Prowling for Essential Goods for Zimbabwe's Black Market

The economy began its free fall when landless black peasants invaded white-owned farms in 2000 with the support of Mugabe, who said the redistribution would undo colonial inequities. The often violent process decimated the country's most crucial industry and biggest earner of foreign exchange, triggering hyperinflation that has rarely paused on its staggering ascent.

Today, it's not unusual to see a wadded-up 10,000-dollar bill lying on Harare's filthy sidewalks. Though officially worth about 33 cents in U.S. currency, the real value is about one-tenth of a penny.

As Chakanetsa moves through the city, downtown Harare's most established retailers look as if a cyclone blew through, sucking out the inventory, leaving mostly empty shelves and bare clothing racks. Yet the most crucial goods can be had, for the right price, on the black market.

The leather school shoes impossible to find in shops are plentiful at the rollicking Mbare market, an outdoor bazaar. The fuel that often runs out at pumps can be bought from the young men lingering near most gas stations. The vegetables missing from a grocery store's shelves are offered, at black-market rates, in the shop's own parking lot.

Trader Atson Karwenya, 31, said store managers phone him when they expect the arrival of basic goods and offer to divert them for the right price. Delivery trucks sometimes drop off bags of scarce products at Karwenya's home in a working-class Harare suburb, allowing him to stockpile the most valuable goods, he said.

Mugabe's government occasionally cracks down, as it did in its 2005 "clean-up campaign," when police rampaged through the nation's slums, demolishing hand-built shacks and flattening illegal marketplaces. Chakanetsa's business partner, Victor Chidatsi, 25, said he spent five days in jail then.

More commonly, though, police -- who, like other government workers, earn the equivalent of only a few U.S. dollars a week -- generally can be bribed for a few cents.

Chakanetsa's mornings begin with long, expensive bus rides from the hardscrabble slum of Epworth to Harare's lush northern suburbs, where gardeners sell cans of gasoline siphoned from their employers' cars.

Chakanetsa then heads to a fruit distributor on Harare's industrial southern edge, where he buys 40 pounds of bananas to sell to hungry workers downtown. If he manages to sell them all, his profit will approach $10 -- the foundation of a good day of trading.

The fruit stand also offers a convenient cover for his illegal trade in price-controlled groceries. On this afternoon, Chakanetsa had an order to fill: A customer had requested a large bottle of cooking oil and a stick of all-purpose green soap about the length his forearm.

Two days ago, green bar soap was going for 7 million Zimbabwean dollars. But at the first shop on this day, it was 11.9 million, at the second 12.8 million. A sign at the third shop boasted: "1 Kg Greenbar Soap $8,500,000," but there was only an empty pallet on the floor and a single broken bar left.

Chakanetsa kept moving south, toward the railroad tracks that run along the edge of Harare's downtown. A cluster of distributorships there offered goods at discount prices but few amenities for shoppers, just bare walls, concrete floors and long lines.