by Peter Godwin
Interviewed later by Wetherell’s Independent, while she tended the Schulzes’ roses, guarded by Mugabe’s youth militia, Mrs. Matonga praised President Mugabe for his “patience with the racist white farmers,” and said that the Schulzes “had only themselves to blame.”
There are rumors now (later confirmed) that she has been abandoned on the Schulzes’ farm, as Bright Matonga, in a shrewd career move, transfers his affections to a new woman, Sharon Mugabe, reputed to be related to the President. It is her PR agency that has been running the “Fist of Empowerment” ad campaign.
IN THE HOPES OF persuading Mugabe to release the election results and avoid the coming crisis, Thabo Mbeki jets into Zimbabwe the next day, Saturday, 12 April. Mbeki is in an odd position. The region has officially mandated him to solve the Zimbabwe crisis, yet since it did so he has been toppled as leader of the ruling ANC party by Jacob Zuma, who is now effectively President-in-waiting. Now, as Andrew Pocock, the British ambassador, observes, “Mbeki has the position without the power, and Zuma has the power without the position.” Inevitably, Mbeki’s own political humiliation has diminished him. At sixty-five, he is white haired and white bearded, tentative. Next to him, Mugabe at eighty-four looks the more vigorous man, not a gray hair in sight.
As Mbeki steps off the plane and onto the red carpet, Mugabe reaches for his hand, but Thabo is coy in front of the cameras, slipping his hand away. At the end of the flying visit, however, at a photo op in front of an antique stuffed lion, inside State House, Mugabe slides his arm through Mbeki’s, and the South African is content to leave it there as they pose arm-in-arm for the cameras, while Mbeki announces—to our cries of disbelief—“There is no crisis in Zimbabwe.” For this bizarre denial, he instantly earns the indelible Mad Magazine moniker, Thabo “What crisis?” Mbeki.
When the cameras turn to Mugabe to comment on British Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s criticism of Zimbabwe’s protracted election-result delay, Mugabe dismisses Brown as “a little tiny dot on this planet.”
IT HAS NOW been fifteen days since the presidential elections, and still the result has been withheld. In the meantime, Nepal and Italy have both been to the polls, and already know their outcomes.
To pressure Mugabe into releasing the vote count, the opposition announces a “stay-away,” asking their members to boycott their work places. But how do you tell there’s a strike when only 6 percent of workers are employed? Anyway, most senior members of the MDC are out of the country in fear of their lives, so nothing happens. The trucks of riot police trundle through the streets, the men singing martial anthems and banging their rifle butts against the metal floors. The jet fighters scream back and forth low over the city. Check points cordon the approach roads.
And still we wait.
FINALLY, Georgina and I connect with Theresa Makone, at Meikles Hotel. She is dressed in a long ethnic-print caftan, an Ethiopian silver and amber necklace, and nails painted mulberry. She’s anxious and agitated. She hasn’t heard from her husband, Ian, who is MDC secretary for elections, for several days. He’s in Mashonaland East, she says, collating evidence of violence against MDC activists: brutal beatings and house-burnings. I ask if I can join him. She throws up her hands in horror. “Every day I fully expect to hear he has been killed. That is dangerous work, especially for you as a white person, you would never survive.”
Theresa has one of her husband’s cell phones, which keeps pinging with incoming text messages. She hands me the phone. “Look,” she says.
Hi Ian, We have eight people from Mudzi badly injured, reads one. Another reports: One death and numerous beatings in Hurungwe.
She doesn’t want to talk openly as she believes the room is bugged. The fact that part of my ceiling light-fitting inexplicably fell to the floor a few days ago only supports this notion.
“You know this place is crawling with CIO agents,” she warns. “They sit in the lobby café all day drinking tea and eating cakes.”
“Do they get very fat, eating all those cakes?” asks Georgina. Pale-complexioned and zaftig, like a young Anjelica Huston, she is ever curious about weight-related issues.
“No, no,” says Theresa. “Because they have the Disease,” by which she means AIDS. “Otherwise they would be voluminous.”
