When a Crocodile Eats the Sun

by Peter Godwin

  “We’ve been here for thirty-three days,” she says in a trembling voice as she passes out the first of her dogs, four Jack Russells and a fox terrier.

  The police will give Harrison an escort, as a ZNSPCA officer, to rescue the animals, but they still refuse to provide an escort to the old couple themselves to leave. That is “a political matter,” they say, beyond their powers. A few days later, however, old man Bayley falls from his walker, breaking his leg, and the police do allow an ambulance in to take him (with his wife) to the hospital. He dies days later.

  After the old couple has left Danbury Park, their son Tommy asks Harrison to go back with him to rescue the remaining animals. They manage to get one cat out, but though they call and call and lay down a trail of food, they cannot find the last one. Just as they are about to give up, Harrison hears a tiny meow coming from under the bathtub. Tommy gets down on the floor and reaches his hand in through a hole and feels the cat lick his fingers, but it won’t come any farther. And Tommy just lays his head on his arm and begins to sob. Great racking sobs. It is his last day on the farm. His father is dead. The cat is too frightened to come out from under the bathtub.

  Harrison decides that she will bloody well get this cat back for him, if it’s the last rescue she ever does. So she goes to Never, the base commander, and bargains with him — as it is now his house — to be allowed to knock out the base of the bathtub. She offers to treat his dog and to give him blankets and some food. Never finally comes to attention with his wooden rifle, the one with the carving knife tied to the end of the barrel, and he says: “Permission granted.” So Harrison and her inspector, Addmore Chinembe, find a hammer and a crowbar and start to knock down the bath wall. Finally the cat flies out, and they manage to cage it.

  The next day Harrison returns, gives Never the blankets she has promised him and treats his dog, a Rhodesian ridgeback called Rambo that needs deworming and vaccinations for rabies and distemper.

  Never says to her, “You are the only white person I trust,” because she has kept her end of the bargain, and so she is allowed to follow the Treasure Island–style map that Tommy Bayley has drawn for her, entitled “Danbury Park tortoises.” In red, he has marked every tortoise hole and enclosure on the property. In the end she finds all twelve of them, including the seventy-five-year-old.

  But it doesn’t end there for the Bayleys. After the trauma of losing their farm, and the death of his father, Tommy and his wife, Trish, and their two-year-old daughter decide to drive down to South Africa to escape for a short vacation. On the way down, just north of Bulawayo, a cow has wandered onto the highway, and they round a bend and slam into it. The toddler is only slightly injured. Tommy is badly hurt and spends months recovering in the hospital. Trish is killed instantly.

  THE NEXT PICTURE is of Terry Ford, one of the country’s premier horse breeders. He lies dead, a blanket over his body, shot by war vets. And curled into the crook of his arm is his Jack Russell terrier, Squeak, who is refusing to leave his dead master, snarling at anyone who tries to remove him. After Ford’s funeral, Harrison gets a call to rescue four dogs belonging to Mwambo, the man who, eyewitnesses say, killed Terry Ford. Mwambo has been arrested and has left his own dogs unattended at the Ford farmhouse, which he has taken over. Harrison takes the dogs to the ZNSPCA, vaccinates them, deworms them, and treats them for bilharzia. Then she returns them to Mwambo’s relatives. When Mwambo himself is released by a government that declines to prosecute him, he moves back into the house of the man he has murdered and is reunited with his own dogs.

  “It’s the nature of our job,” shrugs Harrison. “It’s the animal not the owner that we must focus on.”

  Another picture shows two of Ford’s thoroughbred racehorses with deep cuts and abrasions on their chests. Mwambo has harnessed them and tried to make them pull a plow.

