by Peter Godwin
“The way they’ve divided up the farm makes no sense at all,” says Roy. “The guy who’s been given this house and the surrounding land, Mr. Munyawarara, he has no water source on his plot at all. His sister works at the Zimbabwean Embassy in Rome, and the plot is in her name. He comes to visit occasionally on Sundays in his SUV. One Sunday he came to me and said, ‘Do you mind, Roy, if we take some pictures of our house?’ And he posed there, smiling, on our front doorstep, while his friends photographed him.
“Another settler, a senior civil servant who works in town, has already moved her stuff into my mother’s cottage. She arrived one day with an entourage, and I said to them, ‘The Lord forbids that I should give you the inheritance of my fathers,’ and they laughed and laughed.
“Mr. Sekeremai, who is related to a government minister, he has another of the hundred-hectare plots. He came to me and asked if I would plow one hectare for him. So I did it, and when I’d finished I asked him, ‘What about the other ninety-nine?’ And he said, ‘No, I only have a small family, one hectare is enough to feed them.’ That’s the real tragedy. Most of these people won’t actually farm much of the land at all.”
As he knows it’s his last season, Roy has virtually stopped farming the land, planting nothing but one small plot of corn, so that his labor force will at least have some food when he’s evicted.
“I call it the ‘well-watered garden,’?” he says, “after the biblical garden. But the pump switches for the irrigation were stolen. I replaced them and they were stolen again, so it’s not so well watered anymore.”
Among the cornstalks Roy has hammered in wooden stakes that bear placards of biblical quotes. As far as my eye can see, this little placarded plot of corn is now the only crop growing. This well-watered garden, no longer watered at all, is the only agricultural activity. In this whole district, less than 5 percent of farms are still operating.
“I keep thinking of the scriptural readings of the desolation of Judah,” he says.
“What will you do now?” I ask.
“I don’t know. It’s difficult to start again at fifty-two, with no capital. If I leave, I think I will lose my self-worth entirely. Everything I have is in this place. I’m not sure where we’ll go.”
“What about going to South Africa?” I ask.
“Hmm. I’m not so sure about that,” says Roy. “My aunt was murdered in South Africa. It was a ritual murder, you know, a muti killing. I heard that they cut off her hair and cut out her eyes and her heart to use in traditional spells. But I think the police caught the guy who did it.”
BACK AT THE HOUSE, another evicted farmer, Bux Howson, has arrived with his pickup to help them cart away the last of their personal belongings. We finish loading the boxes as darkness falls around us. Bux latches the tailgate, leans back on the pickup, and looks out across the gloaming.
“You know, we’re Africans, but we will always be the scapegoats, the aliens,” he says. “My philosophy now is that you have no security in Africa. We’ve tried to kid ourselves that it was going to be different here. We plowed everything back into our farms. It was all reinvested. And now look. We’ve lost everything.”
Fifteen
September 2002
EVEN FROM THE AIR, when we go up in a little Cessna to get some aerial shots, it is obvious that everything has been jambanja’d, turned upside down. At this time of year, you should see freshly tilled soil planted for the new season. But as we circle over the highlands of Mashonaland, in central Zimbabwe, there are few fields planted. Many of the peasants who have been allocated small plots on seized farms still wait in vain for the seeds and the fertilizer and the squads of tractors that the government has promised them. Irrigation has been destroyed, wells ruined, electricity cut off for nonpayment of bills. Some have reverted to medieval agricultural methods on what were, just the year before, highly sophisticated, productive farms. Unsurprisingly, yields have plummeted. Cereal production is already down 57 percent from last year, and corn 67 percent. And as the hunger spreads, Mugabe’s men are using it to their political advantage, controlling the supply of grain through the monopoly of the grain marketing board and trying to prevent aid agencies from delivering food relief to areas associated with the opposition.
Some of the main casualties of jambanja are the two million black farmworkers and their families who lived and worked on the commercial farms.
