by Peter Godwin
As we bump eastward, we cross over ruinous rivers. Goldpanners have gouged the banks, peeling them back from the narrow mountain streams, once so clear and cold and sweet, into a wide swathe of sludge. The waters now run red, as though the mountains themselves are bleeding from their wounds. The ground on either side of the rivers is pockmarked with craters dug by the gold-panners. They look like shell holes from a war.
The panners ride here on big flat-bed lumber trucks called “goneyets,” after the hookers who service them. The hookers ask whether this truckful have “gone yet,” or still have carnal needs to be serviced. You can only imagine what the HIV rate is.
Hayfield “B” farm has been a white-owned farm since 1922 when an Afrikaans dairy farmer called Muller settled on it. In 1980, buoyed by the optimism of Zimbabwe’s independence, Lynam purchased it, together with three friends. He remembers when he first arrived, going to pay obeisance to Chief Ngorima, the tribal head of the communal lands in the valley below.
Initially he went back and forth from London, where his clowning work was, but then he came out here permanently in the late ’90s. His interest in it was essentially conservation—Hayfield B is the site of the last lowland rainforest in Zimbabwe. Lynam, who had his wife and two small children with him, built a house and set about ripping out the invasive species, mostly eucalyptus trees, that threatened the fifteen-hundred-acre indigenous forest. “I had just a bicycle for the first six months of setting up the serious rainforest restoration, often riding the fifty miles from Chimani with hardware, bags of cement, milk, soap on the back.”
During that time, he also founded the Chimanimani International Arts Festival, “to entice my mates to come out and see this extraordinary spot.”
Above the rainforest, he planted a thousand macadamia trees, two thousand pineapple bushes, lychees and oranges. But today, as we round the last sweeping bend, we see that the macadamia trees are on fire; most have already burned down, their charred trunks smoldering.
“Maybe your presidential tribute wasn’t appreciated,” I wonder.
“All is not well,” warns Chitsi, the manager, emerging from the undergrowth when he sees it’s Lynam at the wheel. He says that a group of war vets have been on the farm since the elections. “They say it now belongs to them. I can’t stay here with these people, while they are in this mood,” Chitsi declares in disgust. “They say they are not supposed to lose elections.”
Lynam has built not so much a farmhouse here as a soaring, four-story habitable log sculpture, with a view over the eastern end of the Chimanimani range and down the valley, where the Haroni River flows into the Rusitu and across the Mozambique flood plain, out to the Indian Ocean. From up here, on a very clear day, he says, once or twice a year, you can actually catch a glimpse of the sea—a shimmering mirage some sixty miles distant as the eagle flies.
After a while, a posse of unsmiling war vets approach. They are led by a man who wears a camouflage forage cap, and a T-shirt with Mugabe’s clenched fist image stretched over his large belly, and the slogan: Vote Mugabe. His name, he says, is Willie Mafuta, which means fat.
Mafuta announces that the farm now belongs to them. “I don’t hate the skin,” he explains, and he runs his finger slowly along Georgina’s bare arm. “But we have a small issue on which we don’t agree—is this land here part of the communal area, or the farm?”
“It’s farm,” insists Lynam. “All pegged out by a government surveyor. Chitsi, are the maps here?”
“No,” says Chitsi, “they are all stolen.”
“We bought this land,” says Lynam. “We didn’t steal it from anyone.”
“Well, now the government is taking land from white people,” states Mafuta. “Are you Zimbabwean or not? We are ZANU-PF supporters here—which side do you support? We have some whites, like Joseph Sacco, who is ZANU-PF, but he is the same color like you. He is a true Zimbabwean, he participates in the party. We don’t hate all whites. But you, you hate Robert Mugabe—the one who brought freedom to this country. You don’t care about liberation in this country.” And he repeats his question, this time more belligerently. “Which side are you on?”
“I didn’t fight in the war,” says Lynam. “I left the country during the war, to avoid fighting.”
