by Peter Godwin
The young woman next to him, too scared to give her name, says that when they came for her, she and her family ran into the bush and hid there for three days and nights, without food, and on their return, they found that their houses were burned down and their cattle had been stolen.
The stories flow raw and unmediated. Another polling agent, Takawira Chamauya, twenty-eight, from Masvingo Central, where the MDC won, now has a broken arm and leg. “A group of twenty-five war vets led by Eliah Mugabazi, armed with sticks and bayonets, said to us, ‘You have sold your “X” to the opposition and now you will pay for it.’
“First, they destroyed the thatching of all our houses, so when it rains our families have no shelter. They beat us there and then took us to Chedenje Dam, where they have a base. There were many of us MDC prisoners, taken there to be ‘re-educated,’ they said. One of us, Zvidzai Mapurisa, just a young guy, a member of MDC youth, they beat him, pushed his head into the water, beat him again, pushed him back into the water, on and on and on like that for hours, until finally, he died. They were happy then, Mugabe’s people, they danced around and sang that they had killed an MDC member. We reported it to the Muchakata police post but they did nothing, just took the body away.”
Like many others, they are waiting for operations to set their limbs, and then they will have little option but to return home. Even though they are scared, they have nowhere else to go.
“What if there is a re-run?” I ask.
“We’re no longer interested in doing that job for now,” Takawira says vehemently, “because there is no protection—from the MDC leadership or from the police.”
OWEN MACHISA, thirty-four, is here with his wife, Fungai, and their young kids, Bright, who’s seven, and Felix, four, who have fallen asleep on their laps. Owen is MDC secretary of Hurungwe West. He had been working as a tree-feller in South Africa but he came back especially to participate in the elections, because, he says, he believed in democracy.
He doesn’t anymore.
“First the soldiers came and threatened us, saying all MDC people would be attacked.” So as a precaution, Owen and his family retreated into the bush. Sure enough, Mugabe’s supporters came and torched their homestead, a small cluster of huts. Owen and his family waited in the bush, but after a few hours he concluded that the attack was over, and that it was safe to return. He and Fungai salvaged what they could and started clearing up the charred chaos. Owen was relieved to find that his most precious possession, his chainsaw, had been overlooked and was still intact. At nightfall, they settled down to a restless sleep in their roofless hut.
But at 10 p.m. Mugabe’s men suddenly attacked again and the Machisas ran for their lives for the second time in a day. This time, the mob found Owen’s chainsaw, swaddled in its blanket, and they poured the petrol from its tank over the huts and set fire to them once more. This time, boosted by the petrol, the fires burned fiercely, the flames leaping high into the darkness of the Hurungwe night, a malign beacon of revenge, flickering on the terrified faces of Owen and Fungai, Bright and Felix, as they watched from their hiding place in the bush.
Soon all that was left were circular charred rims on the ground, to mark the place that had been the Machisas’ homestead. “Our home and all our belongings were destroyed,” says Owen. “And my chainsaw, they… they stole it.” He finally chokes up. “You know I am a tree-feller, that’s how I made a living. Now I am nothing.”
The chainsaw is the tool he needs to provide for his family; it represents to him the possibility of starting again. Now that it is gone, he can see no future. He becomes nearly hysterical, incoherent. “Better my wife goes back home with the children, even if only to die there—they have no money, no food, no clothes.”
Fungai doesn’t seem to register this dire forecast. She stares down at the scruffy carpet by her feet. Her eyes are blank. She is clearly still in shock.
Owen hugs the kids closer to him. “Better for these ones if I die myself,” he howls, as the two little boys, awake now, look up at him, anxious and upset themselves, at his distress. “They are now outcast, they are labeled MDC children.”
Watching Machisa dissolve is Anna Kadurira, a beautiful eighteen-year-old girl, with the smooth complexion of a burnished acorn. She is dressed in a pink sleeveless blouse and white plaster cast, and like Fungai, she also has that thousand-mile stare. I point at her cast and before I can ask, she murmurs in a low, flat voice that when they beat her buttocks with logs, “it was so painful, I put my arm back there to protect myself, and my arm, it got broken.”