  AT HOME I tell my mother that I’m considering getting a few friends together, arming ourselves with sledgehammers and chisels, sneaking into the unguarded cemetery at night, and smashing into Jain’s tomb to liberate her ashes. But my mother counsels caution and instead steers me to Keith Martin, an undertaker friend of hers. Until recently, he was managing director of Mashfords, the country’s oldest funeral home, with branches all over. But at lunch at the Brontë Hotel, he tells me how he was fired. A black businessman named Philip Chiyangwa, a former vegetable vendor and police officer (and a relative of Mugabe) who became rich riding the crest of the indigenous business advancement campaign, buys Mashfords outright in cash three years ago. Chiyangwa lives in a luxury villa he has built in Borrowdale, which features eighteen bedrooms, each with a bath; “computerized closets” for his three hundred suits; a helipad; and a ten-car garage. Initially, he tells the sixty Mashfords staff members, four of them white, “You are the value of the company to me, I want you all to stay on.” But, disappointed at profit margins, Chiyangwa soon tries to dismiss Martin. He sends him disciplinary letters, one for not coming to work by car but instead “Walking to work, like a beggar, through the dust. We are shocked and surprised and it is going to stop.” One for taking a bottle of wine, which is part of the rite, to a Greek Orthodox funeral. Finally, the senior staff are snatched from their offices by security guards, who haul them off to Harare Central Police Station while their houses are searched.

  Now Martin is back at the university, training to be a doctor, while also working in the deceased-estate department of a law firm in Harare. Having been in the death business for so long, he knows where many of the bodies are buried.

  He has seen the corpses of several cabinet ministers who were supposed to have died in “car accidents,” whose bodies were “pulverized until they were almost unrecognizable.” He also once had a unique view of Robert Mugabe after the death of his first wife, Sally.

  “Sally Mugabe died in January 1992, and his mother, Bona, a few months later. These were the only two people whose opinions Mugabe cared about, and he lost them in quick succession. I embalmed Sally and put her, as ordered, in an open casket, where she remained at Mashfords for nine days until the state funeral. And Mugabe came on each of those nine days to visit Sally and to sob over her casket.

  “Of course, it’s true that he already had two kids with his mistress, Grace, by then. She was a secretary working in the protocol department of the president’s office.”

  Martin isn’t surprised by my experience at Warren Hills, and he promises to look into it. The whole way of death is collapsing, he says, just like the way of life. Many bodies are now just left on the street by black families who cannot afford a funeral. The Social Welfare Department piles hundreds of the bodies of the “indigent dead” into common graves. In the smaller towns like Kadoma and Rusape, Zvishavane and Masvingo, for hygiene reasons, they burn the bodies on open pyres, “like huge barbecues,” he says.

  I ask Martin about possible retirement homes for my parents. Athol Evans is the best, he says, because they have the most access to foreign currency. Some of the others are terribly short of funds. The junior staff in one home are so hungry that they sometimes steal the residents’ food. In another, he says, when a son leaves some pocket money with his mother, her nurse’s aide demands it as soon as he has left. She refuses, so the aide beats her head against the basin, shouting, “You fucking British bitch,” until the old woman hands it over. One old woman has her wedding ring torn off her finger, skinning it. The thief is also one of her caregivers, but because the victim has Alzheimer’s she can’t make the identification.

  “Jesus,” I say, “that’s a grim picture. I don’t know what to do with my parents. What I need right now is someone to help them inside the house, part-time, because they clearly can’t cope alone. But they’re very gun-shy after what happened with Mavis.”

  “I have just the guy,” he says. “Adston. He was this old lady’s cook. Comes from Mount Darwin. His wife died in childbirth. His two young daughters are looked after there by an aunt, I think. He did everything for the old lady, lifted her fro
m bed, got money for her from the ATM, and cooked for her the only thing she would ever eat: butternut and pumpkin puree. When she died, he got on his bicycle and rode into town to tell her attorney that she was lying dead in her bed.”

  Adston, it turns out, can live on in her house, which is near ours, caretaking it for at least six months while her estate goes through probate, and work part-time for my parents to supplement his salary.

  “You thinking of leaving yourself?” I ask Martin as we get up from lunch.

  “Nah, we’ve been here forever. My great-grandmother gave birth on Salisbury Kopje during the 1896 Mashona Rebellion. She cut the umbilical cord herself with a pair of pinking shears, while her husband was out securing the defensive camp. In 1921, she went back home on vacation to County Wicklow, in Ireland, only to have her house there burned down by Sinn Féin, as planned by her servants. We never went back after that.”

