by Peter Godwin
We met during his days as a Zimbabwean diplomat in London in the early 1980s, when we were both still rouged with the first blush of enthusiasm for the new Zimbabwe, still enjoying our “rainbow nation” moment. He used to hold great parties at Zimbabwe House, the embassy on the Strand, a listed building designed originally for the British Medical Association in 1907 by Charles Holden, architect of many London Underground stations.
Godfrey had proudly showed me around the building. It had eighteen large naked statues by Jacob Epstein, representing the Ages of Man, which stood in exterior alcoves. When first erected, they had appalled conservative critics, and in 1937, after claiming that Epstein’s statues were crumbling, the Rhodesian authorities hacked off their extremities, ostensibly to prevent passers-by from being struck by falling stone genitals. Now the mutilated, emasculated honor guard of statues that stands shattered sentinel around Mugabe’s London outpost seems appropriate.
Chanetsa returned to London for a second posting, fresh from a diplomatic stint in Moscow, where he had just witnessed the dramatic collapse of Soviet power.
“It feels like that now here in Zimbabwe,” he says, enthusiastically, “that the ancien régime is over, just its phantom limb twitching.”
Chanetsa’s second tour of duty in London came to an abrupt end, when he clashed with Mugabe’s new wife, Grace, thirty-four years Mugabe’s junior, who had been a secretary in the President’s protocol office. Mugabe had her husband, Stanley Goreraza, an air-force officer, posted to China, and sired two children with her while Sally was dying of kidney failure.
“I complained that we were turning our historic embassy library into a warehouse for Grace’s shopping,” Chanetsa explains. “I wanted her to store it elsewhere.” (When she was later challenged about her expensive taste in shoes, in a land where many now go barefoot, Grace replied: “I have very narrow feet, so I wear only Ferragamo.”) He was ordered onto the next plane home, “the only diplomat to be withdrawn by Robert Mugabe personally, not by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, because I was said to have insulted his wife.”
Back in Harare, he didn’t last long. “It was awful, my office was next to the toilet, which wasn’t disinfected, and it stank. Opposite my door sat Sithole, the department messenger, whose job was to cut the Herald [Mugabe’s mouthpiece newspaper] into squares and put them on a metal spike, as toilet paper. I had just come from the Strand to this! After six months I left, I didn’t even bother to get my pension.”
Chanetsa joined Coca-Cola International, running their business in the nine southern African countries. Then, at fifty, he kept a promise he’d made himself and went back to his rural home. “That’s my musha, that’s where my father is buried, and you know African superstitions, no one can come close to my graves.” He established a pig farm there, complete with export abattoir.
Before becoming a diplomat, Chanetsa had been the man at Robert Mugabe’s elbow. He was his personal secretary, his amanuensis, and his spokesman both in exile in Tanzania in the 1970s, and after independence in 1980 when Mugabe took power. He saw him first thing each morning.
“I wrote speeches and letters for him. He was really impressive. He has a force in him, and even some regional heads of state, they still react to that. He doesn’t talk much. He just blinks and listens. He lets you talk. He leans back with his head cocked to one side, resting on his hands, and listens to you.
“You had to be very careful when you briefed him. You had to be really on top of it as he would ask very penetrating questions.”
Chanetsa, too, describes Mugabe as the consummate loner. “He has absolute power within the party—there’s no internal democracy. He stays distant, remote. He never meets his ministers except on cabinet days, every Tuesday afternoon. He never trusted anyone enough to groom as a successor.”
After Tsvangirai’s opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) was created in 1999, says Chanetsa, Mugabe fell under the control of his security chiefs. “He has a responsibility to them. Their guiding fear is that they’ll face retribution for the Matabeleland massacres. They only want to see a successor they are confident can look after their interests.
“Their bottom line is: we fought and died for this country—they—the MDC—didn’t. It’s an entitlement thing. This is why I really believe Mugabe will not hand over to Morgan Tsvangirai. He will never do it. We will all go down. The ballot box only appears to be the final determinant, but for Mugabe it’s only final if it endorses him. Robert Mugabe doesn’t understand ‘process’—power to him is raw.”
