The Last Resort

by Douglas Rogers

  He had a beautiful way of speaking. Words flowed like water. I now recalled my dad telling me about this John. He’d been hired as a gardener many years ago but spoke such good English that my dad had trained him to be the tour guide. ‘He doesn’t know an antelope from an elephant, but he speaks very well, and the fact that he’s black means foreign tourists think he knows what he’s talking about,’ Dad had told me.

  I chuckled as I remembered the story.

  ‘Can I buy you a beer, John Orange?’ I asked.

  ‘I do not drink beer, Douglas. I am Apostolic.’

  I should have known. The Apostolic Church had several charismatic sects in Zimbabwe, and their members – the men known for their shaved heads and long beards – didn’t drink. More beer for everyone else.

  ‘What about you, Mr Muranda?’

  The old man grinned that dopey yellow grin and shook his head.

  ‘If I am drinking, your mummy getting very cross,’ he said.

  ‘My mother’s not around, John.’

  He shook his head again. ‘Very cross.’

  After a while he found the station he was looking for and his face lit up, as did the other John’s. They huddled round, listening intently through the static. They told me it was a talk radio station called SW Radio Africa, and it broadcast from London because its staff were not allowed to operate freely in Zimbabwe. I felt embarrassed. I lived in London, but I’d never heard of it. A phone-in show was on. Callers from Zimbabwe were telling listeners how the militia and war veterans were terrorising their villages. They spoke in whispers, terrified of being heard. The two Johns huddled closer. One caller wasn’t afraid. He said he was a commercial farmer who had lost his land in the invasions. ‘There is no way Mugabe can win this election,’ he bellowed. ‘I swear, if he does, I will run through the streets of Harare naked!’ I was surprised. Not because of his threat to streak through the capital, but because he wasn’t a white farmer but a black one. Black farmers who supported the opposition party were losing their lands, too.

  I sat with them awhile longer, paid for my beers, and then walked back to the house, taking the narrow path through the bush on the eastern edge of the camp and over a wooden footbridge that spanned the creek that ran down the saddle of the hills.

  I’d just reached the front gate when an enormous mechanical roar rolled in from the hills, scattering the crows from the tops of the baobabs and shaking the branches of the fig tree. I looked up and saw a helicopter, lithe and green as a snake, skimming low over the roof of the house and racing west down the valley, toward Harare, following the course of the road.

  I ran up and saw Mom standing with Philip Pangara on the front lawn, their eyes wide as saucers, staring after it.

  ‘Jeez, that was bloody low. Who the hell was that?’

  Philip was grinning madly. He had a mouthful of yellow teeth that speared off dangerously in all directions when he smiled, which was most of the time.

  ‘That was the president,’ he said.

  ‘Mugabe?’

  ‘Mugabe,’ he nodded. ‘Today there was ZANU-PF rally in Mutare.’

  My mother and I looked at each other nervously.

  ‘I told you they were watching us,’ she smiled. ‘I just didn’t know they were that close.’

  THREE

  Where Is Your Identity?

  SATURDAY, THE FIRST day of the election, arrived with all the excitement of a big match.

  The MDC’s fear was that the election would be stolen, the ballot boxes stuffed with illegal votes at remote rural polling booths, if the MDC could not get their polling agents out to monitor them. MDC volunteers like my father – those with motorcars and cellphones – would drive around, checking in with polling agents and phoning in any signs of irregularities.

  I drove to Mutare with Dad early that morning to attend a meeting where he would get instructions on the areas he was to check up on. The meeting was at a local sports club.

  Mom stayed at the house. ‘Good luck,’ she said, waving to us from the back door, as if we were going on a fishing trip.

  The police had set up roadblocks across the country to harass and intimidate opposition supporters, and the first checkpoint loomed five minutes after we left home, at the foot of Christmas Pass, the dramatic mountain road that traverses the northern barrier range before Mutare. There had been a roadblock here for as long as I could remember: four policemen usually manned it, a chatty, bored bunch, pestering drivers for licences or IDs, and occasionally dismantling the heaped luggage on the roof of a bus to check for smuggled contraband.

