When a Crocodile Eats the Sun

by Peter Godwin

  Every election, they said, the same thing happens. The party chooses a candidate for us from somewhere else, someone we don’t even know. He comes here for a few weeks before the election, he wears a smart suit and makes a lot of promises, and then, once he is elected, he never really comes back, and we are left to cope on our own. We would like you to be our candidate this time, because you live here and we know you.

  At first Bennett said he was a farmer not a politician, but they pressed him and pressed him, and eventually he agreed. So they went to Harare and told the ZANU-PF officials there that they had chosen Roy Bennett, a white farmer, as their candidate for the next parliamentary election. The officials just laughed and said, “Don’t be stupid. We will decide who your candidate is, and it certainly won’t be a white man.” And the local councillors came back disconsolate. But then they heard about this new party, the MDC, so they went to Roy again with an idea. How about if they all joined this new party, and he stood as their candidate? The MDC was delighted, and this is how a white man came to run in a rural constituency where over 99.9 percent of the electorate is black.

  Bennett is expecting me, and his workers direct me to his farm office. He is burly, uncomfortable behind a desk, a tanned outdoors-man who was once a champion polo-cross player. He is just finishing going through election correspondence in a file fat with constituents’ letters. I ask to see them, and he turns the file around, while he answers the phone. Some address him as Father Chimanimani, others thank him for helping to repair bridges after the cyclone. There is a poignant tone of optimism to them, though many are afraid to sign their real names. One reads: “I tell you that I am one of the people who was beaten by those thieves. They beat my flesh but not my mind or brains. . . . We are not going to be intimidated by ZANU-PF anymore. . . . Let’s change things. This is our time. Say hi to your wife and family.”

  Another writes of distributing Bennett’s campaign pamphlets, inserting them under doors at night, and it ends with a postscript: “We would have liked to talk to you live, but with the situation as it is I guess it’s too risky.”

  Bennett’s rival, the ZANU-PF candidate chosen by the central committee in Harare, is Munacho Mutezo. He wears well-cut suits and Italian loafers and has postgraduate degrees from universities in England and Scotland. His family originally came from this area, so he is the right tribe, but he lives far away from here, in Harare.

  And so the battle lines are drawn. The homeboy is a barefoot white farmer without a college degree who lives just down the road, and the interloper is from the capital, a black man with a postgraduate, First World education and expensive shoes.

  Judging by his reception from the locals, Bennett is probably a shoo-in — if he can just stay alive until the polls open. He has had a steady stream of death threats. His farm is guarded by dozens of youths armed with knobkerries and iron bars, and he has supporters in the village and the black township who warn him of approaching danger.

  Bennett tells me that he has only just moved back onto his farm after war vets invaded it. He was away at the time, he says, and they seized his wife, Heather, who was three months pregnant. They put a panga to her throat and made her dance around the house and chant ZANU-PF slogans until she collapsed from fear and exhaustion before they let her go. As a result she miscarried. They beat up the farmworkers and occupied the farmhouse, ransacking it and daubing the walls with their own shit. They emptied the urn of Bennett’s father’s ashes and cut the paws off the lion-skin rug to use for muti — traditional medicine.

  “These white farmers who appease — I’ve got no time for them,” says Bennett. “Appeasement has never worked, just look at history. What’s so heartening about these elections is that there’s a good percentage of Zimbabwean whites who’ve said, ‘Damn it, let’s get involved,’ and we’ve suffered together with the blacks and feared together with them. We’ve made a stand and shown that we’re prepared to sacrifice ourselves for this country. And isn’t that what a patriot is, after all? It’s the first time in my life I’ve felt really Zimbabwean.”

  We eat supper in the Mawenje Lodge, which Bennett built as accommodation for the Chimanimani National Park above us, and where some of Georgina’s wedding party had stayed. He moved in here with Heather when their own house was trashed.

  As we sit talking under the tall open thatch eaves by the fire, the two-way radio crackles to life. “It’s my security bloke,” he says. “They’ve spotted a truck of war vets coming this way.”

