Book Review: The Last Resort by Douglas Rogers

When Africa Moves Your Cheese

by Alan Brody

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 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.

The Last Resort by Douglas Rogers - published by Harmony Books

South African Review of District 9 - The Sci-Fi Hit

You've probably heard about this fascinating new Sci-Fi movie set in Johannesburg. But you've probably been waiting for a review by a South African.

So here it is - and whatever you do - you will have to go to the movies to catch this one!

Aliens in Africa Make the Worlds Come Together
A Review of the Sci-Fi movie by Alan Brody

Who'd have thought the no. 1 box office movie started as a "mockumentary" from 2005 and posted on YouTube, of a UFO landing in Johannesburg, South Africa - circa 1982 - at the height of apartheid. In many ways this is a wild movie - like nothing you've seen before. Real, uncomfortable and deeply interesting. This is today's Blair Witch Project but only bigger, better and more exotic. More technology too.

Neill Blomkamp is the director and co-creator and it is produced by the man who brought us The Ring.

For South Africans this is having déjà vu but this time as a kind of weird comedy verite. You're seeing what apartheid really looked like back in the day - but instead of the Africans being treated like animals, the mostly white strike force of the movie - who look a whole lot like South African Police from the apartheid days are treating aliens that way. Only here, the aliens look like giant shrimp with legs.

In much the same way Art Spiegelman's Maus made the Nazis and Jews of the holocaust seem more real as rats and mice respectively, this makes the once oppressive world of apartheid seem more vivid.

This time, the chief enforcer is no Schwartzenegger, instead, he is an efficient, mild-mannered bureaucrat from like Steve Carrol mold in The Office.

For some reason he is the only one videotaping his mission to displace the aliens to a new camp. Unlike your typical higher civilization though, these aliens are a mixed bag. A million of them washed up in a dilapidated spacecraft above the country's largest city -poor, destitute. Forget E.T. meet galaxy trash. They speak something that sounds like Xhosa played through a vacuum cleaner. They have a madness for cat food and are willing to sell whatever technology they have. But we can't use it for reasons of interplanetary DNA.

Watching all this UFO stuff go on with heavy South African is a riot. When Wilkus tells an alien to "Voetsek" any South African in the audience has to laugh convulsively.

So is this an allegory? Do we have a subtext here? Could these aliens represent a new kind of force, like say, the Chinese who are becoming highly influential in Africa?

To Americans - this is just strange stuff . A new, gritty kind of sci-fi flick. Something like Mad Max meets Office Max.

But somewhere along the way you are getting a cultural lesson. The whites are venal and somewhat bumbling but they get along with the local Africans. You could say aliens unite everyone against them. Except that is, for the Nigerians - they run the show when it comes to dealing with aliens - and they given to extreme violence and primitivism.

Life gets more interesting when the various races merge with the aliens. That is no mere sci-fi for South Africans; this is a headscratcher within a sci-fi flick because miscegenism was a very big deal back in those days. Since all reproduction here is by way of pathogenesis, this is arguably a family film. However, it is not a chick flick, so check with the girls first. They might just prefer to spend the afternoon with Lindsey Lohan. From a tourism point of view, it cements Johannesburg's image, begun with Tsotse, as the township capital of the universe - even though the city itself looks crudely interesting with its blockish skyscrapers etched against a dry, sun-drenched sky.

There are a number of loose ends in the story, but the experience of Johannesburg set to this strange world with a giant space ship hovering over downtown (somehow this missed the world news at the time, but Wilkus, the hero gets to make it his personal videotape) is just too exquisite for the ex-pats to not want to see..

I'd have to say the experience could make you want to reach out for some African music and a cool one - but that antidote will have wait for a different kind of South African movie. In the meantime sit back and watch a not-distant place and time of Africa become box office interest no. 1. In this galaxy, that is.

Alan is the author of White Shaka Boy
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Volume 2 of White Shaka Boy launched at Brooklyn Book Fair - Sep. 13.

Vote for the soundtrack songs on the Fame Game

Episode 2 of the award-winning online visual book, White Shaka Boy goes online today.

The soundtrack, the English and Zulu song "Umile" reached no. 2 on the R&B charts of the international independent music site Overplay.

