The Last Resort

by Douglas Rogers

  He suddenly leapt off the chair in the dark room and began firing an imaginary machine gun at the thatch. He was grinning, his eyes like coals.

  ‘We fought like lions, Rogers junior! But they were many! Helicopters shooting, jets bombing, explosions! Bodies were flying everywhere! So many people dying in front of me. I caught a bullet in my leg, shrapnel in my arm here. See, I have fragments.’ He lifted his khaki trousers to show me a deep purple scar on his shin, and another on his arm, below the shoulder. ‘They attacked for three days. The next day they dropped shells. I found shelter in the bush. I was bleeding. Many of my comrades were killed that time. You want to know about whoe, Rogers junior? This was whoe!’

  The soldier sat down again, breathing heavily, and took a sip from a glass of water Muranda had left on the table. I didn’t know what to say. Finally I told him that I remembered the helicopters, too, although from a slightly different vantage point: that I was a nine-year-old boy and had watched them fly right past our farmhouse one evening, returning from that same attack. I didn’t tell him I’d cheered them on, that I was leaping up and down on our lawn at the exact time he was bleeding in a bush in Mozambique. It didn’t seem appropriate, particularly since I hoped he was now helping us.

  He returned to Rhodesia in 1978, a sixteen-year-old guerrilla, fighting under the nom de guerre Aaron Baya Mabhunu – Aaron Kill the White People. He was posted to this valley and became a detachment commander in 1979, leading seventy-two guerrillas, sending information about the state of the war back to the Top Man in Mozambique. He had been tied to the Top Man ever since.

  When the war ended in 1980 he was eighteen years old. He joined a personal security team for the president, and on 18 April 1980, was at the stadium in Harare when Zimbabwe celebrated its independence from Britain. Bob Marley and the Wailers performed at the ceremony.

  ‘I will never forget that day, Rogers junior. It was huge! I was thirteen when I went to war – now I was eighteen. We had achieved! Can you believe it?’

  We spoke for another hour as the rain lashed down. I asked him about the mortar attacks on Umtali and told him how, as kids, my friend Michael and I would collect shrapnel in town. I told him how jealous I was in 1978 when the brother of a school friend found the tail of a mortar bomb with Chinese writing on it.

  The soldier’s eyes lit up again.

  ‘Don’t tell me, Rogers junior! I was commanding! I was sending those bombs on the top of that hill by the aerial: ‘Two shells down. Up!’ We were only ten because we were afraid of the helicopters. We came over three days through Imbeza Valley near La Rochelle. In Imbeza we used the forest fields, hiding there, eating mushrooms without salts. We would disassemble our weapons and carry them in sacks, and then assemble them at the GP.’

  ‘What’s the GP?’

  ‘Ground point, Rogers junior, ground point.’

  I couldn’t believe what he was telling me. He had led the attack on our town, the one when the Rhodesian artillery almost shelled our house. Then he laughed.

  ‘I am happy you two chickens picked up that shell I fired.’

  I asked him if he had ever been involved in the attack on another farm one bright afternoon in 1979, right next to a grape farm near the Methodist mission in Old Mutare, and he grinned again.

  ‘You are talking of Mr Neil Barry? No, that was my comrade, Garikayi. I was not there. But let me be certain: my detachment laid a land mine for Mr de Klerk. They planted a land mine there on his farm and he came and stamped on it in his vehicle. But he survived. I told Mr de Klerk this when I helped him recover his cattle, and he was laughing. He has very luck, that old man, Mr de Klerk. Very luck.’

  So this was one of the ‘interesting’ stories Oom Piet had said he’d heard from the soldier about the war. I pictured the two of them laughing in Piet’s car about how his vehicle had once been blown sky-high by one of the soldier’s mines, and I thought of Mom’s words to me: There are lots of stories out here, lots of stories. She didn’t know how right she was.

  Finally the rain subsided, the thunder became a dying rumble. I had to go. I said I would give him a ride to the bus the following morning, but as I got up to leave he told me something that sent a sudden electric surge down my spine, like a delayed shock from the lightning outside.

