Zimbabwe's Coca Cola Drought

One of my favorite stories from my experiences in Africa comes from when I was in Botswana in 1997. We left the town of Maun in the north of the country, drove out into the veld for 45 minutes or an hour where we met some African men in an isolated spot in the Okavango Delta. Those men took us out on the Delta in hollowed out canoes called "Makoros" which they pushed along with long poles. (We were promised that the water was fully potable, and over the three-plus hours on the Delta as we progressed deeper into the wild we liberally filled jugs and drank; at one point a couple of hours in, we rounded a corner and not more than 30 feet away was an enormous elephant in our path letting fibrous nature work its course directly into the water -- let's just say that elephants eat vast amounts that later they expel freely.) After our time in the makroros we set up camp in a pastoral setting that had nonetheless just been ravaged by another enormous, and this time angry, bull elephant. After setting up, we went for a hike across miles and miles of veld. Elephants everywhere, other wildlife similarly ubiquitous, we walked until we hit a tiny village. The children there were fascinated by us, and some of my favorite pictures are of those children, and of me playing with them. Tired and hot and thirsty, we were amazed to find that in that village was a stand, and in that stand an old woman sold goods that came in once a week or so from rugged trucks that pass through this isolated spot a long, long way from Maun. And at that stand we could buy Coca Cola. It was a remarkable revelation about globalization and Coke's penetration into the world -- forget about McDonald's; this was an example of a corporation with a foothold in the entirety of the globe.

I thought of this wonderful memory when I read this story in today's Mail & Guardian detailing how Zimbabwe faces a dire shortage of Coca Cola for the first time in four decades. One need not be a rampant capitalist to understand that this, as much as anything, brings home to roost the recklessness and callousness of Robert Mugabe's morally, politically, and apparently literally bankrupt regime. When Mugabe led Zimbabwe to independence in 1980, Tanzania's independence leader Julius Nyerere told Mugabe that he was inheriting a "jewel" in Africa. Now that jewel cannot even maintain supplies of a commodity that one can find in the most isolated reaches of the Okavango Delta.