by Peter Godwin
“The funny thing is,” Kidd writes, when he finds himself languishing in the cells again, having first been assaulted, “that the more they arrest me, the more respect I get from the lower-ranking officers, they were only too willing to be of assistance and talk to me.”
He’s out a day later, but after two weeks’ liberty, I find this entry.
“Dot dot, dash dash, dot dot. Good evening, Zimbabwe and all ships at sea, this is Shane Kidd (apologies to Walter Winchell) with the latest up-date on law-and-order in Chimanimani. Yes, you guessed it. I fell down the rabbit hole again.” He’s dumped in a cell at Chimani with the same prisoner, accused of rape, who was here two weeks ago, and they settle down on the concrete floor together, sharing a blanket. Meanwhile the police lie to Birgit about where he is, so she drives between distant police stations “playing hunt the prisoner.”
Late the next night they cuff his hands behind his back, blindfold him, and push him into a police truck. As they drive along, “they start threatening me and telling me how I’m being taken to a secret location to be killed.” The blindfold slips down, so they tie a jacket over his head and force him down on the floor. “We then settle down for an hour and a half journey,” he writes grimly, “with the occasional death threat thrown in to lighten the atmosphere.”
“[S]o it’s another weekend in jail,” writes Kidd. “This is really playing hell with my golf handicap. The high point is the cell search on Saturday morning. After everyone is searched individually, we are all put in the dining hall while the cells are searched. I’m called out of the hall and shown a package. One of the prisoners has taken some of my hair from the haircut on Thursday morning and wrapped it up in toilet paper to use for mushonga, African spiritual medicine. I found it hilarious, but the guards took it quite seriously. Hey, what do they want me to do, stop my hair growing?”
When Birgit is eventually permitted to bail him out, he records, “I’ve now spent thirty-three days in jail in the last three months. I’ve opened up a bet book to raise funds for the club, at Z$500 a ticket. You get to guess how many more days I will spend in jail before 30th December.”
In the meantime, the magistrate in Chipinge, Walter Chikwanha, who allowed him to be bailed, is dragged from his courtroom by Mugabe loyalists and severely beaten. Lawyers defending MDC activists have had their houses and vehicles attacked. And Shane is disqualified from standing as a local councillor, because he doesn’t have a Zimbabwean birth certificate, even though he is a Zimbabwe citizen and resident, and holds a Zimbabwean passport, and indeed, served as a councillor once before.
He writes: “The food situation in the village is getting a lot worse and people have started dying of hunger in the western part of the district (poor agricultural area, bad soils and rain shadow).” But if you are not a party member, you can’t get food aid.
Soon Kidd is “down the rabbit hole” again. By chance he drives onto Roy Bennett’s farm just as Mugabe’s security men, police, CIO, and soldiers are there in force, arresting all Bennett’s senior staff, and random people like Doug van der Riet, and some visitors from the UK, who just happen to be nearby. The way Doug remembers it, he sees Shane’s bright orange VW Golf drive up, and Shane leans out of his window and says to Mwale, “My, my, what have we here, Joseph?”
Mwale tells him to get in the back too. Of course, Shane refuses.
“Just do it,” urges Doug, because he knows what’ll happen next if Shane doesn’t get in. So does Shane, but he won’t comply, just the same. In his diary, Shane puts it this way. “Mwale approaches, toting an FN rifle, and I greet him by his first name, ‘Hello, Joseph.’ This gets him going, he hates being called Joseph. He turns the rifle around and hits me in the face with the rifle butt, and tells me of the dire consequences if I continue to call him Joseph. ‘You know you are dead already,’ he tells me.”
Kidd is locked up again. During interrogation, Mwale tells him that the only way he will stay in Zimbabwe is buried in the ground. Chimani, says Mwale, is his district and he’ll do as he likes here… “Mwale seems to think he’s some sort of a general and is undoubtedly setting himself up to become the local warlord when things ultimately fall apart.”
