The Fear

by Peter Godwin

  The medical chief, Captain Dr. Paul Thistle, a Canadian obstetric surgeon, is conducting an emergency C-section in his operating theater when we arrive, and as before, we spill out into the hospital itself, while McGee waits for him.

  Inside we find dozens more victims, many from the Chaona district. One of their number died at the place they were beaten, they tell us, a torture camp they call Gum Tree Base, near Chaona school. Another died here in this hospital, from his wounds. The rest are traumatized and terrified. They have been beaten on the soles of their feet, a method of torture called falanga, and on their buttocks. But don’t think of this as a “normal” beating; think of deep, bone-deep, lacerations, of buttocks with no skin left on them, think of being flayed alive. Think of swollen, broken feet, of people unable to stand, unable to sit, unable to lie on their backs because of the blinding pain. Husbands and wives have been handcuffed and beaten alike. Their wrists still bear the cuts of the cuffs.

  They were beaten, they say, because they failed to attend a “compulsory” ZANU rally, a re-education session. One of them, a young man of twenty-five, Shine Mzariri, is trying to discharge himself from hospital, despite a broken foot, and unhealed back and buttock wounds still leaking through layers of bandages. He thinks it’ll be safer outside, but doesn’t know where to go. “I am hesitating to go home,” he says redundantly.

  His bedmate Fideus Mapondera is sixty-one. You can feel his outrage. “I was just plowing,” he says, “and they beat my wife Silvia as well.” Then he turns his face to the wall to hide from me the fact that he’s weeping. Weeping with shame that he couldn’t protect her, couldn’t protect himself.

  Finally, Dr. Thistle emerges from surgery. He pulls off his mask and snaps off his gloves, and confirms the victims’ accounts, their wounds, their cause, and the death toll. But you can sense his unease. Here he stands, running the only medical facility for a quarter of a million people. He and his staff do three thousand surgical procedures a year; they deliver two and a half thousand babies. A quarter of the women who give birth here are HIV-infected, and the hospital struggles to minimize mother-to-child transmission. Howard is the sole local provider of anti-retrovirals, clawing thousands of Chiweshe residents back from certain death in such a dramatic way that they call it the Lazarus effect. And Howard is at the forefront of the struggle to treat the effects of widespread malnutrition among the district’s hungry children. And they do this with only three doctors, at present not even that. At present Thistle is the sole doctor here. You can see why he is torn. If he is too outspoken about this political violence, he will jeopardize all the good work this hospital does.

  Because he knows, we all do, that Mugabe, when irked, is quite capable of expelling him, of cutting off food aid, or throttling a hospital, of letting his people die. It is as if he has taken an entire nation hostage, using them as human shields. He has killed so many already, with barely a blink. You can see Dr. Thistle struggling with this audit of agony. Humanitarian agencies here do it all the time, measuring the good they do and, in public at least, choking back their repugnance toward the tyrant who can stop it all in a heartbeat, if provoked to do so. Dr. Lovemore at the CSU does it, so that she can continue to pick up the pieces of broken humans and try to mend them.

  This is how little his own kith and kin now mean to Mugabe. He holds them in such low regard that he will decimate them, even as he chunters querulously on, lecturing the world about historical wrongs, raging like an aggrieved adolescent, casting blame everywhere except where it most belongs, with himself.

  Yet Zimbabweans have grown used to it. It is what they now expect, their new normal. The playwright Tom Stoppard observed that the worst thing about tyrannies is the way in which they render the crazy, commonplace. Through an awful alchemy, the grotesque becomes quotidian, as you forfeit your ability to be shocked.

  ON THE HOME STRETCH back to Harare, just past the 007 Hideout Bar, we slow down at a police block, and when the officer tries to wave us down, McGee rolls down the window, and says, “We’re diplomats, you have no right to stop us.” He turns to his driver. “Drive, Misheck! Drive on through!” And the column behind us follows in his breach.

