by Peter Godwin
“Do you know where you are?” asked the driver.
Gandanga had no idea. It turned out he was on the Wedza road, about sixty miles from where he had been abducted in Harare. It was an old white farming area, now jambanja’d, and the good Samaritan turned out to be a resettled farmer, and a Mugabe supporter. When they ran low on fuel they pulled in for the night at the homestead of another new farmer, who gave Gandanga his carved walking stick. But later they became suspicious about his politics—“They said thieves don’t usually run over their victims’ legs,” explains Gandanga. “But the local headman said: ‘It doesn’t matter about his political affiliation. We still have to help him.’ ” The next day they took him to Marondera, into cell-phone range, and Gandanga called his wife’s brother, who came to collect him.
Now he is worried. “When they realize that I survived, they may try to get me again. They know my address, they’ve visited me there before. I will have to relocate to a safe house.
“My wife and my four-year-old son, Shepherd, came to visit me in hospital.” He points to his swollen feet. “Shepherd said, ‘Daddy, where are your shoes?’
“We are in a deep political crisis,” says Gandanga. “The police won’t deal with perpetrators of political violence—reporting it to them, it’s a waste of time. We have people with their fingers cut off, their feet burned—and nothing happens. We need to think outside the box as a political party—the state is at war with its own citizens—we are not armed, and they are. We know very well that we won the elections. ZANU is scared. This is a strategy to reverse our victory—forcibly—in front of our eyes. It’s clear from the questions in my interrogation that they want to incapacitate the MDC—to eliminate its key people. So many of us are threatened, hurt, displaced. Our main leaders are outside the country. Our structures are damaged. We need to make strong decisions. Here power is being taken by force, so what’s next? We need to contemplate our options. Even if we win a re-run, they will never announce it. And it’s daydreaming to think that the re-run will be fair. Already people are being terrorized.”
eleven
Chronicles of Narnia
I SPEND THE AFTERNOON transcribing the testimony of Dandaro’s wounded, backing it up on flash drives, and emailing it out of the country, my anger and fear growing as I review their gruesome experiences. I try to imagine what it must feel like to be tortured. I have read that time slows. It becomes elastic. “For in a minute there are many days,” but Shakespeare wrote that about a different agony, the agony of yearning. I try to call my family in New York, wanting to hear the reassuring voices of my young sons, Thomas and Hugo. So many of those in Dandaro don’t even know where their children are. As usual, I can’t get an international line. It only adds to the claustrophobia of it all.
That evening, Georgina and I go to a party given by the Hon. William Brandon. His father was an English law lord. Brandon Jr. is a first secretary at the British embassy here, though everyone seems to assume that he’s Our Man in Harare. But not for much longer—barely three months into a three-year posting, he’s about to leave.
We have been doing our best to assist him work his way through the last of his good South African wine. Toward the end of one hard-drinking evening, recently, Brandon suddenly roused himself from the torpor of his fireside armchair to announce that he’d had an interpretational epiphany.
“I’ve got it!” he said. “It’s C. S. Lewis. We’re living in Narnia, and Morgan Tsvangirai is Aslan!” And he fell back into the creased leather depth of his armchair, while we considered this.
Some see Aslan, the talking lion, king of the beasts, as a Christ figure—after all, he is resurrected, and returns to free Narnia. Aslan is also the son of the Emperor over the Sea, a distant but powerful authority over Narnia—as such, an unsettling echo of Mugabe’s taunts that Tsvangirai is a mere puppet for British neo-imperial interests. Though C. S. Lewis was at pains to say that Aslan, notwithstanding his generally peaceable disposition, was “not a tame lion.”
In Brandon’s version of the allegory, Mugabe would have to be Jadis, the White Witch, who freezes Narnia into a hundred-year winter. Only seventy to go, then? It’s a dispiriting prospect.
Brandon recharged our glasses.
“In vino, veritas?” I toasted bitterly.
“What?” said Georgina.
“In claret, clarity?” I ventured.
