War on Iran threatens global economy, but worse, rattles 'just world' ethic in places such as Malawi

Malawi, east of Lilongwe, looking toward Lake Malawi
RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Americans are suffering an affordability crisis wrought in large part by the Middle East war. But the impact of the conflict is global. And the lasting message to the world's poorest places might be less about economic setback, and more about the unreliability of western capitalism.

Driven especially if not exclusively by the Iran war, record fuel prices in the United States make local and national news every day and are sending ripples through the economy, worsening the affordability crisis that the White House alternatively grapples with and declares "fake."

It's easy to be self-absorbed in this crisis. I've lately lamented the $65 tab to fill my gas tank. Traveling to join family for an upcoming weekend wedding will cost my wife, daughter, and me more than $3,000. 

We're blessed; for now, we can absorb these costs. But as we consider our retirement plan with airfare inflation topping 23%, I worry about an impending need to decide what family we want to be close to in the States, presumably a parent or child, and to move there, understanding that we will rarely see other family again. 

It's like going back in time to when Americans moved west knowing they might never see their loved ones again. Shouldn't that be a forgotten era with modern transportation technologies? Both political parties purport to support the American family, but neither takes responsibility for our geographic fragmentation in the national labor market. We have no long-distance, high-speed trains, and we treat air travel like a free-market luxury.

Many Americans are in that bind already, tethered to work, if they can find it, and isolated from family. As Americans talk on the news about increasingly having to choose between fuel and food, it can be hard to remember how much better off we are than people elsewhere in the world. 

In May this year, I visited Malawi, a small country in southern Africa. The Iran war was then only a couple months on, but it reverberated worldwide already. I traveled overland from the Zambian border to Lake Malawi and back with Colby Mughogho, an entrepreneur, developer, and tourism operator. 

Drivers await a fuel delivery at a station outside Lilongwe.
RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Open fuel stations were hard to find. A station might get one delivery per day, then dispense fuel until the tanks went dry. At any station, a glut of trucks and motorcycles waited for hours in anticipation of a delivery. Petrol usually was delivered a few times per week; some areas were deserts for diesel, which we needed.

Colby worked the phone to call ahead to friends, sometimes to nail down the delivery time for a fuel station, or if we were lucky, to enlist someone to set aside a couple of liters for us. Police patrolled the main streets and watched fuel stations closely, enforcing a purchase limit of 15 liters (3.96 gallons) per customer.

With that limit, a fill-up would not get us the whole way. A pickup on Malawi's rough roads might at best get 9.3 km/L (22 mpg), so 140 km (87 miles) on a legal-limit fill-up. The distance from Lilongwe to our destination, Chembe, on Lake Malawi, was 216 km (134 miles), each way.

Motorcyclists queue for petrol at a fuel station outside Lilongwe.
RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

At a fuel station, petrol cost about MK7,000 (Malawian kwacha) per liter (US$4.04/L). That's US$15.29 per gallon. Before the war, the fixed price had been about MK5,000/L (US$2.89/L), or US$10.92 per gallon.

If we were unlucky, we could leave the main road in search of scant and risky supplies of black-market fuel, sold curbside by men looking over their shoulders while they juggled ragtag containers. Black-market sellers commanded MK12,000/L, or US$26.20 per gallon.

The government blames black-market sellers, fairly, for amplifying scarcity and driving up prices. The quality of fuel also is suspect, possibly diluted, and tainted fuel can damage engines, a further drain on a fragile economy.

At the same time, black-market sellers disperse supply so that small-capacity users such as motorcycle taxis can continue to operate without losing productive hours in lines. A great deal of downstream commerce that depends on transportation is thereby protected, as well as beneficial noncommercial needs, such as health care, family connections, and schooling.

A billboard in Lilongwe touts the "Malawi 2063 National Vision."
RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

For me, our fuel search was a "#FirstWorldProblem," a matter of convenience. I could have hitched a ride to the airport if I'd needed to. I was more worried about Colby making his way back to his wife and kids.

And I was more worried still about the impact of the shortage on people whose livelihoods depended on the fuel supply. No fuel meant no work for many, and no work meant nothing to eat. The food supply itself, for everyone, would be in jeopardy when fisherman and farmers could no longer fill the tanks of boats and tractors.