Theresa has just come back from rural Mutare South, meeting her constituency members. “They are very frustrated,” she says. “They don’t know what to do. For the first time these rural people didn’t vote for Robert Mugabe, and now they are facing the consequences. I have a situation there where three hundred rural families—ex-farm-workers—are in the middle of being evicted from their land for supporting the MDC.
“We want the results in their original form, why do they want this recount?” She answers her own question: “To finish rigging the result.
“It’s hard, very hard. We don’t know what to do. We have the potential to make this country ungovernable—but in the end, too much blood would be shed, too many lives lost. Is it worth it?
“We feel marginalized, internationally, as though the world doesn’t really care about our struggle for democracy. Because we have no oil to give anyone, if we had oil in the ground, they would all be here.
“The tragedy is that we could easily have gone through a peaceful transition to the democratic state we all cherish. But the army is on standby, just waiting for an excuse.”
six
The Tears of a Clown
AS WE WAIT for Mugabe to massage the election results, we decide to drive east to the Chimanimani Festival, headlined by Zimbabwe’s premier musician, Oliver Mtukudzi. We will leave on the morning of Independence Day. Even as the presidential election results are withheld, there are to be state-organized celebrations across the country. These are, in effect, praise parties for Mugabe.
Diana, a friend and art-gallery owner, has agreed to change some money for us with her black-market dealer, a local supermarket proprietor. Now at her dining-room table she tries to count out the money from a shopping bag filled with bricks of notes, in denominations of ten million dollars each—three billion in all.
Back in the hotel, Georgina sits on the floor, busy with her own culinary provisions, dividing out the LighterLife sachets of diet powder she has brought from London into their different flavors. LighterLife packs, she tells me, are only available as part of a full course, which involves counseling.
“I like the chocolate flavors,” she explains, “particularly mixed with instant coffee in the morning, and Thai chicken, which is spicy and burns my mouth so I don’t really want to eat anything else.”
She moves to another pile. “This is the second division: vegetable, which is okay, and mushroom. But once I’ve gone through these, it’s vanilla and banana, which are totally disgusting, oh, and caramel, ew.”
In the background the TV is tuned to the BBC World. Across the bottom of the screen runs the news ticker: Zimbabwe now a crisis measured in hunger.
She looks up briefly from her diet powders, registers the headline, and immediately fixes me with a look. “I know, I know. D’you think I don’t get the irony—that I’m trying to lose weight when half the people here don’t have enough to eat.”
“I didn’t say anything!”
“Yes, but you thought it,” she accuses, and punches me on the arm.
According to Georgina, by far the most important preparation we have to make for a long drive like this is to stock up on music. The revolution, she insists, needs a soundtrack. To provide it, we go to her friend Gavin’s, who has just digitized his music and welcomes us to help ourselves to anything in his CD collection. His tastes, he cheerfully admits, “tend to the queeny.” Confronted with rack upon rack of musicals, Georgina’s eyes light up. And then, even better, ABBA, an entire smorgasbord of it. She scoops them into her big woven grass bag.
As we rattle out of the city, Georgina selects “Waterloo” as our Independence Day tribute. The lyrics which pump out of the buzzing speakers, she has decided, would be a
fitting anthem of defeat for Mugabe.
“I’m confused. Are you singing this to Bob, or is he doing the singing?” I ask.
“They’re supposed to be his words to us,” says Georgina. “He’s conceding defeat.”
“But if he’s cheating, then he feels like he wins, even when he loses, too.”
She shrugs, suddenly glum, and gets out her NicoPipe. This one is black.
AT CHIMANIMANI, we are hosted by Doug and Tempe van der Riet, two of the last whites of my generation still living here. More boys from our local high school are in Western Australia now than in the whole of Manicaland province, Doug says.
That night, the van der Riets put us up in the old house of Dr. Mostert, the village doctor before my mother took over. His medical instruments are still here. His boxed sphygmomanometer, with its perished rubber cuff and air bulb, and its mercury column, still in the chest of drawers, and his stethoscope and auroscope, still in a black leather Gladstone, as though ready for him to go on a house call. In fact, he has been dead for years. The calendar on the wall is from 1988, and the book shelves are stocked with old Rhodesiana. I lie in bed listening to the plaintive, churring calls of the fiery-necked nightjars, and reading Dr. Mostert’s Jumbo Guide to Rhodesia 1972.