To understand how Mugabe keeps his people down, says Chanetsa, you must understand “the psychology of deprivation: Zimbabweans have learned to be self-reliant. There’s a deep sense of individuality—no collective sense. We’ve become a nation of black-marketers, crooks. Robert Mugabe has subverted the revolution by keeping people busy just managing, just getting by. There’s no employment but people are busy, busy.
“Only now do we realize we’ve been under serious dictatorship. It has become part of our identity.
“In Eastern Europe the border guards faced in. Not here. Here, the people who would be in the front line have been allowed to go.” All four of Chanetsa’s grown kids have joined this Zimbabwean diaspora: one in Canada, one in Australia, and two in South Africa. “My son in Australia came back for a visit. He was born when I was working for Mugabe, and Mugabe is still here—my son has known no other leader here. During his visit, there was no electricity, no running water, and he turned to me in disgust and said, ‘Dad, how can you allow this? I have options, I’m outside. But you?’ ”
In these elections, Chanetsa is serving as campaign manager for a third presidential candidate, Simba Makoni, who is offering himself as a sort of ZANU-PF-lite candidate, a reformist from within. Georgina and I find Makoni in his sparsely furnished office. On the wall is his banner: a sun rising over green tilled fields, into a clear blue sky. Underneath is his slogan—“Let’s Get Zimbabwe Working Again.” The young men in dark suits who guard him pace around the corridor outside, looking anxious.
Makoni knows Mugabe’s court from the inside too. Armed with a Ph.D. in chemistry from Leicester, he served as a deputy minister when he was only thirty. Even now, at fifty-seven, his unlined complexion gives an impression of youth. He was in the politburo and a member of the cabinet for eight years, ending up as Mugabe’s Finance Minister. But after clashing with Mugabe on monetary policy, and being shuffled away from finance in 2002, he resigned—only the second man ever to have left Mugabe’s cabinet voluntarily. “People said, ‘Do you have a death wish!’ Fear is such a crucial part of the way he runs things.”
After Makoni declared his presidential challenge, Mugabe was furious, denouncing him as “worse than a prostitute,” and some inside Mugabe’s ZANU-PF, like General Mujuru, who had initially promised to support him, were in the end too afraid to do so.
Such fear is well founded. Since James Mushore, the general’s nephew, has been helping Simba Makoni, his phones have been monitored, and he’s been trailed, and received death threats.
“Originally,” says Makoni, “Mugabe was puritanical and brooked no failure. In the early days, he was intolerant of greed and corruption, sloppiness and incompetence. When he came back from a foreign trip, he would even return unused foreign currency! But that all went. Now he likes greed and incompetence in his ministers, as it gives him more control over them.”
Being in the politburo, he says, “feels like you’re in the court of the emperor. Earlier, he used to enjoy discussion, give and take, but then he became more and more intolerant as he concentrated power in himself. Now if you differ with him, you are his enemy.
“Mugabe’s a mixture, initially he had the aura of a liberation hero—eleven years in jail, seven in the bush war, self-disciplined, he does press-ups at five thirty each morning, a teetotaller. Over the years, Mugabe and ZANU have built themselves into the lives of the people, there is a very intense fear of them. I’d come out
of a cabinet meeting and colleagues would say, ‘How could you argue with the President like that!’ The fear factor is crucial to understanding his power.”
The country is in the condition it is because of a failure of leadership, says Makoni. “The other ministers could have said, ‘We’re not going to invade farms…’ But we didn’t. He managed to do that because he had a team of jellyfish. On the surface, he is a very dominant character, but you can only do that in the face of pliancy and subservience. I saw him lose his temper many times, shouting, fist thumping the table.”
Makoni says that in all his dealings with Mugabe, the President never left a paper trail. “There were no memos. Everything was done face to face.
“Many say they hide things from the old man. He doesn’t want to know the nasty things. In March 2001, for instance, I told Bob that we would face a food shortage and that we needed to import food. And simultaneously Joseph Made [the Agriculture Minister] says to him, ‘We will have a bumper harvest.’ He knows this how? Because he’s flown over the country in a helicopter ‘and it’s all green!’ When famine indeed struck, Mugabe never acknowledged this error. He said he had a bumper harvest, when the only thing we were growing were weeds.