By the time Kidd is released, it is night. “Walking away from the police station in the dark I was greeting other pedestrians. One of them, whom I’ve never met before, said, ‘Is that you, Mr. Kidd, what are you doing here?’ ” Shane explains that he’s just been released from the police cells. “He comes up to me and says, ‘Mr. Kidd, we people in Chimani are proud of you. Can I shake your hand?’ ” And they shake hands there on the road, in the dark where no one can see them, the injured white man, and the black villager, and then Shane makes his way back up the hill, through the sleeping village, to the indefatigable Birgit.
THE NEXT DAY the village almost burns down, reports Kidd. A grass fire started by the war vets on Frank Elias’s old farm is whipped by high winds and rages out of control. It licks up Pork Pie Mountain, site of the eland sanctuary, which is soon covered with towering flames, “and fireballs the size of houses.” From there, it sweeps down into the village itself, where the residents desperately battle to beat it back.
In Kidd’s next entry, he reports the assault and torture of Mike Magaza, Roy Bennett’s bodyguard. Bennett’s wife, Heather, “could hear his screams of agony from the charge office and at one point saw him running out of the CIO offices with a bleeding head, only to be dragged back in by Joseph Mwale, where the torture continued.”
In the prison, they discover “eight other MDC members from the surrounding area who have been in the cells for four days without food. All have been assaulted. Some have open head wounds and at least one has broken ribs.”
Behind the accounts of the fires and the arrests and frequent jail time, the assaults and the torture, Kidd worries about his mother, who’s in an old-age home in Bulawayo.
“I visited Mum on Friday,” he writes. “She’s getting smaller and smaller every time I see her. There is a book by a South American author called One Hundred Years of Solitude. In it, the grandmother gets smaller and smaller each year until eventually the great-great-grandchildren use her as a doll in their games and put her to bed in a shoebox. It reminds me a lot of Mum. She used to be four foot nine, now she’s about four foot and getting shorter by the day.”
eight
Birgit’s Bad Hair Day
I AWAKE IN THE MORNING to the screech of butcher birds dueling in the monkey-puzzle tree outside Dr. Mostert’s windows. From our camping supplies, Georgina and I assemble a makeshift breakfast of instant coffee and boiled eggs, and then I take up Shane’s journals again.
He is hiking in the mountains when their house is surrounded by a mob, several hundred strong, from “The Party of Thugs,” ZANU-PF, and soldiers in plain clothes. They throw rocks, which smash the windows and the roof tiles. Birgit is alone upstairs, trying “to make a few calls to the outside world for help. She has got it down to a fine art now, of just texting the word HELP to a group of embassies and lawyers and MDC officials.” The mob breaks down the gate and swarms inside. Birgit takes a deep breath and comes halfway down the stairs to address them, as calmly as she can.
“Why are you breaking into my house like this?” she asks.
“We want to know why did you give your offices to the MDC?”
“One day you will know it and understand,” says Birgit.
They demand to search the house to see if Shane is hiding in there, and they come behind her breaking things and raiding the pantry and looting the refrigerator.
Then, writes Shane:
Man 1 “gets into Birgit’s face and starts shouting, ‘I can kill you. I will kill you. Your ancestors have stolen our land… Go back to Britain where you belong.’ ”
At this stage Man 2, who obviously has some local knowledge, tells Man 1, “Mrs. Kidd, actually, she is from Finland.”
“I am the 1st Finn to come to Zimbabwe, I have no ancestors here,” Birgit interjects h
elpfully.
Man 1: “Where is this country called Finland, is it next to Austria?”
Birgit: “Try a little further north between Sweden and Russia.”
Man 1: “Ah, so you have been to Russia. What did you see there?”
Birgit: “Plenty of Russians.”
Man 2: “This is your house, where are your guns.”
Birgit: “I have lived my life without guns and still I am without them.”
The mob forces her to carry a ZANU-PF flag, and marches her down the road, while they follow, jeering. A neighbor rushes to the police station to report that Birgit has been abducted, but is told it is “a political issue,” and no concern of the police. While the neighbor is there, the phone keeps ringing as embassies and NGOs ask where Birgit Kidd is, and what’s happening. The policeman tells them all, “I know nothing.”
Birgit is marched to her bottle store, used as the MDC office. The Kidds had painted on the white wall: MDC. Nothing illegal. Registered Political Party. But the office has been trashed and everything inside it set on fire.