THE NEXT DAY we sit on the terrace of the stone house the van der Riets have built overlooking the mountains. But the glittering quartzite ranges we climbed as kids are not what they once were, warns Doug. Today they are teeming with prospectors, who dig up the water-courses and pan the mud for gold.
“Some of the nuggets these guys are finding are huge,” he says. “At the height of the gold rush, there were estimated to be over a million people panning for gold here along the mountains and valleys; you could smell them way before you saw them, because they wouldn’t leave their holes even to relieve themselves, for fear that they would lose their digging site, so they crapped right there in their trenches, and carried right on digging.”
In a recent cold snap, thirty thousand of them came down from the mountain, and dozens died of exposure in caves in the mountains. “You know those caves we used to camp in as kids,” says Doug. “I don’t camp in those caves anymore. There are skeletons in so many of them.”
The van der Riets are almost entirely self-reliant now. “We have two dairy cows, fatten our own pigs, make our own bacon, sausages, provide our own milk, vegetables, salad, cream, yogurt. My dad makes the butter. Everything on the table we produced. Lettuce, onions, potatoes, carrots, peas, tomatoes. Chicken, guava, avocados, apricot, lemons, oranges, passion fruit—all organic—the soil is so fertile here. We sent away for this book called Self-Sufficiency by John and Sally Seymour, and learned how to butcher livestock. It’s quite satisfying, this self-sufficiency. There’s always a pig being fattened. Tempe home-schooled the kids for four years—if we didn’t have to pay for the kids’ education now—we wouldn’t have to work—we could survive on what we grow. We made a cake of feta and a big wheel of Gouda, our own muesli, with roasted oats, honey, oil, sunflower seed, and we barter with each other in the community. We haven’t really used actual cash at all for nearly six months.”
When there are power cuts, which is often, they revert to cooking in a three-legged cast-iron potjie, over a fire, just like the old white pioneers used to in the 1890s. In a little over a century, white lifestyle here has come almost a complete circle.
But not everyone is as fortunate, Doug admits. Some of the people in the outlying districts with poorer soils, who are in the grip of a drought, are now so hungry that they only eat every other day. They eat red ants, they’re so famished. And when he asked them, “Why don’t you eat the fruit from the trees?” they replied, “Because the baboons are also hungry. They eat them first.”
THE FESTIVAL is taking place on the central grassy meadow around which Chimanimani village is arranged. The memorial to the white pioneers, in the middle of the square, which we used to play tag around when I was a child, is long gone, smashed by war vets after independence. Once a year, on Pioneers’ Day, there was a little service there, and we laid wreaths upon the dimpled granite plinth, in honor of our white forefathers. Well, they weren’t actually my forefathers as such, since my parents came here later, after World War II, but the pioneers were the first white settlers here, trekking up in ox wagons from South Africa in 1893.
Unlike Cecil John Rhodes’s initial pioneers, the ones who came here, the Martin and Steyn and Meikle treks were looking for land to farm, not gold. They called this district Gazaland, not after the biblical one in Palestine, but after the abaGaza, a Zulu people who moved north during the Mfecane, the great scattering. In time, these people took the name of their king, Shoshangane, and became known as the Shangaans. They, in turn, dislodged previous residents, the Nxaba. And in 1832, as the Nxaba fled further north, they came across the Portuguese settlement at Macequece, a gold-trading post and mission station. The Nxaba attacked it, and during the fierce battle the Portuguese ran out of bullets. In desperation, they broke out their boxes of bullion, melted the nuggets over the fire, and poured them into molds to cast bullets of gold.
I had always been fascinated by that story when I was growing up. Imagine that, casting the bullets out of the gold that was your most precious possession? Literally using your riches to save your lives. And I used to think about the bodies of those Nxaba warriors felled in the bush, with gold bullets lodged in their flesh. And whenever I read in the press the phrase a silver bullet, or a golden bullet, to solve some problem, I thought of those Nxaba warriors, those Nxaba corpses, lying on the riverbank. And the fact that the golden bullets used by the Portuguese didn’t turn out to be golden bullets in a problem-solving way, after all. The Portuguese ran out of gunpowder, and the Nxaba killed them all.