That was then. Now the war drags on and is expanding in Yemen and Saudi Arabia.

The New York Times reported last week that rising fuel prices have touched off furious protests around the world, "from Indonesia to Guatemala to Syria." The Times reported on work stoppages with insufficient fuel for boats, tractors, and factory machinery, and people responding angrily with marches, horns, and burning tires.

Malawi managed to cut fuel prices later in the summer. With fixed government pricing, petrol has held steady at US$3.24/L, or $12.26 per gallon, and diesel has closed in toward that number, about 12% higher. That's still an increase for petrol of 122% over the price a year ago. And I know that the official price says nothing about availability on the ground. Authorities say demand is being met, though in "good times" in 2024, an NGO reported Malawi fuel retailers operating at only 30% of capacity.

Boys play football beside their school in Chembe.
RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

The Iran war is not the only reason that fuel shortages hit hard in Malawi, where fuel already was expensive and in short supply. Part of the problem is simply geology and geography. Malawi has no oil reserves and no domestic fossil fuel production. The landlocked country depends on imported oil products, though finds some relief by blending in domestic ethanol.

Other key factors in Malawi's fuel pain, predating the war, are economic: a foreign currency deficit and stubborn price fixing (e.g., BBC). People I talked to in Malawi were quick to blame their government, observing that surrounding countries were better managing the latest crisis. 

There's truth to that. In the long term, Malawian politicians have been unwilling to make unpopular choices to get a grip on the economy. But in fairness to Malawi, its economic woes are less a result of misfeasance than of the seemingly insurmountable poverty cycle that plagues developing countries in the contemporary global economy. 

With reinvested revenues, hard-won grants, and a great deal of grit and hard labor, Colby and his brilliant better half, Violet, have been developing tourism infrastructure in Malawi, especially in the north, around Mzuzu, the capital of the northern region and the country's third-largest city. Mzuzu is superbly located as a base for Malawi tourism, because it affords ready access to the small country's stunning range of landscapes, from iconic Lake Malawi to wildlife safariing, and to trekking through plains, forests, and mountain ranges. Colby and Violet have built camps and miles of trails and employed hundreds of Malawians in the process. 

Near Lilongwe: Some modes of transportation require no petrol.
RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

The problem now is getting people there. Besides fuel prices, the Iran war is tanking tourism in Africa. Airline routes have been reduced, and demand for travel services has fallen off. The retreat of U.S. (and others') foreign aid from Africa is destabilizing governments, spilling red ink across the continent on the travel advisory map, spooking travelers. Malawi and its neighbor Mozambique are hanging on to their "level 2" status (travel with caution), though neighboring Tanzania, home to Kilimanjaro, has slipped to "level 3" ("reconsider travel"). (Neighboring Zambia boasts a remarkable "level 1" ("normal precautions"), though the rating system seems suspiciously aligned with a U.S. appetite for African resources; read more.)

I had not intended to come home from Malawi to write about fuel woes and war effects; rather, I wanted to write about the Mughoghos' investments in "community tourism" through homegrown enterprise, admirably independent of the foreign quid pro quo that haunts so much of the African economy. The latter is still an important story. Tourism is the bellwether of foreign investment that will be essential to bolster the Malawian economy and give the people a fighting chance at socioeconomic mobility and a healthy, middle-class standard of living.

Right now, though, it's hard to see the road to that prosperity. Like many countries and many peoples in the developing world, Malawians are captive to an emerging geopolitical catastrophe that they had no hand in making. What for Americans is a crisis of affordability means, for people elsewhere in the world, development paralysis, and worse: a betrayal of the western economic promise, that hard work pays off. The "just world hypothesis" holds that good people will reap rewards. It's sometimes called the "just world fallacy." But it is a motivating ideal that keeps the peace in much of the world, and it's an ideal worth striving to make real.

Sign at a Lilongwe bus stop along a Chinese-financed highway
touts foreign aid.
RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

If you are inclined go to Malawi, please do. It is safe and open for business. Flights are available; Ethiopian Airlines hedges against economic downturn with a diversified fuel supply. Please consider planning your time in Malawi with Adventures with Colby; Colby and Violet reinvest proceeds in communities. They'll store fuel if they know you're coming. (Nothing received for this endorsement.)