  ‘Rogers junior,’ he said, ‘tonight we have spoken of whoe. Let me be certain with you. There are three political parties in this country, but only one party has a history. Only one party went to whoe: ZANU-PF. How can you feel if some puppet party comes that has no history of whoe and wants to rule? How can you feel? We fought for this country, we cannot just give it.’

  It was something I often lost sight of. When one saw the failure of the regime, the corruption and cruelty of its leaders, it was easy to believe that their constant invocation of the liberation war was an act – a diversion from the fact that they had lost control and simply wanted power for the sake of it; for money, for riches, for protection from the crimes they had committed. But listening to Walter that evening, I realised it was no act at all. They were believers. To them, having fought in the war gave them rights. They had suffered, sacrificed, seen comrades killed; they had survived the bullets and bombs, and unleashed their share of the same in fighting back. But in winning the war and ending white rule, they had earned a privilege that those who never fought – Morgan Tsvangirai, for example – could never have: the right to rule. The war might have ended twenty-seven years before, but to men such as Walter it was still very much alive. And I realised right then that there could be no easy solution. The collapse of the nation was inevitable, an unstoppable force, but the ruling party was also an immovable object. There would one day come a terrible reckoning, that much I now knew.

  The following morning I drove the soldier to a bus stop thirty-two kilometres west, and he pointed out the domed granite hills that rose out of the shimmering grassy fields around us. It was in those hills, he said, that he had fought the war.

  ‘Rogers junior,’ he said wistfully, his eyes glazed, as if he were talking about some old love, ‘when I drive through this terrain, all I can think of is whoe. Next time you come I want to take you to the places I fought. I will tell you all the people I killed: the white farmers; the Rhodesian soldiers. I want to tell you our tactics. How I prepared my men for battle. Perhaps, when you return, we can even write a book together. My story. I can take you everywhere.’

  It was happening again: everyone wanted their story told. I wondered whether it was something mystical in those eastern mountains that made storytellers of us all. I was intrigued, too. It sounded like a business proposal. I had one of my own, more open-ended.

  ‘That’s a great idea, Walter,’ I said, ‘but there’s only one problem. What if my parents are not here anymore? If they lose their home, I won’t come back and I won’t write your story. That will be the end.’

  The soldier nodded grimly, but he said nothing.

  We came to the bus stop, a gravel shoulder on the side of the road, bush and trees all around, and we sat and waited. I wasn’t sure how much money my father had given Walter for this latest mission, but I had US$20 on me and I gave it to him. I still had no idea whether he was helping my father or scamming him, but US$20 seemed worth the chance. He took it and thanked me profusely – so profusely, in fact, that he took my hand and kissed it. I felt embarrassed.

  And still we waited. Half an hour. An hour. No bus. By now more than a hundred people had gathered by the roadside, ragged villagers, sapped by the humidity of the bush noon, waiting endlessly for a bus to take them away, to take them anywhere. They wanted out. But where to?

  I’m not sure whether it was the sight of these bedraggled people or perhaps the thought that here he was, a war hero twenty-seven years after the fact, sitting in the car of a white man and accepting paltry handouts from him, but the soldier turned to me then and – doubt written over his face, all the bravado of war gone – said: ‘I could have been somebody.’

  I wasn
’t sure what he meant, but it sounded like a line from a movie.

  ‘Sorry, Walter?’

  ‘I could have been somebody, Rogers junior, but I didn’t get an education. Instead I went to whoe. I went to whoe at age thirteen. Can you believe it? I was but a child. Thirteen years. I had no schooling. But today, these ministers, they have many houses, many cars, much money, and what do I have? Still I am just a simple soldier.’

  He was shaking his head; he seemed close to tears.

  I tried to console him.

  ‘You have your honour, Walter,’ I said. ‘You fought for your country and you won. You are a good Christian man. You have not stolen from the people like all these ministers. Many of them are educated, intellectuals, but they have become thieves. I think God will reward you one day.’

  He looked at me and shrugged. He didn’t seem convinced. Neither was I. What did I know of God and his plans?

