When a Crocodile Eats the Sun

by Peter Godwin

  Dube has been telling how he pleaded with Banana to stop the abuse and how Banana refused, pronouncing, “We are the final court of appeal.” And how Banana worked his way through the State House Tornadoes, the soccer team of strapping young men he handpicked for their looks. Dube had appealed to his boss, the commissioner of police, and to the deputy prime minister, only to have them shrug and do nothing. Even Mugabe was informed, but instead of the news sparking his rabid homophobia, he too was strangely acquiescent. Until the day the taunt incited Dube to take fatal action.

  “How are things otherwise?” I ask Georgina. I’m feeling a bit out of touch since I moved to America.

  “It might still look just about OK from the outside, but I think we’ve been white-anted,” she says.

  White ants devour wood from the inside out. A wooden chair or bed may look fine from the outside, but when you sit on it, it will collapse into a heap of dust.

  “I’m thinking of leaving ZBC,” she continues. “There’s so much political interference now, I can’t bear reading the news anymore. It’s lies, total crap. I’m beginning to feel like such a hypocrite.”

  One of the white women at the Phreckle and Phart has wandered over to the dais and is tapping the karaoke mike with a long red fingernail. She has bottle green platform sandals, thick green eye shadow, and a big green cardboard shamrock pinned to her green tube top. It soon becomes apparent that she has misjudged the key of “Danny Boy.” Her voice breaks into a tragic squawk, and she quickly retreats to a lower octave.

  “Oh, God, this is just too depressing. Let’s go,” Georgina says.

  As we try to leave, a terrible commotion begins outside the Phreckle and Phart, a fight between black hookers. They’re cursing and slapping and scratching each other in the rain, while their pimps and several customers ineffectually try to pull them apart.

  We lurch back through the downpour to Georgina’s cottage where I am to stay the night. On the ZTV news black police frogmen with shaved heads are searching inside a bus that has been washed over a low bridge. A survivor is saying that the passengers had all shouted at the driver to stop and asked to be let off if he was going to try to cross. But he suddenly plunged ahead into the torrent regardless. A dozen people are missing, including several babies.

  Georgina has to be up again at 4:00 a.m. to go to the radio studios and broadcast The Good Morning Show. At 9:15 a.m. she returns, exhausted. “You should go up and say hello to Shaina before you go,” she says on her way to bed.

  Shaina is Georgina’s mother-in-law, a remarkable woman, and one you didn’t want to offend. There was a photo on Georgina’s corkboard of Shaina as a South African beauty queen, slender and curvy and sexy in her black bathing suit and Miss Port Elizabeth 1952 sash. Before Sunday lunch once, Joanna had made the mistake of trying to compliment Shaina on this photo.

  “You looked beautiful then,” she said.

  “What do you mean ‘then,’ missy?” said Shaina.

  Afterward, Joanna discovered the placement at lunch had been altered. She’d been demoted from the seat of honor next to Shaina and was now at the other end of the table, between toddlers.

  Shaina wants to show me her extraordinary hilltop garden with its views out toward the Umwinsidale Hills. She walks me around the effusive beds of well-tended flowers. Hovering in attendance is the gardener, Naison, equipped with fork and trowel, ready to pounce on any weed. Shaina identifies the plants as we walk: cannas, strelitzias, primroses, black-eyed Susans, begonias. And nosing along behind us are two Rhodesian ridgebacks, hackles bristling with russet menace. They stay between Shaina and Naison, always facing Naison and occasionally baring their sharp yellow fangs and growling if he gets too close to her or makes any sudden movement. As we walk, I become aware of a soft hissing sound coming from close by.

  “Now this, this is a Java orchid,” says Shaina. “It’s actually quite rare, and very delicate, hard to grow.”

