by Peter Godwin
He bids the assembly raise their glasses to absent friends and then, as the sun dips behind the green hills of Africa, a young farmer walks slowly out along the jetty over the golden lake, tartan bagpipes under his arm, and pipes them out. Pipes them away into their diaspora, to Britain, to Australia, to Canada, to America, and points beyond.
IT’S A RELIEF to get back to New York. The boys mob me, but Joanna seems uneasy. When I finally get them into bed, she tells me that the FBI has been looking for me. Two special agents from the counterterrorism task force want to talk to me urgently. She hands me their cards, embossed with gold shields. At first, I assume that it has to do with security clearance for my green card. But when the two special agents arrive the next morning, it quickly becomes apparent that they have something else on their minds — my contact with Dr. Stephen Hatfill, a bioterrorism expert who has become their main “person of interest” in the anthrax attacks. They have searched his apartment in Maryland and drained a nearby lake looking for anthrax-handling equipment.
My interest in Hatfill was originally piqued when I read that he studied medicine in Zimbabwe and subsequently practiced in South Africa. I have been talking with him for months now, trying to negotiate an interview — so far he has not talked publicly at all. After hours of questioning by the FBI special agents, during which it becomes apparent that they know the content of my e-mails, phone calls, and letters, we finally close in on the nub of their suspicions: an incorrect date on one communication from Hatfill, which makes it look as though I had preknowledge of the anthrax attacks; and the fact that I was teaching at Princeton at the time that one of the anthrax letters was mailed — from a Princeton mailbox.
Even then, the FBI remains interested in me, and I get the distinct impression they want me to get close to Hatfill, to see what I can learn. And I worry that if I refuse, my green card will never come through.
I tell my parents none of this. Instead, I keep up my regular calls in which they always assure me that all is well, when everything I read describes Zimbabwe collapsing in a quickening downward spiral.
TWO MONTHS AFTER the Tsatsi farmers’ farewell, there is yet another full eclipse of the sun there. Two total eclipses within less than two years. This is very rare — no one can recall such a thing, even in the stories handed down through the generations. People are saying that the celestial crocodile must be truly furious to be back so soon, threatening us again with perpetual darkness. The approach of the second eclipse has a chilling effect.
Even my mother, now finally retired, becomes uneasy. Despite her medical training, she remains at heart a superstitious woman. She drops her bright assurances, and for the first time she admits that her back pain is now unbearable. It has been tracked to her hip, which is collapsing with avascular necrosis and needs to be replaced.
Although there are a couple of surgeons still performing the procedure there, she says, artificial hip joints are difficult to get in Zimbabwe. So I start looking into how I can buy one for her in America. It proves tricky. The socket and cups come in a confusing array of materials: titanium, ceramic, cobalt-chrome alloys, zirconium, polyethylene. I am leaning toward the metal ones, which seem more durable, and are more expensive. But then I read that some of them exude trace metals into the blood, and worse, that the leading manufacturer has withdrawn one of its hips because of a glitch in its construction. Surgeons around the country have had to saw it out of nearly eighteen thousand people and replace it. A class action is pending. It hasn’t been a stroll for the ceramic kind either. One model has been recalled after it began disintegrating. Without any notice, apparently, it is prone to give way with a loud pop.
I worry about how I will get the artificial hip to my mother. If I try to import it officially, I will almost certainly get bogged down in Zimbabwe’s baksheesh bureaucracy. Or it may simply go missing en route. If I take it in my carry-on luggage, it will probably get nixed by security. It looks like an offensive weapon of some sort; a high-tech knobkerrie, a hockey stick with a metal hemisphere bonded onto the blade. Finally, to my relief, Mum reports that her surgeon has secured one himself. She is all set.