  A bus finally pulled up, belching black fumes, its roof piled high with bags and baskets. It teetered dangerously to the left, as if the wheels on that side had come off. The soldier shook my hand, stepped out of the car and walked toward the bus. But then, as if forgetting something, he stopped, turned back, and leaned his head through the open passenger-side window. He said something that literally took my breath away:

  ‘Don’t worry, Rogers junior. I will protect your mother and father.’

  I was stunned.

  Was it an acknowledgment of an ‘arrangement’ between us? Or was he telling me that he’d known all along that I had wanted to meet him and ask about the war in order to find out if he was going to help my father? He walked to the bus, and I watched him go. A couple of kids ran to beg from him, but he scattered them in his wake like a buffalo swatting flies with its tail, and was gone. I loved the soldier at that minute. He was monumental to me. A hero.

  I was about to drive off myself when my car was suddenly swarmed by a dozen skinny kids, barefooted, mud-stained urchins, none more than sixteen years old, all pushing their hands through the driver’s-side window, all trying to sell me something. In their open palms I saw tiny bits of stone.

  ‘Diamonds, sa!’ they were shouting. ‘Diamonds! Buy diamonds, sa!’

  They were desperate, frantic, as if I was their last chance. Diamonds? That was ludicrous. This was farmland. I looked at the pieces. One resembled molten lava, another the glass of a Coke bottle. One was a small clump of soil.

  It had come to this in Zimbabwe: children were trying to pass off bits of rock and detritus as precious gems.

  If the soldier was a mystery to me, then so was the stranger in Cottage 12A.

  I met him a few days later, slashing the tall grass around the wall of the lodge. He had brought some new staff on board, four teenage boys with grand-sounding names – Wilbur, Lancelot, Freedom and Reagan – and they were all slashing the grass together. To my parents, this would have been a good sign: the new tenant was a guy prepared to get his hands dirty.

  If he was going to turn the business around, though, he was taking his time. The lodge had barely seen a customer since he took over six weeks earlier. Although he was maintaining the grounds and cleaning the kitchen and had installed a new colour television set and DVD player in the bar upstairs, I didn’t hold out much hope for him. Liquor was expensive and food hard to come by, and even the few ‘customers’ who spent time in the chalets these days rarely popped in for a beer, as they had other priorities: cesh for flesh.

  I could see why my parents were charmed by Tendai, though. Twenty-six years old, over 6 foot 5 inches tall, with the slim build of a middle-distance runner, he was without doubt one of the best-looking men I have ever met. He had caramel-coloured skin, thick black eyelashes and sleepy, hooded eyes that gave him an almost feminine look. He wore loose-fitting slacks, sandals and floral shirts, and moved in a graceful, upright manner that carried the calm breath of confidence. He spoke in a voice as deep and smoky as a late-night radio DJ.

  ‘So you are Dougie,’ he purred, smiling gently, leaning on his scythe.

  ‘Hi, yes. You’re Tendai, the new man in charge.’

  I soaked in the sweet wet smell of freshly cut grass, and it gave me butterflies. It reminded me of cross-country racing season at school, feeling nervous before a race.

  ‘Yes, Dougie. Your mom tells me you once lived in London?’

  ‘Ja, for about eight years. Harare North. You?’

  ‘No, but my sister was there for some time. I managed to buy a London bus through her. I imported it back here and sold it for a seven-ton truck.’

  ‘You bought a London bus?’

  ‘Yes, I sold it for a truck to start a transport company.’

  ‘You have a transport company?’

  ‘Not yet, but soon. I have strategies.’

  I suspected right then that he was a bullshitter, another scam artist.

  ‘So this is the first time you’ve run a restaurant and bar?’

  ‘Yes. I think I can make it a success. I have plans. New strategies.’

  ‘How is business?’

  ‘At the moment it’s quiet. But in a few months we’ll be thriving.’

  I doubted it. The economy was going south fast. I had to say I even felt sorry for Tendai at that point. Back at the house Mom and Dad thought the same.

