The Last Resort

by Douglas Rogers

  I made my way back to Brian’s truck with Sydney. I wanted to speak to Tsvangirai, but his bodyguards hurried him back to his car, and the crush of people made it hard to get close to him. His vehicle sped off down the road in a cloud of red dust.

  So much for meeting the leader of the opposition. At the same time I was relieved. I wanted to get out of there, get home. Who knew what dangers lurked as afternoon gave way to dusk? Then Brian came up to me.

  ‘He’s waiting for us at Birchenough Bridge.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Morgan. You can speak to him there.’

  ‘You arranged that?’

  ‘It’s safer. Let’s go before it gets dark.’

  It appeared I had a meeting with the man who would be president.

  We drove due south on a busier dirt road, which might have been a good thing, but it made me nervous again. A popular method of political assassination in Zimbabwe is to ram a military vehicle into a targeted car. Here I was in a carload of opposition party activists driving in the late afternoon on a remote rural road. We were obvious targets. But we passed no military vehicles, no police roadblocks. It was eerily quiet. Even that struck me as suspicious.

  By four o’clock we had arrived at a run-down hotel on the banks of the Save River in the shadow of the Birchenough Bridge. The bridge is a gleaming single-arched steel structure, 329 metres in length, that rises out of the arid veld like the silver fin of a giant sailfish. A stunning, futuristic masterpiece built in 1935 by Ralph Freeman, designer of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, it seems utterly out of place, almost a mirage, in this dusty, primeval landscape.

  The hotel was better suited to the surroundings: a sleepy, run-down property of airless, peeling chalets and bougainvillea-splashed bungalows, the only shade provided by the veranda of a bar and a baobab tree on a lawn. I remembered this bridge and this hotel from another time, and my mind drifted back to it. It was 1977, and we were waiting in our Chevrolet in a queue of cars in an armed convoy to drive to the border for our Christmas holiday in South Africa. The area was a hotbed of action, and the hotel was pockmarked with bullet holes and boarded up. My sisters and I sat and smiled at the Rhodesian troopies with their machine guns guarding the bridge, and counted the crocodiles basking on the banks of the Save River below.

  I snapped out of the reverie as we pulled up.

  Tsvangirai and his wife were sitting on garden chairs under the tree, outside the bar, relaxed as honeymooners at a desert resort. His cowboy hat was on the table. For a second I imagined we were in west Texas. His bodyguards drove off to find food in a nearby village, and I joined the Tsvangirais at the wrought-iron table. We spoke as the late-afternoon sun glinted off the steel arch of the bridge, and two vultures circled in the sky.

  Say what you like about Morgan Tsvangirai – the ruling party branded him a puppet, a stooge of whites and the West; the MDC Senate faction that had split from his party a year earlier denounced him as an autocrat; intellectuals and many liberals in South Africa called him uneducated and inarticulate – but there can be few braver people in the world.

  He was born in the southeastern province of Masvingo, not far from where we now sat, in 1952. The eldest of nine children of a poor bricklayer, he dropped out of high school to support the family, working for a while in the textile industry in Mutare, and then in the mines. He didn’t fight in the liberation war but joined ZANU-PF after independence, rising rapidly up the ranks of the mineworkers’ union. In 1989 he became secretary-general of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions. By 1997, however, he’d split with the party over its misrule and corruption, and he became an outspoken critic of Mugabe’s dictatorship. He was promptly hung out of his tenth-floor office window by state security agents. They would have killed him, but his receptionist walked in. He founded the Movement for Democratic Change in 1999 and had been looking over his shoulder ever since, surviving two more assassination attempts, several assaults and arrests and a highly public treason trial. When I spoke to him, his worst beating was yet to come – that 2007 prayer meeting assault.

  I asked him if he felt safe, and I glanced over my own shoulder as I did so. A white Mazda sedan pulled up, and three men in jeans and T-shirts stepped out. Tsvangirai had the round, compressed face of a chipmunk and talked in a deep, raspy voice that came out in a machine-gun staccato.