  I hear the sound again, “Ksst, ksssst.” It’s like the sound you would make to provoke a dog, and indeed it’s followed by a low bass growl like the grumble of distant thunder. I look up and realize that the kssst is coming from Shaina, and that every time she does it, the dogs growl and bare their fangs at Naison’s torn trouser legs. Naison stands still but seems oddly unperturbed. Dogs and gardener are performing an old dance, I realize, just going through the motions.

  When I ask Shaina about it, she says, “Oh, that. I just don’t want them to get too used to him. I don’t want them to lose all their hostility — or else they won’t be much good as guard dogs, will they?”

  AT HOME MY father sits in the sunporch, drinking weak tea from a chipped pottery mug with “Dad” painted on it in wobbly childish letters by Georgina years ago. He shakes his head and snorts as he reads the Herald, the government-owned newspaper — snorts at the distorted, looking-glass world it reflects, as Zimbabwe has been a one-party state for ten years now, and the Herald faithfully preaches the word according to the government gospel.

  From time to time it all becomes too much for Dad, and he writes a letter to the editor, usually about some very specific falsehood, signing the letter with a pseudonym. Often he’s “Rustic Realist.” Mostly the letters aren’t printed, but he keeps on writing just the same.

  I sit down to give him a report on my travels with the Kalahari Bushmen.

  “Aren’t we supposed to call them the San now?” he asks.

  He is right. But much to the consternation of my editors in Washington, all the San I have met in the desert are still demanding to be called Bushmen, a name that Western anthropologists now consider derogatory.

  Dad has just retired from the Standards Association of Zimbabwe, a nonprofit institution that devises and administers quality, safety, and management systems for industry, and he is studying to qualify as an independent assessor, the only one in the country. Some of the technical standards he is studying, he wrote himself.

  At seventy-three, my mother has tried to retire several times, but there is no one to replace her, so she still works at the hospital. She starts each morning at 6:30, and she sees more than eighty patients a day.

  When I visit her at her clinic later, her longtime assistant, Nurse Machire, welcomes me, as she always does, like Odysseus returning to Ithaca. She escorts me through the packed waiting hall to my mother’s examining room. Beige manila patient files are piled high on Mum’s desk, and behind her on the windowsill is a bright pink ceramic vase full of colorful ceramic flowers. My mother’s not usually one for knickknacks, so I gently tease her about it. She picks up the vase and turns it in her hands and wipes it carefully with a paper towel.

  “It was given to me by one of my patients,” she says, “an operating room nurse.”

  She sighs and puts it carefully back onto the sill.

  “She came to see us years ago with a novel ailment that looked like German measles but wasn’t. I thought it might be HIV, but we’d never seen HIV before. It was still so new there was no test for it then. When testing became available a few months later, she was one of the first patients we tested. It came back positive.

  “For the first time we had to deal with the problem of how you inform patients they have HIV. It was decided that a panel should do it: a consulting physician, a psychiatrist, and me. The OR nurse was an intelligent woman, and the others talked to her for about fifteen minutes, discussing contraception and the prevention of transmission, and then they left, well satisfied that they’d told her all they could. And she turned to me after they had gone and said, ‘What was that all about? What were they trying to tell me?’

  “I said, ‘You have a new viral disease that may cause you great difficulties in time. And there is no treatment for it yet.’

  “?‘But I feel better now,’ she said.

  “I said, ‘Good, just enjoy yourself, then, while you feel well. Keep as healthy as you can, eat well, don’t get overtired. And I will be at your side.’

  “There was no point in s
pelling it out to her that she had a death sentence and spoiling what life she had left to live. Anyway, she survived nearly ten years, and she gave me this china flower basket as a present just before she died.”

  My mother’s assistant knocks gently on the door to say that the next patient is ready.

  “You must remember how many years we weren’t even allowed to talk about AIDS here,” my mother reminds me. “It was all a dreadful secret. Herbert Ushewekunze, the minister of health, issued an edict, a ministerial fatwa, that there was to be absolutely no publicity at all. And later he died of it himself.” She shakes her head and reaches for the top patient file. “Why don’t you wait for me in the waiting area and then you can drive me home.”