  Bennett’s hunting rifles — even though they are correctly licensed — have been confiscated by the police, but one of his mechanics peels down a horse blanket on the sofa to reveal a shotgun and a belt of cartridges.

  Bennett’s MDC guards, our guys, as he calls them, are gathering at strategic points to repulse the attack. Having seen what they did last time, he is going to make a stand, however unequal the fight. “I’m sick of running now,” he declares. “If they’re gonna come, they must just come and let’s get this over with.”

  We take up positions by the windows and arm ourselves with knobkerries and pangas, and we wait there, listening. The Haroni River burbles below the lodge, and the wind rustles the bamboo grove, and the baboons bark up in the mountains, and the nightjars call, and we wait to be attacked. “So this is democracy Zimbabwe style?” I say to Bennett, and he just laughs and shakes his head and keeps on looking out the window, scanning the bush. We stay like that, alert, waiting for a gunshot, a gasoline bomb, a hail of stones. How it will start we do not know exactly. I feel strangely calm about an impending attack. It seems somehow predestined, as though I have been drawn back across the globe to meet this fate at home.

  And while we wait, the moon rises over the Chimanimani Mountains, glittering the quartz of their jagged granite peaks. I have climbed the range so many times, first as an infant strapped onto the back of my nanny, Violet, and then as a boy, scrambling up on my own into this enchanted kingdom in the air. Later I learned that the winding passes we climbed were ancient slave routes along which captured tribesmen, yoked together by logs at their necks like oxen, were prodded by Arab traders on an enforced trek to the slave brigs that awaited them on the coast of Mozambique. In the Zimbabwe independence war, they became guerrilla infiltration routes, and now their latest bit part in the unfolding history is as Sound of Music escape routes.

  I am dozing, my forehead on the windowsill, when finally, in the early hours of the morning, Bennett’s guards radio in to say that the party militia have turned back. I fall asleep in my bed to the gurgling of the river and the call of the nightjars. I wake up once to the sound of murmuring outside the window and look out to see the young opposition activists huddled around a fire there, blankets draped over their shoulders, hands clasped around enamel mugs of steaming coffee. These are brave men, many are kids still, who are taking on the full wrath of the state, and they are in just as much danger as Bennett.

  The next morning I accompany Bennett to the police station, where he has been summoned for a meeting. The wovits’ leader, a tall black man who will not look at Bennett directly, tells him that they intend to reoccupy his farm, by force if necessary, but they are prepared to do it peacefully, “cooperatively.”

  “That’s what you said last time,” spits Bennett, raising his voice and reeling off a litany of the crimes they committed when they first visited Charleswood. The room is thick with tension, and several of the vets look as though they will quite probably shoot him in a heartbeat, given a pretext. The police officer is doing his best to calm them down, but Roy’s not interested in compromise now — he’s had a gutful of these guys. I try to work out how many of us are armed. Neither Roy nor I are, but I can see that some of the wovits have pistols. The police officer follows my eyes and nods. He gets up from behind his desk and walks over to the bureau, and on the way back he whispers to me, “You must get Roy out of here.” So I remind Bennett that he is running late to address his rally at Ingorima communal lands this afternoon
. He looks at the clock and scoots his chair back and thankfully we are out of there.

  From the Land Rover, Bennett calls his election agent and friend, James Mukwaya, who says that he has had to cancel the rally. Gangs from ZANU-PF have been there overnight, moving from house to house, warning people that if they attend they will be killed. But Bennett is not downhearted. “They’re all on our side anyway,” he says, “so why risk their lives with public rallies? We know how they’ll vote when the time comes.”

  ON MY WAY out of the village, early the next morning, I drive once around the old square and there, faded now and chipped, is the little sign to the elementary school I’d attended up on top of the hill overlooking the village. On impulse, I follow the sign and drive up past banks shouting with bright blue morning glories. I get out and survey the long low buildings.