BY SATURDAY NIGHT, the Chimani Festival is running hours behind schedule. It is already midnight and the crowd of forestry laborers and their families, with horse blanket capes around their shoulders and woolly balaclavas over their heads to keep out the mountain chill, are growing restive, impatient for the headline gig, Oliver Mtukudzi and the Black Spirits, Tuku to his many fans.
The MC finally bellows, “Are you ready for TUKU?”
“Yebo!” the crowd roars back, expecting Mtukudzi to appear.
“Well, he’s about to come—but first, we have another act, Chris Lynam, who is a…” He consults his notes. “Who is a, a… well, some sort of clown.”
The crowd groans with disappointment, as the single spotlight picks out a diminutive white man leaping onto the stage. He is dressed in a shiny white suit, a shocking pink shirt, neon braces, oversized black shoes. His long dark hair is teased up into a punk pompadour; his face is caked with white foundation, and heavy black eyeliner.
From inside his oversized pockets he pulls handfuls of white paper squares and throws them into the air.
“Snow,” he announces.
The crowd regards him silently.
He throws more. “Big snow.”
Behind me a mystified lumberjack murmurs, “Ah, but there is no snow in this country.”
Lynam pulls his white jacket around himself and stands still, hands at his side.
“Bottle of milk.”
In the same position, he jiggles a bit.
“Bottle of milk in transit.”
The crowd is mute, but for some babies wailing.
“Eskimo talking,” he says, popping handfuls of ice cubes into his mouth and spitting them out across the stage. Huddled in the darkness, the crowd is nonplussed.
Lynam juggles fire sticks. He swallows one of them, and there are murmurs of admiration. This they get, a fire-eater.
“There are three kinds of people in the world,” continues Lynam, encouraged. “Those that can count and those that can’t.”
The crowd consult one another, and there is much shaking of woolly hatted heads.
Lynam kicks off his bulbous clown shoes, peels off several brightly colored socks, to reveal ballet pumps. He sheds his sui
t, and underneath it is a white tutu, in which he pirouettes and prances. Then, to the soundtrack of Ethel Merman’s There’s No Business Like Show Business, he begins a striptease. Off come the tutu, the pumps, the leotard and tights, until only a pair of Victorian bloomers remains. Turning his back to his audience, Lynam is now ready for his finale. He places his legs apart and theatrically rips open the bloomers to reveal his G-stringed bottom to the crowd, the twin moons of his pale buttocks glowing in the spotlight.
“This,” Lynam announces, now with his head upside down, looking at them from between his legs, “is my tribute to our President.” He wedges a long tube into the cleft of his buttocks, clenches it in place, and reaches around to light the fuse. It is some sort of Roman candle, and immediately a pyrotechnic fountain of sparks spurts from his arse, high into the dark Chimani night. The forestry workers murmur some more. They are nervous now. There are CIO spies and Mugabe’s militiamen and plain-clothes policemen among them.
From between his legs, Chris Lynam’s mascaraed raccoon eyes regard their ranks of upturned faces, lit by the sparks showering from his own bottom, and repeats his tribute, as though it were an official toast at a diplomatic dinner. “To our President!” he shouts.
Georgina and I are hugging ourselves with mirth, crying with it.
THE NEXT DAY, Lynam drives us out to his farm. In mufti, he’s compact and muscular, his boyishness belying his fifty-five years. For an hour or so we bounce along a dirt road, following the curve of the mountain range round to the east toward Mozambique, with a clown at the wheel.
“I woke up one morning when I was about twenty and just said to myself, ‘I want to be a clown.’ ” He shrugs. “I got a place at Le Coq School in Paris, one of eighty places from three thousand applicants, but I couldn’t afford the fees, so I taught myself by playing on the street and doing some acrobatic workshops in London. I think clowns are born, not raised.” He calls his style of clowning “modern anarchic,” or, on reflection, “maybe zany,” and admits that it scares some people.