  I SIT AT the back of the room behind the rows of patients: nurses and orderlies, maintenance men and cooks and cleaners. All of them are black. Two-thirds of them have contracted HIV. In Shona they now call it mukondombera, which means “a plague.” It has become so common that my mother can usually diagnose someone at the doorway of her examining room. As a patient politely knocks on the metal door frame, she already knows what is wrong.

  There are no more consulting physicians and psychiatrists now. And antiretroviral drugs are not yet available, so there is no treatment at all, there is only shame. Shame and its offspring, secrecy. The death notices and the obituaries only mention the opportunistic diseases that actually felled the victims. They never mention that these diseases galloped in through the open gate of a collapsed immune system — collapsed because of AIDS.

  And sometimes, especially when it is a man who is infected, my mother says, he has a terrifying hunger for revenge. If he is going to die anyway, then he will infect as many women as he can before he goes, because it is a woman who has done this to him, a woman who has given him this sickness.

  There are orphans, so many orphans. In an African society where there has never been much of a need for orphanages or nursing homes because the extended families have always looked after their own, there is suddenly a great need for both. The people in the middle die, leaving the very young and the very old behind. Deep in the bush, whole villages are being found where the eldest person is a twelve-year-old girl. Villages of children, alone. And these children walk miles to fetch the water and collect the firewood and plant the crops and cook their meager food, and sometimes they even try to keep on going to school, all by themselves.

  Because it is only blacks who die of this sickness, not whites, some have started to claim that it is a white man’s weapon, part of a plan to get rid of blacks. Some claim it has been deliberately concocted in a secret laboratory, by the American CIA.

  When Robert Mugabe, resentful at his overshadowing on the African stage by Nelson Mandela, sent thousands of Zimbabwean soldiers to fight rebels in the jungles of the Congo in return for diamonds for himself and his cronies, many of the soldiers came back on leave infected. It was said that whole units came back with the virus, shared among them by the bar girls in the noisy village shebeens; and the camp followers who became their “temporary wives” and even bore their children; and by the timid tribal girls deep in the forest clearings, who the soldiers found on patrol, girls who had never had any money or owned anything like radios or bicycles or flashlights or even shoes, girls who were afraid of men with guns and would sleep with the Zimbabwean soldiers for a pair of plastic shoes molded in China — even if they were the wrong size and hurt their broad, path-worn feet. They could not talk to the soldiers — they had no common tongue. They would just see the gun and the plastic shoes, and they would have to make a choice, and then later they would die in their villages in the clearings deep in the forest. And the soldiers came back home to Zimbabwe, and they passed this disease on to their wives and to their girlfriends.

  Week after week after week, there are funerals, so many funerals now.

  The population projections have had to be revised. In 1980, at independence, a man might expect to live to sixty and to see his children grow up strong and have children of their own, and if he was fortunate, a man might even live to see his great-grandchildren bring him gourds of beer before he died. But life expectancy dropped to fifty, and now it has collapsed, all the way down to thirty-three. It is hard to comprehend. At thirty-three, just as people should be in their prime, they suddenly sicken and die. And the managers of the mines and the factories and the farms have begun training three people to fill every job, because they know two will not live to do the work.

  I can see that my mother is weighed down by the burden of it all. Every day she has to tell dozens of people they have an incurable disease. She sits in her office surrounded by the badges of her profession, her white coat and her stethoscope, and they serve only to mock her inability to heal.

  And some of her patients, intelligent, educated, middle-class people, people who drive cars and work on computers and watch TV, they have lost all faith in the Western empirical catechism, and in desperation they go to those who peddle the promise of a cure. Some unscrupulous ngangas, traditional herbalists and sorcerers, say they know how to defeat this sickness, for a fee. And they prescribe snuff to be shoved up the vagina, or muti, various bogus unguents and ointments made from the ground bones of wild animals.