  “Good morning, may I be of assistance?” A tall, tidily dressed black lady introduces herself as Iris, a teacher. When she hears that I once studied here, she offers to show me around. Most of the children are away for a long weekend, she says, but one of them has not been reclaimed by his parents. His name is Honest, and he is a tiny boy in a khaki uniform with a green jersey and serious, dog-dark eyes. He is obviously dejected at having being left behind but determined not to show it. I know exactly how he feels, having been in the same position all those years ago, when my mother was frequently delayed by medical emergencies.

  “I am pleased to meet you, sir,” Honest says, and he stands very straight, with his chin out, like a little soldier.

  On Iris’s instructions, he takes me to the spartan classrooms, their ceiling panels hanging down to reveal the metal ribs of the roof struts, and past the empty swimming pool to the threadbare playing fields with their crooked goalposts. He shows me the shower block with its missing tiles and ruined porcelain toilets, and finally he takes me to the boarders’ dormitory. I point out the bed where I slept when I was six, the first bed to the right of the main door, the bed traditionally reserved for the youngest boy. It is the very same narrow iron bed with sagging diamond wire mesh under the mattress that I once used to wet.

  “It is my bed also,” says Honest. “I am the youngest, so this is where I sleep, the same as you.”

  Iris comes to say good-bye, and Honest strides away over the gravel driveway. When he reaches the red-cement veranda, he turns and holds his hand up in solemn salutation like an Indian chief in a Western.

  “Some months,” Iris says quietly as she looks over at Honest, frozen in his gesture of farewell, “there is no budget left for the boarders’ food, so we have to ask the day students to bring extra food with them, to share.”

  As I drive slowly away, I feel the distinct sensation that I am on the stern of a ship pulling away from a dock and that soon I will be separated from Iris and Honest by a vast ocean.

  The sun is just breaking through the granite ramparts of the mountain, dissolving the mist, as I drive up and out of Chimanimani to Skyline Junction. But there is no skyline today, just fat gray clouds sitting heavily on the hill, and rain. Work gangs in olive green plastic ponchos dig in the downpour, trying to keep the road open. As I drop down the other side into the Biriwiri Valley, the rain stops, and the clouds lift and the baobab trees begin. I come up behind an old, slow-moving Land Rover pickup. The back is filled with young black men singing exuberantly. They wave me the open-palmed sign of the MDC and throw some fliers up into the air. For a brief moment one sticks to my windshield, and I see the grinning face of Roy Bennett and the headline “Chinja Maitiro — Change Your Ways — Vote MDC,” and then it blows off into the bush.

  Eight

  June 2000

  THE ELECTIONS ARE CHAOTIC. In the cities, long lines form, with some people waiting for days to vote. There is a polling station at Oriel Boys School, right across the road from my parents’, and they wait for the throng to thin out, but it never does, so they take folding chairs and join the line. It’s a hugely partisan crowd, overwhelmingly in favor of the opposition. There is a carnival atmosphere — a feeling that the old guard is about to be swept away, that we are on the brink of momentous change.

  Every few minutes, my parents get up and move their blue-striped camping chairs a few yards on as the line snakes slowly in long switchbacks through the school grounds. The sun blazes down, and everyone shares water and refreshments. Eventually Dad becomes exhausted, stooped with back pain, sodden with sweat.

  “You go home,” says Mum. “One vote won’t make the difference here.”

  But he refuses, and eventually he casts his vote, and they walk slowly back over the road. He can barely catch his breath, but he is triumphant.

  And Stalin Mau Mau does not become the member for Harare East. Stalin Mau Mau comes away with less than 20 percent of the votes cast, trounced by Tendai Biti. In fact, the ruling party gets almost no urban seats at all, and none in the entire southern province of Matabeleland, and few in Manicaland, where Roy Bennett romps home to become member of parliament for Chimanimani.

  I leave a few days later for New York, as the last results come in, from constituencies deep in the bush. The MDC has just failed to tip over into outright victory — they are four seats short, fifty-seven to ZANU-PF’s sixty-two. And according to the constitution, the president gets to appoint another twenty seats.