Western dollars and a little bit of faith are needed to help Malawi, "the warm heart of Africa," to weather this storm, and to get back on its feet.

Let's hope that the current strategy in U.S. foreign relations has not completely undermined the just-world hypothesis in places such as Malawi. Because if it has, there are other nations with less benevolent intentions waiting in the wings to export a very different worldview.

(This post was updated on Sept. 25 to restore the sentences about the "just world hypothesis," which disappeared inexplicably after the original posting, in the paragraph beginning "Right now ....")
 

Communities mourn teacher, writer, missionary; Chidzero modeled faith from Rhodesia to Rhode Island

Alice Chidzero
1963-2026
Tharp Funeral Home

A worship service at Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Va., on Friday memorialized teacher, writer, and missionary Alice Chidzero.

Alice Rumbidzaishe Bwerinofa was born to the Shona people in the village of Gutu, Masvingo, in what is today Zimbabwe, Rhodesia in 1963, about 230 km south of Harare. As her friend Lesley Hamer of the Providence Classical School, Williamsburg, Va., shared at the service, what Alice regarded most important about her identity was that she was a follower of Jesus Christ.

Alice often visited Rhode Island, where she lived with her husband Felix Chidzero for their first years in America. They came as students and earned degrees at Rhode Island Bible College.

For some years in Rhode Island, Alice and family attended Barrington Baptist Church (BBC). She worked early in her teaching career at Barrington Christian Academy. Alice attended BBC before my family joined in 2012, but I came to know her through her return visits and legendary reputation.

Alice told the astounding story of her life in a memoir, When the Brook Runs Dry: My Journey from Africa to America ... And Back a Few Times (N.Y. Free Press 2018) (Amazon). As the narrative traces Alice's journey from Rhodesia to Rhode Island, Sierra Leone, and Virginia, the book demonstrates the beliefs that sustained Alice through life's hills and valleys, both the customary community ethos of hunhu and an abiding, foundational faith in God.

Valleys there were. At the service, Hamer told an anecdote, also recounted in the book, of when Alice was stuck in a catch-22 between an expiring visa and compulsion to leave the United States, on the one hand, and airline refusal to let her fly without a visa for transit, on the other hand. 

"Why is Alice's life so hard?," Hamer asked herself at the time, she said.

That was exactly what I asked myself, repeatedly, reading Alice's memoir. She lost a child, a spouse, and parents in too short order. She finished her higher education despite the strain of single-parenting in a foreign country. She navigated the long road to U.S. citizenship. She battled the lifelong effects of rheumatic fever, and later, cancer. All the while, she ministered tirelessly to others, persons in need physically and spiritually, from the U.S. east to West Africa.

Well deserved self-pity is the opposite of how Alice met every challenge in her life. Eschewing any self-indulgence, she carried on and trusted relentlessly in God (Ps. 91). And the memoir demonstrates time and again the endless expanse of his provision.

Alice left this world on September 7. She is survived by her children, Simbarashe and Shekinah, and her grandchildren, Avianna, Zenai, and Xavier. She was predeceased by her parents, Levi and Catherine, by her husband, Felix, and by her daughter, Vimbainashe.

The family welcomes contributions at GoFundMe to help honor Alice's wish that she be laid to rest in Zimbabwe.

Protestors burn transit stations in Madagascar capital; is American frustration so different?

Protests over lack of water and electricity turned violent late last week in Antananarivo, the capital of Madagascar, and the government responded with tear gas, rubber bullets, and a curfew.

(UPDATE, Oct. 14, 2025: Madagascar President Rajoelina has fled the country, and the military has assumed control of government, purporting alliance with protestors.)

I know about the crisis because of friends with family there. I have not seen the story on American TV, which I mention with anxiety over endangered media heterogeneity. You can read more about the protests at, e.g., Reuters (UK), TRT Afrika (Turkey), RFI (France), WION (India), Al Jazeera (Qatar), and if you dig for it, the AP (US).

I was in Antananarivo, known locally as "Tana," in July. The people there could not have been more gracious and welcoming.

At the same time, socioeconomic tension was plain. That's not unusual in African cities, but in Tana, by plain, I mean that there were troubling and unavoidably visible signs of increasingly worrisome economic inequality. 