  ‘I do not travel anywhere in the country where I feel in danger from the people,’ he said. ‘I feel insecure by the state machinery. But they would not dare do anything to me. It is too risky. My security comes from the people.’

  The three men walked into the bar.

  What did he make of South African president Thabo Mbeki’s approach to Mugabe? Mbeki was the world’s designated point man on Zimbabwe and for six years had advocated a policy of ‘quiet diplomacy’ to resolve the crisis. Tsvangirai rolled his eyes. I chuckled. My father always did the same whenever anyone mentioned Thabo Mbeki.

  ‘Mbeki’s quiet diplomacy will never work. It is quiet approval. The biggest mistake on his part is to endorse all the flawed elections. The human cost of that is enormous. He gives Mugabe the opportunity to defy everyone.’

  I sipped a Coke as the sun dipped lower. The three men stood at the bar drinking beers. One turned his head to look our way, then turned back. Brian lounged by the truck, staring at his watch.

  It was often remarked that Zimbabweans were a docile people, that they lacked the courage to stand up to Mugabe, to force him from power. From the safety of my perch in New York, I often expressed this view myself. Knowing it to be true of me, I asked Tsvangirai whether he thought it true of the majority of Zimbabweans. He shook his head forcefully.

  ‘They are not docile. The people know the experience of the violence from the liberation war. It was not an easy experience, and they know this time it is not like we are liberating ourselves from a white oppressor. We are now fighting brother to brother, and the ruthlessness may even be much worse.’

  ‘Worse?’

  ‘Worse. I mean, look at the whole of Africa. We don’t want that. We can’t fight another independence war. We fought for that and won it. We are now fighting for democratic change so we can express ourselves freely again. But let me tell you – don’t underestimate these people. They are not docile. Not at all.’

  The three men moved outside now. They sat at a table across the lawn.

  I asked Tsvangirai about white farmers. I wondered where people like my parents, Brian James and other whites would fit in if he came to power. His reply would have pleased my dad.

  ‘White farmers are Zimbabweans. Some are third, fourth generation in this country. They know the climate, the soil, the agriculture. It’s not like you can come here and just start ploughing. It needs a culture, long-term understanding of the culture. White Zimbabweans had this.’

  He rolled his eyes again. ‘Now Mugabe has a policy to “look east”. To look to the Chinese to invest in us. What is a Chinese going to understand about Africa? It will take another hundred years! Mugabe’s policies are denial. The base of the Zimbabwean economy is Western investment for over one hundred years since colonialism. The fabric of this economy is investment.’

  The sun was setting, and it was beginning to get dark. I had one more question, and it was about what had struck me so much about the people at the rally. The support for the MDC has long been in the cities, among the urban working class. Rural Zimbabweans, especially the elderly, had always been Mugabe’s constituency. Yet there were so many old supporters at that day’s rally. Was this happening elsewhere? Was Tsvangirai starting to get rural support outside his Buhera constituency?

  He nodded confidently.

  ‘Let me tell you: Mugabe can never win an election in this country. Eighty percent of the people below the age of forty support us, and that is most of the population. But now what you are seeing is that the older people are overcoming their fear, too, influenced by their children in the cities. You can see that at our rallies – the drumming, the singing
, the choirs. ZANU-PF has lost that spirit. People are coerced to their rallies. Forced. Our rallies are alive. Everyone volunteers; no one is forced to come. Between the leadership and the people there is a symbiosis.’

  The sun had now set, and it was time to go. I stood up and shook Tsvangirai’s hand and thanked his wife for their time. The three men sipped their beers. They were facing our way. Tsvangirai paid them no mind. I told him I was going to Kariba in a few days’ time with my American wife.

  He smiled. ‘Watch out for elephants.’

  I glanced at the three men.

  ‘Watch out for yourself,’ I said.

