The Fear

by Peter Godwin

  “What do we do?” one black middle-aged lady asks aloud.

  “I’ve been worshipping here for thirty years,” replies her friend, Charity Murandu, the deputy churchwarden, who wears a bright-pink angora sweater with matching trousers. “Let’s just hold hands and go in.”

  “You know we will probably be savagely beaten?” says the first woman.

  “Yes,” sighs Charity, “very probably.”

  But they clasp hands and start to walk toward the church anyway, singing “On Jordan’s Bank.” As I’m about to leave, Charity turns, holds out her hand, and looks at me expectantly, and I feel a sudden surge of shame. I should stay away from this; my position is far too perilous as it is. But as these black women, middle-aged and elderly, in their careful Sunday clothes, their cardigans and cork wedge sandals, prepare to confront the riot police in order to go to church, I am ashamed to walk away, ashamed to let them do this on their own. So, to my own surprise, I find myself reaching for Charity’s hand.

  At first, the riot policemen are taken unawares and fall back, but they quickly regroup on the steps of the church itself, blocking the entrance. Their sergeant speaks urgently into his cell phone.

  Prevented from getting into the locked church, Father Blessing Shambare decides that he will hold the service right there, on the lawn in front. He ducks into the parish office and returns in his cassock, with a bottle of communion wine and a plastic bag of communion hosts. Someone else brings a conga drum, and begins beating it as the congregation strikes up, “Stand up! Stand up, for Jesus!”

  The riot police stand impassively on the steps, awaiting orders.

  “Bless those who persecute you,” Martin Murombedzi the churchwarden says to them. “If we fight, we fight on our knees.”

  A truck pulls up and more riot police spill out of it, commanded by a very small, angry inspector. He surveys the congregation and shouts at us to disperse, but his words are barely audible above the drumming and the singing, and no one budges. Then, though I am at the back, trying to stay out of sight, he spots me, the sole white, and points with his brass-topped swagger stick.

  “Bata murungu!” he orders. “Grab the white man.” The riot police swarm in to snatch me. But Blessing Shambare interposes himself, and links his arm through mine. “He is part of my flock, I am responsible for him, you can’t arrest him.”

  The policemen try to pry him away but he will not let me go.

  “Arrest him too,” orders the inspector, pointing at Blessing.

  Then Stanley Nikisi, the subdeacon, intrudes, so they grab him as well. And when Martin Murombedzi steps in front, they also seize him. And suddenly the whole congregation is pushing in, saying they will not allow us to be arrested, that we are all together.

  “We are one,” says Charity, furiously fending off a policewoman.

  The little inspector, annoyed to begin with, is really losing his temper, but so are the congregants. One takes the inspector to task. “We have a court judgment that allows us to worship here. You are breaking the law.”

  “Fine,” shrieks the inspector, his voice cracking into a falsetto to be heard above the melee. “Arrest all of them! All, all, all!”

  So everyone is arrested, surrounded by the ranks of riot police, and herded out into the car park. And because they don’t have enough transport, they form us into a long column, and march us down Crowhill Road for several miles to the Borrowdale police station. As we walk, we continue to sing hymns. Traffic slows to gawk at this strange spectacle, an entire church congregation surrounded by riot police, being marched at gunpoint down a main road.

  As they walk, the congregants taunt the riot police. “You are being used by the higher-ups to do their dirty work,” they say. “You should be ashamed of yourself, arresting church-goers.” Others shout, “Judas!”

  Some of the policemen argue back. They are just following orders, doing their duty. But others just shrug and look ashamed. “We need the jobs,” says one quietly, so as not to be overheard by his colleagues. “Our families must eat too.”

  In my little red backpack, hastily borrowed when I left New York from my son Hugo, to bring me good luck, there is a half-filled notebook and a cell phone with addresses of contacts, sources, and victims. I mention this quietly to Blessing, as we walk. Soon I sense a church lady walking very close behind me, and the zip being opened, and an item surreptitiously removed. Then another lady takes her place, and another, until all the offending items are gone, stuffed down the bras and underclothes of the church ladies.