  ‘He keeps talking about “strategies”,’ chuckled Dad. ‘I mean, at least he’s enthusiastic, and he’s cleaning the place up, but poor guy. The place will never get going again as things stand. He’ll have to pack it in, just like Dawson.’

  They’d come to the conclusion that he wasn’t even close to the Top Man, which was a relief. They were simply glad to have a little money for the rent. I didn’t think much more about Tendai on that visit, and neither did my parents. But then we all underestimated the stranger in number 12A back then. None of us knew what he was capable of at all.

  My daughter, Madeline Barbara Rogers, was born at Lenox Hill Hospital, in Manhattan, on the seventeenth of April, 2007. If she had arrived twelve hours later, she and I would have scored a unique double: Zimbabwe’s independence day is 18 April, and I was born on 11 November, the anniversary of Rhodesia’s infamous Unilateral Declaration of Independence from Britain. Five years earlier my parents had practically given up hope of ever having grandchildren; now, in the past three years, Sandra had given birth to two boys in Johannesburg, and in London, Helen was pregnant, too. Soon my parents would have four grandkids.

  Three months after she was born, Madeline’s American passport arrived in the post, her gorgeous face with its cheeky lopsided smile lighting up the back page alongside the wonderful words Birthplace: New York City. Having been born in the United States, she will probably never have to worry about a civil war, and she will always be an American citizen. I couldn’t say the same for my mother’s birthright back then.

  It was at this exact time that she became a stateless person, a woman without a country. In June 2007 her passport ran out of pages – all those visa stamps for food and fuel trips to Mozambique and South Africa – but when she went to renew it, she was told by a Home Affairs official that under a new law passed in 2001, in order to ‘restitute’ her Zimbabwean citizenship, she would have to renounce her rights to British and South African citizenship. She was horrified.

  ‘But I have no rights to British or South African citizenship,’ she told the official. ‘I’m a Zimbabwean. I was born here. I’ve never lived anywhere else and I have no intention of doing so.’

  ‘But your father was born in South Africa, your mother in Britain.’

  ‘Yes, but I was born here. I want a passport – it’s my right.’

  ‘First you must renounce.’

  ‘I renounce.’

  ‘You need proof of doing so.’

  She was back in the tall grey windowless building, having to prove a negative.

  The Citizenship Act of March 2001 was used to disenfranchise white Zimbabweans, most of whom had European ancestry, and who the government knew suppo
rted the opposition party. But it was also used to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of black Zimbabweans, many of them farmworkers, whose ancestors were born in Zambia, Mozambique and Malawi and had come to work on farms and mines in Rhodesia as far back as the 1920s. I recalled what Lady Charlotte had told me about her father farming in the valley in 1929: ‘The population was so small back then we had to import people from Malawi and Mozambique to work.’

  Zimbabwe specialised in queues at this point, but there were few as long or depressing as those outside the nation’s passport offices as shocked and bewildered black Zimbabweans, the descendents of those migrants, discovered they were no longer citizens of their own country.

  My mother was in the same boat, and she was now forced to get official letters from the British consulate and the South African embassy confirming what she already knew: that she had no rights to their nationality. Eventually she got that documentation. But when she discovered that it might still take two years to actually get a new passport and that the citizenship process would require her having to swear allegiance to the president, she put her foot down.

  ‘I refuse. There’s a limit to how much I’ll humiliate myself,’ she said.

  There was one other way to get a passport, though: through a dealer. As with other Orwellian decrees the state passed, the effect of the citizenship amendment was to create a black market, a criminal commercial sideline in which dealers with connections to those working in the passport office could get you a passport, bypassing the red tape and the two-year wait.

  A friend told Mom about one such dealer, a twenty-one-year-old woman named Sandra, the daughter of that friend’s black maid. My mother met up with Sandra one morning on Herbert Chitepo Road outside the passport office. They sat in Mom’s car and talked over the deal, how it would work.

  ‘I felt dirty, like a criminal, bribing someone to get my own citizenship,’ she told me later, ‘but this Sandra was wonderful. She had all the documents ready to fill out, very efficient, her own little business going. We agreed to a fee of US$200, to be paid when my passport was done. I was so relieved.’