It was ten years ago to the decade this happened. We had done what we wanted to do on the Zambian side—dog-paddled from Livingstone Island across the Zambezi River blissfully oblivious of crocs and hippos, summoned up the courage to take the big leap down into the deep but small Devil’s Pool on the precipice, inches away from an unthinkable 208 metre drop to the rock-strewn bottom of the great falls. We had seen what we wanted to see on the Zambian side—the best viewing points to survey the majestic Mosi-oa-Tunya from; the statue of explorer/evangelist Davie Livingstone. Now, having wrestled with our ethical demons and overcome them, we decided to buy a day tripper visa and cross the bridge into Zimbabwe, swayed by the lure of it supposedly having superior vantage points for seeing Vic Falls.
(Photo: www.victoriafalls.net)
As we approached the checkpoint at the Zambian end we skirted round an African kid waving copper bracelets in our face (copper bracelets are one of the few items dirt-poor Zambian youngsters have to barter in exchange for South African rands). After completing the immigration stuff we didn’t dilly-dally around at the check-point, I had read that the local troop of baboons here could be quite aggressive with tourists (just before we came to Zambia 🇿🇲 I had read that one unfortunate tourist had fallen over the falls to his doom trying to avoid the pressing attentions of a baboon who had taken a fixedly determined interest in the bright orange bag he was carrying).
(Map: Lonely Planet)
We tip-toed very cautiously onto the bridge, avoiding eye-contact with the bulky and menacing guard on border duty brandishing an AK-47, save for a single furtive glance in his direction to catch his cold, expressionless countenance. There was none or minimal passing foot traffic as we did the 1.8km bridge trek into the Zimbabwe tourist township. This bridge apparently is famous for being the site of a formal “pow-wow” between the white UDI regime representatives and Mugabe’s ZANU-PF rebels which signalled the end of the long Rhodesian Bush War (I could be wrong about this as it might be the other one, the nearby railway bridge, where the icing was put on the cake of peace?)
Not long after passing the customs point, having got a set of fresh new Zimbabwe stamps in our passport, we encountering our first Zim local keen to barter with the tourists. We managed to out-walk most of these but finally we relented and stopped for one particularly persistent guy who just wouldn’t take ‘NO!’ for an answer. As it turned out this Zim street trader did have something we were interested in – some Zimbabwe 🇿🇼 bank notes. These were not any old legal tender that you might get back in change at the nearby Victoria Falls Town shops when you buy some souvenirs of Zimbabwe, these were examples of the fiat currency that the Mugabe regime was infamous for!
So, after a very short bargaining session, in exchange for a handful of wrinkled RSA rand notes✳, we walked away with three crisp, new looking Zimbabwe bank notes. They were, respectively, a Z$20 billion note, (which we discovered was merely petty cash compared to) a Z$50 trillion note and, la crème de la crèam, a mind-boggling fresh, ‘new’ Z$100 trillion note! Talk about collectors’ items! When I enquired of the street trader what exactly could I buy with the Z$100 trillion note, he produced his default smile and replied, “one loaf of bread”! But I can happily report that on checking later I discovered he was wrong…for the Z100Trn note I could get three loaves of bread – at least…and probably a few buns thrown in as well!
Yes, I had heard about Zimbabwe’s notorious mega-inflation. Back in high school history classes I had learnt about the troubled Weimar Republic in the 1920s and it’s crazy, runaway hyperinflation which led to workers being paid every day, twice a day (morning and afternoon) and having to cart away their ‘soft’ mark currency notes in wheelbarrows! But I didn’t appreciate the full dimensions of Zimbabwe’s economic calamity until I came here. In 2008 the country’s insouciant and haphazard economic mismanagement had resulted in a tsunami of hyper-inflationary escalation which peaked at a staggering 231 Million percent. At its year’s worse, prices were doubling every 24 hours [‘Where is the next Fiat Currency Revaluation?’, (Andrew Henderson), Nomad Capitalist, Upd. 28-Dec-2019, www.nomadcapitalist.com]. A worthless, disposal nappy of a currency. Zimbabwe – welcome to the world of the “starving billionaires” as the Zimbabwe cynic (ie, realist) would put it!
As well as adding naughts to the money denominations at an alarming rate of knots, Zimbabwe in a currency-printing frenzy went paper money crazy – they started issuing notes for all the coin denominations too. At one point they even had a one cent note! In the hyper-inflationary swampland that is Zimbabwe, imagine the lunacy of printing a 1₵ note! Then again, perhaps we are underestimating the government’s capacity for irony…or maybe it was an artistic statement, theatre of the absurd, surreal farce, that sort of thing!
Within two years the out-of-control inflation reached even more embarrassing stratospheric heights – 89.7 sextillion percent. Finally the Zimbabwe government arrived at a solution of sorts, it jettisoned the worthless local dollar currency for the US dollar. It began trading principally in US$ and South African rands (today the country accepts up to eight other foreign currencies as legal tender—including the Botswana pula—in place of the valueless Zim $).
Sadly, the economic situation in Zimbabwe today is not much better. In 2019 the economy took another sharp downturn and hyperinflation rose again like an exploding thermometer…at this point Zimstat (the Zimbabwe stats office) stopping releasing inflation data (in a desperate attempt to cover the government’s own scandalous ineptitude). However the IMF put the level of Zimbabwe inflation in August 2019 at 300 per cent. Bread was now something like US$10 a loaf. The annual inflation rate as at December 2019 was sitting around 521 percent! Venezuela could happily reclaim second place in the world’s worst stakes [‘IMF: Zimbabwe has the highest inflation rate in the world’, (29-Sep-2019), www.zimbabwesituation.com; ‘Zimbabwe Inflation Rate’, www.tradingeconomics.com].
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000……
Footnote:Trillions, Quadrillions, Sextillions, Septillions, Octillions, etc.—ultimately it’s a numbers game of theoretical interest only
The dubious honour for having printed the world’s highest numerical value banknote goes to postwar Hungary – 1 sextillion pengö back in 1946. Zimbabwean financial control suddenly doesn’t look quite so bad!
𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠 𝕠
✳ and my wife’s plastic tube of hand-sanitiser gel, which the guy’s infant kid had taken a fancy to