Dark Star Safari

by Paul Theroux

  In great contrast to Malawi and Tanzania and Kenya, Zimbabwe was not a destination for the white Land-Rover and the charitable effort and the foreign agent of virtue. There was little for the Hunger Project or Save the Children to do, since there was no starvation and the children were in good shape. The country’s patchy history as British-ruled Southern Rhodesia, the renegade white-ruled Republic of Rhodesia, and finally Zimbabwe had already forced people to learn important lessons in self-help. But the minister’s mention of the pariah status of Mugabe’s government I saw as my chance to bring up the subject of the war veterans and the farm invasions. I said, ‘Doesn’t this situation worry you?’

  ‘It is complicated. Everything has been mixed up together.’ He clawed at the back of his neck and went on gabbling, embarrassed by my direct question. ‘Yes, some land has been taken away and some farms have been resettled by so-called invaders. But the people who have taken the land are being productive. It is not what the papers are saying. People reporting should see for themselves.’

  ‘I’m going to look. I’ve heard that the seized farms are a lot less productive and that there’s a maize shortage,’ I said. ‘But even so, taking the land by force is illegal, isn’t it?’

  ‘Maybe you could say we need a level of political maturity,’ the minister said, with what I felt was unusual candor. ‘Competing parties have to speak to each other. We have to see that the country is more Important than our philosophies. And maybe you can help us.’

  I leaned forward and said, ‘What would you like me to do?’

  ‘You can portray the positive aspects of life here,’ the minister said. ‘You can dispel the image of instability.’

  ‘I’ll do what I can, sir,’ I said, and then with gusto he went back to discussing the ambiguous prohibitions of the Shona people.

  The day that I drove out to Peter Drummond’s farm I heard on the radio that the British government had stopped aid to Zimbabwe and canceled a large loan, because of ‘the resettlements’ – farm invasions. Two reasons for the British move were mentioned - the land was not being given to the poor, and none of this was being done legally. That news had Chenjerai (‘Hitler’) Hunzvi screaming denunciations of the British.

  ‘You can see for yourself,’ Peter Drummond said. He had picked me up at my hotel. ‘Talk to the squatters. Talk to my people. Talk to anyone you like. Stay on the farm.’

  I told him the conciliatory remarks the minister had made, about the need for political maturity in Zimbabwe and the necessity for different parties to speak to each other.

  ‘Maybe he was telling you what you wanted to hear,’ Drummond said. ‘But also there are a lot of reasonable people in the government. I’m sure you’ve heard that it’s a one-man problem.’

  ‘Everyone says it.’

  ‘He hates us.’

  In that year’s Independence Day speech, President Mugabe referred to whites in Zimbabwe as ‘snakes,’ saying, ‘The snake we thought was dead is coming back again. The whites are coming back!’ And the opposition Movement for Democratic Change he saw as ‘a puppet’ of the whites, who were anti-government.

  Zimbabwe farmers generally were so accustomed to adversity that simple-minded abuse - being called snakes – just made them shrug.

  Outside Harare the road straightened, became narrower, closely fenced, with plowed fields on either side and tall regular stands of trees marked the presence of farmhouses. After twenty miles we were in open country, grazing land and in places tall maize stalks drying and turning brown, awaiting the harvest.

  ‘How’s business?’

  Drummond chuckled. He said, ‘Could be better. There are the thefts, of course. We discovered that between November and March several of the workers have been stealing chickens. Quite a few. So for three months we lost all our profit. Also, because it was an inside job, the thefts buggered our books.’

  ‘What happened to the thieves?’

  ‘They still work for me. I couldn’t sack them, because they’re politically connected – there would have been trouble. The police wouldn’t have been helpful either.’

  Thefts by employees were not unusual, he said – old-timers stole diesel fuel, maize bags routinely disappeared from trucks on the way to market, tools were pinched. But so many chickens had been stolen that the bookkeeping and delivery figures were skewed, and the loss meant that for three months he could not service his bank loan.