  Finally, the raucous congregation arrives at the police station. The priests and I are interrogated, separately and alone, sometimes by the small inspector, and sometimes by another policeman, who seems to be the same rank. They ask me why I was at the church—am I a journalist? I tell them I had simply wanted to attend the service, and that my family is buried there. The questions and answers have to be shouted, to be heard over the Christchurch women in the courtyard, directly under the window, who keep up a continuous round of “Onward, Christian Soldiers” in Shona, ignoring the angry shushing sergeants.

  In a separate office, we can see “Bishop” Rinashe, who seems to be running the operation. The man who buried my father is now, it seems, responsible for my arrest.

  The two senior officers are clearly at odds. One is embarrassed and ashamed that his police station is filled with hymn-singing middle-aged ladies, arrested for going to church. This is clearly not what he joined the police force to do. The other, the little inspector in charge of our initial arrest, seems determined to lock me up, and charge me, with Rinashe egging him on.

  I am shuffled between offices and holding cells, and finally they take me in to be confronted by Rinashe directly. “You were at my earlier service,” he says. I agree. “Who are you, why were you at my church, what business do you have being there?”

  “You know me,” I say. “My sister is buried in your churchyard, and so is my father.”

  He looks unconvinced. He turns to the small inspector. “He is a spy, or a journalist, or working for the opposition.”

  “You should remember,” I say. “You buried my father yourself, you conducted the funeral service. And now you have me arrested for trying to visit my family’s graves! What kind of a priest are you?”

  He asks for my name again. I spell it out for him, and he sends a policeman back to the church to check on the gravestone inscriptions, the ones that we have filled with scarlet lucky beans.

  While we wait for him to return, I am thrown back into the group interrogation, with Blessing and Murombedzi. And I find myself next to a man in shorts and flip-flops, whom I haven’t seen before. He begins defending us rather articulately, and seems to know a lot about the law. When the police officer briefly leaves the room, he murmurs, “I’m a lawyer, the American embassy sent me.”

  So many people have seen our arrest and our public march that they have called it in.

  The policeman returns to say that my gravestone has checked out, there is indeed a George Godwin in the churchyard. I can almost hear my father chortling over it—that he is protecting me not so much from beyond the grave, but from the grave itself.

  The small inspector, however, remains determined to hold me. He is trying to get through to CIO, but because it’s the middle of a three-day weekend, in honor of Africa Day, and it’s also the launch of Mugabe’s “run-off” election campaign, which is preoccupying senior members of state security, he can’t get through to anyone on the phone. Finally, I hear him tell his colleague that he will drive over himself to speak to them, and return shortly, and I see him walk to his vehicle and set off.

  The other priests have now been released, though no one will leave without me, and they are still milling around the charge office.

  The seriousness of my situation now sinks in. So far, the police haven’t worked out my identity. And I have a perfectly legitimate reason for being at the church. But once CIO get involved, my gig may well be up. As I sit th
ere, listening to the Christchurch ladies singing themselves hoarse, I can’t help but spin through the parade of images of the torture victims I’ve seen so much of recently. Deep in my stomach, I feel a hernia of panic rising—polyps of fear threatening to burst out of the abdominal wall of my calm.

  It’s odd really, but when I’m here, I mostly do a pretty good job of suppressing the thought of what might happen to me if I am picked up by the police. But at some level I know even a routine police stop can play out in any of four possible ways for me.

  It can be, and usually is, a bit of banter at a roadblock and I’m sent on my way.

  It might end up, as has happened to some foreign correspondents recently, with a week or two in cells—with friends or embassy staff permitted to deliver take-out pizza and bottled water—followed by expulsion from the country, with nothing worse than some head lice and a good story.

  It could, I suppose, end up with the resuscitation of spying allegations against me, originally leveled after my news reports of the Matabeleland massacres (after which I was accused of working for British or South African intelligence), and following a trial before a pliant Mugabe judge, years in a ghastly, shitfumed Zimbabwean prison.