“Again, in September 2004, when food shortages were imminent and he was told so by his colleagues, he said, ‘You can’t expect me to admit that in front of the UN.’
“Many colleagues, as early as 1997, disagreed with his direction, but instead of standing up, we were expedient, greedy, we betrayed the national interest. Why have we allowed him to become the Kim Il-Sung of Africa? We are cosmopolitan and worldly-wise. The war veterans spent time in Tanzania, Mozambique, Zambia, and they said, we are never going to let our country become like them, and yet we did. It’s a terrible indictment of us, a terrible reflection of our cowardice, our opportunism, that we have followed our narrow self-interest.”
The blame for the “overwhelming, omnipresent character that Mugabe has become,” Makoni attributes to three things. The departure of Mugabe’s most forceful colleagues, after which there was no counter to him in cabinet, as the rest all owed their jobs to him. The death of his Ghanaian wife, the tempering Sally, and the impact of his new wife, Grace. “Under her influence, the avarice and ostentation began to show, the vast convoys, the huge shopping trips.” And the “Unity Accord” in 1987, which effectively established a one-party state. The switch from a British-style prime-ministership to an executive presidency sealed Mugabe’s dictatorial metamorphosis.
WHEN GODFREY CHANETSA calls later, to see how our meeting with Simba Makoni went, his election prognosis has darkened. “No more politburo members support Simba. They’ve tested the water and retreated,” he says scornfully. “People smell power and they run to where it is.”
He now fears that Mugabe is preparing to punish his subjects for their latest rejection. “Robert Mugabe will make the villagers crawl back into their huts, with low-flying jets and helicopters flying all over the place. ZANU’s already sending its storm-troopers into the rural areas—they know the places they didn’t do well. They’ll kill the cattle of the last white farmers, send soldiers and paramilitaries in to scare the voters. We have no other way to respond to force, other than by using our vote. It’s our life against Mugabe’s life.”
four
The Last Goats
FROM THE VERY START of his political career, the opposition leader, Morgan Richard Dzingirai Tsvangirai, Mugabe’s nemesis, has had a torrid time. In 1998, Mugabe’s war veterans beat him with iron bars and tried to bundle him out of a tenth-story window. Since then his bodyguards have been murdered, and he’s been charged with treason three times, arrested multiple times, imprisoned, and survived two further assassination attempts.
In 2007, he was arrested on his way to a prayer meeting. When his wife, Susan, finally managed to visit him in his cell, she found that he had been so severely beaten and tortured that he had lost consciousness three times, and had to be revived. TV footage of him waiting to appear in court, his head massively swollen, one eye gashed, shocked the world. He was later hospitalized with a fractured skull and internal bleeding.
A freelance cameraman, Edward Chikombo, who distributed the footage of the badly injured Tsvangirai to the foreign media, was himself abducted. His corpse was found a few days later, dumped on waste ground outside the city.
Now, as we wait for the official election results, Tsvangirai is AWOL. The MDC’s own projections, based on results recorded by their election agents at most of the nine thousand or so polling stations, show that despite all the obstacles placed in his way he has not only won the presidential elections, but has cleared the crucial 50 percent barrier that triggers a run-off poll. So he has jetted off on a hectic series of meetings with African leaders, trying to persuade them to accept him as Zimbabwe’s new president.
Tsvangirai’s biggest hurdle to regional acceptance is Mugabe’s almost messianic reputation as a “liberation leader,” Africa’s oldest, at eighty-four—nearly three decades older than his fifty-six-year-old rival. Mugabe’s propaganda machine portrays Tsvangirai as a sell-out, someone who watched the liberation war from the sidelines. And the hyper-educated Mugabe also derides Tsvangirai as “an ignoramus,” because he isn’t caped with degrees.