“It’s pinotage,” said Brandon, drily, and wandered off down the gloomy corridor of the empty house, perhaps to pen an encrypted chronicle of his own to Vauxhall Bridge Road, lionizing the opposition leader and extending ice-queen Mugabe’s winter of our discontent.
TONIGHT IS his farewell party.
Polly, his wife, and their daughters (eleven-year-old twins and a nine-year-old), and their eighteen-month-old son have already gone. Brandon is packing up the house before he too will return to the UK.
Their premature departure was triggered at 3 a.m. one night, not long after their arrival, when his wife awoke to find four large men standing over them, stripped to the waist, their shirts tied around their mouths and noses to mask their identities. The men were armed with sharpened crowbars and pipe wrenches with which they had peeled back the iron burglar-bars. They ripped his wife’s rings off, and she was terrified she would be raped (one of the burglars sported a prominent erection) or, worse, that their daughters would be. So they cooperated. The men allowed Brandon to pull on his pajamas, and then force-marched him to unlock the safe.
“We are doing this because we cannot feed our wives and families,” one of them said.
But they were disciplined and confident, and of military bearing. And they had managed to evade the house security, the electric fences, and the guards, and they seemed to know the layout of the house.
They took U.S.$2,000 from the safe and jewelery worth much more, leaving Brandon and his wife bound on the bed, but the kids undisturbed. After they had gone Brandon turned to his wife and, with admirable sang-froid, declared, “Well, I think that went rather well, considering.” And she concurred. They had got off lightly. But after that she could no longer sleep at night, and the kids were terrified.
AT TONIGHT’S PARTY, I find myself talking to a rather corpulent black man in a clerical collar. Because my head is bursting with the torture stories, and because I assume that as a churchman he should be particularly appalled by man’s inhumanity, I let the stories tumble out of me. But it becomes apparent that he’s growing distinctly uncomfortable with this conversation; he’s glancing around for rescue. Georgina has been outside, still trying to make calls requested by the people we’ve met in Dandaro, telling their relatives where they are. When she approaches, I introduce her.
“Yes, I can see you are related,” he observes. “You have the same nose—the same frying pan, as they say.”
As he says this, she discreetly tugs my sleeve.
“You know who he is, right?”
“Well, obviously a priest, but I didn’t quite catch his name,” I admit. “Something vaguely Cuban, I think. Fidel?”
“Father Fidelis,” she says. “You know, Fidelis Mukonori?”
The realization seeps into me. The man I have been hectoring about Mugabe’s torture camps is the head of the Jesuit Order in Zimbabwe; but more importantly, he’s Robert Mugabe’s personal chaplain and spiritual adviser.
“Well, one hears these allegations of abuses, generally,” he is saying now, taking advantage of my shocked pause, and waving his hand in airy dismissal. “But one is not sure if they’re true, really, of the details, or just exaggerations. Anyway, I’ve been away for the last three months, in Rome, helping to elect a new Jesuit Superior-General. He’s the head of the Jesuits worldwide, you know, heir to St. Ignatius.”
Warming to this new and much safer topic, Mukonori tells me that the Jesuit chief is called the “black pope,” not because of his skin though, he quickly qualifies, but because of the color of his cassock. Laughter rumbles up from his belly. The General Cong
regation of Jesuits, two hundred and seventeen of them from all over the world, including himself, gathered in Borgo Santo Spirito, the order’s headquarters in Rome, for several days of prayer and what they call in Latin murmuratio, the murmurings. During these discussions canvassing is forbidden; in fact anyone who shows even a flicker of desire for the top job, “the crime of ambition,” must be ruled out. Then the vote is held by secret ballot.
While he talks, I am trying to weigh up the risk of further exposing my presence in Zimbabwe against the potential reward of getting Mugabe’s spiritual trainer undeniable, first-hand exposure to the bloodied victims of his President’s policies.
Once elected, the delegates all drop to their knees and kiss the new general’s hand, Fidelis continues. He holds office for life, and can only be removed by the General Congregation, convened by the general’s five “assistants.” Apparently, this has only happened once, in 1664, when Goswin Nickel SJ, a German General, was removed because he sank into senility.