  Or, as seems to be happening more these days, I suppose it could end with being blindfolded and driven to some waste ground outside the city to be shot in the back of the head, and dumped there, doused with kerosene and burned, like rubbish.

  But if you went around imagining that, you wouldn’t do anything; you’d be paralyzed by the fear of it. It simply doesn’t bear thinking about.

  My forebodings are interrupted by a summons from the other officer in charge, the one who seems fed up with his role of religious inquisitor. He closes the door behind me so that we are alone, and settles back into the office chair behind his desk.

  “Sit,” he says, nodding me into the hardback chair opposite.

  He pauses for a moment to allow a particularly full-throated chorus of “Onward, Christian Soldiers” to recede.

  “You are in trouble,” he announces.

  I nod.

  “My colleague wants you to stay in jail.”

  I nod again.

  He pauses once more, places his hands together, fingertips to fingertips, and glances over at the side wall where there is a large chart graphing burglaries in Borrowdale.

  “He suspects you are lying to us,” he says. “And so does the priest, Rinashe.”

  I nod, noncommittally this time, trying to look penitent without looking guilty, a somewhat subtle expression to try for, I realize.

  His cell phone rings and he flips it open. I fear this is the small angry inspector, calling in the disquieting results of his inquiries at CIO.

  “Herro? Herro!” shouts the policeman. But the call has been dropped. “This cell service is useless!” he says.

  “Yes,” I agree, secretly glad. “It’s very frustrating.”

  He snaps the phone closed and places it on the desk in front of him, and we look at it for some time, both expecting it to ring again. When it remains silent, he finally looks up.

  “I have decided to release you from custody,” he says slowly, examining me closely.

  “Thank you.” I grin foolishly. But almost immediately, I fear a trap. I don’t want to be set up for “attempting to escape.”

  “What about the other inspector, he said I was to be held here.”

  “It is my decision to make,” he says irritably, and I sense a history of tension between the two. “And these women”—he gestures wearily at his window where the hymnal medley shows no signs of abating—“are giving me a headache.”

  He grows grave. “But you must leave the country as soon as you can. During this weekend. It will not be safe for you to stay here any longer. Okay?”

  “Okay.” I nod vigorously.

  I leave on the next plane out, to Johannesburg, early the following morning. And when the captain announces we have reached our cruising altitude, my hands start to tremble uncontrollably. So much so, that the steward has to put the drink on my tray table for me.

  twenty-one

  They Laugh While You Burn

  THE SITUATION THAT GREETS ME when I arrive in Johannesburg is hard to believe. The place is in the grip of the most ferocious attacks on foreign migrants. It is chilling to behold. Starting in the gritty squatter camps of Alexandra township, the pogroms quickly spread to the grim dormitory townships of the East Rand. Hunting parties of residents are summoned by eerie, high-pitched whistling, as though being piped aboard a warship by the bo’sun. They jog through the streets, armed with pangas and chains, spears and sjamboks (long tapered whips), axes, knobkerries (cudgels), knives, shovels, and metal fence posts. A few have golf clubs, and one even has a tall carved wooden giraffe. From time to time, hunters will squat down to sharpen their blades, drawing them back and forth over the asphalt, with a sinister rasping.

  But the target of the mobs’ anger is not the rich folk next door in the plush garden villas of Sandton, with hadedas cawing by the pool and Weimaraners lounging on the lawn. These rich folk live behind tall walls crowned with razor wire, chaperoned by pistol-packing patrols.

  The targets are poor black migrants, from Mozambique and Angola, Nigeria, Somalia, Malawi, and Zimbabwe, especially from Zimbabwe—because they are here in such great numbers now, well over three million by some estimates, fleeing south from the violent collapse of their own country.

