It’s a strange, strange feeling being proudly shown around extensive fields of top quality tobacco plants mid-harvest. It has been a really good crop for the farm manager with whom we were staying and his brick barns were full of massive compressed bales of cured leaves waiting to be taken to be sold. It felt odd trying to appreciate a crop whose sole purpose is to shorten lives. He is looking to branch out into potatoes next year: I really hope that takes off – I feel a lot better about potatoes.

There are over 100 black workers who work long, long hours in the searing heat for a wage of one hundred dollars a month. (Zimbabwe’s main currency is US dollars. Currently 100 dollars would be £65). Let’s call it £2 a day. They do get basic housing and electricity in their workers’ village but when we’re sitting on the veranda sipping cold beers and 200 metres away they are surviving on a staple diet of mealie-meal after a long shift in sweltering heat…. It felt awkward.

We attached the speedboat to the new 4 x 4 and drove it down to the lake to do a little recreational fishing. Out on the water we passed some of the locals on the bank, fishing with a little more earnestness.

Sure there are rich and poor in every country of course, but here it felt as though (substituting boat and car for 18th century equivalents perhaps) we might have been back on the cotton plantations.

However, there is one big difference to the way this scene would have looked 20 years ago, say. For today, although the conditions for the workers are the same, the owner of the farm is also black. My white relative is working for him as a farm manager because he has the skills to get the best yield, as he would have done on his parents’ farm had it not been taken from them. A majority of the other stolen farms have not been run so well.

Many Zimbabweans, black and white, have left the country – there are 4 million in South Africa alone.

The black Zimbabweans remaining in Zimbabwe are the poor and the couple of hundred politically and economically protected families that make up the ruling elite. In the words of one ex-pat Zimbabwean now living in South Africa: “They (the ruling elite) have raped and plundered their country and impoverished their people. Almost all the mining resources have been handed over to China with the government ensuring that they are 51% shareholders of everything that comes out the ground. The diamonds they have just stolen. Their contribution is nil and the money made goes to the ruling cabal….. The farms were handed over to the ruling elite and they are in ruins. From an economic perspective you can take the farmers off the land but the skills to work these assets are no longer there…… Sporadic electricity, a collapsing infrastructure, a corrupt government and yet some whites stay. On the surface they enjoy an enviable standard of living but at what cost? What is the risk? Underlying it all is the ever present threat that everything you have can be taken at the stroke of a pen.”

This has happened to some of those in my family. They have started again from scratch and made promising (albeit fragile) futures for themselves. It is a country which is deeply scarred, many of the wounding blows wielded by its own politicians.

I don’t think President Mugabe cares much whether foreigners come into the country – unless it’s to give him money in return for business rights to leach some of the country’s phenomenal natural assets.

With the astonishingly beautiful resources of Victoria Falls, Lake Kariba and some not-too-shabby scenery along the way you would have thought the tourist industry would be forefront in the government’s mind.

And, to lighten the tone a little, having been there I can tell you there is not a fat lot to do as a tourist in Harare. If you log into Trip Advisor and type in “Top Attractions in Harare” the results are a little sparse. Fortunately for us, we could spend lots of time with family. But Harare? Well, it’s not set up for tourists.

However, there’s an exception to most rules and one place which was simply AMAZING is a place called Wild Is Life. It’s a small animal conservation area not far from the airport where they take small groups of people around to fully engage with the wildlife they have there. So, you get to see the lions being fed up close and personal. (Good excuse to show off photos I took – this one of a lion looking at me and, unnervingly, licking his lips!)

(We were THAT close!). We got to walk with cheetahs, bottle feed giraffes,
stroke a pangalan (one of God’s weirder projects – probably invented on the same day as duck billed platypuses and the blob fish – go on, google “blob fish”, it’s very strange.) Pangalans are a bit like an anteater crossed with a tank. They walk on their back legs with their front paws off the ground, looking like an old (very flexible) man looking for a lost contact lens. Quite rare now – they used to be taken to the head of the tribe to be eaten as this was considered good luck (more for the chief than the pangalan it has to be said). Today, President Mugabe, by decree, owns every pangalan and if you find one you are meant to present it to him. Wild Is Life is thankfully allowed to keep theirs and he has his own keeper who cares for him full time.

There are lots of animals running pretty free and you also get to meet and greet a little orphan elephant. He and I got on very well and I got to shout things down his trunk.

It was, all in all, an awesome day of animal encounter