  But a few miles further on, the police are ready for us. They have been reinforced by CIO agents, and they’ve drawn two vehicles across the road so we cannot pass. These are senior officers, unperturbed by his indignation, unimpressed with his diplomatic immunity. They demand to see McGee’s papers. They make it clear that we are detained, and then they congregate around their cluster of vehicles to discuss with each other and headquarters what to do next.

  “I’ve never been detained before,” says McGee.

  They hold us there on the road for an hour and a half, as ever more senior officers and security agents arrive from Harare, discussing the protocol of what to do with the diplomats, how far they can push this. In the CD vehicles behind us, the local journalists stay hidden behind smoked glass, safe for the time being in their little diplomatic islands. As for me, the security officials seem to assume I’m part of the diplomatic delegation.

  Among the security officers are the two CIO chiefs from Bindura, the very men who’ve been directing the violence we have seen the results of today. We’re all feeling raw, having just spent hours in the company of their victims. So when these two CIO officers walk over to Kevin Stirr, the U.S. embassy’s democracy and governance officer, and ask what we’ve been doing, he replies, angrily, “We’ve been looking at the people you’re beating up.”

  “We’ll beat you thoroughly too,” says one of the agents.

  “Are you threatening me?” Stirr says, striding after them. “You’re threatening me!” he says, shouting now. “I’m making a formal complaint.”

  The officers look a little alarmed, and quickly climb back into their olive-green Renault—751–859M. They start up, but Stirr wrenches the door open, reaches in, and tries to grab the keys. As they tussle, McGee arrives and Stirr explains.

  The ambassador steps in front of their car, ordering the CIO agents to stop, as he wishes to record their threat to his staff member, so he can register a diplomatic protest. The CIO agent at the wheel has retrieved the keys now and starts up the engine. He puts it in gear and lurches forward, hitting McGee’s thigh. The ambassador lets out a roar, but stands his ground. Inside the car the officers now looked panicked; this has suddenly escalated beyond anything they imagined.

  McGee takes out his digital camera, and they hide their faces in their hands as he snaps away.

  It is a small victory, but sweet nonetheless, to see the bullies themselves squirm for a change.

  Finally, after an hour and a half, the police release us, on condition that McGee and the other ambassadors report to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs the following day. “Which I’ve no intention of doing,” McGee says as we re-embark.

  “What the police just did speaks volumes,” he concludes, back in the car, and weary from his third altercation with them in a single day. “What they’re running here is a military campaign.” And though he has another two years to go of this posting, he ventures, “I don’t think I’ll last my full term.”

  eighteen

  It’s Hard to Play Cards with Two Broken Arms

  AS THE PACE OF the violence increases in the following weeks, victims are streaming into Harare, but there is nowhere for them to go. CSU is only a way-station; Harvest House, the MDC headquarters, is constantly being raided by the police; and churches that have tried to open their doors to the refugees have also been harassed and closed and the refugees arrested or chased away. Now impromptu safe houses have popped up across the northern suburbs.

  Mike Mason and his family run one of them out of their home in Borrowdale. Behind the house, the Masons have rigged up a large olive-green army-surplus tent, whose floor is strewn with mattresses and blankets. At present, it sleeps forty-five people.

  Darkness gathers, and the refugees boil a large pot of water to make sadza. Among them are nine k
ids. They should be at school but instead they are huddled here, hidden away in this safe house, far from home, far from school. Trymore and Francis are here, the two little boys from CSU, the ones I saw when they first arrived, exhausted from yomping in through the bush. And their grandmother, the old ambuya, is here too, helping to stir the boiling sadza pot.

  “We send trucks in to get the injured out,” says Mason. “That’s how we ended up doing this. But many can’t get out. They’re told not to go to clinics, not to report to police, not to leave the area—on pain of death. There was one guy in Gokwe, who loaded up a ten-ton truck with the injured, about thirty of them—and these were just the very worst. But they were stopped at a roadblock and were all assaulted and told to go back, so they never made it out. Many will sicken, their wounds, fractures, gashes, burns will get septic and infected without treatment and they will die.