“Man 2,” writes Shane, “hands Birgit a broom and tells her to clean the mess.” So she does, and all the while, they jeer and chant at her, telling her that they are going to kill her and that she will soon return to Britain in a coffin. A truck arrives and a MDC local official, David Mudengwe, is pushed out of it, accompanied by CIO officers. In front of the crowd, they abruptly attack him, head-butting him in the face and kicking him with martial-arts high kicks, while the mob cheers.
“Birgit tried to intervene and help David,” writes Shane, “but she was pulled back and held. They then stripped off his shirt and there was an MDC T-shirt under that so they attacked him again, giving him another beating, and stripped the T-shirt off his body. David was in agony, his face and body swollen from the repeated beating.
“One of the soldiers dressed in civilian clothes (Birgit has seen him around the village before in uniform) approached her and said, ‘Let’s see if you have an MDC T-shirt on under your blouse.’ At this she finally loses her composure, and raising her voice, says, querulously, ‘Don’t you dare!’ and surprisingly, he backs off.”
Birgit has been told that a ZTV crew from Mutare has been summoned, and when it arrives, David Mudengwe is quickly chased away, and Birgit is paraded before the camera alone.
“When Birgit returned home,” writes Shane, “she found Celia the ridgeback dying, one of the rent-a-mob had given her poisoned meat.
“This latest attempt to wreck the MDC office was simply the last in a long line of attempts and like all previous attempts it will fail as well. We will reopen the MDC office again.”
TWO WEEKS LATER Shane is summoned to the police station once more. Inside the charge office, four policemen repeatedly punch him. Another approaches him with a chair, its legs pointing forward, “like an animal trainer circus routine,” writes Shane. The police charge him with assault and throw him into the cells. Later Joseph Mwale comes in with six soldiers. He grabs Shane from behind in a headlock, while the soldiers take turns slapping and punching his face.
His spell in the cells does not have the intended effect, however.
“Whilst in the cells,” Shane writes, “I’ve decided to do more work with MDC in the village, take a higher profile and try and strengthen the office.”
The first thing he does when he gets out of jail is to go to the MDC office with Birgit. He paints over the ZANU sign there and replaces it with his own:
MDC OFFICE—NO MORE FEAR
On another wall, as a joke he writes:
GET YOUR FREE GO-TO-JAIL CARD HERE! IF YOU GO TO JAIL 3 TIMES, YOU GET A FREE MDC WHISTLE.
A crowd has gathered to watch him repaint it. The police chief comes, says, “I can do nothing for you,” and quickly leaves. Shane is up a ladder, painting the wall, when one of the CIO trucks draws up and security agents, war vets, and Mugabe loyalists pour out of it. They wrench the ladder from under Shane and begin assaulting him and Birgit.
“I have six people attacking me and Birgit has three people attacking her,” Shane writes. “Let’s be honest, I’m no Rambo and went down fairly rapidly, but I did get a few good punches and kicks in. I then concentrated on protecting my head with my arms to the best of my ability, while kicking out with those wonderful steel-capped boots. At this stage things were getting a bit blurry.
“Birgit meanwhile was contending with her own problems… Lazarus and two others then attacked her with rocks. She received multiple blows to the head and shoulders but managed to stay on her feet… Birgit tried to find refuge in the garage kiosk with Lazarus and co following behind and continuing to attack her. By this stage Birgit was bleeding profusely from her head wound and was blinded by blood, her left shoulder had also been dislocated and that arm was hanging uselessly by her side.
“Meanwhile I was still doing my impression of road kill…”
Birgit is rescued by a passer-by and rushed to hospital. Shane is badly hurt too, but still, minutes after the assault ends, he returns to the MDC office, which the war vets are repainting with pro-Mugabe slogans, and he berates them.
“I know it’s a pointless exercise,” he writes in his diary, “but the only reason that I’m doing it is to show them that they can beat me, but they can’t make me fear them.”
