Zimbabwe: Victoria Falls and the Grim Reaper

It was 1985, and I had just crossed into Zimbabwe from Zambia, arriving in time for the fifth anniversary of Zimbabwe’s independence. I carry two deeply etched memories from that country, both involving close encounters with the Grim Reaper.

Having travelled across Zambia from Malawi, I headed straight for Victoria Falls. On the Zambezi River, the falls plunge 108 metres into the narrow Batoka Gorge, and standing at the edge is an almost physical experience. The sound hits you first—thunderous, constant—followed by clouds of mist rising up as if the earth itself were breathing.

As I moved along the paths, the scale of it all slowly sank in. Sheets of water poured over the lip of the falls, disappearing into white spray below. Sunlight fractured through the mist, throwing rainbows into the air at odd angles. The ground vibrated faintly underfoot, the rhythm of falling water echoing in my chest.

It was overwhelming in the best possible way. Even now, decades later, it’s hard to separate the sight from the feeling—humbling, exhilarating, slightly unsettling. Victoria Falls doesn’t just impress you; it reminds you how small you are.

If you ever get the chance to see it for yourself, take it. Stand there. Get soaked. Let the noise drown out your thoughts. Some places recalibrate you.

You might assume this was where I nearly slipped and fell to my death. It wasn’t. That came the next day—and in a far more ordinary setting. I was staying at a campground near the falls, packing up early in the morning and getting ready to hitchhike east toward the capital. As I was sorting my gear, I caught movement out of the corner of my eye. I turned—and there it was.

A black mamba, a snake so dangerous its venom is among the most potent of any snake in the world. It carries a fast-acting neurotoxin that can shut down the nervous system, paralyzing lungs and heart in a matter of hours, sometimes less. Long, lean, and terrifyingly quick, it doesn’t need to be aggressive to be fatal; a single well-placed bite, untreated, is often enough to kill.

The snake, which is actually more grey-ish in color, was crossing the campsite, unhurried, elegant, and utterly uninterested in me. Instead of freezing or backing away, I did something incredibly stupid. I picked up a small pebble and tossed it, thinking I could scare it off.

I didn’t. The stone somehow arched high above and came down right on top of the snake's head. It stopped, turned, and looked directly at me for about a full minute before moving toward me, fast.

Whatever dignity I had evaporated instantly. I ran. Adrenaline took over, my legs moving faster than I’d ever known they could. The campground blurred into a series of obstacles: tents, tables, trees. My lungs burned. My heart hammered. All I could think about was getting away as fast as possible. I didn't look back.

Somehow, I reached the far end of the campground and didn’t stop until I was well clear. Only then did I slow down, bent over, gasping for air, the realization settling in that I had just picked a fight with one of the most venomous snakes on the continent—and survived.

Later, once my hands stopped shaking, the lesson landed. This wasn’t about bravery or adventure or even bad luck. It was about arrogance. I had forgotten that I was a visitor in someone else’s world.

No, I didn't stop to take a picture. I purchased this image on Shutterstock (photo credit: Craig Cordier) to give the reader a sense of what I was dealing with.

Rhodes and the Great Zimbabwe Ruins

From Victoria Falls, I hitchhiked south and east across the country, pausing for a few days in Bulawayo. Along the way, I detoured to Matobo National Park, a landscape of granite hills and balancing rocks that feels ancient and watchful. It is also where Cecil John Rhodes was buried.

Rhodes lies beneath a heavy slab of stone at the summit of a granite outcrop, facing a vast African horizon. The location is undeniably dramatic, and deliberately so. Rhodes was nothing if not theatrical. Born in England, he came to southern Africa in the late 19th century and built his fortune on diamonds, co-founding De Beers and helping create a cartel that would dominate the global diamond trade for generations. His wealth and influence were inseparable from conquest. Through the British South Africa Company, he seized land, displaced communities, and laid the foundations of settler rule in a territory he named after himself: Rhodesia.

Standing at his grave, it was impossible not to feel the tension between scale and legacy. The land endures. The man beneath the stone tried—successfully, for a time—to bend history in his direction.

From there, I continued east toward the Great Zimbabwe ruins.

Unlike Rhodes’s grave, Great Zimbabwe doesn’t announce itself with grandeur or self-importance. It simply exists. Spread across a broad valley, the site is made up of massive dry-stone walls, some over ten metres high, constructed without mortar and fitted so precisely that they have stood for more than seven centuries. This was the heart of a powerful African kingdom between the 11th and 15th centuries, a centre of trade that linked the interior of southern Africa to the Swahili Coast and beyond. Gold, ivory, and ceramics passed through here. Chinese porcelain has been found among the ruins.

For a long time, European scholars refused to accept that Africans had built it. The structures were too sophisticated, too orderly, too monumental. Myths were invented—Phoenicians, Arabs, anyone but the obvious answer. Walking among the walls, those old denials felt absurd. The stones speak clearly enough.

