Chronicle Editor
Bruce Ndlovu , Sunday Life Reporter
WHEN Carl Joshua Ncube moved to the village of Ntabayengwe, on a secluded corner of the resort town of Victoria Falls, many took it as a joke.
After all, this was a man who cracked ribs for a living, crafting hearty, humorous tales that allowed Zimbabweans to laugh not only at the each other but, crucially, with each other.
This latest move from a man who speaks English with such a flawless accent must be his latest joke, some would have thought, a prank meant only to grab newspaper headlines and put Ncube on the spotlight once again.
However, this was far from the truth.
There was a method to Ncube’s “madness”. Alongside his wife, Nelsie, Ncube had done his calculations and realised that since the pair walked out of the parents’ homes when they were 18, they had spent as much as $300 000 in rentals over the years. It was time for a change and Zimbabwe would bear witness to it.
“If you own a house it’s okay and you don’t have to make a move,” Ncube said in an interview on Moments with Nyengeterai.
“If you don’t, you need to look at yourself deeply and say how do I start, where do I start? I call what we do, the catapult effect, and Nelsie and I have been doing this a lot, we move backwards in order to launch ourselves. If we want to travel around the world, Nelsie and I will not eat in restaurants, saving money. For every restaurant we were going to go to, we will cook at home instead. We started getting better and better at this. Then what you see is, Carl and Nelsie were quiet during the year but November, it’s our time. We go everywhere, we do everything.”
While the move might have seemed bizarre, for Carl it made a lot of sense in the long run. In retrospect, Zimbabweans should not have been shocked by Ncube’s latest “innovation”.
After all, this was the same guy that spent most of the Covid-19 inspired lockdown in an old bus that he converted into a home.
“These are some of the things that you realise because Nelsie and I calculated that it had cost us US$300 000 rent since we were 18 and left home. We just did a general calculation of how much we had spent since we left home. US$300 000 is a lot of money and someone like me who is a diabetic has very little time on this earth so, I always need to make drastic changes to my life. I’ve been blessed by God that my situations have been so drastic that even our decision making was even more drastic,” he said.
Ncube said he had realised that he could even make more money from people that wanted to share the experience of living in the village, even though some did not always come with the best of intentions.
“Nelsie and I just don’t do stuff. We moved because we came up with a business model that really made a lot of financial sense. Moving out of rented accommodation and getting tents, we started getting people booking those tents for US$50 per night. It wasn’t just that we were living in the tents. People believed in us so much they came to live with us in the tents.
Some came to make fun of us but they were paying US$50. I don’t care how the money comes.
“I started performing around the fire for 10 people and making more money than I was in the clubs . . . I could perform around the fire for 10 people, all of them paying me US$100. Where do you get that kind of money? And so we said no, we need to move into the village because once we move into the village, we can leverage our start-up, sell our start-up and then maybe buy a house. We agreed that it would maybe take us five years to achieve this because we have dreams of where we want to live. We want to live in a house on a lake but if it means we have to live for five years in the village, I will do five years gladly,” he said.
Ncube said that moving to the village had not been a spur of the moment thing, as he had been thinking about making such a move for at least five years.
“Both of us were in agreement. In fact, I was thinking about that five years ago then Nelsie brought it up. She was angry because she was the one paying the rent, she was the one that had to do the bills so she said Carl, ‘we need another plan because I cannot be forking out US$800 or US$1 000 a month’. It doesn’t make sense. We pay a thousand bucks so we are hungry the whole month? What if we could use the thousand bucks and use it for something else?’” he said.
Moving to the village, Ncube said, allowed him to enjoy some delights that he could not afford while he was in an urban setting.
“In the village we have the best wine. Our tuck shop now knows what prawns are? They now actually order sea food for us.
We live the life that we want to live but it’s just in the village. There are people in town that take water from a bucket. I take water from a bucket but I have an outdoor shower which overlooks the best sunset that you can imagine. I hear lions at night roaring. I have fresh air, my brain supercharged,” he said.
When Ncube featured on one of the most popular food shows on the globe, The Best Ever Food Review Show, it acted as an eye opener on how highly regarded he is both in and outside the country. Now the founder and CEO of Rural BnB is determined to see his “crazy” ideas make him more money.
“The first year we had 300 visitors without a business model. I realised that this is my biggest strength now. I can be a tourist attraction. You can visit Zimbabwe, but you can visit Zimbabwe because of Carl. We started noticing documentary makers, film makers, Youtubers coming for me as Zimbabwe because I am a testimony of this place. I am the only person with a curated lifelong experience of this country. That’s what it taught me. It taught me that I can exist in my own sphere of influence.”
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