Antananarivo, Madagascar, July 2025
(RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

A Tale of Two Cities

Tana from the Radisson gym.
(RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

I used the nicely equipped gym on the eighth floor of the Radisson Blu Hotel in Tana. The room has floor-to-ceiling windows that afford a view of the city from the treadmills. But if one looks straight down from the windows, immediately adjacent to the hotel, there is a residential warren of ramshackle homes. Children play on clay paths between crumbling walls and an open sewer. The neighborhood is right behind a concentration of auto shops, noxious with exhaust and dribbling out the toxic effluents of their work.

Shanty town and auto district adjacent to Radisson. A cable-car line is visible on the horizon.
(RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

In contrast, the Radisson itself is part of a small swanky village that boasts a grocery store, theater, cafes, and gift shops. The village is enclosed by high walls with only one road in from the auto-shop strip. At night, a massive steel door rolls shut to seal off the Radisson village. 

The scene is reminiscent of the fictional town of Woodbury in The Walking Dead, fortified against an incongruent dystopia. Though to reiterate, here, in real life, the souls outside the wall are good people trying to make ends meet. As the sun sets, all but a few local people evacuate the commercial village before the door closes, and then they flow back in with the light of dawn.

Kids play beside a drainage canal behind the Radisson.
(RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

Even the walled Radisson village, anyway, is not immune from Tana's socioeconomic troubles, because the utility infrastructure is the same, inside and out. The tap water is not recommended for drinking, and power outages are frequent, if usually short.

Malagasy people generally don't have freezers and shop daily for produce. The cost of appliances would be manageable for many. But the problem would remain the power grid, which is not sufficiently reliable, even in the city, to make home refrigeration cost effective. When the power goes out, most of Tana life hums on without interruption. But the outages paralyze places such as the Radisson village, where devices from refrigerators to televisions to elevators are essential to business.

In bizarre juxtaposition with the motley cityscape, wires are strung across Tana's skies, visible from anywhere. The wires reach from tower to tower and occasionally dip groundward into modern multistory buildings of metal and brick. This is Tana's brand new cable-car system.

I was not surprised to read that protestors last week set fire to "several" of the cable-car stations.

Madagascar and the Monorail 

A cable-car line fills the sky behind the Tana train station.
(RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

 

The motivation for building the cable-car system was ostensibly sound. Tana is plagued by jammed traffic, which is impeding economic development. One of the reasons people crowd into the tight and unsanitary living quarters of the inner city is that they could not otherwise reach their jobs if they moved to better accommodation on the outskirts.

The cable-car lines promise to soar over the cars and trucks, moving people into and out of the city with quiet efficiency. The lines also are built to reach less developed surrounding areas, rather than tracking the congested main highway, thus inducing new suburbs to bloom and alleviating the crisis of housing, besides transportation.

One doesn't have to look hard at the plan, though, to doubt its cost-benefit analysis. To start with, the road congestion is a function of infrastructure failure as much as volume. Though there are some recently constructed traffic circles, most roads are unmarked by lanes, and most city intersections are chaotic tangles with no right of way indicated by signs or signal lights.

One wonders that infrastructure money might have been spent better to bring the existing potholed road system up to standard before stringing cables over head between shiny stations.

Cable cars hang motionless over Tana in July.
(RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

Then there are the cable cars themselves. The first time a friend and I had a look at them, I couldn't help but say aloud, "That wreaks of kickback." My friend agreed. We both thought immediately of "Marge vs. The Monorail."

The 198 gondola cars can hold only 12 passengers each and move only so fast. The system is designed to move daily 75,000 people and replace 2,000 cars on the road. That's not nothing, but also not a big chunk of potential commuters relative to the city's population of 3 million. And if one figures that growing suburbs will attract more people to Tana from impoverished parts of the country, the problem of induced demand is compounded.

Though cable cars are touted as a potential boon for urban development, they work best as a discrete-route solution for particular hurdles, such as topography, and as a complement, not a substitute, for proven mass transit systems such as busses and rail cars, both lacking in Tana. A "bus system" exists only insofar as terribly overcrowded minibuses barrel along customary routes. Limited inter-city locomotives rumble over dilapidated tracks.

Is There a Hyena in the Debt Trap? 