She pauses and looks at me for the first time, before continuing.
“While they were beating me they kept shouting, ‘You want to sell the country to the white people.’ ”
As we speak, many are painstakingly filling out Victim Report forms, helped by CSU staff. And new groups keep appearing, knots of red-eyed, traumatized people who have traveled miles and miles over many days, dragging black plastic bin bags containing what meager remnants they have managed to salvage, a little maize meal, blankets, plastic bottles of cooking oil, chipped enamel plates, cheap Chinese umbrellas, all that remains of their broken lives.
THE SECURITY CAGE rattles again and two disheveled little boys, Trymore and Francis Zondo, five and seven years old, with dusty bare feet, pad in out of the dark, trailing their grandmother, Esther Dewe. Trymore holds a bloody rag over the bridge of his nose. Francis, his older brother, in a blue jacket too big for him, has a grubby, red-stained bandage loosely bound around his head. It keeps falling down over his eyes, to reveal an angry gash beneath.
They were asleep at midnight when their house was attacked by a gang of Mugabe’s militia. The boys’ faces were cut by shards of glass that burst down on them as their bedroom windows shattered. “Then they threw burning grass through the broken windows to smoke us out,” says Esther, and she shrugs hopelessly.
The two little boys share an office chair, huddling together under the flickering glare of the neon strip light, bewildered and homeless and exhausted, watching their gogo do her best to answer the questions from a CSU staff member, who is filling out their victim reports. Finally, the exhausted boys doze off, right there on the office desk, their heads resting upon their thin forearms.
IF YOU LOOK at the patterns of the violence, says Dr. Frances Lovemore, CSU’s medical director, in her office on the second floor, it’s mostly in Mugabe’s strongholds, to get rid of people who, they say, betrayed them.
She looks up at a wall map, which has pins in it, color-coded for the kind of abuse. There is a thicket in the northeast, and another one west of Harare, but there are pins across the entire country now, as the pace of the attacks accelerates.
“Ugh, there’s that rat again.” She lifts her feet onto the table as a large brown rodent scurries across the carpet and behind the desk. In the last few days CSU has seen seven hundred victims, which she believes is less than a tenth of the total in this catchment. The others are too scared to travel, and don’t want to leave their land in case they lose it forever.
“Of those we see, we try to get them to lawyers, to prepare legal and medical affidavits, but we’re overstretched. We can prove systematic torture during this post-election period. Justice is essential, so there need to be reparations and redress.”
Frances uses a phrase I’ve started to hear: “smart genocide,” a grotesque science that Mugabe is apparently honing. There’s no need to directly kill hundreds of thousands, if you can select and kill the right few thousand. Is this really a “refining” of genocide? As Stanislaw Lec, a Polish-Jewish poet, once wondered, “Is it progress if a cannibal uses a knife and fork?”
Some call what is happening here “politicide.” As genocide is an attempt to wipe out an ethnic group, so politicide is the practice of wiping out an entire political movement (and Mugabe had done this before, of course, when he shattered ZAPU, by siccing his troops on their office bearers, during Gukurahundi).
And now the murders
here are accompanied by torture and rape on an industrial scale, committed on a catch-and-release basis. When those who survive, terribly injured, limp home, or are carried or pushed in wheelbarrows, or on the backs of pickup trucks, they act like human billboards, advertising the appalling consequences of opposition to the tyranny, bearing their gruesome political stigmata. And in their home communities, their return causes ripples of anxiety to spread. The people have given this time of violence and suffering its own name, which I hear for the first time tonight. They are calling it chidudu. It means, simply, “The Fear.”
I ask Frances how she’s coping herself, and this gives her pause. She’s been too busy to consider it before. Angry, she says. She’s really angry at what is being done to these people. Then she briskly changes the subject. But just before I leave, the tone of her voice softens. “It’s strange you know, I haven’t cried,” she says. “Not once, through this whole thing.”
