by Peter Godwin
But earlier this year Denias Dombo made a terrible mistake. He believed it when he was told that Zimbabwe was to hold free and fair elections. “It was my job,” he says, “as the district organizing secretary for the MDC to apply to the police for clearance to hold party meetings.” So everyone knew his party affiliation. As it turned out Mudzi did not go well for the MDC. They lost all three parliamentary constituencies to Mugabe’s ruling ZANU-PF. You might think this would be a cause of celebration for the victors. But that’s when the trouble started.
One Thursday, in mid-April, Denias Dombo set off from his kraal to investigate a report that a local member of the MDC had been beaten by political rivals from ZANU-PF. Before he was out of earshot, though, he heard a vehicle growling to a halt outside his home, and he turned back to investigate. As he approached he saw “bright flames—my brick and thatch house already on fire” and the two men who had set it alight, scampering back to their pick-up truck.
He recognized both men. One was the newly elected ZANU-PF MP for the area, and the other was a prominent ZANU-PF member and neighbor. The vehicle in which they sped off had ZANU-PF party signs on its doors, and in the back sat a group of youths in party T-shirts, with pictures of Robert Mugabe’s face across their chests.
Dombo yelled after them, “I see you, I know who you are and you are the ones who have burned down my house.”
Everything inside was destroyed. “We Africans are used to putting all our valuables in one place, in what we call the sleeping room,” explains Dombo, “and all our most precious things were there, our beds, a wardrobe, a kitchen unit, all of the family’s clothes, our blankets.”
So Dombo collected the MDC district vice-chairman and his own brother and together they walked fifteen miles, through the night, to the nearest police station, at Kotwa, to report the crime. He made his statement to the police and then walked the fifteen miles home.
Later that afternoon the police arrived, took a cursory look at his burnt house, and departed. Twenty minutes later, about thirty youths in ZANU-PF T-shirts swarmed into the kraal, armed with sticks and iron bars. They were yelling and throwing rocks. Dombo and his family tried to barricade themselves in the kitchen. But their attackers broke down the flimsy door and began stoning the family huddled inside.
That’s when Denias Dombo came to a decision.
“I decided, better for me to come out, or they will kill my family.”
So he told his wife, Patricia, who was carrying their four-month-old son, Israel, told his fourteen-year-old daughter, Martha, and her nine-year-old sister, Dorcas: “I’m going to go out and when they run after me, you must all run away as fast as you can, and hide.” Then Dombo took a deep breath and ran out toward his attackers, and, just as he had anticipated, they converged upon him, with their rocks and iron bars and their heavy sticks, until, he says, “my blood was rushing out everywhere.” He tried to protect his head with his arms while they beat him. “I heard the bones in my arms crack and I cried out: ‘Oh, Jesus, I’m dying here—what have I done wrong?’ ” And as they beat him, on and on, his assailants made him shout, “Pamberi na [up with] Robert Mugabe,” “Pamberi ne ZANU-PF,” “Pasi na [down with] Tsvangirai.”
“And I did,” he admits. “I shouted all those slogans because I was in deep trouble.” But still the beating continued. Until the ringleader, one Jeavus Chiutsa, finally looked at his watch and said, “Let’s leave him here, we’ll come back and finish him off tonight.”
So they walked across to the road, and stood and watched while Denias Dombo tried to stand up, teetered, and fell down, tried to stand up once more and fell again. And then he looked down and realized that his leg was broken; he could see the jagged shard of his left shin bone “waving out,” as he puts it. And one arm hung limp and shattered too. “And they saw I was going nowhere,” he says. “So they blew their whistles, and toyi-toyi-ed [war-danced] away down the road, back to Vhombozi school,” which had served as a polling station and had now been co-opted as a ZANU-PF torture base. There, he heard later, they celebrated. “They killed a goat and roasted it over a fire and sang, ‘We have done it—we have killed their leader.’ ”
Unable to escape, Dombo lay down by the embers of his burnt house. “The pain was so great,” he says, “there was blood everywhere, coming out of my nose and out of my mouth, coming down from my head and into my eyes so that I couldn’t see clearly. I was in such terrible pain and I thought I was dying, and I decided, better to kill myself than just wait for them to return and finish me off.”