“I fought in the war,” interjects another man, pushing past Mafuta, and puffing out his chest. “I am Ruben Zuza and I was in a detachment called ‘we sacrifice ourselves.’ ”
Caiphas Mupuro, another vet, brings out his official war veteran ID card. It describes him as “Liberation War Hero,” number 66450, Republic of Zimbabwe. His photo is set against the backdrop of Heroes’ Acre.
“Look,” he says. “It may seem heavy, but I am not being harsh, because I have even lived with whites. David Hughes from Harvard lived with us for two years.”
He puts away his liberation hero ID, and when he continues, his voice has a threatening edge. “You just take your things, and you go. That’s the fact.”
We walk over to the house to gather up Lynam’s belongings. But the place has already been pretty thoroughly looted: pots and pans, bedding, and clothes taken, basins and plumbing ripped out.
“This house was going to be so beautiful,” Lynam says wistfully, as we walk slowly through the devastation. “I was going to add one more floor. Even now, I kind of wish I’d finished it. The roof tiles are salvaged from the old Union Avenue Post Office in Harare, you know.”
He walks past a dusty manual on rearing silk worms and picks up a metal music stand. “This was part of a sketch, trying to put it together, and it keeps collapsing.” He points to the main wooden joist. “This roof tree, we pulled up with Doug’s Land Rover. Ah, we’ve had some fun here.”
Lynam walks past the old cast-iron Fire King Deluxe stove and looks out at the mountains again. “We get four meters’ rain a year, man—it’s so lush. There was going to be a veranda here.
“In the morning the sun rises over the flood plain down there, and in the evening the mountains turn purple as the sun sets,” he says, looking across at Dragon’s Tooth, the jagged peak that looms above us. “I wish I’d had time to climb that face.”
He points down at the land just below us, where vervet monkeys are swinging between the trees. “That hill down there, that’s on my farm, I’m going to get it back, I tell you.”
As we prepare to leave, the breeze freshens off the mountain. The war vets stand waiting in a grim-faced line. Right up until the end, even through the Land Rover window, Lynam implores them to respect the ecology of the place, to plant on the flat areas and not on the hillsides, and please, to look after the rainforest. “It’s a sacred trust,” he says.
But while Lynam was salvaging the few, randomly overlooked belongings from his house, I had walked out onto the end of the spur and peered over into the valley below to see that the squatters have already begun to clear-cut the last lowland rainforest in Zimbabwe.
But I don’t have the heart to tell him yet.
seven
Down the Rabbit Hole
BACK IN CHIMANIMANI village the next day, we drive up the now rain-rutted road toward the elementary school I once attended, to a stone and timber house owned by Shane and Birgit Kidd. Shane is a freelance saw-miller; he cuts other people’s timber under contract. He met Birgit in Finland when he was on a forestry course there, and brought her back with him to Zimbabwe. Shane is as slight and taut and tough as a stick of biltong. Birgit is sparrow-small, with a lustrous silver helmet of hair. Together, this unlikely couple have ended up as accidental activists.
Of course, it all started with Roy Bennett, whose coffee farm, Charleswood, you can see pressed right up against the foot of the glittering mountain range. No one gets under Mugabe’s skin quite like Roy Bennett, a Shona-speaking former policeman, who joined the MDC when it formed in 1999. He quickly became a champion of the local black community, who nicknamed him Pachedu, “one of us,” and overwhelmingly voted him in as their member of parliament. Mugabe’s fury
was soon felt, not just by Bennett, but by the whole of Chimanimani district. Bennett was thrown off his farm, which was occupied by Mugabe’s war vets. They ripped out the coffee and burned down his lodge. Now Roy Bennett is in exile in South Africa.
The Kidds (who supported Bennett) were sucked into the center of political resistance to Mugabe’s dictatorship through something as incidental as their ownership of the village bottle store, on the main square. I still remember it from my childhood, when it was owned by old Mrs. Ness. My mother, after finishing her medical rounds of the tribal trust lands, would go on a weekly liquor run there to pick up a bottle of Bols brandy for herself, and one of Gold Blend whiskey for my father.