  It had never held any threat for me before, but now it seemed to gleam with menace. I wanted to turn round and drive back to the house, where Mom would be pacing up and down the veranda, smoking. I wanted to be back in London with Grace. I didn’t want to be here. But I wasn’t driving. My father, grim-faced, pressed on until we fell into line behind a dozen cars. Soon it was our turn. A surly plainclothesman with a Kalashnikov over his shoulder – an officer from the Central Intelligence Organisation – came to my father’s window and asked for his ID.

  Dad gave it to him, staring straight ahead as he did so. I knew that once my father would have chatted amiably with this man, made small talk. Now he didn’t look at him, greet him, acknowledge him, say a word to him. He stared straight ahead, silent, seething.

  From the passenger seat I did my best to stay friendly. I had with me, under the seat, my notebook and a tape recorder, and I didn’t want the police to search the car and find them. They would know I was a journalist.

  ‘Kanjani, comrade,’ I said. ‘How are things? Today’s a big day, my friend.’

  My father gave me a withering look from the driver’s seat.

  The officer came to my side of the car now, holding his weapon in his hand like a club.

  ‘You. Where is your identity?’

  I no longer had a Zimbabwean ID. All I had was the British passport. I handed it to the officer and felt a hole burn in the back of my head: it seemed a betrayal of my father right then, right in front of him, to produce this foreign document, my ticket out of there. I had an escape route, a safe haven. What did he and my mother have? Local passports. They were stuck here.

  The officer paged through the document with a lot more concern than the immigration official had shown at the airport a few days earlier. It suddenly occurred to me that it might not be any safer here on a British passport. The president often seemed to be campaigning more against Tony Blair and the British government than against Tsvangirai and the MDC. Mugabe was obsessed with the former colonial power; he believed the British were the power behind the MDC and white farmers. My heart pounded against my shirt. Was the officer going to ask me to step outside? Search the car?

  Suddenly there was a commotion behind us. I looked in the rearview mirror.

  A goat had escaped from the back of a truck a few cars away, and three male passengers had leapt out of the vehicle and were chasing it, shouting wildly, as it ran toward a stand of trees. They hauled it in while it was still in the long grass and carried it kicking and bleating back to the vehicle.

  The officer, briefly distracted, returned my passport and waved us through.

  We drove on in silence for a while, but I could tell my father was annoyed.

  Then he turned to me and said: ‘Douglas, why are you polite to these people? The police in this country are criminals. They stand by while these thugs beat people, burn down farms, run the country into the ground. If our place was invaded, they would never help us. They would stand by or join in. I refuse to be civil to them.’

  I was taken aback.

  ‘Come on, Dad, it’s best not to annoy them, either. You need to stay out of trouble, keep your head down.’ I was afraid he would end up in a Zimbabwean jail.

  ‘What do you mean, stay out of trouble? We are in trouble! We’re in deep shit here, and these are the fucking people who are causing it. I refuse to treat them with any civility.’

 
There was no point arguing with him. My father appeared to believe in his right to be there as much as the black man with the gun. For him it was inalienable, almost tangible. For me it was something to question.

  Soon we crested the pass, and there it lay below us: Mutare, a blanket of tree-lined streets set in the green bed of a valley, with giant cloud-reaching peaks that towered behind. Perhaps the stress of the roadblock and my father’s angry mood had heightened my senses, for I was surprised now by how the sight of my former hometown, the city where I was born in 1968, took my breath away, as if I was seeing it for the first time.

  Mutare is easily the most beautiful city in Zimbabwe, although to call it a city – and it is the country’s third largest – is not quite right, for it’s more a state of mind: quiet, secluded, hidden in its valley. It is a place, my mother informed my father when they first moved here in 1961, ‘for newlyweds and nearly deads.’