Sixteen
May 2003
I BUCKLE MYSELF into the seat of the South African Airways flight from JFK, and the screen lights up with the physical reality of my separation from Africa. Distance to destination: 7,969 miles. And then I still have to connect from Johannesburg up to Harare. After several hours, I give up trying to contort myself into sleep and switch on the seat-back TV screen to the progress map. The blinking red plane is flying directly into the armpit of West Africa, the infamously fever-ridden Bight of Benin, which I always used to think deserved to be called the Blight of Benin. English sailors evidently agreed — they used to sing:
Beware, beware the Bight of Benin
Twenty come out of a hundred go in.
Our flight path takes us down a continent of catastrophe. Many of the conflicts thirty thousand feet below I have covered in my time as a foreign correspondent. It unfolds like a geography of doom. Sierra Leone, where the hacking off of limbs was standard practice; Liberia, where peacekeeping Bangladeshis in blue helmets were struggling to separate teenage gunmen wearing women’s clothing; Ivory Coast, divided between bitter ethnic rivals; Congo, where civil war still raged in a nation that has ceased to be and probably never was; Sudan, where a civil war still rages and triggers frequent spasms of famine; Somalia, which has no government at all now, a country that deserves the description anarchic.
And of course, everywhere, AIDS.
Africa seldom makes it into the American media; even the venerable New York Times mostly smuggles in its Africa coverage as soft features on slow news days, or six-line bulletins in the news-in-brief section. Yet every single day, newspaper headlines can legitimately announce: “Another Five Thousand Africans Die of AIDS.” Nearly two Twin Towers’ worth of humans every day, dying quiet deaths, unobserved and unclamored.
THE PLANE DESCENDS over Zimbabwe to a wintry dawn. Plumes of mist trail with the prevailing breeze from rivers and dams below, ghostly ribbons garlanding a bleak khaki landscape. The fields of Mashonaland stand reproachfully uncultivated. Large-scale farming here is all but at an end.
The new airport is still paint fumed and contractor fresh. It has royal blue wall-to-wall carpets and large expanses of plate glass. It feels expensive. It is. The airport is one of the biggest examples of the corruption now rampant here. A country that has not been particularly dishonest in the past is now a den of deceit. Leo Mugabe, the president’s nephew, brokered this particular contract. His proposal for the new airport was awarded over five competing bids (as stipulated by law), even though it was the most expensive one, it came in after the bid deadline, and it didn’t meet the requirements. None of these are obstacles to Leo, the First Nephew.
You can bet Rustic Realist has something to say on the matter. The selling point of the new airport plan, my father explains, was its patriotic control tower, which was to have been a stylized replica of the acropolis at Great Zimbabwe. It was only after the bid was awarded that anyone bothered to run it by the international civil aviation regulators, only to discover that such an edifice ran foul of safety rules, and if built no mainstream airlines would land there. So it was hurriedly modified and now resembles a vast white artichoke. It stands in the sunshine, glittering in all its pompous redundancy, completed just in time for the total collapse of tourism.
Most airlines have now canceled their flights to Harare, and Air Zimbabwe, the national airline, is increasingly unreliable. Behind the new terminal stands one of its Boeing 737s, mysteriously damaged — one of only five planes in its fleet. The airline is struggling to retain technicians and find spare parts to keep the fleet airborne. The fact that the president commandeers a plane whenever he needs it to attend an international function or to take his new wife, Grace, on a shopping trip also makes Air Zimbabwe’s schedule extremely tentative. Three journalists who have pointed this out in pri
nt have been arrested and charged under the law that makes it a crime, punishable by two years in jail, to bring the president into “ridicule or disrepute.”
THOUGH IT IS RUSH HOUR in Harare, there is little traffic. At every fuel station along the way, long lines of driverless cars have formed, waiting for the next delivery. There has been no fuel here for weeks.
My promised vehicle, borrowed from Murelle, a friend of Georgina’s, has been in an accident, so she offers me a substitute: a tiny, ancient, pimento red pickup that has the word CHAMP emblazoned on its sides in sloped letters, as if they have been thrown backward by the immense speed of the vehicle. It has no immense speed; I can coax its little engine up to about sixty miles per hour. Champ’s interior is so small that my knees are up near my chin, and my head brushes the roof. Every bump and pothole threatens to break my neck.