It's unclear from government reporting just how much the cable-car system cost Madagascar, but it's a lot. The price tag was supposed to be €152 million. The French government loaned the country €28 from the French treasury and arranged for the rest by private loan from Société Générale. Malagasy voters were not happy about the indebtedness. Moreover, Madagascar committed to fund any cost overruns. Some reports say that the French loans wound up covering only one of the two system lines.

The government's revenue basis to fund cost overruns and pay back the loans also is shaky. Malagasy people have balked at the cost of tickets on the cable-car system, which range from about €0.65 to €1.1. That might be low by western standards, but it's a lot locally. Daily round trips add up to at least €32 per month in a country where the monthly living wage is only €126, and €85 marks the low end of actual-wage estimates.

President Andry Rajoelina, 2019
(ILO via Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

The government has not been forthcoming with data about the project, and no wonder. Malagasy-French businessman Andry Rajoelina has been president since 2019 and held out a technological solution to Tana's legendary traffic woes as a showpiece project. 

Rajoelina's vision has been slow to come to fruition. Plans were sidetracked initially by the pandemic. The French money came only in 2021, and construction began in 2022, with delivery promised in two years. In 2024, the Rajoelina administration inaugurated the cable-car system amid much fanfare and worldwide press. But the system wasn't actually finished then, and operational opening was postponed to 2025. 

On my last day in Tana in July 2025, the cable cars moved, surprising everyone on the ground. The system was not yet open, but was being tested. Buckets of water were loaded into cars to simulate the weight of passengers. The system finally opened in August.

The worst public relations challenge the cable-car system has posed to the Rajoelina administration to date is not its ultimate efficacy, but simply the foreboding physical presence of the empty gondolas hanging motionless over the city. When people are stuck in traffic, or when the power goes out, or when they leave their homes in search of drinkable water, they look up at the network of towers and heavy wires and wonder whether any of that debt and spending will make their lives better.

Don't Look Up 

I'm sometimes guilty myself of a siloed focus on American affairs. And thinking about what's happening in Madagascar makes me wonder whether—when?—the day will come that Americans turn our frustrations into conflagration.

America feels every day less a "developed" country in terms of critical needs such as transportation, healthcare, housing, and jobs. And people struggle more every day to make ends meet, while politicians bellyache over the government supposedly doing too much.

An anecdotal survey: 

Transportation. To travel for work, I have to make the arduous, two-plus-hour trek to the airport via foot, bus, train, and bus again, across slow, unconnected, and overpriced transit systems that my region is lucky to have at all. When I land in Europe, I'll travel about the same distance with one ticket on a rapid, unified transit system in under an hour.

Amtrak is hard at work on "NextGen Acela." But it will only serve the northeast corridor and will top out at 160 mph. Europe hit that mark in the 1970s with trains today running in the 190s. China and Japan have high-speed trains on dedicated lines running at 220 mph. Anyway, "old gen" Acela was a corporate subsidy, as it practically priced out non-business travelers, even before Amtrak introduced predatory dynamic pricing. 

Healthcare. My wife and I saw Trevor Noah deliver his latest stand-up in Connecticut a couple of weeks ago, and he did a long bit on the nonsensical costs and bureaucracies that tyrannize patients in the U.S. healthcare system. Noah was treated for a wrist injury he sustained just before boarding a plane home to New York from his native South Africa. He could have been treated faster and for less out of pocket had he just flown back to a hospital in Cape Town, he only half-joked. 

A Connecticut stage awaits Trevor Noah on September 18.
(RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

Most memorable about Noah's monolog to me, besides his trademark storytelling brilliance, was the chorus of audible vocalizations of assent and empathy from the audience, including us, as Noah described the absurdities of hospital billing, from the mysteries of bloated pricing—weren't we promised "No Surprises"?—and picayune itemization of the mundane to the unashamed prioritization of profit over care.

Housing and jobs. My daughter bought a home in Los Angeles this year and has done yeoman, Instagram-hit renovation work herself. But she's looking for a new job to make the mortgage bearable. From her scores of applications, she recently rated an interview in her entertainment-industry wheelhouse. Yet she was one of 54 people interviewed for one low-level position. A form email later communicated regret that she was among the hundreds of unsuccessful applicants. Every American job-seeker knows such woes amid the full-time job of looking for a job, despite the touting of low unemployment by the administrations of both parties.