  We motored down the pass, hugging the edge of the cliffs. A pair of hawks surfed the thermals above us. We drove past Chancellor, my old junior school, its lawns now overgrown, and turned onto the main street, Herbert Chitepo Road, where my father had had his legal practice for thirty years. The street unveiled its first pothole opposite the faded red umbrellas of the Dairy Den ice cream parlour. The central square, where once a year Luna Park and its Big Wheel would come to town, and to which Mom and Dad would drive my sisters and me for a night of roller-coaster rides and cotton candy, was now a shambling open-air market of makeshift canvas stalls. Mutare reminded me of my parents’ house: still beautiful, but fraying at the edges, coated in a film of dust. Nearing the Mozambique customs post, we turned right.

  ‘Remember this?’ said Dad.

  It was the Mutare Sports Club, the cricket ground where I had played so many games up until my early twenties. I hadn’t seen it in twelve years. I had been a good player back then. My dad had coached me from the age of five, and built me a cricket net on the grape farm, where I spent every school holiday hitting balls thrown at me for a dollar an hour by the teenage son of one of the farmworkers. When I finished boarding school in 1986, I played semi-professionally for two summers in England. One of those summers I flew over with a friend who was a good left-handed batsman and wicketkeeper, although, in truth, I considered myself much better than him. But what do I know? His name was Andy Flower, and by the end of the 1990s he was rated the best batsman in the world. It had got a little annoying on a recent travel writing assignment I did in India when, on telling the Indians I met that I came from Zimbabwe, all they could do was jump up and down and shout excitedly: ‘Andy Flower! Andy Flower!’

  We parked by the clubhouse. I remembered how nervous I used to be arriving here on the morning of a big game; I was nervous now for a different reason. There were about thirty MDC volunteers, several white farmers and some local businessmen, white and black. Dad got his instructions. I ran into the clubhouse before we left. I needed a whisky to calm my nerves, but the bar wasn’t open yet. An old grey-haired white man, scarlet-faced, still drunk from the previous night’s session, was already inside, waiting his turn at his stool. I vaguely recognised him from my cricket-playing days.

  ‘Have you been sick?’ he asked me.

  ‘No, why?’

  ‘I haven’t seen you for a while.’

  ‘I haven’t been here for twelve years.’

  ‘Oh. That must be it, then.’

  We spent the morning driving around Sakubva, a black township my father had supplied most of the liquor licences to in his legal days, and where I once coached cricket at a local high school. And there we came across an incredible sight: outside a polling station was a queue of voters a kilometre long. Some of them must have been waiting in line since sunrise. The MDC had overwhelming support in urban areas like this, where a young, educated black population had watched jobs disappear and prices rise, yet it was still inspiring to see that despite the intimidation they were turning out to vote.

  It was the same scene in Dangamvura, a township eight kilometres south. It reminded me instantly of South Africa in 1994. The only serious news reporting I have ever done was in South Africa, where I worked on a city newspaper and at a radio station in Johannesburg, and reported on the first democratic elections in 1994. Millions of black South Africans lined up to vote for the first time. This had a similar feeling, the same sense of pentup euphoria, as if we were on the verge of something momentous.

  I walked down a dusty road past the school and was summoned into an empty beer hall by the tavern owner, a burly black man who wanted to shake my hand and show me his bar.

  ‘The Red,’ he said excitedly under his breath, ‘the Red.’

  ‘What’s the Red?’

  ‘MDC,’ he whispered, and then he showed me his membership card. Red is the MDC colour.

  ‘Are you going to win?’ I asked.

  ‘Of course! Now is the time!’

  He sounded as optimistic as my father.

  In the afternoon we drove to a rural area back over the pass, not far from my parents’ home. There were no queues here – there seemed to be a lot more polling stations – but all was quiet. We visited several of them, Dad bounding in confidently to ask the agents how things were going. They seemed confident, pleased. I made sure to stand back. I didn’t want to be noticed. At around 5 pm Dad drove me home; I needed to file my story for the Sunday Times in London. Dad was joining another white farmer to go and check on an area called the Honde Valley, up in the mountains much farther to the north.

  He dropped me off and raced away, so determined to be doing his bit.