I have convinced myself that about the only compensation for the pimento Champ (which my father immediately christens the Noddy car) is that it is unlikely to be carjacked. But Robin Watson soon disabuses me. The Nissan Champ, old as it is, and tiny, has a reputation for great reliability and convenience, while offering enviably low fuel consumption. It stands high on the hijack desirability list, and I am constantly fending off suitors who want to purchase it.
At home, I find that Mum has retreated to her bed permanently, such is her pain. Dad has rigged up a metal gantry over her bed, and from it hangs a “monkey chain” with a handle that dangles over her head. Whenever she wants to sit, she hauls herself up on this contraption. She has hung other useful things from it too, a shortwave radio and an electric bell she buzzes if she needs something. Adston comes in for just a few hours a day to vacuum and do laundry, so it’s been Dad responding to her buzzing, Dad doing all the fetching and carrying and cooking and after-hours gate opening and fuel queuing and shopping, even though he gets very easily exhausted.
Although he has been responding well to new drugs, and is, my mother says, much better than he has been, my father has shrunk, and he now walks permanently stooped at an acute angle, the result of his own back problems, which cannot be operated on because his heart is not strong enough to withstand major surgery. His legs, I notice, are dappled with a livid trellis of veins.
Adston knocks gently at the outside door to say that he is going now.
“Hello, Aston.” I have only met him once before, just for a few minutes, when I initially interviewed him.
“Hello, sir.” He is tall and strong. He looks down, a little embarrassed. “Adston,” he says. “My name is Adston, not Aston.”
“I’m so sorry,” I say. “I heard my parents calling you Aston.”
“Yes,” he agrees. “That is what they call me. I think they didn’t hear properly at first. And afterward . . . I never corrected them. But my name is Adston.”
“I will tell them to use your real name. I’m sorry for our mistake.”
“It is no problem.” He hesitates. “Actually, Adston is not my real name either. It was the name given to me by the old lady I worked for before. My birth name, my African name, is Gomo.”
“Gomo? ‘Hill’?”
“Yes, because my mother walked up a hill, and then grew tired and went into labor and I was born.”
“Why didn’t he tell us?” says Dad when I explain the misunderstanding. My mother is mortified.
I offer to make them lunch, but I find that the refrigerator is nearly empty, just like the one in the Chave Chimurenga commercial on ZTV. It contains half a lemon, hard and dry with age, and little portions of leftovers and scraps: two hard-boiled eggs on a saucer, a few shavings of stiff ham — Dad buys only six thin slices at a time now — and bread crusts and cheese rind saved for the dogs. My mother has also stored a small bag of cornmeal in there, which I toss out as it is mildewed and inedible.
I look around in the pantry for something to eat and find a couple of avocados that are almost ripe and a tin of pilchards, but no bread or rice. Mum’s friend Linnea is visiting and she suggests I mix the two. So I mash up the avocados and mix them with the pilchards. The result is an unappetizing olive green mush in which I can identify the tiny spines of the fish among the hard nodules of underripe avocado. I add a little salt and pepper and a squeeze from the elderly half lemon.
Then I taste it.
Immediately my eyes tear up, my lips burn, my nose leaks. I grab the can and inspect it. Underneath the word pilchards is written, in faded red script, chakalaka. Next to it is a tiny picture of a red chili pepper with little comic-book lines of heat radiating from it.
“It’s a bit spicy,” I warn Mum and Linnea before they dig in, but they gamely proceed. And though they are soon damp eyed and gulping at their water glasses, I am amazed to see they seem to quite like it.
Later that afternoon, though, Mum buzzes me to her bedroom.
“I’m feeling a bit queasy,” she complains, and she hoists herself up on her overhead monkey chain. “I think you’re going to have to help me to the loo. But there’s no water at present.”