  The heat of the day had rapidly given way to the cool of a winter evening. It was another starlit night. We piled into Brian’s truck again and drove north. Brian hit the accelerator. I looked in the rear-view mirror for the headlights of a Mazda sedan to appear. Brian drove faster still.

  ‘Are you worried they’re following us?’ I said.

  ‘Nah. I have to get home soon. Sheelagh hates it when I’m late.’

  In the back of the truck the activists sang Shona hymns. We sped on through the night.

  THIRTEEN

  The Helicopters

  THE TRIP UP the Commissar’s ancestral mountain was a disaster from start to finish, although not without its moments of dire comedy. I picked up the Commissar, Gracie Basket and Tweed Jacket at the bottom of the road in Dad’s bakkie.

  It was a blinding hot Thursday morning, not the best weather to hike up a hill, and the Commissar had on his long trench coat, his briefcase in his hand. He was dressed for a middle-management conference in midwinter Chicago.

  We exchanged pleasantries – ‘Morning, Dougie,’ he said – but he soon started on a political rant. We passed the fuel station at the foot of the pass where a scrawled sign read, No Petrol. No Diesel, as it had for about four years.

  ‘The British have diverted oil ships from Beira coming to Zimbabwe,’ he said. ‘They just hate the leadership of Zimbabwe. Britain wants to use its power to show the president and Zimbabweans that they cannot succeed without them. So they enforce sanctions on us.’

  I glazed over. There were no sanctions on Zimbabwe. There were travel bans on leaders of the regime. Companies that disinvested from Zimbabwe did so because it was unstable; the government had broken its own laws and dispossessed its own citizens. Who would invest in a place like that?

  But then the Commissar mentioned the United States, and I woke up.

  ‘You know, I like America. It is known for advocating democracy. This teaching is good. Democracy would want to see everyone on equal footing.’

  ‘In a way,’ I said.

  I reached for the tape recorder in my bag, keeping my eyes on the road.

  ‘But we have a problem with our opposition,’ he continued. ‘The kind of opposition leader we have, Tsvangirai, was once a trade unionist, but in a sweet change he supported the employers. If you were represented by such a person, he is a sellout. Our opposition leader is a stooge, a puppet, being used for his personal gain by the British. Not for the benefit of the people.’

  Gracie cackled in the back seat. She clearly agreed. I pressed what I thought was the Record button on the cassette player. By accident I must have pressed Play.

  A deep voice came on, an extra passenger in the car.

  Mbeki’s quiet diplomacy will never work. It is quiet approval. The biggest mistake on his part is to endorse all the flawed elections. The human cost of that is –

  It was Morgan Tsvangirai – the tape from the interview at the Birchenough Bridge hotel! The opposition leader was in the car! I panicked, tried to switch it off, dropped it at my feet, swerved in front of a bus and then swerved back again. Eventually I found the Stop button. The Commissar turned to give me a look. Then he faced the front again. He didn’t speak for quite a while.

  We motored down the other side of the pass, past the ancestral hill we were supposed to climb. It still gave me the creeps, that mountain, but I was excited to see the burial ground of his ancestors. I didn’t think much of the Commissar’s political views, but he had told a gripping story about the past. However, he needed to go to a pharmacy in town to buy some headache tablets before we resumed our journey.

  I parked outside a pharmacy on the main street while Gracie harrumphed in the back. It was all taking too long. ‘I have meetings,’ she squeaked. ‘Crops to harvest. I need to tend my fields. Farming takes time.’

  Tweed Jacket smiled happily next to her. He had nowhere else to go. As we waited, a young black man standing at the entrance of a shoe shop across the road saw me and waved. Then he bounded over to my side of the car.

  ‘Douglas,’ he said quietly, almost in a whisper. ‘The Red. How are you?’

  I had no idea who he was.

  ‘The Red?’

  ‘The Red. Thanks for coming to the rally. Did you enjoy?’