So Dombo picked up a length of thick wire, and wiping the blood from his eyes, twisted one end into a tight noose around his neck and summoned his remaining strength to reach up and attach the other end to a hook in the brick wall of his charred house. He took a deep breath and threw himself down. He felt the wire tighten around his throat, felt the sunlight dim, felt himself grow faint, felt the hurting fade, and the life inside him ebbing away. Then he fell heavily to the ground. The wire had broken.
Dombo can’t go on; a great jagged sob wells up from his chest—it is the first time he has really recounted the detail of what happened, and faced the enormity of it all. At his bedside Georgina is crying too, and she reaches over to grasp his hand, and we stay like that for a few minutes, as an air-force fighter roars overhead, and Dombo struggles to regain control. Slowly his sobs subside and he takes up his story once more, in a tremulous voice that is barely more than a hoarse whisper.
After the wire broke and he fell to the ground, Dombo lay there trembling with pain, the wire noose still twisted around his neck, until he heard a piping voice calling to him.
“Baba, Baba, simukai, ndapota,” which in the local Shona language means, “Father, please wake up.” It was Dorcas, his nine-year-old daughter, kneeling at his side. When she saw him lying there, covered in blood, his bones broken and wire twisted around his neck, she began to weep.
“It’s okay, it’s okay, I’m not yet dead,” he told her softly, patting her arm. “But you must go and get help quickly or I might still die.”
He asked her to fetch another neighbor, a fellow opposition supporter, Wellington Mafiyoni.
Soon Mafiyoni arrived and gingerly loaded Dombo’s shattered body into a wheelbarrow. He trundled Dombo five hundred yards out into the bush and laid him down on the ground, pulling some branches over him as camouflage.
“Be brave,” he urged, “and try not to cry so they won’t hear where I hid you.”
Then he set off to walk the fifteen miles to the police station to get help.
“It was cold, and I was still bleeding and the pain was severe,” says Dombo.
And as he lay there that evening on the cold, hard ground, with the jagged end of his broken shin bone sticking out of his flesh, the mob returned. Dombo listened as they searched for him and he heard them decide that he must already be dead. And he heard them setting about his prize possessions, his seven cattle, with axes.
“They cut the tendons on their back legs,” he sobs now. “I could hear my cows crying to me. But I could do nothing.”
As they killed the cattle and looted the house, he could hear them singing a victory anthem. It went like this, he says, singing in a hoarse whisper in his hospital room: “Mugabe torafoshoro nepick to bury Denias Dombo.” “Mugabe take your shovel and pick to bury Denias Dombo.”
Later he heard a vehicle stop outside his house, and heard the mob following it down the road, singing and chanting their victory songs.
Dawn came, and then the day heated up, and the flies buzzed around Dombo’s open wounds, and he fell in and out of consciousness. And when he was conscious he thought he would surely die of “thirst and hunger and pain.” And then, sometime in the afternoon, his colleagues, alerted by Wellington, arrived at his hiding place. They constructed a makeshift stretcher by tying their jerseys between two long branches, and they carried him to the road where the ambulance arrived with a police escort, as the driver was too afraid to come alo
ne.
The ambulance took him to Kotwa clinic, but there was no medicine there; all they were able to give him for his grievous wounds were two aspirin, and he was transferred to Parirenyatwa, the big government hospital in Harare, where there was nothing either, and finally, through a medical charity, he got treatment here, at Dandaro.
“I need another operation to set my bones properly,” he says, “but my doctor told me that I am still too weak, my blood pressure is still too low for that.”
His broken ribs still hurt, and they stop him from sleeping, and he can’t move his leg. And as he lies here, sleepless, he dreams of his children.
“I don’t think I’ll ever see them again,” he says.
Then he holds up his broken arms.
“For me, this is a death sentence—I can’t provide for my children any longer.”
He starts to lose it again, and through his tears, he rails. “I have lost everything. All I had accumulated has turned to ashes.”