China in Africa – Why it Matters to Americans

Thanks to "China Safari" this new book reviewed in the Times – the extraordinary story of China’s incursion into Africa is being documented for a general audience.

The bottom line is that China sees Africa as a way to catapult their economy to the status of the US – and they have a grand plan to do so.

Let me say it is not all bad – China is building the kind of sorely needed infrastructure that the West has mostly shied away from. In the 70’s Mao Tze-Dong built the Tanzania-Zambia railroad to take copper and other resources from Zambia’s landlocked mining region to the port of Dar es Salaam.

In addition to the interest-free loan China sent about 25,000 of its engineers to help complete the awesome project. No doubt many learned Swahili.

25 years later China stepped up the pace but with a much more targeted vision – wining over African leaders with gifts of mansions and motorcades and then building just the infrastructure they need to move the resources from the low-cost mines they control to the ports that will ship the materials to China. Once in China, they are turned into the products they will sell to the rest of the world – including Africa.

The negative is that emerging manufacturing industries in Africa are leveled by the Chinese factories. The best jobs are reserved for Chinese workers and whatever wealth is generated for Africa tends to stay in the hands of the countries’ leadership. Some trickles down but not enough and the Chinese have a habit of propping up some unsavory dictators like Zimbabwe’s Mugabe and the Sudan’s Bashir.

The downside to all this is that once the economy begins to recover, many of the commodities we need will be either owned by or reserved for China. Plus, the opportunity for growing our economy by selling to a developing Africa is deeply compromised.

To win the hearts of Africans China even resurrected the legend of Zheng He, the 15th Century Chinese sailor who was probably a marauder and was shipwrecked in Kenya. He and his crew began many biracial families in Kenya which experienced various kinds of discrimination. They have since been resurrected as heroes of sorts in China. The idea is to show China’s deep roots in Africa.

(In some ways, this parallels the White Shaka story and in this regard, it is a prism by which an American audience can understand the deeper issues of this new economic run on Africa.)

The opportunity for America - if it wakes up - is this: Africa doesn’t really like China. They certainly appreciate the attention, the money and for some, the new sources of corruption. But they much prefer their relatives in America. And with a son of Africa in the White House…..

Indeed if you compare the Zheng He legend with the Obama reality, you can see why the Kenyan’s are particularly crazy about Americans. Obama is not just a favorite son but he is competing against some deep Chinese propaganda.

Alas, we give Africa little attention beyond the usual charitable stuff and the mortal fear of fresh atrocities. Charity is good but hardly the engine of economic growth and stability they need. More importantly, they crave a fellowship with cultures and people they have come to understand at many levels - and that is us. They would gladly buy our products over China’s but as we all know, when they do, the product is actually made in China….

What we can do is take advantage of a couple of things. Africa is not good with maintenance, we can certainly provide legions of help there. Most of all they want self-sufficiency and for that they want training, support and fellowship which can offer. Unlike China, we are happy to help them build and develop factories which will make products highly suited for their environment and their working style – which shall we say, is very, very different from the Chinese.

To do all of this we need an awareness, a national program and a plan to connect this new American generation with this new generation of Africans.

White Shaka is an adventure story for sure, but it is also a parable about taking the traditional concepts in an African culture – in this case, the Zulus – and showing how they can be transformed into a 21st Century solution.

White Shaka Music Goes to Top of the Charts

White Shaka is going online and now the theme music from Episode 2 - Umile - went to no. 2 on the Rhythm and Blues charts of overplay.com

Dear Mr. Obama: What Africa Needs is a New Kind of Digital Marshall Plan

Forget charity. Forget cash. What Africa needs is a way to unleash its own entrepreneurship.

Its already doing that thanks to cell phones. There are now over 50 million on them on the continent.

So here's how to do it. Convert these to smartphones, create a secure online currency a la Paypal and let individual Africans participate on the world market.

It is really that simple. Once businesses and non-profits can go directly to individuals and vice versa then thieving government officials and billion-dollar banknotes like Zimbabwe become irrelevant.

Why send a bag of rice when you can give a village a way to earn rice credits that they can cash in at a store?