  And worse, some of them have begun saying that the only way for a man to cure himself of this lethal affliction is to have sex with a young virgin, that this will make him clean again. Many young girls are raped by men for this reason, and they too die in their turn, as do the ones who rape them. Some of the unscrupulous ngangas fall back on atavistic rites long suppressed by overbearing white district commissioners, instructing their patients to eat the heart of another human, that it will give them the strength to survive.

  I think of Prince Biyela’s Zulu impi cutting out the gallbladder of a brave adversary and sucking on it to ingest his courage, shouting, “Igatla!” — “I have eaten!” And I realize that maybe not so much has changed as we all thought, that maybe the whole idea of progress is a paradox, a rocking horse that goes forward and back, forward and back, but stays in the same place, giving only the comforting illusion of motion.

  And as I sit there in this waiting room full of dying people, I’m struck by an image of futility from Joseph Conrad’s paean to melancholy, Heart of Darkness. Sailing toward the African coast for the first time, the narrator, Marlow, sees a French warship shelling the bush:

  In the immensity of earth, sky and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent. Pop, would go one of the six-inch guns; a small flame would dart and vanish, a little white smoke would disappear, a tiny projectile would give a feeble screech — and nothing would happen. Nothing could happen.

  But my mother hasn’t given up. At seventy-three she still gets up at dawn every morning and comes into the hospital, working on well past her retirement age, paid only her meager government salary, impelled only by her stubborn sense of duty. Even when there is little she can do for them, she has not abandoned her patients. She continues to lob her little shells of compassion, benignly bombarding the mangrove littoral with her good offices.

  FOR SOME YEARS now she has also been playing another role: trying to roll back corruption, in a small way, by serving on a medical compensation board, reviewing claims from former guerrillas disabled in the independence war. The compensation fund set up to make grants to them has been ransacked by false claimants, for fictitious injuries. Several perfectly fit cabinet members have qualified as quadriplegics and are being paid for 100 percent disability.

  And here it is that my mother comes up against her nemesis. He too is a doctor, Dr. Chenjerai “Hitler” Hunzvi, a prominent member of the War Veterans Association. He has chosen Hitler as his Chimurenga name, the deliberately frightening nom de guerre used in the war, though, like many of the most militant, he never actually fought in the independence war himself, sitting it out in the safety of Warsaw, from where he returned only after independence, with a Polish medical degree and a Polish wife. (She didn
’t last long, fleeing back to Warsaw with their two sons, and describing in her book, White Slave, how Hunzvi tortured her.) It is the same diagnosis — polyarthritis — with Hunzvi’s signature that my mother finds again and again below many of the false payments. They include his own for being 85 percent disabled. Now the coffers are empty for actual war veterans who really were disabled in combat.

  The other doctors who are supposed to be reviewing drop out until there are only two left, my mother and Dr. Edwin Mhazo. Together they sit long hours at the hospital, one white, one black, reexamining claimants and challenging hundreds of bogus physicals, some of them of senior party members and members of Parliament.

  When Hitler Hunzvi hears what they are doing, he is furious. He sends word to my mother that he is “coming to sort her out,” that she should “beware.” He has now been elected leader of the War Veterans Association, and his threats are to be taken seriously. But neither my mother nor Mhazo will back down. And my father waits for her in the hospital parking lot, so that she doesn’t have to drive home alone, with Hitler Hunzvi out to “get her.”

  With the revelation that the compensation fund had been drained, mostly by party fat cats, the war veterans take to the streets, to demonstrate, with a hypocritical Hunzvi at their head. Mugabe concedes immediately. These ex-guerrillas were the backbone of his revolution. And from 1997 he starts putting through what are, by Zimbabwean standards, enormous onetime payments to the fifty thousand war vets, plus generous monthly pensions. Many economists calculate the real collapse of the economy from this moment. The Zimbabwe dollar crashes, never to recover. Mugabe brings Hunzvi into the government; he is too much of a threat outside it.