“Come with me tomorrow and I’ll walk you through the wards,” I find myself saying, cutting across his continuing explanation of the arcane traditions of Jesuit leadership. “You can talk directly to those who have been tortured. You’ll get all the details first hand.” Mukonori starts to dissemble—he is busy tomorrow, and the following days, with many pressing commitments. But I kept insisting, and finally he agrees, more to get rid of me than anything else.
THE NEXT DAY we go to the races with Heinrich and Amanda, and their son Christof. Borrowdale Racecourse has limped on, through all of Zimbabwe’s crazy decline, though with a vastly reduced field. And the sea of faces that once lined the stands and queued at the Tote to wager is now reduced to small knots of people, few of them betting—what’s the point when the currency of your winnings is almost worthless. From here you get a view of the city skyline which could foster the illusion that it’s still a dynamic, confident place, a view of course that melts like a mirage as you actually enter it. Neighboring the racetrack is Pockets Hill, home of the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation (ZBC), marked by a looming aerial that pumps out Mugabe’s toxic views to the city’s townships and out across most of the country, radiating a message of hate and revenge.
Upstairs in the Members’ Enclosure of the racecourse, the hardcore remnants of the equine fraternity gather in a room lined with photographs of old racing triumphs. They surge to the balcony to watch the latest race gallop by. Dandaro is barely a quarter of a mile from here. Dandaro where Dombo lies, with his broken legs and arms, and Gandanga with his blood-bloated legs that were run over repeatedly by a CIO truck, and Norest, the angry welts of the whip still ridging his back and legs, Tendai, lying on his front as the deep lacerations on his buttocks suppurate into the gauze dressing. That is what’s so bizarre about this place. That even as the violence goes on, there is somehow an illusion of normality, a tuning-out of the awfulness that surrounds us, just as surely as the airwaves above us thrum with ZBC’s malign message. Yet here people are placing bets on horses, and drinking bad sparkling wine. That, I suppose, is the genius of the human condition, its ability to adapt, even to the most extreme situations.
AT THE TIME THAT Father Fidelis has notionally promised to come to see for himself, Georgina and I return to Dandaro. The duty nurse hustles us in—there have been CIO agents around earlier, she says nervously, and we do our rounds, delivering the scrounged items that have been requested, a pair of shorts here, flip-flops there, air time for a cell phone. Dombo has asked for more books—he’s consumed Kidnapped, and is ready now, I think, for some C. S. Lewis. Fidelis’s appointed time comes and goes, and from the business card he’s given me I start to call him on his various numbers, but his cell is switched off and his land line goes unanswered. I am unsurprised.
Dombo and I are discussing C. S. Lewis when there is a gentle knock at his door, and a shocked nurse shows in Fidelis, his large presence filling up the little ward. I can’t believe he’s here. I clasp his hands. “Thank you for coming, thank you so much.”
I introduce him to Dombo, who recounts his story, and we move him round the wards of the torture victims. Dandaro is full of them. At the end Fidelis’s smooth, plump face has sagged, and his twinkling eyes have dulled. Now Fidelis knows there’s no denying what has been happening here, that this is real, the savagery of it all. And he knows that I know that he knows.
There really is no middle ground here any longer—especially for a man of the cloth. Moral choices must be made.
“Can you do something?” I ask. “Can you talk to the President?”
“I’ll definitely get the message up the line,” he promises.
Even as he promises, I’m aware of the absurdity of it all, my request and his promise. It’s the President who has unleashed this wave of terror—of course he knows it’s going on, even if he leaves the details to underlings and never gets his own hands soiled.
“How will this all end?” I ask.
Fidelis suddenly softens. He sighs and smoothes his large palm over his face.
“The old man is tired,” he says. “He wants to go, but there are others around him who will not let him step down. There are peace initiatives going on as we speak. I think it will be fine.”