  ‘It’s pretty funny,’ he said. Then he gestured out the window and said, ‘My estate starts about here.’

  We drove for miles after that. Drummond explained that he had recently learned that a mining company had been given permission from the government to look for minerals on his land. The miners had discovered a vast deposit of platinum in an extensive dyke that ran across his property. The bad news was that though he owned the stony fields and the pigpens and the chicken houses and the diesel that were being raided, this platinum deposit was not his.

  ‘I don’t own what’s under my land. That belongs to the government. They can do whatever they like with it.’

  Drummond’s house was on a little hill, a kopje, at the end of a dusty track. On the way, we passed some of his workers – men repairing fences, cutting grass, tinkering with the plumbing at water troughs. Drummond spoke to them in Shona and the patois known in Zimbabwe as Chilapalapa.

  The house he had built for himself was made of bricks he had fired in his own kiln, and thatched with grass that had been cut on his own land. The mortar was made from mixing the clay from anthills with sand. It was not large, a squarish house with a sitting room upstairs in what would have been the attic, several rooms cluttered with books and files, much of it decorated with African handicrafts. Nearby were stables and staff houses, clumps of banana trees and a lovely rose garden. The compound was simple and comfortable while retaining the look of headquarters. Drummond’s great regret was that he had not put in a fireplace in the house.

  ‘It can get cold here. We have frost in June.’

  His estate lay on the shores of a large lake, Manyame (formerly Lake Robertson). After he had taken me around some of his land I had the impression of his farm being more than a simple settlement but rather something like a small town, with the same solid infrastructure. It had good roads, a gas station, a fuel depot, a substantial machine shop, a garage, a main road, a piggery, sheep and lambs in the fields, a chicken factory, cattle grazing, lots of crops and plenty of water. The various operations were located on different parts of the land, requiring a great deal of driving. He had 200 workers and, including dependants, there were 400 people altogether on the property in a workers’ village of substantial huts.

  I remarked on the completeness of the place and its orderly appearance. I was impressed by the way he recycled the chicken by-products, using the manure and the plucked feathers to fertilize the crops.

  But he dismissed my praise. He said any look of prosperity was illusory and that ever since diesel fuel had been rationed he had had to cut back on his operation. ‘What you see is a farm working at half its capacity.’

  At the chicken station he said, ‘A woman came here not long ago and told me she wanted some of my land. The Zimbabwean women are keen and they have a good work ethic. She said she wanted to build a house here’ – he indicated a field near a warehouse. ‘She planned to hook up her electricity to my line there. That way she’d have lights and I would be paying her electric bill for the rest of her life. Good arrangement, eh?’

  ‘Was she a war vet?’

  ‘That’s what I asked her!’ he laughed, remembering the woman. ‘She said, “In a way.” I said, “Where were you fighting?” ’

  ‘You talk to Africans about these things?’

  ‘Oh, sure. I tell them I was fighting for my side,’ he said. ‘I ask them where they were fighting. I tease them a little. They can take it. As ex-soldiers, we have a lot in common. That war is history. It’s over. It was foolish for us to think that a small number of whites could govern
millions of Africans.’

  ‘Do you get into the specifics of the war?’

  ‘Yeah. I often say, “Oh, you were in that sector? I was in that sector, too. I was probably shooting at you.” ’

  ‘What kind of a reaction do you get?’

  ‘A good one,’ Drummond said. ‘We often talk about the people who didn’t fight – the informers. I say, “Oh you had information from whites? What did you think of that?” They say, “We just used them.”. No fondness for them, see. I say, “Well, we had African informers. We just used them, too.” ’ Drummond looked at me to make his point. ‘The informers weren’t fighting. I can’t talk to an informer, but a fighter – that’s another story.’

  Back in the car, driving through his estate he must have been ruminating on this and wanting me to understand, because out of the blue he said with emphasis, ‘A certain bond exists between ex-fighters — the soldiers. We each had our own side, but we shared a common experience.’