  Finally I placed him. He was one of the activists we had driven out to Buhera with. MDC supporters often said ‘the Red’ when it wasn’t safe to wave the open hand. I hadn’t recognised him without his white T-shirt. He wore the uniform of the shoe shop.

  I grinned nervously.

  ‘Ja, it was great, man. Good to see you again. See you later, hey.’

  I wanted him to go away. I didn’t want the Commissar to see him with me. I didn’t want him to see me with the Commissar, either.

  Who knew what role the Commissar had played in the area these past few years? Had he led assaults on MDC activists? He was well known enough to have been waved through the police roadblock we had passed on the other side of the pass.

  I glanced over at the pharmacy and was horrified to see the Commissar striding purposefully back to the car. I turned to tell the activist to disappear and was surprised to find him already gone, halfway down the street, swallowed up in the crowd on the pavement and the tired queue outside the CABS bank.

  Good man, I said to myself, good man.

  Gracie sat in the back and said nothing. I wondered if she knew what it was about.

  To get to the path up the Commissar’s hill we took a road through Fairbridge Park, another now forlorn and decrepit suburb of Mutare. It was the road we used to take to the drive-in on the western outskirts of town. Though the drive-in was long gone, bulldozed to make way for housing, childhood memories returned effortlessly to me. Mom and Dad would always put Helen and me in the boot of the Peugeot 404 so they only had to pay entrance for two kids. They would park, hook up the metal speaker box to the window, rest the FN rifle between the seats – we still used to go during the war – then open a carton of box wine and start drinking it out of plastic cups. Twenty minutes into the film, once they were sure the night manger wasn’t snooping around, they would let us out to join Stof and Zaan on the sticky leather back seat and eat the juicy hamburgers Mom made that always steamed up the windows. What movies we saw there! The child catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang gave me night-mares. The albino in Foul Play did, too. Mom and Dad loved Peter Sellers – we must have seen every Pink Panther movie three times. Woody Allen, too, although as a kid I never got the point of that funny-looking man. One of the first things I did when I moved to New York, though, was go see Woody play clarinet at the Café Carlyle on a Monday night; I wanted to tell him how he helped my parents laugh their way through a war. Best of all was Clint Eastwood. We all loved Clint – Dad and me especially – and as we watched him ride into view above the hazy fields of blonde grass on the horizon of our town, it was easy to imagine he was our sheriff, our outlaw, looking out for us.

  We arrived at a rusty park gate on the right side of the road. I pulled the car over in front of the gate. An entry fee was posted, but there was no one from the Parks Department around, and it looked as though a parks official hadn’t been here in years. We managed to pry open the rusty gate, but it was hard to see any pathway. The bush along the fence was thick as jungle.

  ‘I thought you said you came here all the time,’ I complained to the Commi
ssar.

  He was wrestling with a green vine as if it were a snake.

  ‘Many times, to pay respects to the ancestors,’ he muttered.

  ‘So where’s the path, then?’

  ‘It’s here. Somewhere.’

  Eventually we found a vague track under the branches, as faded as a distant memory. I looked at the granite boulders towering over us from the top of the hill.

  ‘How long will it take to get there?’ I asked.

  ‘One hour, maybe two,’ he said.

  I doubted it. You could tell the path became bush again a few metres ahead. It would take much longer than that. I gave out the bottles of water I had brought.

  ‘You going to climb the mountain with your briefcase?’ I asked the Commissar.

  ‘Not at all,’ he said.

  He handed it to Tweed Jacket. Then he took off his trench coat and gave that to him, too. The old man was weighed down, and for the first time he didn’t smile.

  ‘He may be the elder,’ the Commissar reminded me, ‘but in our culture the nephew is still the junior.’

  We set off, but we didn’t get far. The path petered out into a thicket of thorns twenty metres in. We tried to go under but got scratched and retreated. We tried to go around but ran into a high boulder. It stank of baboon shit. Flies swarmed us. We turned back to look for another way.

  And then a terrifying thing happened.