His plow and his cultivator were stolen. His groundnut crop, which he should be harvesting now, is either rotting in the field or stolen too.
He doesn’t know where his family is, his wife and daughters and his baby son, or how they will survive with their kraal burned down and their grain plundered, their cattle slaughtered and eaten by Mugabe’s marauding mobs.
“The MDC were going to try to send a message to my family but I heard that the MDC offices were raided and many there were arrested, so I don’t think they managed.”
Dombo reaches painfully into his bedside table to retrieve a small Bible—the New Testament, Psalms and Proverbs. He thumbs through it to find a tattered, much-folded piece of lined paper with the phone number of someone he hopes might know where they were. He presses it into my hand and asks me to try to locate his family.
“Please, sir, I am begging you.”
And then, apologizing as he does so, he turns his face to the wall and begins to weep again.
DOMBO’S WARD MATE, Tendai Pawandiwa, thirty-two, wears a red baseball cap and flicks listlessly through the pages of a four-year-old issue of People magazine. “Who Is Brooke’s True Love?” “Will Young and Eminem—What’s the Low-Down?” lure the headlines.
On his cabinet is a bouquet of roses, still cellophane-wrapped, and wilting without water. “Who gave them to you?” I inquire.
He lowers his magazine and shrugs.
“I don’t know.”
Pawandiwa comes from Mtoko. He was ordered by the local ZANU-PF chairman, Tafirenyika Shada, to attend a party meeting, where he was accused of being a troublemaker for supporting the MDC. Later that same day, a group of ZANU youth, wielding sticks, attacked his kraal. Pawandiwa and his wife and his sister fled into the bush but he was pursued by the mob, and they finally caught up with him near a river.
“They grabbed me and pushed me into the river, telling me that they were going to baptize me in the name of ZANU-PF. Then they pushed my head under the water and tried to drown me.”
Finally, he managed to wrestle free and then he walked fifteen miles to the main road. His body also bears the stigmata of elections, Zimbabwe-style, lacerations on his back and legs.
Now, as he sits here, he worries most about his three-year-old daughter, who was left behind with her very elderly grandfather.
IN ANOTHER WARD, Tonde Chakanedza, thirty-eight, lies on his bed in a green-striped T-shirt, donated by a local clothing store. He is swathed in bandages, on his arms, legs, and buttocks, and peels one up to show the oozing lacerations beneath. Also from Mudzi, he was beaten by a group of over fifty Green Bombers, as Mugabe’s youth league are called here, from the green fatigues they wear.
Next to him, in an identical donated T-shirt, lies Norest Muchochoma, thirty-one, with a small goatee beard. He was taken from his village last week by a group of men, one of whom claimed to be a policeman, who said he was under arrest.
“What for?” asked Norest, but the cop told him, “We’ll tell you when we get to the police station.”
Instead, they took him to the local school, which had served as a polling station. “This,” said the rogue cop, “is the scene of the crime. This is where you voted for the wrong party.”
They made him lie on his stomach and began beating him with sticks, “as big as this.” He points to the bedpost. “There were two hundred and ten votes for the MDC in this ward,” they told him, “and we will find all of you.”
They were about twenty of them being beaten at the school by ZANU youths, led by war veterans, and he insists I write down the perpetrators’ names: David Kanjere, and Clemace Murambidze, and Clifford Makuatsine.
“And when one got tired from beating us, another took over. They also jumped on us with their heavy boots, and kept asking us for the names of other MDC supporters, but I refused to tell them. They said we had to burn MDC T-shirts and party cards and that they would baptize us from MDC to ZANU, from Tsvangirai to Mugabe. ‘By the time of the re-run,’ they said, ‘you must change to ZANU-PF or you will die.’ ”
By the end of the beating, Norest Muchochoma was vomiting and urinating blood, then he lost consciousness. Finally, some time the next morning they were permitted to leave and he crawled the two miles home. Later he made a full report to the police, even though his assailants warned him not to, and then other party members brought him to hospital.