  WHEN I EXPLAIN the Adston arrangement to my parents later, they seem relieved. I have only a few days left before I have to get back to classes at Princeton, a world away, and it has been such a rushed visit that I have had no time to talk to them properly. I’ve hardly been in Harare, just hopping from farm to farm, jambanja to jambanja. But now my father asks me to do something for him before I leave. He wants me to go, as a family representative, to the memorial of Garfield Todd.

  Originally a churchman from New Zealand, Todd was the prime minister of Rhodesia from 1953 to 1958. He introduced universal primary education for blacks, doubled the number of schools, and tried (unsuccessfully) to legalize sex across the racial divide and move the country toward one-man-one-vote, moves considered far too radical by most whites. They voted him out of office and later chose Ian Smith, who led them into seven years of civil war. Todd established a school at Dadaya, where he lived, and one of the teachers he employed was the young Robert Mugabe. During the independence war, Todd secretly helped the guerrillas.

  In recent times, Todd had been critical of Mugabe and, because he is foreign-born, like my parents, he was stripped of his citizenship and his right to vote. He had gone from prime minister to pariah under white rule, and from hero to heretic in the time of Mugabe. His daughter, Judith, a friend of mine, supported the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU), one of the two nationalist groups that fought for independence. It turned out to be the one that came second, in a continent where the winner takes all and there are no second places. ZAPU was humiliated, crushed, and dismantled. Now Judith is a fiery critic of Mugabe, the more effective, and the more reviled by him, because of her impeccable chimurenga credentials.

  On the day of the memorial, I arrive early, so I wait across the road in the Monomotapa Hotel, downstairs in the Safari Bar. The last time I was here, the place was bustling with the Harare International Festival of the Arts. Now I am the only customer, eating a sandwich at an empty bar, trying to read the paper, but reflecting really on the ironies of Todd’s life, on the weird circularity of his roller-coaster ride.

  “Hi there?”

  The voice that breaks into my Todd reverie is startlingly close. It belongs to a young black woman now sitting on the next stool. The stools are fixed to the ground so close together that the silver-sequined leg of her skintight jeans touches my knee, and her prominent cleavage looms over my chicken sandwich.

  “Ah, hello.” I nod curtly and turn back to my paper.

  “I’m a little thirsty,” she says. The bartender has materialized from his stocktaking and is hovering to take her order. But she is not speaking to him; she is addressing me. Though I’m pretty sure she must be a hooker, I’m somewhat nonplussed at how to get out of buying her a drink without being rude. So I nod to the bartender and he immediately mixes her a piña colada, without asking her what she wants to drink.

  I retreat behind my paper again, swinging away from the insistent pressure of her leg.

  “Ahhh,” she moans loudly, smacking her lips after the first sip.

  I ask for my bill and hide again behind my newspaper.

  Tap, tap, tap. She is tapping on my newspaper with her swizzle stick. I lower the paper, obviously annoyed now. But she doesn’t seem to notice. “Are you on business?” she wants to know.

  I slide some cash over the counter to the bartender for the drinks and the sandwich, and her eyes follow the money like an egret hunting fish.

  “Actually, no, I’m local,” I say curtly, getting up to leave. “I live here.”

  “Tsssk.” She makes the Shona sound of disgust. “You people,” she says.

  I shrug and start to walk away.

  “You are a racist,” she says, her voice rising and attracting the attention of a newly arriving cohort of Chinese visitors. “You don’t want to go with a black woman because you are racist.”

  I flee through the revolving glass doors out onto the street where I am mobbed by a throng of desperate curio sellers and money changers and kids selling toy cars made of scavenged wire and tins, and a begging cripple who sits on a little wooden cart, propelling himself along the road with his heel-hard hands. I hurry to the church for the memorial, trailed by my needy retinue and by the hooker’s accusations of racism.