  “Now they’re rounding up farm workers and appointing voting supervisors and making them responsible for ensuring their group votes the ‘right way,’ or otherwise, they say, they’ll return and kill each supervisor.”

  From time to time Mike walks out into his garden, past his small plant nursery, to the very end of his lawn, and there he climbs up onto a metal chair strategically placed among his rose bushes to speak on his cell—it’s the only place he can get a signal. He’s standing on the chair now, in the dark, canvassing for mattresses, blankets, fuel. Sometimes as you approach his house you can see just his head with a cell phone at his ear, poking above the Durawall.

  He moves restlessly back and forth from the phone chair in the rose beds to the computer in a bedroom that is used as an office, and out again to the large open veranda where tea and rusks are always being served. The metal garden gate trundles back and forth frequently with constant arrivals and departures: refugees going to medical appointments and returning for supper, other MDC Support people bringing donations of clothes, food, Bibles.

  “Many of the refugees are just languishing in their hospital beds,” says Sharon, his wife. “They say, ‘We are bored and depressed.’ So we try to get them biscuits, sweets, newspapers, books, playing cards.”

  “Ja, but it’s hard to play cards with two broken arms,” says Mike.

  Ever since they lost their farm in Tengwe eight long years ago, “where,” he says with a chuckle, “we were known for our parties, if not for our tobacco,” the Masons have been helping to run MDC Support, helping to provide logistical backup.

  “I just couldn’t sit by and not get involved. This is far beyond ‘Mugabe stole my farm and put me in jail,’ ” both of which happened to him.

  In the back garden there are several metal shipping containers bearing the remnants he was able to get off his farm.

  “It’s not much,” he admits.

  Sharon describes the final attack on their homestead.

  “They had guns that time. Before he scarpered, our security guard appeared briefly at the window and shouted, ‘You’re in trouble, and I’m gone!’ I phoned my sister to say, ‘Look after my kids if we die.’ ”

  Mugabe’s men had already beaten and chased their farm workers into the bush. When a convoy of armed white farmers arrived to try to rescue the Masons, the Mugabe militiamen fled into the bush too, where they found themselves hiding next to the farm laborers they had chased away. The farm foreman said to the militia leader, “What’s the point of this, then—you chased us here, and now you are chased here, and we find ourselves hiding together, though we are hiding from you!”

  And he got beaten for his trouble.

  After he was thrown off his farm Mike worked for a tobacco company, “but when I refused to set foot on stolen farms, they made me redundant.”

  On his laptop in the bedroom, Mike shows me photos of some of the latest violence. “Look at this little kid, Sampson, he’s three, and he was hit in the eye with a rock fired by a catapult. His skull is fractured and they think he’ll lose the eye.”

  The little boy is standing solemnly, one eye hugely swollen shut and discolored. In the next shot, he is clutching a new toy, and grinning, notwithstanding his gruesome wounds.

  “He’s such a little trouper,” says Sharon. “Despite what’s happened to him, he nearly always has a smile.”

  Mike’s last safe house was located and raided by the police, who searched it for five hours and accused him of hiding drugs. He’s worried now that there is too much traffic in and out of this property and that it will soon attract police attention.

  The gate trundles open once more, and in drives another ex-farmer, Rusty Markham.

  “Howzit,” he says, grinning. “A luta continua!”

  It’s the old guerrilla rallying-cry from the civil war, now co-opted for a new struggle. He’s against a run-off, he says, after the mayhem he has been helping to cope with.

  “There’s no point in a run-off other than depopulating the countryside.”

  “Yeah,” agrees Mike. “The membership has been dispersed and their IDs burned so they can’t vote.”