A measure of wealth inequality, the U.S. gini coefficient was 41.8 in 2025, on a scale from 0, perfect equality, to perfect inequality 100, according to World Population Review (WPR). That's bad for a well developed economy, comparing unfavorably with, for example, western European countries, which score in the low 30s, and Canada, at 29.9. Worse, inequality in the United States is rising over the long term, while it's falling elsewhere.

Our number is, however, on par with Madagascar. Malagasy data are difficult to come by, but WPR estimates a 2025 gini coefficient of 42.5, also on the rise over the long term.

The gini coefficient is a ratio, so it doesn't speak to comparable sums. People in a poorly developed economy might be quicker to disrupt the status quo when their very survival is on the line than people in a highly developed economy who become unable to afford cable TV. 

At the same time, Americans have a temperamental sensitivity to injustice and, even after 250 years, little patience for tyranny.

History is littered with great societies befelled by their own greedy elites.

Happy Independence Day, Namibia!

Your humble blogger reaches Swakopmund, crossroads of the Namib Desert and South Atlantic Ocean.
All photos RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-SA 4.0.

Yesterday, March 21 was independence day in Namibia. One of the youngest countries in the world, Namibia attained independence from South Africa in 1990 after a brutal war and bloody history of subjugation as the German colony of Southwest Africa. Public celebrations of 30 years of independence were cancelled because of the coronavirus, though an inauguration ceremony of President Hage Geingob, for his second term, proceeded.

Sign fallen to the ground in Windhoek.

I found mixed feelings on the ground about Geingob, who was the country's first prime minister and a hero of the independence movement. One middle-aged man from Namibia's rural north told me Geingob can't be blamed for entrenched intransigence and corruption in the political establishment, that he can only do so much. Meanwhile a young woman in the capital, Windhoek, stringing together multiple jobs to put herself through university, blamed Geingob squarely for double-digit unemployment--by various estimates, one in three Namibians, or more, need work--and fiercely lamented his second term.

The National Museum and historic German Lutheran church stand in juxtaposition in Windhoek.

Me and Nujoma. He holds the Namibian constitution.

I've been sensitive in traveling Africa to the subtleties of foreign influence, especially that of China, and that shadow turned up in a curious way in Namibia. Like elsewhere in Africa (I wrote earlier about Guinea-Bissau), communists financed the independence movement as an aspect of the Cold War; consider, for Namibia, this was the 1980s. North Korea grew close to legendary independence leader Sam Nujoma. North Korea financed a great many public works projects in independent Namibia, including recently and strikingly, the National Museum, which opened in Windhoek in 2014. The building is modernist (technically "socialist realist"), marking a contrast with Windhoek's colonial center, and boasts a Kim Jong-ish statue of Nujoma. The interior is to match, celebrating Namibian independence with socialist-style murals and cult-of-personality-type homages to national leaders.

A mural in the National Museum celebrates independence.

The sun rises over the Rössing Uranium Mine in the Namib.

Why does North Korea's interest persist so many years after independence? Locals point to Namibia's especially valuable natural resource: uranium mines in the western Namib desert. Though North Korea formally is walled off by the West from materials that might advance the DPRK's nuclear capabilities, suspicions point to China as a willing intermediary. And so the African "natural resources curse" persists.

Namibian Parliament: A banner on the Parliament's administrative building heralds 30 years of independence.

Customary law undergirds justice systems in Africa: A-courting in Harare

Outside the "Harare Civil Court" buildings, a discarded sign reads, "Harare Magistrate's Court / Civil and Customary Law." Other court building in Harare are pictured below. All photos RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-SA 4.0.

The integration of customary law into national legal systems based on post-colonial polities is a challenge, and an opportunity, throughout Africa. I wrote recently about customary legal authority in the Casamance region of Senegal, and Zimbabwe is no exception to the norm.

The Zimbabwe constitution expressly preserves customary law, and federal enactments spell out the scope of customary law in sensitive areas, such as marriage and child care. The constitution creates customary courts and charges other courts, including the Supreme Court, with respecting and developing customary law, just as they do common law. For NYU Law GlobaLex, Saki and Chiware (updated by Pfumorodze and Chitsove, 2017) further explained:

The main reason for the existence of these customary law courts is to provide a justice system to ordinary people in rural areas which is consistent with African custom and values.  It is  realized that most ordinary Zimbabweans regulate their lives in accordance with customary law to the extent that the legal ideas and institutions inherited from the system has  preserved the authority of traditional leaders  to adjudicate in civil disputes by customary law.