Bigson Gumbeze is the displaced farmworkers’ project manager at the Farm Community Trust. From his high-ceilinged office within an old colonial house in central Harare, he follows the growing humanitarian disaster on the farms as the workers are thrown off with their old employers. On a whiteboard in his office he updates the tally: last month there were eighty thousand displaced farmworkers. You see them along the roads, sleeping in the open, little knots of people like remnants of a defeated army, with nowhere to go.
Today, Gumbeze and I drive east out of Harare with a delivery of clothes donated by a local factory. At the massive balancing granite boulders of Epworth, as featured on the country’s beleaguered currency, eroded by 200 percent hyperinflation, the paved road narrows and then runs out altogether as we come to Rock Haven Refugee Camp, an expanse of olive tents where several hundred farmworkers have lived for the past nine months. They sit, mostly barefoot and ragged, under a grove of musasa trees as Gumbeze and his assistants dole out their bounty. The clothes, it turns out, consist of just three oufits, and soon we are surrounded by refugees in a surreal uniform — the women all in matching housedresses, yellow floral swirls on orange; the men in identical khaki chinos with cuffs and sharp creases, and dark green golf shirts; the kids all in the same jaunty Hawaiian shirts. And they assemble in rows and begin to sing a thank-you song, their words floating up in effortless four-piece harmony.
Many of these workers are from one farm — Chipesa, owned by Ian Kay, who paid the price for openly campaigning for the MDC in the recent general election.
James Sani, twenty-six, tells me what happened: “One day, the war vets and party youth arrived on our farm and said it belonged to them now,” he says. “They put a gun to Ian Kay, but he managed to escape. The vets beat us with iron bars and axes, and they looted our property and burned down our houses and chased us away.”
“They called us mwengi, which means ‘enemy,’ because, they said, we supported the opposition party,” says Armando Serima. “We hid in the bush for two months eating roots and leaves and begging food from other farmworkers at night, until our employer, Mr. Kay, came and found us hiding there in the mountains just when we were about to die of hunger, and he brought us here.”
“So we have nothing,” says Sani. “There are no jobs, and now this drought . . . I was born at the farm, grew up at the farm, went to school on the farm, worked for the last eight years on the farm, my father died on the farm. All we know is farming. That’s what we want to do again.”
“We did try to lease another farm for them to set up agricultural projects,” says Gumbeze. “I took twenty-one of the workers from here to prepare the land there. The day after we arrived, at 1:30 a.m., when we were all fast asleep after digging in the fields all day, the riot police surrounded the building and arrested us all. They bundled us into trucks and took us to prison. Then they kept moving us about from prison to prison so that our lawyer couldn’t find us. They charged seventeen of the workers with undergoing military training, and they charged me with coordinating an unlawful public gathering. The charges are ridiculous.”
THE NEXT DAY, I visit my sister’s grave, something I try to do every year. Neither of my parents feels up to the trip, but my mother calls Isaac to help her cut a selection of flowers. She calls and calls, but he doesn’t come, and she gets irritated. Then we see him cycling up to the gate. He is wearing long trousers with the hems rolled up and Wellington boots. And over a pressed white shirt he wears Dad’s hand-me-down herringbone-tweed jacket. In its top pocket he has carefully placed a handkerchief, its corner showing, just as Dad d
oes. He has pinned a miniature rosebud to his lapel. And around his neck is one of Dad’s old paisley cravats. Mum remembers Dad has given him time off to attend the PTA meeting at Cheesely’s upscale school, Lewisam.
“How was the PTA?” I ask him after he has changed back into his gardening clothes, and Mum is pointing out flowers for him to clip for Jain. I wonder how he has fared, Isaac, the gardener, among the black diplomats and the bankers and the government ministers.
“They did not elect me to any committees,” he says glumly, “though I volunteered.”
Mum points to tall blue and yellow crane flowers, and sprigs of yesterday-today-and-tomorrow, forget-me-nots, strelitzia, soft ivory kapok blossoms from the tree that Mum transplanted from Jain’s garden after she died, green mop heads of papyrus from the pool and blue plumbago.
“I want her to see how the garden’s doing,” Mum says as she helps Isaac tie the selection together into a huge, unruly posy. At the center of their floral architecture are two long spiny stalks of aloe, “to ward off Kipling’s hyenas,” says Mum, and a clutch of white arum lilies, “as symbols of purity.”