Then he walks up to the government district administrator’s office, “where I’m about as welcome as a plague carrier, and start giving him a hard time, about who the hell he thinks he is, telling the war vets that Birgit doesn’t own the bottle store anymore. To tell you the truth, my heart isn’t really in it, the adrenalin is wearing off and the shock is starting to set in, and I’m feeling decidedly woozy.”
He phones a friend to collect him, and while he waits, “I amuse myself by spreading blood around his office. The body is way past walking mode, and was telling the ego to sod off, it wasn’t the ego that had just been stomped on and the body had the casting vote and the ribs are unanimously behind it.
“The net result,” writes Shane, is that “Birgit had sixteen stitches in the head and a dislocated shoulder. I was a lot luckier, no stitches just badly bruised ribs and upper body and some cuts and lacerations. One bright moment; some reporter from VOA [Voice of America radio] was on the phone to Birgit and asked her what she was going to do for protection in future. Birgit replied that she would wear a hard hat. The rest of the week has been taken up with hospital, lawyers and doctors. See attached photo of Birgit having a bad hair day.”
In the photo Birgit is in profile, her silver bob and face caked with blood. This is her good side. On her other side, the Chipinge doctor is stitching an angry gash.
In the police report filed by the Kidds, they name the assailants. Lazarus Shahwe, one of Mwale’s men, leads the attack on Birgit, “with rocks, fists and boots.” He finds a six-foot gum plank, “which he then used to beat Birgit on the head three times,” splitting it open. Yet nine months later, it is to the Kidds and the MDC that Lazarus runs, seeking sanctuary from Mugabe’s men, having now fallen foul of them himself.
SHANE HAS CALLED one of his journal entries Days of Our Lives, because “our lives are turning into a rather dreadful soap.” He wrestles with the news, brought to him by someone who has overheard Mugabe’s men plotting, that “apparently we are to be kidnapped and then ‘disappeared!’ ” and tries to figure out why he’s sticking his head so far above the parapet, when most others are crouching well beneath it.
“Doug asked me today why we do what we do. I rather glibly replied, ‘We each have to draw our own line and make our own stand.’ But that’s not really the answer.
“I’ll be buggered if I’ll be told what I can and can’t do in my own country. But there is more to it than that. While we were at the MDC office in Mutare, this morning, three Chipinge women came in, one of them was an MDC councillor in Chipinge, all three have just had their homes burned and destroyed. The councilwoman was one of those who attended all my trials in Chipinge a coupl
e of years ago as a show of support.”
When she hears that the Kidds have reclaimed the MDC office in Chimani, says Shane, “it brought a smile to her face, and a little hope.”
THERE IS A disturbing epilogue to Joseph Mwale, which I hope is only a provisional one. He was rewarded for his hard-core tactics by being promoted and transferred to Harare, as part of Mugabe’s close security team. And to this day, he has not been prosecuted for the murders of Talent Mabika and Tichaona Chiminya, and the many, many assaults he personally carried out and ordered.
A few months later, at Princeton, I met an anthropologist, David Hughes, who had done doctoral field work in Zimbabwe. His name was familiar, and then I remembered what I’d been told by Caiphas Mupuro, who had taken over Chris Lynam’s farm. This was the American who had stayed down in the Rusitu valley. Hughes confirmed it—he was actually at Berkeley, not Harvard—and told me that it had become too dangerous for him to continue his research there, that people he talked to were being beaten by Mwale’s CIO agents. Hughes had finally met Mwale at Heroes’ Day celebrations in Chipinge where, because he was a visiting American, he was hauled up onto the stage as a VIP.
As Mwale got drunker, he summoned Hughes and began complaining that the CIO had been treated unfairly. “The army and the police, they also kill people. More people than we do, but they don’t have such a bad name. You know why?” he asked.
“Why?” Hughes obliged.
“Because they have public relations officers. That’s what we need in the President’s Office. We need public relations officers. Then we wouldn’t have such a bad reputation.”
Mwale’s solution to the CIO’s murderous reputation was not to kill fewer people, but to spin it better in PR terms! It gives you an insight into the depth of their dysfunction, agreed Hughes. In the meantime, he had settled upon a new subject for his own anthropological study, the last of an endangered species: the white farmer.