When the Kidds decided to rent the store’s back room to the MDC to use as the Chimani office, Mugabe’s goons threw them out and took it over themselves. On one outside wall, the war vets drew an oddly simian picture of Mugabe, with no neck, entitled His Excellency Since 1980. On another they wrote: Chimanimani District War Veterans, War Collaborators and ZANU PF Office. Under this, they drew an AK, spitting bullets, like it would in a cartoon. Shane posed for a photo in front of it, so that it looks like the bullets are coming straight at his head. Then he painted over it.
This modest, frontier-style building became a symbol of the political identity of Chimani. And what followed was an extended tussle over this office, as it changed hands in ever more violent circumstances. In the process the Kidds, who insisted they had the right to rent their store to whomever they liked, and they liked the MDC, became the nucleus of opposition to Mugabe in this mountain enclave.
SHANE IS BRISTLING with anger at the recent elections. He shows me his three-page analysis of how the voting was rigged here, through a combination of outright fraud, deliberate miscounting, and the disenfranchising of opposition voters by polling-station officials working for Mugabe. The fraud is sometimes ridiculously obvious: in some wards, the results were just swapped. In others, they simply subtracted a digit from the MDC vote, to reduce it by a factor of ten. As he walks me through the figures, he can clearly show that the MDC would have won healthily here, notwithstanding the intimidation. Yet Chimanimani will be posted as a ZANU parliamentary gain.
Shane also lends me his journal. That night, in old Dr. Mostert’s musty mausoleum, I begin to read it. The journal is a compilation of emails to friends overseas and his diaries, a telescoped account of an almost continuous range war, with the Kidds at the center—harassed, threatened, assaulted, abducted, arrested, imprisoned—recounted with humor and grit and humility. And scorn, both for their tormentors and for those locals who are intimidated, who collaborate or acquiesce. And in between, he rails at how bad this all is for his golf handicap.
Shane’s nemesis through much of his account is one Joseph Mwale, local head of Mugabe’s spying agency, the CIO, also sometimes sinisterly known as “the President’s Office,” under whose direct authority it falls. Of all the people who shattered the calm of this mountain enclave, none bears greater blame than Mwale. He is a tin-pot tyrant, trying to make his name as Mugabe’s enforcer. Mwale’s first brush with infamy was the gruesome murder of two of Morgan Tsvangirai’s election agents, Talent Mabika and Tichaona Chiminya, while they were out campaigning on his behalf in his home district of Buhera, in southern Manicaland, back in 2000.
The eyewitness accounts of what Mwale did to these two are not for the faint-hearted. Just after leaving the police station where they had tried to report the brutal assault of one of their colleagues, their vehicle was blocked by a twin-cab truck with “ZANU-PF Manicaland Province” logos on its doors, driven by Joseph Mwale. He and his men leaped out, smashed the windscreen and windows of the MDC pick-up, beat the two campaigners, and poured paraffin over them. Then, according to several eyewitnesses (from both sides), Mwale lit a newspaper, threw it onto the paraffin-soaked election workers, and drove off. They staggered out of the vehicle, according to Sanderson Makombe, their colleague, who had escaped, and now came sprinting back. “They were running across the fields burning like balls of flame, you know. So when we got there, Chiminya was already dead but Talent, she was still speaking.” The police were nearby but had merely watched, without intervening.
Makombe and his friends tried “to lift our colleagues, you know, with our own bare hands, they were still burning. Talent was still screaming, she was not dead yet, she had been badly burned. Her whole body was black with smoke and soot… And their skins were peeling from their bodies… but we just had to do it, to lift them.”
This, then, was the reputation that preceded Mwale, when he arrived in Chimanimani and launched his signature reign of terror here.
IT WAS NOT LONG before Shane Kidd clashed with Mwale and was thrown into jail. One of the documents Shane shows me is his prison diary, written clandestinely in an exercise book that Birgit managed to smuggle in. Shane records in it the midnight routine, when the policemen, at Mwale’s command, spray freezing water through the prison bars, dousing the prisoners and their thin blankets, and leaving the cell floor ankle-deep in water. Some nights, he writes, the policemen supplement this by throwing buckets of piss over them.