  I found my mother calmly sipping tea on the lawn. ‘Hello, my boy. How’s it going?’ she asked.

  I couldn’t contain my excitement. ‘It’s incredible. There are so many voters. It reminds me of South Africa in ninety-four.’

  ‘Well, don’t get too excited,’ she counselled.

  ‘Really, it’s amazing how many people are turning out.’

  ‘Why do you think the lines are so long?’ she asked.

  ‘Because so many people are voting.’

  ‘No, darling. It’s because the government has cut the number of polling stations in the cities.’

  We had heard this would happen. The government was trying to stop the urban vote. But what difference would it make? There were two days to vote, and people were determined.

  My mother shook her head.

  ‘You are as naive as your father. In Harare the lines are much longer. They can wait for days and days – they will never let them vote.’

  I turned on the television and saw that she was right. The queues in Harare were extraordinary, but the lines weren’t moving. The opposition was literally being stopped from voting in the areas where they had overwhelming support.

  ‘Just watch,’ said my mother. ‘They know exactly what they’re doing.’

  And slowly the mood changed. The government machine swung into action as my mother believed it would: methodical, ruthless and, in its way, quite brilliant.

  My father called just before I filed my article. He was up in the Honde Valley. The police had arrested dozens of polling agents as well as two white farmer volunteers and their wives, one an American from Texas. A third farmer had been severely beaten and was in jail.

  I made a call to a civic rights group. The man I spoke to was in a rage.

  ‘They are arresting hundreds across the country! Hundreds of agents!’

  I phoned a senior MDC official named Tendai Biti. Someone had given me his number but I knew little about him then, although later he would become a household name in the opposition, along with Morgan Tsvangirai.

  ‘They are not allowing us to vote,’ he shouted down the line. ‘They are trying to steal this election.’

  It was apparent by now that two days would not be enough for all the people in Harare still waiting to vote. The number of polling stations in the cities had been halved from previous elections, even though the urban population had virtually
doubled since the farm invasions.

  By 9 pm there was no more news from my father. Mom was getting nervous.

  ‘I’m sure he’s all right,’ she said, smoking furiously.

  Another hour passed. Mom and I drank brandy and smoked her Kingsgates.

  Finally, just before midnight, his car lights appeared in the driveway and the familiar sound of his diesel engine came up the hill. I saw my mother exhale with relief.

  He walked in, exhausted, his grey hair a mess. Now he did look his age, very much 66. He filled a mug with Coke and gulped it in one go while Mom made him a sandwich.

  He said he had spent the past four hours at a police station trying to secure the release of the polling agents and the white farmers and their wives, but they were in jail for the night. Then he turned on the television to find out what had happened elsewhere. It was a big mistake. It appeared that every news station in the world was running a greatest-hits version of Mugabe’s speeches.

  Mugabe, 78 at that time, was a short, wiry man with outsized glasses that gave him an almost comic, froglike look. But he was an impressive orator, and when he spoke he waved a bony fist – the symbol of the ruling party – defiantly in the air, which induced paroxysms of joy in his legions of supporters. And it would be churlish to deny he had millions of them. Born in rural Zvimba, east of Harare (then Salisbury), in 1924, the son of a carpenter, he was educated at the elite black Roman Catholic mission school, Kutama, and trained as a schoolteacher before forging an interest in Marxism and nationalist politics at the University of Fort Hare in the 1950s. In 1963 he helped form the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU), and was the party’s secretary general in 1964 when he was arrested by the Rhodesians for ‘subversive speech.’ He spent the next eleven years in jail. Studious, bookish, socially aloof, he attained three university degrees in prison. On his release in 1975 he crossed the border to Mozambique to join the liberation struggle, and by the end of the war in late 1979 he was the outright leader of ZANU, a hero to millions in Zimbabwe and across the continent. In his first two decades in power Mugabe did indeed do many great things, helping turn Zimbabwe into one of the most literate and productive nations in Africa. But now, three decades on, that legacy was crumbling and he was lashing out at those he claimed were to blame – chiefly Britain, whites and their ‘puppets’ in the MDC.