  Inside, the pews are full; Todd has lived a life of public service, of charitable deeds. Pius Wakatama, father of Ellah, Georgina’s best friend, is one of the eulogizers. He tells the story of how, after he lost office, Todd went back to his farm near Zvishavane and founded a school that took the children of poor black families and gave them a thorough education, turning them from peasants into teachers, lawyers, accountants, university professors, cabinet ministers. But the path of the righteous man is not always a straight one. In 1990, a student dispute over food at Dadaya escalates and they burn down their classrooms, their chemistry labs, their library, and the principal’s house. And Robert Mugabe, whom Todd had treated so kindly, strips him of his right to vote.

  LATER I DRIVE OUT to visit Meryl Harrison at the ZNSPCA headquarters, to say good-bye. Her position is becoming increasingly perilous. The wovits have lost patience with her interference. Her life is in danger. At one rescue, she tells me, a policeman who was supposed to be guarding her directed her to go around the back of the house where she found herself surrounded by Mugabe’s militiamen. One started swinging a golf iron menacingly at her; another loaded a slingshot with a rock and held it at her temple. “If you ever come back here, we’ll kill you,” he said.

  She is also getting death threats by phone. They call and say, “We are coming to cut your throat next.”

  And there are written threats too. She brings out a folded piece of lined paper on which is handwritten in ballpoint pen:

  Mrs. Harrison,

  Be warned that the days of serving the interest of the white at the expense of blacks are over. We know you are 100 percent a racist who does not deserve to live in a liberated Zimbabwe. You are only interested in the plight of dogs and cats left by white farmers.

  You love dogs and cats, at the same time you hate blacks. Your days in Zimbabwe are numbered. Take this seriously. You are given 24 hours to leave Harare where you are operating from.

  Thank you for your racial attitude.

  Vying for your head, you are under spotlight.

  What annoys her most is the accusation that she cares only for the animals of whites. “We’ve rescued animals of black owners too,” she says. “Opposition supporters who have had to flee, and I’ve treated war vets’ goats and donkeys as well. It’s immaterial to me who the animals’ owners are. And when people say to me, ‘Why do you worry about the animals and not the people?’ my retort is this: ‘There are over seven hundred welfare organizations for people in Zimbabwe, and only one for animals.’?” But now, more and more of the animals she rescues have to be put down later.

  “Every riding school in Harare is groaning with horses,” she says. “We’ve run out of room. With euthanizing we can promise them a good death, because here in Zimbabwe, we can’t promise any animal a good life right now.”

&nb
sp; She suddenly bows her head across the desk, and I see the stoicism drain out of her at the bloody madness of it all. Risking your life to save animals you then have to kill.

  “Sometimes,” she says quietly, “I sit on the end of my bed and think, I can’t face one more farm. It’s so depressing walking around empty farms — people’s whole lives on the floor, trashed, smashed.”

  ON THE LAST DAY before I leave Africa, I go out to a farming community nestled against the Mvurwi Range, north of the capital. Here at Tsatsi, the farmers have decided to mark their own extinction with a farewell party — to themselves.

  When we arrive, we find four generations of white farmers gathered under a large thatched gazebo on a lakeshore. They have literally come to toast their own demise. Lion and Castle and Zambezi lager flows freely, and the atmosphere is thick with the unaccustomed emotion of a tough, taciturn people.

  Rod Bowen, a tall ex-cop, taps his glass to speak. Until recently, he was employed by the local farmers’ association to help whenever one of them was invaded. In the end, though, he could do little.

  “This is a farewell to those displaced persons of this parish who have had to move out so fast they had no time for individual farewells,” says Bowen. “This is a party for all the wrong reasons. Six months ago we were more or less in one piece, and just look at what’s happened now. This is our home — we built it. But now the Tsatsi farmers’ community has been totally dismembered. This is madness. This is utterly unbelievable. And the same thing is happening all over the country to other farmers’ associations.

  “For the past two years this community has had a two-pronged approach — some of us have appealed all the way to the very top, right up to the president himself, to try to save our farms. Others would not talk to a government that was acting outside the law, would not sup with the devil. Neither approach got anywhere. Today, four farmers of sixty remain. The situation is being orchestrated to destroy order here, to destroy the fabric of society, to rid this country of its commercial farming community.”