In Time of Famine 
R.W. Johnson reports from Zimbabwe
When I was in Harare recently I inquired about an old naturalist I’d known there. He knew he had cancer, had told his friends he’d finished his book, was all through and would like to be cremated. Since nothing works in Zimbabwe any more he’d got in a nice store of mopani logs and was sure his friends would know what to do. They did. When he died they came round, wrapped his body in a blanket, made a funeral pyre and stood around it, glass in hand, till it burned low. The few doctors left in the country are so badly paid that it wasn’t hard to get the various necessary certificates made out. Anywhere else DIY cremation might raise eyebrows, but not here.
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From the LRB letters page: [ 8 March 2007 ] Neal Hodge.
R.W. Johnson, an emeritus fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, lives in Cape Town, where he is completing a book on South Africa since the advent of democracy.
Other articles by this contributor:
Rogue’s Paradise · The Russians and the Anglo-Boer War by Apollon Davidson and Irina Filatova
Her Boy · Mark Thatcher
How Mugabe came to power · R.W. Johnson talks to Wilfred Mhanda
Burning Blankets · Robert Mugabe’s latest tidy-up
Where do we go from here? · Zimbabwe
Mr Shepperd to you · Classes and Cultures: England 1918-51 by Ross McKibbin
Nerds, Rabbits and a General Lack of Testosterone · Major and Lamont
Cads · Roosevelt’s Secret War: FDR and World War Two Espionage by Joseph Persico.
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