  He brings news of the Rogers, a farming couple (whose son, Barney, plays cricket for Zimbabwe) who have just been very badly assaulted. Mugabe’s “Green Bomber” militia invaded their farm and took workers hostage, using them as human shields as they chased the couple upstairs in their house. Mrs. Rogers has cancer and was due to go down to South Africa the following morning for a bone-marrow transplant. Instead, she found herself surrounded by armed militia.

  “Her husband shot several times into the air and she used a Mace can, and then things really turned ugly,” says Rusty.

  They were seized, beaten, and then dragged around the garden by the hair. Both were very seriously injured.

  In the fading light, out on the veranda, at another computer, two young black men are quietly working their way through a pile of handwritten statements from victims of political violence. Pecking at the keyboard is Daiton Japani, the MDC organizing secretary for Hurungwe, who has a large gash on his head.

  While he was at the police station in Karoi, trying to file a complaint about election violence, Daiton was surrounded by Mugabe’s militia. They threw rocks at him, and then began shooting at him, “right there at the police station,” he says, shaking his head. He was only saved, he says, because one of the policemen managed to push away the barrel of the gun as a militiaman fired.

  “I have been warned that they are looking for me,” he says, “in order to kill me.”

  The other man is Tawanda Mubwanda. This is his first day out—he’s been in hiding for the last four weeks. He is tall and bespectacled. His father, Tapiwa, the district director of elections for Hurungwe North, was the first person murdered in post-election retributions.

  “There was a ZANU-PF meeting and one of their resolutions was to kill my father,” explains Mubwanda. “About five hundred party youth came to his village on April 12th, just after dark. They beat him and stabbed him and he died on the spot. He was fifty-three, turning fifty-four this year, in July. Since then, I have been in hiding. Today is my first day out. I feel obliged to help, I’m trying to keep my mind occupied and working on a worthwhile cause. We collate reports from the rural areas—many there are not allowed out, even for medical treatment. So they write accounts of what has happened to them and smuggle the reports out to us.”

  He slides across the table a handwritten note. It is from Givemore Tsangu in Hurungwe.

  I K.G. Tsangu, I was attacked by the ZANU-PF thugs on the 9th April 2008. They attacked me during the night. Cause of being an MDC activist…. On 22nd April they accused me of being helped by MDC party for treatement. On the same date they send more than two hundred youth thugs to finish me off. At their first attack I managed to fight back and they ran away. By so doing they sent more than before to kill me. Fortunately I was away in my maize field. They harassed my wife after she told them she was not aware of my post. One of my relatives wives told the thugs that I had gone to my maize field. They followed to the maize field and find not me�
�

  They covered the maize field in search of me. My wife followed them in need of seeing me being slottered. I met her on the opposite road. She cried in front of me. She told me the whole story. I told her to go home and I to follow the youths.

  My wife refused me to do so since she heard them saying they wanted to left me dead or vomiting blood. She told me to go and see what they had done at home. They crush my 12inch TV, drill and angel grinder heavy duty. Drill and grinder which I was using on my welding job, they took them. The youth which did this were not of my place. My wife did not know even one of the thugs. At present they are still at the farm house (Komboni)

  The leaders of the thugs, the War Veterians group which include Madamombe Petter or Nyamadzawo first name and Jawet promised all the once beaten MDC members to be killed if the ZANU PF loose the reran presental election. I do understand that they can fulfil what they are thinking…

  The thugs at my area are all afraid of me. My problem is they come in hundreds when they want me.

  The people at the farm are not allow to share or talking to me and family. No one is allowed to stand with and discuss anything with me. People are forced to pay one goat and chicken for admitting that you have done away on supporting MDC. If you did that then fine is given to subchief.

  Myself I refused to show them my party cards which they demand and if you tell them that you don’t have any of them they put you on a thorogh beat[ing]

  My wife is new to this area of mind. We were in Harare.

  Yours threatened MDC member from the Part[y] Formation,

  Hurungwe Kazangarare

  Thank for your attention.