But Tsvangirai’s story is one of considerable sacrifice. The eldest of nine children of a poor bricklayer in the southeastern district of Gutu, at sixteen, Tsvangirai had to forfeit a scholarship to a good mission school in order to support his family after his father deserted them—a paternal abandonment he shares with Mugabe. He toiled in a textile factory in Mutare, before moving to Trojan Nickel Mine in Bindura, northwest of Harare. There he rapidly climbed from plant operator to mine foreman, and became the mine’s trade-union rep. Initially he revered Mugabe, joining his party.
By 1988, Tsvangirai had risen to head the country’s confederation of trade unions, but he soon clashed with Mugabe’s over IMF-initiated reforms, and then over huge payments that Mugabe wanted to make to the country’s war vets. Tsvangirai transformed the union from a pillar of the one-party state to its main effective opposition. At the time, he said that Mugabe reminded him of his own father, “a stubborn old man.”
Soon after he broke with the ruling party, over its “misrule, official corruption and dictatorship,” he became the founding leader of the Movement for Democratic Change, MDC. Mugabe has done his best to portray the MDC as the bastard child of revanchist whites and neo-colonial Western governments, a Trojan horse bent on purloining the country’s hard-won independence. But 99 percent of MDC supporters are black. From the start, it was more movement than party. A grab bag of opponents to Mugabe’s increasingly autocratic and dysfunctional rule, it attracted support mostly from the black urban working class, but also from the educated elite, churchmen, academics, industrialists, ethnic amaNdebeles, and white farmers.
The latter only really threw in their lot with the MDC once Mugabe announced his plans to confiscate their farms without compensation. The MDC, like virtually everyone in Zimbabwe, agrees that land reform is necessary, but done in a planned, coherent way, not by the chaotic government-encouraged farm invasions that decimated agriculture and ushered in famine.
The “land issue” was about so much more than land. It was about breaking up the million-strong voting bloc of black employees who worked on the farms, and who had voted for the MDC. Mugabe wanted to shatter that bloc. And they became the main, though largely unsung, victims of the land takeovers. Many of them had originally migrated from neighboring countries, Malawi, Mozambique, and Zambia, but now, after three or four generations, they were chased off the farms, and had nowhere to go. Homeless, and reduced to dire poverty, they perished in large numbers. The farmers’ organization JAG (Justice for Agriculture) claims that more than half a million displaced farm workers and their dependents have perished in the decade since their expulsion, of starvation and disease.
The farm takeovers have now entered their final, mopping-up
phase. “We’re in the crosshairs, straight in the firing line, we’re the scapegoats, but there are fewer and fewer of us goats left.” John Worsley-Worswick, who heads JAG, is talking to a couple of sun-charred white farmers in shorts and desert boots, at JAG HQ in Harare. Worswick is the designated mourner at the protracted death rattle of the white Zimbabwean farmer.
He answers the phone and immediately begins briefing: “Masvingo’s hot, Centenary’s hot, there are only ten farmers left there—but all will probably be off by tomorrow. It’s flaring up all over the place. Karoi, Chinhoyi are heating up—they’re driving farmers off there too.”
It is Monday April 7th, and it seems that Godfrey Chanetsa has correctly predicted his old boss Mugabe’s next move.
“The worst scenario is a military junta, but then we’ve effectively been under military rule anyway,” sighs Worswick. He pauses to allow a jet fighter to scream overhead. For the last few days now, they have been constantly buzzing the city. Ostensibly they’re practicing for the country’s twenty-eighth annual independence celebrations due in a couple of weeks, but most see it as something more sinister, a signal from the old man that he still has the big guns on his side, he can still blast his rebellious people into submission.
“They’re a law unto themselves,” continues Worswick. “There’s bugger all you can do except document and publish what they’re up to.”
He hangs up and turns to me. “We’ve been cataloguing human-rights violations on the farms since 2000, electronically mapping them and collating them with political events, building an international case to take to the Hague, to the Southern African Development Community [SADC] Tribunal, to the African Court of Human Rights, to the International Criminal Court of Rome.
“Amendment No. 17, passed in 2005, basically says white farmers are dirt, and need to be swept away. It makes it an offense to be on a farm—your own farm—without permission, you are trespassing on state land. In a country that’s starving, it basically makes it an offense to farm! An offense to grow food!
