Place and Politics in Douglas Rogers’s The Last Resort: A Memoir of Zimbabwe

The chapter focuses on Douglas Rogers’s memoir The Last Resort: A Memoir of Zimbabwe (2010), which recounts the author’s visits to his parents in Zimbabwe, centring on Drifters, the backpacker’s lodge owned and run by Rogers’s parents. The political upheavals of Zimbabwe are a significant backdrop to the story. Place is defined largely by privilege and complex historical realities of the nation. The place of Whiteness is a central theme throughout the memoir due to the colonial history of Zimbabwe. As the nation shifts and transforms, so does the lodge go through various changes in order to survive the political turbulence. The chapter explores the relationship between place, home, and nation, and Drifters becomes in many ways, in Rogers’s own terms, a symbol of the nation. Politics and place converge in The Last Resort, which expresses the difficulty in reconciling the two, particularly in terms of personal relationship with the nation.