This has nothing to do with the politics of President Robert Mugabe, whose government has nationalized thousands of white-owned farms under a black empowerment program meant to reverse the entitlements of the white-led rule of the past. It is a conservation and course management program that will change the landscape of the Royal Harare Golf Club, a place steeped in history where cows and sheep grazed on the fairways in the era before modern grass mowers.
According to records, the early, mainly British, settlers were filled with nostalgia for their home regions and golf gave them solace. They planted imported trees and shrubs in Rhodesia, as Zimbabwe was known before independence in 1980.
King George V, grandfather of Queen Elizabeth II, played on the course in 1929, bestowing the royal title on the club. But the last of the hardy, long-living foreign trees he saw are being cut down now. The first settlers felled the indigenous trees on the course and wild animals that once roamed there disappeared too.
Royal Harare club manager Ian Mathieson said a program to cut down "alien" trees and replant trees "indigenous" to Zimbabwe such as the acacia and msasa varieties is under way, and will take 20 years to complete. So far, nearly 60 gnarled and elderly "foreign" trees have been removed and more than 300 local trees and shrubs have been planted in their place.
Foreign eucalyptus, or gum trees, most of them over 100 years old, are set for the chainsaw, said Mathieson. They suck up too much water at a time when Zimbabwe faces acute water shortages, and the sinking of thousands of new borehole wells in suburbs near the golf course have already lowered the underground water table, he said.
"If we are to retain water, these trees need to come down," Mathieson said. Nearby pine trees also make the soil acidic and "there is also the threat of falling debris from the old trees," he said.
Experts have been called in for the replanting exercise that requires careful planning. Every hole has trees planted in ways to make the game more challenging, according to Mathieson.
"A player has to contend with the trees if he hits the ball out of the fairway," he said.
