by Peter Godwin
“Our commercial national herd is down from two and a half million to a hundred thousand. Maize production is the lowest ever since land reform began. Tobacco is down from two hundred and forty million kilos to fifty million.
“From six thousand five hundred productive farms in 2000, there are now only four hundred left,” says Worswick. “Seventy-eight of those have investment-guarantee protection, as foreigners. We’ve lost another hundred farmers off the land in the last eighteen months as Operation Maguta [‘Full Stomach’] was launched, when soldiers arrived to evict farmers and replace them with military personnel, promising ‘the mother of all agricultural seasons.’ They pledged to put in fifty thousand plows. But still there’s been a greater decline in output this year than any other. Instead of being the mother of all seasons, as they proclaimed, it turned out to be the mother of all disasters.”
He leans back heavily in his chair and lights up another cigarette to give me time to catch up with his torrent.
“The party elite who take over farms have access to U.S. dollars at the official rate of thirty thousand to one when the black market rate is eighty million to one. They can get loans at 25 percent per annum when hyperinflation is 200,000 percent, so they can make huge profits on the difference, buy forex on the street, generating income without actually farming.”
This is the alchemy of the famous “U.S.$500 Mercedes,” where Mugabe’s favored can take just U.S.$500 and, in four black-market currency deals, turn it into enough to buy a brand-new Merc.
A FEW DAYS LATER, on Thursday, Georgina and I have been invited to supper by Peter Lobel, scion of the bakery family that once produced most of Zimbabwe’s bread. Lobel now lives in New York (and set up an artisanal bakery there, called Tribeca Oven), but keeps a condo in a gated complex in northern Harare. The route takes us past State House, where the presidential bodyguards strut along the pavement, thrusting their AK-47s, bayonets fixed, at the passing cars, a ballet of the bellicose, intended to scare us. Like the pupa policemen, they are young and skinny, with helmets too big for their heads, oddly vulnerable, kids dressed up. And somehow this makes them more dangerous and unpredictable. You can feel the diminutive soldiers’ insecurity, and how it’s all about the gun.
One (black) Zimbabwean returning on holiday from the diaspora recently complained that he happened to chortle at a joke his sister had cracked while they were in their car, waiting at these traffic lights, when suddenly a presidential bodyguard banged on his window.
“What are you laughing at?” he demanded, machine-gun at the ready.
The holidaying Zimbabwean tried to explain it was just an innocent family joke.
“You don’t laugh near the President’s residence!” the soldier roared. “It’s against the law.”
Georgina and I keep our eyes fixed straight ahead, our mouths downturned.
As we pass through the suburb of Gun Hill, I get, as I always do in this part of town, a frisson of revulsion. Here, on Garvin Close, is where Mengistu Haile Mariam, “the Butcher of Addis,” architect of Ethiopia’s Red Terror, has lived in a heavily guarded luxury home since being granted sanctuary by Mugabe in 1991, when his regime was overthrown. Mengistu also spends time on a ranch confiscated from a white farmer, and in his holiday villa on Lake Kariba. His security has been redoubled since two Eritreans tried to assassinate him here in 1995.
During Mengistu’s seventeen-year rule, an estimated one million Ethiopians died in famines, exacerbated when he blocked emergency food shipments to areas sympathetic to his opponents. He had half a million more killed as “counter-revolutionaries” in his Cultural Revolution-style purge of the educated classes—especially students and their professors. Human Rights Watch described the killings as “one of the most systematic uses of mass murder ever witnessed in Africa.” Before they could retrieve the bodies of their loved ones, relatives were charged “the wasted bullet” tax, to pay for the execution.
At the height of the Red Terror, it was reported by another NGO official that more than a thousand children had been killed, and “their bodies are left in the streets and are being eaten by wild hyenas… You can see the heaped-up bodies of murdered children, most of them aged eleven to thirteen, lying in the gutter, as you drive out of Addis Ababa.” The city’s gutters, said other observers, were choked with severed heads.
In 2007, an Ethiopian court convicted Mengistu, in absentia, of genocide. Still, Mugabe refused all appeals to extradite him. “Comrade Mengistu,” insisted Mugabe, “… played a key and commendable role during our struggle for independence and no one can dispute that.”