Shane writes that when Birgit brings lawyers from Mutare, they are chased away by a gun-wielding Mwale. He is assaulted again, with rubber truncheons, and two weeks later, “I still have some lovely bruises on my back and arse.” They are given thirty seconds to eat their meal, sadza (maize-meal porridge) crawling with weevils. They are mixed in with general prisoners, including mental patients who bay and howl, and leap about, day and night. And, “After seeing our heads shaved, Birgit arrives with her head shaved in solidarity, and this cheers everyone up.”
“I defy you,” he writes, “to sit on an open squat latrine with no toilet paper, in front of twenty-two other people and maintain a shred of human dignity.” He holds it in for eight days, a personal record, he notes, before he succumbs.
When the guards confiscate the playing cards the prisoners have made from the cardboard cores of scarce toilet rolls, the prisoners entertain themselves by recounting the distorted plots of novels they have read. “The guards are absolutely paranoid of any form of literature or newspaper getting into the cells, even the adverts are censored,” he writes. “But on a small piece of newspaper that one of my cellmates was tearing up for cigarette papers, they have overlooked a small item about a riot in an Algerian jail, where the prisoners burned their mattresses protesting about something or other. The collective opinion of the cell was, wow, mattresses! The lucky buggers!”
Here they sleep on concrete floors, sharing the threadbare blankets.
And there is the degrading tedium of jail too. One entry reads simply, “Took a dump, had a shower, went on another hunting safari for lice.”
“One real pillar of strength through the last weeks has been Birgit—her constant visits with food, cigarettes and information about the outside world and what people are doing to help us, has boosted everyone’s morale… She puts up with endless bullshit and intimidation and still carries on, she also picks up the guys’ wives and relatives from all over the country and brings them through to visit.
“The guys are magnificent in their fortitude. I think that CIO is going to regret throwing them in jail. We are molding our own hardcore right here in jail. They’ve been here and know that they can survive, they are now genuine political prisoners, this is turning into a badge of honor and they are no longer frightened.”
He writes that when he gets out of jail he is determined to “really get in people’s faces… The one thing I am confident of now is my ability to handle prison, I no longer fear that, and I’m sure that I have the ability to make trouble wherever I go.”
“Free at last,” he writes finally. He’s lost twenty-eight pounds in two weeks, a fifth of his body weight.
But the range war continues. The sign writer Kidd hires to draw a new MDC logo on the office is arrested halfway through the job.
THERE ARE MOMENTS of farce amidst Shane Kidd’s j
ournal too. He writes that one local resident, who has spent every spare moment building a boat so that he and his wife can start a new life in the Mediterranean, “eventually got his boat on the water in Beira, fifteen years in the making. It’s a steel hull, thirty-four-foot long, and eight tons, only problem is that it’s actually closer to twenty tons, top-heavy and went down in the water to its railings and wallowed like a drunken duck. The harbor master told him to take it out of the water…”
Kidd is asked by the black residents of Ngangu township to stand as their councillor in upcoming elections. “The problem is that it’s a huge commitment and in this day and age means more confrontation with police, CIO and more prison time.” But barely pausing to reflect on this, he goes straight on to write, “I have reluctantly agreed to do it. The elections are in August so at least when I go back to jail the worst of winter is over.”
Kidd writes that “Talent [an MDC colleague] and I have decided to go to a witch doctor and put a spell on Mwale, hopefully we can do it sometime next week. I don’t believe in it, but what I believe in doesn’t count.”
“I went to Chipinge to see Yannick Lagadec,” he writes. “Yannick’s just been convicted of insulting Mugabe (it’s a crime to demean the president, akin to blasphemy) and is due for sentencing next week. The judge has told him he can expect prison, and his wife is in a flat panic, worried about rape and AIDS. It appears that I’m considered an informed source on prison conditions so they asked me over for a chat.”
He’s being imprisoned so frequently now that he’s taken to calling it “falling down the rabbit hole,” after Alice in Wonderland.