In Zimbabwe, customary courts have jurisdiction over civil, but not criminal, matters. Common law controls in the civil sphere, while criminal law is strictly codified in Zimbabwe's mixed system.

Scales of justice adorn a high court building where criminal cases are heard.

Jehovah's Witnesses occupy the walk outside the characteristically modest legal aid office.

Your humble blogger stands before the highest court('s house) in the land.

Constitutional Court.

Shop like a termite: Sustainable architecture in Harare

Leko, my guide in the Okavango Delta of Botswana, uses a termite mound for elevation.
All photos RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-SA 4.0.

The Eastgate Centre in Harare, Zimbabwe, pictured outside and inside below, uses passive cooling (read more at Wikipedia) to keep cool without exhaustive power consumption. Designed by Zimbabwean architect Mick Pearce, the shopping and office complex opened in 1996. Pearce works in "sustainable architecture" and developed the field upon an interest in biomimicry. The passive cooling design of the Eastgate Centre is said to be based on principles observed in southern Africa's ubiquitous termite mounds.

Eastgate Centre

Zimbabweans still await their development moment

Robert Mugabe airport.
All photos RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-SA 4.0.

In Harare, Zimbabwe, my host (whose identity I am protecting) brought me up to speed on national politics and the present fuel shortage. I had been under the impression that the exit from nearly 30-year rule of President Robert Mugabe, with subsequent electoral fanfare, marked a turning point for the southern African nation. Alas, my host reported that the new regime of President Emmerson Mnangagwa is same story, different day.

Zimbabwe imports its oil, but there is no ready explanation, such as a natural disaster or embargo, to explain the latest (nor the prior) bottleneck and long gas lines. My host blames politics as usual, which means control of the country's oil market awarded to cartels in exchange for lucrative kickbacks to politicians. A business owner dependent on vehicles to move assets, my host explained the strategies he employs to keep his fleet in service, including foreign currency purchases, which can bypass gas lines; fuel storage for a rainy day; the occasional financial inducement to a fuel seller; and, when all else fails, waiting in the interminable lines.

A gas line runs along the road.

A Total station is closed except for its 'Bonjour' shop.

The high ratio of pedestrians to vehicles on the streets of Harare is like none I've seen elsewhere in a major city, as even minibuses are in short supply for want of fuel. There are taxi stands, but the cabs are decidedly parked and not cruising for customers. My host said that the aforementioned politicians never seem to be wanting for fuel, though. Indeed, around Parliament and the executive administration building, I saw many official vehicles, and early in the morning, I saw workers filling their gas tanks from fuel cans. Entrepreneurial roving street merchants, who might be selling bananas, nuts, or newspapers in another city, hawk fuel cans and funnels in Harare.

Customers wait for the grocery store to open in the morning.

Another curiosity that struck me in Harare was crowds of people around and in the grocery stores. Outside a CBD branch of the popular market chain OK were a score of peddlers bearing cardboard signs showing numbers. My host explained that, in tandem with Zimbabwe's economic woes, and also a function of corruption, he asserted, runs the country's currency shortage. Indeed, I paid always with U.S. dollars, received change in same, and never saw other than inflationary Zim notes being sold as touristic novelties. In part because of the currency shortage, and to prevent a run on banks, people are restricted in bank withdrawals. That means one must go more often to the grocery store. But people have adapted, and they do have access to their money through electronic devices. The peddlers outside the stores are brokers, or internet-age money changers, who, for a competitive cut, convert electronic bank balance into hard currency to spend on groceries that don't directly accept debit or public assistance payments.

My host lamented: Zimbabwe is a country rich in natural resources and natural beauty to rival regional neighbors such as Tanzania and South Africa. Yet in 55 years since independence from the UK, the country inexcusably has failed to mature domestic productivity or the touristic sector. Sadly, coup d'etat and the long-anticipated exit of Mugabe seem not to have precipitated meaningful change.

Just wait, my host said: if the people don't see improvements, they'll change leadership again; and again, until someone gets it right.

Zimbabwe Parliament building sits on Africa Unity Square.