Before the elections, says Muchochoma, his kraal head had instructed the villagers to pretend to be illiterate, “so the police could ‘help’ us to vote, but we refused to tell them we don’t know how to write,” he says. “We do know how to write and we wanted to vote freely.”
“If there is a re-run how will you vote?”
“We will vote for the MDC. ZANU made sure of that by beating us.”
TICHANZII GANDANGA lies in an upstairs ward. His head is bruised and bloody; he peels off the bedspread to reveal two massively swollen legs. He was at his office in Harare city center at 6:30 one evening a week ago when four men in civilian clothes burst in, saying they were police officers. They tried to handcuff him and when he resisted, one pulled out a pistol and threatened to shoot him. Then they shoved him down the stairs and into the back seat of a metallic-gray Isuzu twin-cab, with dark-tinted windows. One sat on his legs while another put him in a headlock. They pulled a black bag over his head so he could no longer see. Gandanga believes that the men were members of Mugabe’s spying agency, the CIO, and the sequence of the interrogation that followed is instructive. After every unsatisfactory answer—and they were all unsatisfactory—Gandanga was hit with the butt of a pistol.
Q: We know you are the MDC director of elections for Harare Province.
A: Yes, it’s a matter of public knowledge.
Q: We know you have sent sixty-four people to South Africa for training as guerrillas because we have rigged the elections and now you want to start a war.
A: I know nothing about that.
Q: And you are also going for training.
A: No. I know nothing about that.
Q: Describe what you do as director of elections?
A: Logistics, campaigning, anything to do with the elections.
Q: Where is Morgan Tsvangirai?
A: As you have read in the papers, he is now in South Africa.
Q: No. We know he’s in Botswana. Where exactly is he?
A: I’m not sure.
Q: Your blood will spill for all of the MDC.
All the while, the vehicle was moving and the stereo was turned up loud, playing a religious song, “Nyika Inorema”—“Life Is Hard on Earth.”
“You are terrified, helpless,” says Gandanga. “But somehow you adjust to the situation.”
After an hour of questioning, they took the blindfold off him, and pushed him out of the car. He noticed another SUV behind them. They began to lash him with whips made of tire rubber, and they kicked him in the face. Nine men came out of the car behind and joined in. Then they ripped all his clothes off until he was naked. They un-c
uffed him, forced him to lie face down while someone stood on his neck, and they beat him again with tree branches. This continued for about thirty minutes until his flayed back was numb. Finally, he faked unconsciousness and they stopped beating him. They dragged him naked into the road and beat him again on his buttocks and back. He remained motionless. They pulled him across the road and then he heard the vehicle start up and get closer and closer, until it ran over his legs, then it backed up, running over them again. His body was so numb, he hardly felt any pain as his legs were squashed, just the thump, thump, as the tires rolled over them.
“Then, through the corner of my eye, I saw it coming a second time to run me over and I just closed my eyes and prayed the wheels wouldn’t run over my head this time, and crush me. They went over my legs again, and the vehicle drove away. I managed then to roll off the road and I looked down at my legs and thought, ‘Will these legs ever work again?’ I managed to wriggle my toes slightly.”
Gathering his strength, he dragged himself away from the road to a tree, and broke off a branch and using this as a crutch staggered back to the roadside and tried to flag down passing traffic. Three vehicles went by. But it was dark and what the drivers saw was a naked, bloody man, propped up by a tree branch, frantically waving them down, so no one stopped. After an hour, a truck pulled to a stop up ahead and Gandanga slowly dragged himself to the vehicle and managed to pull himself up to the closed window.
Unsure of the good Samaritan’s political affiliation, he told him that he had been abducted by thieves, robbed, and dumped in the bush. The driver’s mate hauled him up into the back of the truck. Now the pain was terrible and Gandanga became almost hysterical with it as he lay trembling. The driver took pity on him and gave him his jacket, and he wrapped it around his bloody nakedness. After a while, the driver stopped, and allowed him up into the warmth of the cab. When Gandanga started to feel woozy, he asked the driver to write down the phone numbers of his wife and close colleagues, in case he lost consciousness.