  The mobs pulse with a primal hatred of the interloper, and they flourish their weapons to the sky, in rhythm with their stride and with their chant, “Awuleth’ umshini wami” [“Bring me my machine gun”], the anthem adopted by Jacob Zuma’s supporters from the ANC Youth League, as they seek out makwerekwere—the foreigners. Those they find, they attack and kill, and they loot their shacks and burn them down. Sometimes the hunting parties set fire to their victims too—it all reminds me of the 1980s when as a correspondent here I covered the township protests. Then, a favored mob punishment for suspected impimpi, collaborators, was to “necklace” them with burning tires.

  This appalling echo is immediately recognized too by the diminutive Nobel Peace Laureate Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, who distinguished himself then, in an act of real bravery, by wading into a lynch mob to rescue a man from being necklaced.

  “These are our sisters and brothers,” he implores now. “Please, please stop!” He tries to remind the mobs that during apartheid, Zimbabweans and Mozambicans and Angolans risked attack by apartheid forces, by giving shelter to South African refugees and guerrillas. “We can’t repay them by killing their children.”

  But they pay him no heed, and the rampage continues. In one image I wish I’d never seen, a burning man writhes slowly on the ground for long, agonizing seconds, the clothes searing off his back, before a policeman finally arrives with a fire extinguisher and douses his cinder-crusted body, coating him in white foam, a grotesque snowman. This white apparition sways weakly on its hands and knees, with the tentative gait of a chameleon, and then topples over to die.

  “They set you alight… and laugh at you while you are burning,” says Teboga Letsie, a local photographer. “It’s so shameful right now to be a South African, seeing all these things happening here, while claiming to be a rainbow nation, after all the struggles that our parents have gone through.”

  Once the blood lust has the mobs in its savage clutches, there is an almost carnival atmosphere—the cutting and the killing seem so casual, the hunters high on it, psyched, excited, and they are indiscriminate, attacking schoolgirls and old men, anyone who can’t speak the main local languages, or does so with an accent.

  Sometimes the hunters challenge you to count in Afrikaans, to prove to them that you are truly South African, a bizarrely ahistorical reversal: it was black school pupils’ protests at being taught in Afrikaans that triggered the June 1976 Soweto massacre and ignited international revulsion at apartheid, yet now you must pass an Afrikaans test to fend off the asphalt-sh
arpened blade at your throat.

  Xenophobia, they are calling it—the fear of strangers, an intense dislike of those from other countries. But there are uneasy questions about these “spontaneous” pogroms. Why do they seem coordinated? How can they spread so quickly throughout Gauteng to KwaZulu-Natal and even the Western Cape, places hundreds of miles apart?

  The Methodist Bishop of Johannesburg, Paul Verryn, for one, is suspicious. “I was called and warned the day before it started,” he tells me. His Central Methodist Church on Smal Street in downtown Johannesburg is choked with Zimbabwean refugees, three and a half thousand at the last count. The desperation shows on their sweat-beaded faces; they are sleep-deprived and scared; they have lost everything and their trust in their fellow man is shattered. “It’s like living with a wild beast,” says a man with a bandage around his head, who’s too anxious to give his name. “It has turned on us once, and it may turn on us again without notice.”

  Down in the chapel a black Zimbabwean pastor is preaching about xenophobic attacks in the Bible, on Joseph, on the children of Israel. “They had a difficult time in Egypt,” he says, “making bricks with their own saliva, it was tedious. But God wanted to deliver them to their own land.”

  For these people that land is Zimbabwe, but not tonight. Tonight they will sleep here, dossing down on pieces of sackcloth—mattresses take up too much room—squeezed, slave-ship tight, on every available berth of floor space. At the chapel door, under the sign of a handgun deleted with a thick red diagonal line, a man in a trench coat is handing out stickers to the exiting congregation. He gives me one too. It reads, Xpress Yourself. Go Vote. He’s an engineer with an MBA, and works for the Zimbabwe Diaspora Network. For now he goes by the name of Chester, because he’s worried about Mugabe’s CIO agents. “Even down here, we are not safe from them,” he says. Forty buses will leave this weekend from Johannesburg, to take Zimbabweans home. “Our message to them is, ‘Go home and vote, and change things there so you can repatriate permanently.’ ”