Mengistu has acted as a security adviser to his host. In particular, it was he who apparently suggested that Mugabe launch Operation Murambatsvina, driving hundreds of thousands out of the cities, and bulldozing their houses. Mengistu has good reason to fear Mugabe’s overthrow—the opposition here have threatened that when they come to power they will ship him back to Addis to be executed by his compatriots.
AT LOBEL’S TABLE, I’m seated opposite Heinrich von Pezold. He is, I’m told, 1,337th in line to the British throne.
On hearing that Heinrich hails from Austria, Georgina, an ardent lover of musicals, begins to trill “The Sound of Music.”
“Actually,” says Heinrich, who’s thirty-six, with piercing blue eyes and a prominent, vaguely Churchillian forehead from which his blond hairline is in retreat, “the singing von Trapp family are my cousins—but I’m tone-deaf.”
Heinrich’s grandfather farmed on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro. His father came to Zimbabwe to recover from meningitis, and purchased Forrester estates from the Earl of Verulam, who also held the title of Lord Forrester. In 1998, while Heinrich was working on a D.Phil. at Oxford on “communist takeovers in Eastern Europe,” he came here on holiday to help with the farm. Overwhelmed by the beauty of the place, he abandoned his studies and stayed on at Forrester.
“Come and see it,” he insists in a soft Austrian accent. “Visiting a working farm is now somewhat of an elitist activity. There are not many of us left!”
“Oh yes, you must come out,” agrees his wife, Amanda, porcelain pale, thin and elegant, and once the lead singer of the South African band Magic Cactus.
THE DRIVE to Forrester takes you past many ex-white farms, now bedraggled and barely productive, occupied by war vets and other new settlers. We slow by one, to watch squatters hacking down a long roadside avenue of mature fir trees, for firewood. Their amateur felling has toppled several trees onto the telephone poles, and now a forlorn frizz of broken wires hangs from them. Beside me, Georgina rummages in her straw bag. Soon I hear a long intake of breath. She is inhaling on a slim crimson steel cylinder, which tapers in at the stem, a postmodern take on a Jazz Age cigarette holder. This is her latest invention—NicoPipe™, motto: Smoke without fire. Inside is a Nicorette capsule dispensing nicotine as you suck. Nicorette’s standard white plastic dispenser, she says, “looks like a tampon applicator tube. It’s a pharmaceutical appliance, embarrassing and ugly.” NicoPipe™, available in a range of colors and styles, is elegant and aesthetically pleasing. And she is launching it just as smoking is banned in restaurants and bars in Europe and America. NicoPipe™, she hopes, will make her fortune.
“You might not want to suck on that thing in front of the von Pezolds,” I suggest. “They are tobacco farmers, after all, and you’re trying to put them out of business.”
“Somehow I suspect they’ll survive the threat posed by NicoPipe,” she sighs.
Forrester’s main farmhouse is traditional brick and thatch, with green cement floors. We stay in rondavels set in the garden of cacti and palms and frangipanis, Albizia gummifera, African flame tree, and cassia, which is bursting with bright yellow blossom.
Despite the land crisis, Heinrich and Amanda are building an ambitious new house on a rock ledge overlooking one of the farm’s six substantial dams. We pack sundowners in a wicker picnic hamper and drive across the farm to it, followed by what Heinrich ins
ists is the world’s fastest three-legged dog, a Doberman-cross-retriever called Tommy.
“He’s been officially clocked running alongside the truck at 40 m.p.h.,” says Heinrich. “Of course that’s how he lost his leg in the first place—car-chasing.”
On the way we drive through irrigated fields of mange tout and snap peas. Other fields are being prepared, at this time of year, for tobacco, wheat, and maize. At fifty thousand acres, Forrester is one of the biggest arable farms in the country, certainly the biggest still in white hands. Technically, it is protected from land invasion by the foreign investment-guarantee code, and its invasion would put in jeopardy German aid to Zimbabwe (Heinrich has German citizenship too). Though one section of Forrester has already been jambanja’d, Heinrich tells us, he still has over eighteen hundred acres of tobacco under cultivation.