She has a look I recognize. Georgie du Plessis, the CSU nurse, has it too, a closed-off look, the one that says you can’t afford to get too emotionally involved, because there is too much to do. I recognize it because my mother had that look for twenty-five years.
thirteen
Dreamland
AS WE WAIT FOR the official results of the presidential elections, and Mugabe’s men rain down violence on the land, Harare’s International Festival of the Arts, HIFA, begins on 29 April. For Manuel Bagorro, a fellow alumnus of St. George’s, and the founding director (with some help from Georgina), each festival is an excruciating navigation between the siren of free expression and the rock of Mugabe’s censors, who will close him down if they deem the festival subversive.
If he keeps it too safe, Manuel risks playing window-dresser to the dictator. Some Zimbabweans, like my architect friends the Beatties, boycott the entire festival, believing it helps give a spurious sheen of cultural tolerance to a violent and deeply repressive regime. If Manuel stages shows too critical of Mugabe, he will endanger the whole festival, but he has nudged the limits in the past.
His last festival here was entitled Showtime; he intended the double entendre to mean it was time to show what was happening in Zimbabwe. And the South African director, Brett Bailey, devised an opening production that included actors being beaten by the band’s backing singers, the “Sequel Police,” the number “Talkin’ Bout a Revolution” by Tracy Chapman, and a parody of “Ol’ MacDonald Had a Farm,” in which a white farmer who had recently been evicted and jambanja’d shuffled across the stage, playing the role of the white farmer who had recently been evicted and jambanja’d. At the National Gallery next door, where some of the performances are held, the gallery director, Heeton Bhagat, turned the permanent collection to face the wall, and displayed instead a huge installation of Victoria Falls made entirely of worthless Zimbabwe dollar bills pouring over the brink.
The whole enterprise reminds me of my days reporting in Eastern Europe before the Berlin Wall came down, as dissidents probed repressive communist regimes, searching for critical space. Just as it was in Eastern Europe, artistic attack here has to be allegorical and implied.
Bagorro is required to submit scripts in advance, where they are reviewed by Mugabe’s CIO, the organization that employs Joseph Mwale. And CIO agents mingle with the crowds here to monitor the event. Maria Wilson, the Executive Director of HIFA, had a running feud last festival with the CIO field officer in charge of spying on the event. He was boorish, drank too much, threw his weight around, and annoyed people, she said, and told him so. At the end of the week, he came to bid her farewell. “Bye, darling,” he said, and, “mwah, mwah,” air-kissed her on both cheeks. “You see,” he said proudly, “I’ve learned to fit in.” A week of thespian company had turned him into a theater lovey—a rare instance of reverse Stockholm syndrome.
This year’s festival is called The Art of Determination, and its logo is designed around a large X, symbolizing the vote, which is still being “counted.” I find it hard to attend. The principal venues are in Harare’s main park, just a couple of miles from Dandaro clinic with its wards of wounded. But Manuel urges me at least to see the opening show, Dreamland—which will be performed only once. Written again by Brett Bailey, it is choreographed by a fellow South African, Sbonakaliso Ndaba.
Throughout the performance of Dreamland, fragments from Zimbabweans’ dreams are projected on a huge screen behind the stage. These have been collected by the drama therapist Paula Kingwill, in a series of dream workshops she held among Zimbabweans of all walks of life. They reflect the terrain of terror and anxiety inhabited by this nation, even as they sleep:
“There was a maze in the living room. Tanks and bombs and those vine things that when you touch them your hands start bleeding until you can see your bones in your hands.”
Nyaradzo, 10 years old, schoolboy
“I dreamed that there was war. I raised my son in my arms to cover him and protect him from all these cockroaches. People being torn to death, dying and being shot at.”
“Twister,” 30 years old, poet
“I dreamed that a girl drowned at the swimming competition. The coach said, ‘Forget about her,’ and the swimming pool filled with blood.”