He shakes my hand and turns away. And as his footfall clacks down the parquet corridor and the hospital doors swing shut behind him, I know in my bones that it won’t be. It won’t be fine at all.
twelve
What Fear Smells Like
THE OFFICES OF THE Counseling Services Unit (CSU) occupy two floors of a low brown face-brick building on a dusty side road uncomfortably close to ZANU’s crowing tower block. Its unmarked door is covered by a heavy metal security cage, but it is still terribly exposed. CSU is the main clearing house for the injured and traumatized, for the victims of Mugabe’s political violence and torture. If they can make their way into Harare, this is where they’ll end up.
Beneath a sagging CSU banner, a roiling storm cloud with an improbable ray of sunshine piercing it, and the motto “Rehabilitation, Empowerment, Growth,” the waiting room is teeming. No sooner have its occupants been taken to clinics, hospitals, or shelters than new ones limp in, many still in shock, seriously injured. The country’s state hospitals have all collapsed. They have no drugs, little working equipment, sporadic power. And their doctors are on strike. Hyperinflation has eroded their average salary to just U.S.$10 a month. In any case, most of the people huddled in CSU’s waiting room are too afraid to go to any government-run institution after their treatment by Mugabe’s men.
The scene here reminds me of the huge canvas that my mother once showed me in London, hanging on the wall by the great staircase of the hospital at which she trained, St. Bartholomew’s. It is called The Pool of Bethesda, after the biblical scene, and its painter, William Hogarth, modeled it on real patients, a vast scene of the suffering, the groaning sick, the lame and wounded, all pleading for help.
In this CSU Bethesda, some are in casts, some swathed in bandages, some with eye patches, slings, crutches. The place smells of wood smoke and sweat, dust and urine, and blood. This is what fear smells like.
Donnard Gambezi, fifty-one, from Mudzi, sits on an old sofa with his wife. He has on his best straw hat, bright blue work jacket, padded white athletic socks and slippers, these last two from the charity box, as he fled without shoes. His grizzled jaw rests heavily in his hand, his eyes the angry red of the unslept. He is an MDC polling agent for the Bangauya Ward, whose job it was to make sure there were no voting irregularities there. He found irregularities, all right: sixty Mugabe supporters stormed his house. “They said, ‘We want your X for ZANU-PF but you have put it for MDC, so now we’ve come to beat you and destroy you and your family.’ ” And they did just that. “They beat me in shifts with batons and sticks, took me to their base and beat me some more until I couldn’t walk or even sit.” When he was finally released, he says, “I walked for three days to get to Harare, sleeping in the bush at night.”
The man next to him (who is too afraid to be named) is an MDC official from Mt Darwin. There they were attacked by six hundred Mugabe supporters, taken to Mukumbura base.
Another man groaning on the floor says, “The veterans came with AK-47s, they tied me with wire, here.” He points at his crotch.
“Mboro [penis]?” I ask.
“Uh uh.” He shakes his head.
“Machende [testicles]?”
“Yes.” He nods, and tells me they tied his balls with wire, and yanked the wire to pull him around, until he fainted from the pain.
After he and his group finally escaped, they tried to cross the border into Mozambique, “but the Mozambique soldiers said, ‘We don’t want you,’ and they threw us back. So we walked, all the way to Harare, during the nights. Others of us are still hiding in the bush even now.”
Thomas Kanodzimbira, thirty, sits on the floor, cross-legged. He still has a shunt needle in his arm from a drip. “They wanted eight of us, who had started the MDC in Dande. They said they would take our wives, so we are worried,” he tells me. “They hit us with sticks, matombo, stones, sjamboks, barbed wire. Even the ZANU-PF councillors and local MP were doing it to us. They said, ‘You are the ones who are causing our President to be defeated.’… They took all of our grain, our goats, our plows, so our families have nothing to eat.”
No one was spared the violence. Not the women, not the children, not the elderly. Kanodzimbira is particularly incensed at the treatment of his father, who is well into his eighties, and should be venerated in the Shona tradition that pays enormous respect to the elderly. “My father worked for the Salvation Army for sixty years,” he says, “yet they came and beat him too, even though he is not political. They said to him, ‘You are the one that borned these MDC people.’ ” He shakes his head angrily.