One of the reasons that the squatters are only on one section of the farm—apart from the notional foreign investment-guarantee code—is that Forrester is the biggest employer of people from the adjacent Chiweshe Communal area. Heinrich employs between two and a half and three and a half thousand people, depending on the season, and he estimates that there are as many as twenty thousand living on the farm, as each employee has up to eight dependents living with him.
The squatters on one section of the farm live, for the time being, in uneasy coexistence. Heinrich’s manager cures their tobacco, for example, though he charges them for the service.
The view from the site of the new house is sublime—the lake, and past it over a broken landscape dotted with steep kopjes, granite dwalas, mini-sugar loaves, and in between, fields of meticulously contour-plowed land. It’s the kind of view that made white settlers fall in love with this country, the kind of view that re-infects us, generation after generation, with a fervent attachment to it.
Of course, as the eldest son of the von Pezold clan, Heinrich explains, one day, when his parents die, he will have to leave to take up the family schloss in Austria.
After a short, violent downpour in the middle of the night, the morning dawns fresh and clear. Christof, their little boy, who calls his mother “medem” (madam), after hearing his nanny call her that all the time, runs barefoot around the dewy lawn, pursued by the three-legged Tommy. Above him, next to the Zimbabwe flag, flutters the von Pezold one: a double-headed eagle, a beehive, and a wheat sheaf.
“You should see my mother’s family flag,” says Heinrich. “It has a raven pecking out the eye of a Turk.”
five
No Oil to Give
IT IS NOW TWO WEEKS since the elections, and still the results of the presidential contest have not been officially announced, though results for individual members of parliament are coming in.
The gateaux rack revolves slowly in its glass cabinet in the downstairs Gazebo coffee lounge at Harare’s Crowne Plaza Monomatapa Hotel, while we wait for Theresa Makone, a Nottingham University–trained bio-chemist and the proprietor, among other businesses, of Cleopatra’s, a beauty salon that my sister used to patronize. Georgina wants to congratulate her on winning an opposition seat in parliament, surmounting a government dirty tricks campaign. We have seen her being interviewed on TV, standing in a piece of urban wasteland that was the registered address for eight thousand ghost voters. She is still too scared to live at home, so she moves around constantly, staying with friends and at hotels. This is our third attempt to connect.
Outside, the swollen foliage of Harare Park threatens to burst into the window. Inside, Georgina inhales on a turquoise NicoPipe while we watch Tendai Biti, the MDC’s number two, on CNN, giving a news conference in Johannesburg. All legal channels to get the presidential results released have been exhausted, he says. His party won’t participate in either a recount or a runoff, which would be “more like a runover,” he says. If Mugabe tries to hold on to power, he warns, it will amount to a constitutional coup d’état. The lines have been drawn.
Biti is hugely eloquent. Tough and urgent and determined without being bellicose or shrill. He says that Morgan Tsvangirai’s life is now in danger if he returns to Zimbabwe. And he tells of the crackdown he fears is about to be launched by Mugabe, especially in rural areas. He ends with a chilling appeal. “In Rwanda the international community waited until there were a million dead Tutsis; in Somalia and Darfur they waited too until there were piles of corpses. Please don’t wait until that happens to us.”
Theresa Makone is a no-show.
THAT NIGHT, after Biti’s warning, we watch ZTV, the state broadcaster. “Comrade Chinx,” a war vet in a red beret and fatigues, is exhorting the viewers “to war.”
People often complain that it’s hard to fathom the inner workings of Mugabe’s ruling party, ZANU-PF. But that’s not really true. All you have to do is read the government newspapers, the Herald and Sunday Mail, and watch or listen to ZTV and ZBC, the state broadcasters, and you get it from the horse’s mouth, the World According to Bob—a paranoid and distorted view. If you want to hear it raw and unmediated, then listen to the vernacular services. In chiShona, the venom being pumped out is reaching for the excesses broadcast by the Interahamwe’s Radio (Mille Collines), which helped trigger the Rwandan genocide.
We are fighting Nazism again, continues Comrade Chinx, over footage from the civil war of guerrillas dancing, and lingering close-ups of weapons, especially the totemic AK-47. And he sings the liberation war anthem, “Vadzoka kuHondo.”