Isaac puts the flowers into a bucket of water and jams it in the foot well of the passenger seat of the car, and I drive it out along the Bulawayo Road to Warren Hills Cemetery. Since I was last here, the adjacent township, Warren Park, has swollen and is now garlanded with improvised shacks, which press hard up against the cemetery boundary. I park the car and carry the flowers up the hillside to the garden of remembrance, where all cremated remains are entombed in rows inside long, low, curving stone walls, under a canopy of wild musasa trees.
As I approach, I see that something else has changed since my last visit. The fence that used to separate the township from the cemetery has been dismantled, and there is a new network of footpaths where the residents have taken shortcuts through the graves. Closer still, peering over my flowers, I see that they are also using it as an open-air lavatory. There are little clumps of soiled toilet paper scattered around and a fetid smell. And in among the graves at the top, people have started to cultivate little patches of corn. Then I notice that the brass plaques that were bolted onto each mini-tomb, inscribed with the names and details of the dead, are missing. Every single one. The wall is just a long line of blank niches. I have no idea which is Jain’s. Some of the tombs themselves have been broken open and the urns removed.
I stride down to the cemetery office, but there is no one there. Finally, I find a gaunt man leaning against the crematorium wall, smoking and coughing.
“I am not the in-charge,” he says, when he sees I want to complain about the state of the place.
“But how did this happen?” I ask.
He shrugs and exhales his smoke and coughs a bit more. “We have a guard only in the day. When it is dark, those people come from the township and they steal the fence, and sometimes they take gravestones too, to build their houses; and others, they steal the plaques from the tombs. They melt them down to make brass handles for coffins for the people who die of this AIDS.”
“Well, where can I put my flowers?” I say miserably. “We picked all these flowers and now I can’t even tell which one is my sister’s grave.”
He nips the stub of his cigarette between long dirty nails, and sucks one last lungful of smoke, burning it right down to the filter, and he throws it down on the stone path.
“Let’s we go,” he says, and I follow him as he coughs his way down to the office. He wanders off into the back. I hear drawers opening and closing and more coughing, and then he returns with a big ledger. “When did she die?” he asks.
“April twenty-second, nineteen seventy-eight.”
He flips through the book and then turns it around to me so I can see the names for 1978, and I move my finger down the column until I find Jain’s name. Next to it is written “U.160.”
“I can show you where that one is,” he says, and he coughs back up the hill, and down one of the walls, and as we go, he counts the blank tombs and then stops. “This is the one,” he says, pointing and coughing violently. “This is your sister.” And then he leaves me alone.
At least her tomb has not been ripped open. The plaque is gone, of course, but the rough cement plug still seems intact, which should mean that the urn with her ashes is still inside. I move the flowers away from my face and, losing their sweet masking scent, am assailed again by the overpowering smell of human shit. I see now that there is a fresh mound of wet turds right in front of me, right in front of Jain. In the time we have been down at the office, someone has crapped here. I kneel down to prop my mother’s unwieldy flower bunch against Jain’s blank headstone. But when I stand back up, the flowers slowly topple over. I dive to save them, but I am too late, and they fall across the stinking mound. I pick them up to see there is a wide streak of mustard shit all across the white arum lilies. Symbols of purity, my mother had called them.
“Fuck this!” I shout, and I hurl the flowers away, up in a wide parabola. It lands near two women who are bent over, hoeing their cemetery corn, their babies strapped to their backs. They stop their hoeing, look up for a moment, and murmur to each other, and one laughs. And then they go back to their digging. I wonder which one of them crapped here.
Back in the office, I bang repeatedly on the bell that sits on the wooden counter. Eventually I hear the coughing getting closer, and the gaunt man shuffles in.
“I want to move my sister. I want to take away her remains. How do I do it?”
“Ah, it’s too difficult,” he says, shaking his head. “You need special documents. You need permission to disinter, permission to uplift ashes. And you need to relinquish ownership of the burial plot.”
His voice is no longer flat and bored, and he has stopped coughing. “It is too, too difficult,” he repeats.