Priska, 13 years old, orphan
“I was pushing a wheelbarrow with a dead body in it. I was being followed by soldiers. I started to dig a hole. It was so deep I couldn’t see the bottom. The ground started to crumble into the hole. Suddenly a branch appeared. I grabbed it.”
Rutendo, 24 years old, insurance broker
“My house was being blown by fire and then there was nothing. I was crying, ‘Oh! We are buried! We have nothing! Where will we stay?’ Later I became a bird and I saw there was blue water all around.”
Deborah, 42 years old, torture survivor
DREAMLAND is performed on the outdoor stage in Harare Gardens, surrounded by bamboo groves and ilala palms. The tiered bleachers are full to their eight thousand capacity, and more people sit on the lawns.
It opens with a hundred performers, all in striped, old-fashioned prison pajamas, who enter the stage and are knocked into sleep by a tremendous crack of sound. Behind them, the screen dissolves into a huge X—the mark of the vote. A larger-than-life, grotesque figure, the tyrant king, with a bloated, blood-red mask, glistening wetly in the klieg lights, and a white vinyl military uniform (previously worn by Idi Amin in Bailey’s play Big Dada) drags his cello to the end of a lonely ramp that juts out into the audience.
“A long time ago, in a beautiful land far from here,” intones the narrator, and we all know he means Zimbabwe, “there lived a king who had bewitched his people.
“This king loved music. He played from morning till late at night.”
The king begins to scrape at his swollen cello.
“There was a time when everybody had music, and the land was full of song.”
The choirs, in their prison-striped pajamas, begin in turn to burst into song. The first starts “Blame It on the Boogie.” Another sings “Senzeni Na?” [“What Have We Done (Wrong)?”], the haunting liberation lament. A third launches into “Nkosi Sikelela” [“God Bless Africa”], the renowned anti-apartheid anthem. But as each choir starts to sing, it is quickly beaten down by baton-wielding, Darth Vader–helmeted “hyenas” in military fatigues, until the terrified choir members vomit votes into ballot boxes, and each in turn falls into a trance.
In the advance script, the version sent to the censors at the President’s Office, Bailey had called the nefarious enforcers “hyenas,” but we all know they represent Mugabe’s riot police.
“And many of those with the best voices simply went away,” continues the narrator, against a backdrop of migrating birds, to represent Zimbabwe’s swelling diaspora. “The king swallowed the songs of all his people. And the only sound to be heard in that beautiful land was the drone of the king’s voice.”
The king boogies in a stiff-limbed, octogenarian’s shuffle, as he sings “I Never Can Say Goodbye,” while
on the screen behind there flashes up Heeten Bhagat’s neon-tinged video of bulldozers demolishing townships during Mugabe’s bogus slum clearance, Operation Murambatsvina, “Clear Out the Dirt.”
“But in that time, there were songs that the King could not reach.
These were the people’s most precious songs:
The songs they sang in their dreams…
In the dry valleys of Dreamland, the silent choirs sang their songs:
The battered men in forgotten jails.
The broken women on foreign soils.
Families resting in unmarked graves.
The hungry, the lost, the landless.
And their songs rose like thunderclouds over the land.”
A choir of young children, between five and ten years old (clasping their bedtime teddy bears), begins to sing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” in pure, piping voices. Mugabe’s sinister hyena men come up behind them and, one by one, pull rough red bags over their heads, and haul the kids offstage, until there is only one little girl left. She starts the last line but never reaches the end. She too is abruptly bagged and dragged offstage.
All around me, in the packed open-air arena, the Zimbabwean audience weep for their country. I see Frances Lovemore, her face wet with tears. It is the first time, in all her dealings with the wounded and the dispossessed, that she has allowed herself this luxury, the first time that she has let herself cry.
The show ends with a German counter-tenor, Daniel Lager, singing “Pie Jesu” (Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s motet, based on the last two lines of the medieval poem Dies Irae, Day of Wrath—Judgment Day, used in the old Catholic requiem mass) against a screen filled with blood-soaked hands, and scenes of violence from Rwanda and the Congo.