“We are not ex-fighters,” he insists, “we are current freedom fighters—current. I don’t want anyone to call me an ex-freedom fighter.” His words are intercut with footage of dead white farmers. The broadcast is chilling, little less than a death threat, and certainly an implicit incitement to kill. Then, in another sign of the bizarre competing realities that coexist here, there follows a cheery jingle, and the station cuts to a promo for a forthcoming program: Let’s Go Gardening, in which an elderly white matron rollicks among some ferns, admonishing us not to over-water them.
THE FOLLOWING bright, crisp morning, driving south down an almost deserted 4th Street, one of the city’s major thoroughfares, I find myself behind a pick-up truck bobbing with the blue helmets of riot policemen. Suddenly it veers over to the curb and the policemen vault out and, without any explanation, begin beating a knot of pedestrians, including two women with babies on their backs. They beat grimly, but with determination, using long staves, and boots and fists.
Eerily, though my window is open, there is no sound from the people, neither from the policemen nor their victims, just the thwack of the staves, the thuds of kicks and punches. And then above it, I finally hear the sound of the babies thinly wailing.
In the back of the police truck slump two black youths, their wrists manacled behind them, their faces swollen and bloodied. Without realizing it, I have slowed to a stop alongside, and one of the policemen looks up briefly. “Move! Move!” he shouts. “You are causing an obstruction,” and irritably, he waves me past, his stave already raised for the next blow.
EARLY AFTERNOON finds us at Doon Estate, a cluster of artisanal shops on the city’s eastern fringe, just off the Mutare road. The shops sell ethnic clothes, sculpture, pottery, basket-ware, furniture fashioned from reclaimed teak railway sleepers, and paper hand-made from elephant dung. And, unlikely as it sounds in starving Zimbabwe, there is a Belgian chocolatier.
We have come to Kerry’s vegetarian café to join the weekly Friday lunchtime get-together of Zimbabwe’s independent journalists. But today there is only one, Iden Wetherell, editor of the weekly Independent, one of the country’s last surviving indy papers. The last daily one, the Daily News, had its offices bombed back in 2000, just days after Mugabe’s Information Minister, Jonathan Moyo, known by local journalists as Mugabe’s Goebbels, had warned that the Daily News should be “silenced.” No one was ever arrested for it—if you discount the troupe of Chinese mime artists here for the Harare International Festival of the Arts. Dressed in white fatigues laced with tubes of battery powered lights, whi
ch pulsed on and off, they were rehearsing a mime routine on a traffic island across the street from the Daily News, and were bundled into police trucks and taken for questioning. The next year the Daily News printing presses were bombed.
Iden Wetherell looks depressed. He sits alone at his outdoor table, a lean man with gray mustache and brush cut, wearing a blue long-sleeved cotton shirt and a pained expression, contemplating his fried halloumi and lemonade.
“I find myself friendless,” he says, proffering a chair. “There’s barely a journalist left in the country, because the atmosphere’s so dangerous for them. Our newsroom is completely depleted.
“I’ve been very cautious about predicting change, as you know, but now I really think it’s coming. The mold has been shattered. It’s wonderful watching them squirm at the prospect.” He picks up a folded copy of the Herald from the table. “I mean look at this, what their propagandist-in-chief, Caesar Zvayi, is writing: how MDC voters are not politically mature, so their votes don’t really count!
“And now they try to wriggle out of an election that their own government-approved international observers have given a clean bill of health and signed off on.”
Wetherell also rails against the chief government spokesman, the Deputy Minister of Information, Bright Matonga, known to local journalists as Notso. In reply to opposition protests at the unconscionable delay in releasing the presidential election results, Matonga has delivered this considered riposte: he really doesn’t understand why the MDC is “getting its knickers in a twist.”
Notso Bright is famous for an incident in which his white English wife, Anne Matonga, née Pout, from Essex, whom he’d brought back with him from university in 2001, led a jambanja, the following year, of a farm, owned by Vince and Monica Schulz’s family for four generations. As they were arrested she shrieked in a regional English accent at the Schulzes: “Get off our land: we are taking back what you stole from our forefathers.”