  My father insists on driving me to the airport, and on our way we are overtaken by the police motorcycle outriders of the presidential convoy. A policeman jabs his finger toward the side, and Dad veers off the road, as we are required to do by law when the president approaches. More squad cars stream by, lights flashing, sirens wailing — the locals call the presidential convoy Bob and the Wailers, after Bob Marley’s band, which played at independence celebrations here. Now truck upon truck of soldiers from the presidential guard roar by, bristling with machine guns and AK-47s with which some of them take beads at cars and people as they pass. I count ten trucks of soldiers before Mugabe’s black armored Mercedes finally reaches us.

  “I saw the inside of his car once when I worked for the Ministry of Transport,” says my father as we wait for the convoy to pass. “It was specially modified in Italy. It has a bomb-resistant floor, bulletproof windows, no outside door handles, an intercom for passengers to speak to those outside. The glass is also one way.”

  I imagine what it must be like for the president looking out of his smoked-glass windows at the city around him, knowing that not a single constituency voted for him in the entire metropolitan area — knowing that he is driving through enemy territory. Knowing that the only way he has been able to stay in power at all is through massive electoral fraud. In the coming months, court challenges show the extent and detail of the cheating, especially in the rural areas, where his men used intimidation and bribes and vote rigging. In some constituencies, the vote tally exceeded the entire population.

  A FEW MONTHS later, after secret negotiations, Georgina finally leaves her job at ZBC and joins Capital Radio, a new independent station, Zimbabwe’s first, which will be critical of the government, moving into what the political commentators are calling “democratic space.” They import a transmitter from South Africa and set it up in a rented room on the top floor of the Monomotapa Hotel. They scramble up onto the rooftop to erect the antenna, and then they realize they have no idea what frequency to broadcast on, so Georgina phones Dad, and he looks it up in his radio manual and tells them that 100 FM is free, so they begin broadcasting on 100 FM that night.

  And while Georgina broadcasts her show, and Xanthe rolls around on the carpet at her feet, she looks out the window toward Pocket’s Hill and sees the towering antenna of ZBC, whose monopoly they have finally broken. Sunset streaks the sky with ocher, and across it sails a hot-air balloon. It is one of those moments of pure happiness, she tells me. One of those moments that you must commit to memory and savor in the dark days ahead. For those days will come soon enough.

  The morning after her epiphany, Georgina and her colleagues are tipped off t
hat they’re about to be raided, that the president is signing a special decree to close down Capital Radio. As a precaution, they set up to transmit prerecorded programs and leave the hotel. One of the technicians, Brendan, goes back up to check on the studio, and as he enters the elevator, a posse of armed policemen crowd in behind him. When they get out on the same floor, Brendan pretends to be going to another room and watches as the policemen kick down the door of Capital Radio.

  It has been on the air just six days.

  THE PRESIDENT’S RHETORIC gets steadily more incendiary. At his party’s congress, he says the whites have “declared war” on the people of Zimbabwe.

  “We must continue to strike fear into the heart of the white man, our real enemy,” he tells his audience of party faithful, and they cheer him wildly and chant, “Hondo! Hondo!” — “War! War!”

  And Hitler Hunzvi takes the stage to warn, “Whosoever is killed, it’s tough luck.”

  I phone my parents from New York and say it might be time for them to think of leaving. But my father is still unimpressed with the president’s blood-curdling threats. Ordinary people don’t hate us, he says. They couldn’t be nicer.

  And anyway, he says, he’s no soutpiel. It’s an Afrikaans word meaning “salt penis,” a term for us Anglo-Africans who, they say, have one foot in Africa and the other in Europe, causing our genitals to dangle in the ocean where they pickle in the brine of cultural confusion. Soutpiels are not “real Africans.” We are the first to cut and run.

  But people of all races are starting to leave — even Thomas Mapfumo, troubadour of the liberation war, who virtually invented chimurenga music, a blend of electric guitars over mbiras, the traditional metal-pronged thumb pianos.