“So what’s the toilet protocol?” I ask as I maneuver her out of bed.
“Well, every time you need to go to the loo, you have to go out to the swimming pool and fill a bucket with water and pour it into the cistern.”
When I go out to the garden, there is a white egret standing on the step of the swimming pool peering intently into the green water to see if the fish there are big enough to bother with yet. It flaps away when I appear, and I get busy clearing a patch of the scum and weeds from the surface and filling my plastic bucket.
“It’s the pilchards chakalaka,” declares my mother. “They’re the culprit. I’m going to be struck down by a major tummy upset just as I set off for surgery, and I’ll be shamed in front of all the hospital staff, and they all know me. How humiliating!”
I scoop the considerable remnants of the pilchards chakalaka into the trash and scrub the fridge clean. Then, as evening draws in, I am looking around for something for their supper when the house is suddenly plunged into darkness.
“Oh, I meant to tell you,” my mother calls from her bedroom. “There’s a brownout too.” Electricity is intermittent because the state-owned national power utility rations it around the different parts of town. It is another reason why my parents stopped buying perishables in larger amounts; the refrigerator keeps cutting out.
AROUND US, the country seems to be reaching a breaking point. The opposition has declared the following week to be a week of strikes and protests culminating in a march on the State House. They are calling it “the Final Push” and have been running full-page ads in the independent press announcing the action.
“Any thought of the dictator giving up power quietly is sheer delusion,” declares one. “The real African drama . . . begins to unfold in a few days’ time, sadly, in our streets.” Other ads appeal to “our brothers and sisters in the armed forces. . . . Be part of the solution and not part of the problem.”
As I drive along, I notice freshly stenciled signs on walls and curbs — one huge word: ZVAKWANA! In Shona it means, “It’s Enough!”
The government is calling the Final Push “a British-sponsored plan to subvert a democratically elected government,” which is “tantamount to a coup” and will be put down ruthlessly. ZTV, the mouthpiece of Mugabe’s ruling party, announces that “Security agents have been put on high alert” and all police leave canceled. A ZANU-PF spokesman appears to relish the coming confrontation: “The time has come for a showdown with the MDC,” he says. “Their activities can no longer be tolerated.” Businesses that heed the opposition call to close their doors for the week are also threatened. “They close the shop on Monday,” promises a senior minister, “they close the shop for good.”
A confrontation is imminent. It is not a good week to be undergoing major surgery.
THE DAY BEFORE my mother goes into the hospital, I try to stock up with essentials before the protest begins. The first thing I need is cash. ATMs have long since run out in t
he panic so my father has written me a personal check for the princely sum of Z$100,000, which, at the local black-market rate of Z$2,000 to US$1 (which even government ministries, not to mention the British High Commission, openly use — hell, it’s even printed daily in the paper), is actually worth US$50.
The check can be cashed only at the bank branch where my parents have their account — in Sam Levy’s Village, an open-air shopping center on the northern edge of the city. I join a long line of customers also trying to get emergency cash before the protest shuts everything down. When I finally reach the bank teller, she says they have long since run out of Z$500 notes, the largest Zimbabwean bills, worth about twenty-five U.S. cents. She gives me the money in Z$100 bills, each worth five cents, counting out ten thousand of these bills in bricks of notes, each bound with an elastic band. I stuff them into my briefcase, and there are still more, so someone in the line gives me a plastic shopping bag and I stuff that too. It isn’t quite the wheelbarrows of the Weimar Republic, but it’s getting there.
As I’m leaving, I hear the teller apologize to the line that she has run out of money, and she puts up her closed sign. The line starts to mutiny, and the bank manager comes over from the back to see what the trouble is.
“We have no cash left in the entire bank,” the manager confirms. “Or indeed in any of our other branches. We have no money left at all. This man,” he says, as I pack the last of my money bricks, “has got the last of our cash.” Everyone looks crossly at me, and I slink out of the bank.