  That night in his farmhouse, poring over a map of his estate he told me of various plans he had to make the place viable. One was to subdivide a portion of the land and sell off parcels to Zimbabweans who would become smallholders, growers of flowers or vegetables, making the place a sort of cooperative. The idea was not to hand the parcels out to invaders and squatters but to sell each one with a legal title.

  ‘Or maybe time-share cottages,’ Drummond said, sketching a corner with his finger. ‘And this whole area could be retirement homes.’ He indicated some waterholes and said, ‘Perfect for camp grounds. Already this area attracts eland, kudu, and impala. We could put up a huge fence and manage some of the estate as a game reserve.’

  I looked at the map and imagined the cottages, the bungalows, the tents, the long-horned animals.

  ‘Or maybe I’ll go to Australia,’ Drummond said. ‘But I really want to stay here. The trouble is I have this debt. Inflation is sixty-five percent, I get my chicks from the US and have to pay in US dollars, and the Zim dollar is falling.’

  The night was cold and clear, the bright moon reflected on the lake. Except for the barking dogs – a big Labrador retriever and a frisky Jack Russell terrier – there was silence. But when the dogs yapped I thought we were being invaded and imagined war vets, thieves, opportunists, predators.

  ‘I’ll just check those dogs,’ Drummond said. Perhaps he was anxious too?

  But I preferred this farm to Harare, to being in a hotel, a town, or a city. I kept thinking how much like Old Russia this was, Old America, too. And how the stories I liked best had seldom been tales of the city but nearly always the Gothic fictions and tragicomedies of rural life, Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm and Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing (set near Drummond’s farm), Chekhov’s provincial dramas, the work of writers of the American South – Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor, the best work of Mark Twain, all of their comic gloom and isolation summed up in Gogol’s evocative title, Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka.

  Morning at Drummond’s farm was clear and bright, the cold dew sparkling on the long grass. I had been woken by the dogs and by Drummond’s comings and goings. At breakfast he said he was off with two of his men, to Karoi, about 120 miles north, to build a classroom as payment in kind for his daughter Misty’s school fees.

  His parting words were, ‘My son Troy will be over to take you around. Talk to anyone you like.’

  Troy was twenty-six, an Olympic windsurfer who had recently represented Zimbabwe in an international tournament in New Caledonia in the western Pacific, earning a respectable place. He was modest, soft-spoken, and easy-going, knowledgeable about modern farm methods. He and his brother Shane supervised the seed maize, the pigs, the horses and the vehicles. He had farmed the tobacco but ‘My father doesn’t smoke, tobacco’s against his philosophy, so we phased it out.’

  He said, ‘My father said to show you anything you wanted to see.’

  ‘I’d like to talk to the invaders.’

  ‘We can do that.’

  ‘But don’t tell me anything in advance. I want to get acquainted myself.’

  Laughing, Troy said, ‘They’re friendly blokes anyway.’

  We drove across the estate, and again I was reminded of the size and complexity of the place, which seemed bigger than a town now and more like a whole county.

  The first invader was not at home. Stakes had been pounded into the ground to mark his fields – quite an irony, too, since the stakes were also a warning to possible intruders on the land he had seized. I saw no crops. The hut was a shanty, the improvements derisory.

  ‘Not much action here,’ I said.

  We took another road and after fifteen minutes or so turned off on to a narrow track. At the margin of the track was a field planted with maize that looked just sprouted – though this was nearly the harvest season. Nothing was pickable.

  ‘That’s not a crop,’ I said. ‘There’s nothing to eat here.’

  Obeying my request not to tell me anything, Troy shrugged.

  In the distance, in front of four round well-made huts with conical roofs was a skinny tortoise-faced man in a dirty T-shirt waving his arms.

  ‘That’s another one,’ Troy said.

  Attempting to ingratiate myself, I greeted the African in Chichewa. I wasn’t surprised that he answered me, since Chichewa was widely spoken outside Malawi. But he said that he had learned it in Zambia, where he had lived for twenty-one years. His mother was a Zambian. His name was Reywa, he had a large family, all of them living with him on the land he had seized from the Drummond family.