Why send a mosquito net when you can finance a local mosquito net factory.

You get the idea - we can leapfrog the old barriers of post-colonial Africa just by tapping into the wireless economy. Instead of giving people things we enable them to jumpstart their own economies. Cell phones offer a way to bypass the traditional gatekeepers who are generally forced to become corrupt by the system itself.

In fact, cell phones themselves are an example of this new approach. Look at it this way - in 15 years Africa grew from a legacy of just 5 million phone lines - almost all government controlled - to 50 million cell phones - mostly privately controlled.

Old thinking is to give conscience money to the poor while buying up resources cheaply. This isn't grand collusion although it might as well be - Bono raises money and give it away to poor villages while the corporations funding him look for ways to sell baby formula or extract minerals for less. Unfortunately, the Chinese are beat us at this game because they skipped the conscience money part and increased the direct payments to the governments and top officials to get the resources even more cheaply. Example 1 - Darfur (in case you wondered who paid for the oil pipeline that financed the janjaweed).

Plus the Chinese don't place moral conditions on anyone. Example 2 - sending weapons to Mugabe in Zimbabwe so that he increase military pressure when his rigged elections were being contested.

Smartphones and the wireless economy tied to small manufacturing infrastructure is the new success model for Africa. It requires two things: underwriting the distribution of phones and the guarantee of a new "Marshall" Protection Plan. Hands off the little guys - if you steal from the world wireless economy we can find you and we'll get you, so don't do it.

Once people are engaged they buy or borrow what they need to grow their own food, information on how to do it and access to markets that will buy it. They will know what to make or grow and who to trade with.

This will extend to medicine and medical knowledge.

It will tend to redistribute wealth and power among the harder working and women.

This concept will require on-the-ground guarantors and vigilance against a new kind techie kleptocrat, but it is still much, much better than anything we have done in the the past. And it is inevitable.

White Shaka Wins International Storytelling Award

International Fuze Slideshare Storytelling Contest Winner

White Shaka Boy - the multimedia graphic novel about a New Yorker who discovers his personal Obama-like connection to Africa, won an Award in the Fuze Slideshare online storytelling contest.

White Shaka was judged the best Multimedia Story in the International Fuze Slideshare Storytelling contest that attracted contestants from all corners of the universe, where it was described by one voter as an "AWESOME...use of slides to tell a story."

Judges included Tony Hseih, CEO of Zappos; Om Malik, Journalist; Don Tapscott, author of Wikinomics, Pete Cashmore, Founder, Mashable and Ann Handley, CCO of MarketProfs.

White Shaka - Graphic Novel

View more documents from Alan Brody.

Slideshare is the leading Powerpoint presentation sharing site. Fuze Meeting is a collaborative videoconferencing site.

White Shaka Boy is a parable about the new land grab taking place in Africa today. It is based on a true story about a teen who discovers he is the biracial heir to the only white Zulu Chief of Africa. To win back his empire he has to learn about Zulu culture and the new realities of urbanized Africa. He also discovers early feminism in Zulu war culture and the underlying connection between Shaka fighting method and Gandhi's Satyagraha (passive resistance).

White Shaka features an award-winning, sophisticated Zulu hip-hop soundtrack from the album by Imbube, produced by Draztik. The graphics were produced by Revo Yanson.

The book and story concept was created by Alan Brody, a well-known new media pioneer, journalist, speaker and entrepreneur who stumbled upon this saga while researching an article about his early years, growing up in Africa. "I wanted to show my clients that to succeed in sales you have to be willing to make direct contact with your prospects - a grinding, rejection-laden process. I thought I could use the techniques of Zulu warfare to show how to thrive. Then, I stumbled upon this story and somehow, my inner comic creator, music-lover and African adventurer came together."

White Shaka can be ordered on Amazon with the complete 17-song soundtrack CD for $19.95 or directly from the White Shaka website

All 35 Webisodes will be loaded on Slideshare over the next 6 months.

Slideshare is a popular presentation-sharing site in the business world that has crossed over to the creative world.

White Shaka Featured Story on Major Website

White Shaka was selected as the featured story on the major slide site Slideshare.

Please visit and vote on Slideshare.