He is looking at me expectantly and I realize that he’s probably fishing for a bribe. That he is going to hold my sister’s ashes hostage in their crap-strewn resting place unless I pay him to spring her. I find the idea of rewarding this man repugnant. And I know it would appall my father.
So I turn on my heel and walk away from that terrible place.
I TRY TO CALM MYSELF as I drive fast, back into town, late for a meeting with Meryl Harrison. By the time I get to the Italian bakery in Avondale, across the road from the Phreckle and Phart, she is waiting for me on the veranda. She is a tall, imposing woman in her late fifties, wearing the uniform of the Zimbabwe National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals — a royal blue shirt with ZNSPCA shoulder flashes, and dark trousers. As chief inspector of the ZNSPCA, she’s had a ringside seat at Zimbabwe’s farm invasions.
Two years ago, while watching BBC World Service TV, she saw a Great Dane called Black Jack lying unconscious on a homestead lawn while Mugabe supporters danced in a circle around him to the beat of a tom-tom, darting in from time to time to bash the dog’s head with knobkerries and rocks and to hack at his neck with pangas. Meryl realized that the ZNSPCA had to act. (Incredibly, Black Jack is still alive; blind, deaf, and a little lame, but alive.)
ZNSPCA inspectors have the right to arrest those who perpetrate cruelty to animals. But Meryl is well aware that the country’s legal system is in ruins, so she goes directly to Hitler Hunzvi, the man masterminding the land takeover for Mugabe, the man who is supervising the torture of scores of suspected opposition supporters in his medical offices in Budidiro, on the edge of Harare.
“I am the biggest terrorist in Zimbabwe,” he boasts to her and laughs.
“All I want,” she says, “is to do my job, to prevent the abuse of animals. I’m not interested in politics.”
Eventually he agrees.
“But only on strict conditions,” he insists. “Only black inspectors, in uniform, traveling in official vehicles, may go onto the farms; there must be no publicity; and they mustn’t take anything except for pets and domestic animals that are being mistreated. Disobey, and you will be banned from visiting any more farms.”
The first rule Harrison has to brush aside immediately when she finds that the only way to get the militant farm invaders to take the ZNSPCA seriously is for her to attend herself. The last rule has proved very difficult to keep — she often has to refuse the tearful entreaties of farmers’ wives to retrieve wedding photos, passports, legal documents.
She’s been at just about every farm where there’s been a major confrontation.
“We are doing this in a war situation,” she says. “At least when the British RSPCA operated in Bosnia, they went in after the fighting. I have to go in while the conflict is still in full throat. We often have situations where the farmers are warning us that farms are no-go areas and that we’ll be attacked by the war vets if we venture there,” she says. “But still we go.”
Harrison slides a pile of snapshots across the table to me. They are gory fare. Here’s one of a field of dead racehorses, killed when their field of grazing is set afire by war vets; this one is of a young heifer with half its face ripped off by wovits’ packs of dogs. Here is a Staffordshire bull terrier, axed in the ribs. An emaciated two-month-old foal lies on the ground with a huge gash around her neck from a wire snare. A great pink pile of pigs that have starved to death after wovits refused entry to trucks sent to remove them.
From her bag she takes out a large blue diary. On the cover, below a smiley face sticker, she has taped a quote from Mahatma Gandhi: “The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.” Inside, the book is filled with her dense back-sloping handwriting. She starts to flip through it, picking out entries at random. Danbury Park Farm: a white couple, the Bayleys, Edith, seventy-nine, and Thomas, eighty-nine, are barricaded in their house, surrounded by wovits. The Red Cross is allowed in to take the old couple food, and then their son asks Harrison if she can help to get their dogs out, because every time his parents try to let them out onto the lawn to pee, the vets throw rocks at them. The “base commander” is named Never, and he marches around with a wooden replica AK-47 under his arm. He has tied a serrated carving knife on the end as a bayonet. Eventually, Never allows Harrison in, and she taps on the window. Old Mrs. Bayley, who has palsy from advanced Parkinson’s, peeks through the curtains and begins to unlock multiple padlocks.
