spent no more than five minutes in the water. Got changed again lightning fast and then – wait for it – took some photos.

Meanwhile a few bearded miners wandered past. We were waved off by the security guards and headed on our way, feeling that we’d had a lucky escape.

How lucky? Well, we got back to Harare and discovered that Hot Springs is part of the Marange diamond fields, seized by the government in 2006. Some miners were soldiers, others locals, forced to work there. Illegal miners moved in (or legal miners smuggling out diamonds in lieu of salaries, which none of them were paid) until, inevitably, there was a crackdown last October. Helicopter gunships came in and opened fire. Depending on the source you read, anything from 50 to 150 people were killed.