The Great Enclosure, with its immense circular walls and the mysterious conical tower inside, had a quiet authority. There were no signs telling you what to think, no need for explanation. The place carried its own weight.

And then, improbably, modern history wandered in.

As I was exploring the site, a small stir rippled through the ruins. Vehicles arrived. Security appeared. Suddenly, I found myself standing nearby as David Lange, then New Zealand's Prime Minister, walked through with his entourage during an official visit. It was surreal—this outspoken anti-nuclear leader from the South Pacific touring one of Africa’s most important archaeological sites, framed by ancient stone walls and Zimbabwean officials.

The contrast stayed with me. Empires rise and fall. Politicians pass through. But the stones of Great Zimbabwe remain—quiet, unapologetic, and deeply rooted in the land.

Another selfie taken with the self-timer on my SLR and running across to pose in the ruins.

Leaving the ruins, I felt I had seen two versions of history side by side – the Great Zimbabwe Ruins and the grave of an empire builder: one carved into granite by a civilization confident in its place in the world, and another imposed briefly, loudly, and ultimately unsuccessfully, by men who believed the land could be owned, renamed, and mastered.

Harrowing Harare

From the Great Zimbabwe ruins, I travelled north to the capital. When I arrived in Harare, I was struck immediately by how modern and orderly it felt. Clean streets. Decent infrastructure. A sense of calm efficiency. After two years of backpacking across Africa—west to east, north to south, 30 countries from Senegal to Ethiopia and Egypt and then down into southern Africa—all of it by ground transport, no planes, Harare felt almost surreal.

One of the first things I did was go to a cinema. It was my first movie in two years. I saw Amadeus, the 1984 film about Mozart, and sat there absorbing not just the story, but the novelty of a darkened theatre, a comfortable seat, and a screen that wasn’t flickering in the open air.

Harare in 1985.

I was in the city for the fifth anniversary of Zimbabwe’s independence, won after a long and brutal fifteen-year guerrilla war against white minority rule. The liberation struggle had been led by black nationalist forces under Robert Mugabe. In 1985, Mugabe was still widely regarded as a liberation hero, and Zimbabwe was often described as the jewel of Africa. The economy was functioning, the institutions intact, the optimism still real.

That optimism felt genuine—until it didn’t.

One afternoon, as I wandered through the city taking in the celebrations, a black Cadillac pulled up beside me. The rear window slid down. A man leaned out, raised a pistol, and pointed it directly at my face.

I froze.

He stared at me for what felt like a long time—though it was probably only seconds. I slowly turned my palms upward, shrugged, and said the first thing that came to mind.

“Why? I’m from Canada.”

He broke into a grin, mimed pulling the trigger, and the car drove off.

No one reacted. No one stopped. The street simply swallowed the moment and moved on.

As I continued hitchhiking across Zimbabwe, it was mostly white Zimbabweans who picked me up. I call them Zimbabweans deliberately. They were the ones who had chosen to stay when the country reclaimed majority rule on 18 April 1980. Those who couldn’t live under the new reality had already left—most of them heading south to apartheid South Africa.

The white Zimbabweans I met were generally frank, sometimes uncomfortable, often apologetic about the past. There was an acknowledgement—quiet, but present—that history had shifted, and that they were now living in its aftermath.

Occasionally, I was picked up by white South Africans, visiting family or doing business. The contrast was stark. Without exception, they defended apartheid. Every conversation circled back to justification—economic, cultural, racial. There was no doubt, no hesitation, no reflection.

Up until then, I had planned to travel overland all the way to Cape Town. I had already come overland from as far north as Hamburg, after all. But those encounters changed my mind.

Instead of heading south as planned and completing my Cairo-to-Cape journey, I turned back north—through Zambia, then onward to Burundi and Rwanda. I carried with me a clearer sense of where lines were being drawn, and how easily history hardens when people refuse to see it changing.

Over the previous two years of travelling across Africa, I had rarely been conscious of my skin. I was often called names for “white man”—toubab in Senegal, khawaja in Sudan, mzungu in Tanzania—but they never felt like labels or limits. They were descriptors, not judgments. I was welcomed into homes, buses, markets, and conversations, and I learned quickly that how I behaved mattered far more than how I looked. I was judged by my curiosity, my patience, my respect—not by the colour of my skin.

But as I travelled further south, something shifted. The further south I went, the whiter I felt—and not in a neutral way. Whiteness there carried weight. It came with history, power, fear, resentment, and expectation. I became more self-conscious, more guarded, and, at times, less safe precisely because of what I represented rather than who I was. That sense of easy belonging I had felt elsewhere faded, replaced by an uncomfortable awareness of privilege, guilt, and inherited violence. It was one of the reasons I decided not to continue south. Turning back north wasn’t just a logistical choice—it was an emotional one. I needed distance, and perspective, and a way forward that didn’t feel like walking deeper into someone else’s unfinished war.