At a backpackers’ lodge in Victoria Falls, I was invited to join a group of young white Zimbabweans at their table. They said I seemed “a well-travelled man.”

Wayne responded to my first obvious question: “Well, things aren’t easy here, but not too difficult either. You can see—we’re here enjoying ourselves and getting drunk.” He glared at me, as if daring me to contradict him.

Jenny, a farmer, sat at the far end of the table, clutching her double vodka and perched on the edge of her seat. Her pointer dog was by her side. “Yes,” she said, “I hunt with him.” The dog found and set birds like guinea fowl; she flushed them from cover, and her trained falcon swooped down for the kill. “That’s always been one of the sports of kings,” someone at the table remarked.

Gail, a tall, striking blonde of about thirty-five, sat beside me. She worked in arts and crafts on both the Zimbabwean and Zambian sides of the Falls. There was something Meryl Streep-like in her hair and the shape of her head. No, she had never married, nor had she ever had a black boyfriend. She wasn’t racist, of course, she quickly added. They just had such a different culture from hers. “People in Europe just don’t understand that,” she said.

She reminisced about her “wonderful” time in Ireland. She told the story of how one night in a Dublin pub, someone too drunk to sit had slipped off his stool and remained supine on the floor. Someone else, seeing his predicament, gently placed a cushion under his head. She found it a “wonderful” gesture.

She had liked Europe during the year she spent there but cried for two full days with the pure emotion of being back. She was African. It was simply in her blood.

The person she hated most in the world was Robert Mugabe—not because of what he had done to them, the whites, but because he had “f…d his own people.”

The far-off thunder of the Falls drifted weakly through the open door and I went towards it as they worked determinedly on getting drunk.

Image credit: Brooke Saward, Brooke Beyond travel blog – “5 Ways to Enjoy Victoria Falls in Zambia & Zimbabwe”.