PERSPECTIVE ON AFRICA’S DROUGHT : The Bathtub of the Flamboyant : City people still have their green lawns and orchards; in rural areas, there is no water, no harvest, no food.

There’s a huge bathtub in my room at the Flamboyant Motel in Masvingo, a mid-sized city about to run out of water. Like the “Right of Admission Reserved” sign above the establishment’s grand entrance--in the 13 years since Rhodesia became Zimbabwe, no one has gotten around to removing the two screws that hold the banner of segregation in place--the bathtub seems an anomalous relic. The nearby reservoir of Lake Kyle is widely reputed to be at .3% of capacity, and local “dry farms”--those that depend on rain rather than tapping the depleting aquifer with sprinklers--have produced no crops at all this year.

Nevertheless, some Zimbabweans who have the means to do so continue to behave as though this were a normal year. There are more than a dozen private golf courses still green in Harare, the capital, and behind their iron gates, the gardens of suburban houses bloom with avocado and bougainvillea. Here and there in the countryside, perfume rises from orange groves irrigated by the deepest bore holes, and the local Holiday Inn has posted no water conservation signs. It’s as though the reality of the current national disaster--this is the driest year in living memory--does not exist until it strikes each citizen individually.

Last to feel the effects may well be the residents of Avondale, a northern suburb of gracious homes and well-stocked shopping centers. In late afternoon its shaded lanes are bordered by lines of maids, gardeners, security guards and cooks. They’re waiting for the infrequent bus to bring them far south to the crowded townships where flood lamps installed atop high steel poles are kept lit all night, their glare eclipsing even a full African moon.

I’m offered vastly differing perspectives on this stratified society by two women, each a powerful articulator of her social niche. The first is a business executive whose ancestors migrated from England generations ago and who professes to be completely “of Africa.” I’m the second foreigner this year to mention the gulf between rich and poor.

“I thought the first man was talking out of the back of his neck,” she says. “People of different cultures just don’t mix.” But “racialism is alive and well,” though it’s of a more benevolent nature than the apartheid system in South Africa. The wealthy don’t simply close up their homes and go to Europe for several months to wait out the drought, because their servants would be left “high and dry.”

She blames government corruption and bad planning for much of the country’s economic problems. “We’ve gone from white fat cats to black fat cats, but before, at least, the system worked. There was integrity.” Plus, the large commercial farms were more efficient. “Village people are not stupid, but they’re ignorant,” she observes. “They have no money and their fields are too remote from the marketplace.”

It’s hard to imagine a place more remote from the glass and steel high-rises of downtown Harare than the half-built and deserted public granary in Binga, a two-hour Cessna flight to the west, where, in the company of Chris Eldridge, regional director of Save the Children in Britain, I listen to the sorry report of an aptly named group: the Grinding Committee. Fuel has become so expensive that it’s no longer profitable to operate the sleek British-financed machine, and in any case, there is no grain harvest to grind.

The one nutritional hope is the promise of free meat from a government resource-management “cull” of elephants, antelope and crocodiles. This is expected to yield about 600 tons of animals, which will yield 70 tons of “biltong” (jerky) and add much needed protein to the local diet.

Later in the afternoon, in the tiny settlement of Mola, food is very much on the mind of the village secretary for an emergency relief operation that provides a daily bowl of corn mush to children under 5 as well as to pregnant and lactating mothers. A woman with strong arms and a sleeping toddler secured on her back with a tied blanket, the secretary speaks Tonga in a low voice and is all business in her translated negotiations with Chris.

Her first proposal: A number of village women work in this program on a rotating basis, measuring out grain or weighing children for government records; they, too, should be afforded the luxury of an occasional meal since lately some have fainted from hunger. Chris should be clear, she adds, that this provision will not extend to her or to members of her governing committee who, to avoid any suspicion of profiteering, have made themselves permanently ineligible for a ration.

Chris gravely explains that at the moment there is only a finite amount of food; if more people partake, the portions will necessarily be smaller. The decision, however, is up to the woman and her colleagues.

She nods, one item on her agenda ticked off, and moves on. What about the agency’s pull-cart, she wants to know. When it’s not in use for this program, may she have permission to designate it for other purposes, such as transporting the sick to the airstrip? Otherwise, it will simply sit idle.

Once again Chris confirms her authority, and once again the woman and the audience of recipients who watch this drama for entertainment are satisfied.

There’s one final issue to be settled: Would Chris please find out and report on his next visit what will happen to the 50-gallon tin drum, now on loan to store hauled water, when the rains come back? The request is made casually, offhand even, but no one present believes for a moment that the woman doesn’t already have a plan for this rusty object of foreign manufacture, a plan that will, without doubt, be accomplished.

Where does your water come from now, I ask before we depart, and am led nearly a mile down a path to the dry bed of what normally would be a river. Into a small hole, scraped into the dirt, there seeps a puddle of brown water. We stand around the perimeter in silence, for the shallowness, the precariousness is numbing.

Eventually I look up at the secretary’s face. She’s frowning, thinking hard, absolutely determined to figure something out.

Next: The specter of disease.