  ‘What were you doing in Zambia?’ I asked him in English.

  ‘I was a driver.’

  ‘Are you a war vet?’

  ‘No. No fighting. I am landless.’

  ‘I thought only war vets could invade the land.’

  ‘A war vet said I could come here,’ Reywa said.

  I said to Troy, ‘He’s just a guy who wants land.’

  Troy said, ‘Right.’

  ‘Reywa, your garden isn’t doing too well.’

  He started to scream at me, his tightened face even more tortoise-like. ‘Garden is nothing! Because I planted too late! The government promised seed, fertilizer, use of a tractor. But they didn’t give me! I just waited for them until it was too late. They didn’t help me!’ He was whining and moaning. ‘I did this all myself by hand – yes, myself!’

  ‘But there’s nothing to eat here.’

  ‘Near the anthill, some maize is bigger.’ He indicated a mound about forty yards off with tall plants on its dome. ‘I have some pumpkin blossoms to eat, some small tomatoes.’ He turned to Troy and said, ‘I need a fence. The animals will come here and eat my plants. Tell your father he must put up a fence, or else.’

  ‘Or else, what?’ I asked.

  His beaky face became agitated and he said, ‘Or else there will be war! Because I must have a fence.’ He kicked at the edge of his garden in frustration. He said, ‘Next year will be better. The government will help me.’

  ‘What if they don’t help you?’

  ‘Then Mr Drummond will help me.’

  ‘Why should Mr Drummond help you? After all, you invaded his land.’

  ‘Because I was landless.’

  ‘Now you have land.’

  ‘What good is land if I don’t have a tractor? Mr Drummond has a tractor. He must help me. He will plow for me.’

  ‘Why should he do that for you?’

  ‘He has money!’ Reywa screamed. ‘I am poor!’

  ‘He owes twenty-two million dollars to the bank,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t care. If Mr Drummond does not plow for me then’ – Reywa paused and scowled at Troy, conveying a message – ‘then we do not understand each other.’

  Having invaded the land and staked his claim, and put up four big huts, he now wanted free seed, free fertilizer and the fields plowed at his bidding, his victim working the tractor. It was like a thief who had stolen a coat insisting that his
victim have the coat dry cleaned and tailored to fit. Reywa was very cross in anticipation of any delay in these demands being met.

  We sat in front of the largest hut and I sketched a hypothetical episode. Reywa had seized a large piece of Mr Drummond’s land, too large for him to plant it all – that was obvious. What if, I said, someone came and saw that little work had been done on the farthest acres – for ‘neglected land’ was one of the conditions that sanctioned a farm invasion; what would happen if someone wanted to squat and build a little hut on that corner of his land? What would Reywa do to an invader on his farm?

  But almost before I finished speaking, Reywa was frowning with aggression and he was hyperventilating through flared nostrils. ‘No! No! I have nothing! I would chase them away!’

  He saw no contradiction; the thought of someone taking even a small part of his land just enraged him. He got up and began to pace. He shook his fist and then pointed to his stunted maize.

  ‘It almost happened. A stupid war vet from here needed some money, so he sold some of my land. People came! They said, “This i our land.” ’

  ‘What did you do, Reywa?’

  He clamped his teeth and said, ‘I send them away!’

  So what I had given as a grotesque hypothesis of ingratitude had actually taken place.

  Troy said, ‘You want to see the others?’

  But I said no. I didn’t have the stomach for this absurdity. I hung around and looked at Troy’s horse and then at an old 1962 Land Cruiser he was restoring to its original luster - ‘Notice the bullet holes in the door? They’re from the struggle.’

  Near the lake, later on, I chatted with an African who owned a fishing cooperative. He was Joseph, a Malawian, who said the farm invasions were ‘a disaster.’ I asked him what he thought of his homeland, Malawi. ‘Hopeless,’ he said. But he added that he seldom went home, because it so happened that he was successful in his fishing business.

  ‘If I go back to Malawi my relatives will borrow money and eat my food and make me poor.’