The Fear

by Peter Godwin

  He wants to address the refugees here, to appeal to them to board the buses, rather than stay to be attacked by hostile locals. “They need to go home and vote, to make a difference. At the end of the day it’s up to us, no one else will help.”

  But Bishop Verryn disagrees, and won’t let Chester make his address tonight. “There’s no guarantee of their safety if they go back,” he says. “What if they are brutalized again there? I’m not prepared to cooperate with sending them back to their deaths.”

  I find Verryn in his eyrie at the top of the church, surrounded by great mounds of donated clothes that rise to the ceiling. To get here I’ve had to walk up four flights of stairs in the dark, stepping over prone bodies on almost every step. “Pamusoroyi” [“Excuse me”], I apologize, as I accidentally nudge the bundled forms. “Ehoyi” [“That’s okay”], come the muffled replies from beneath blankets and coats.

  I FIRST ENCOUNTERED Paul Verryn twenty-two years ago, after I’d written a profile of Stompie Moeketsi, a thirteen-year-old who had become the leader of anti-apartheid resistance in a tough black township in the Free State town of Parys. His mother, a poor washerwoman, arrived at my door, bearing the business card I’d given her a few months before, dog-eared and creased now, and asked me to help her find Stompie, who had disappeared. It turned out that he had initially found shelter, along with other refugees, at Verryn’s Methodist residence. Then he had been snatched by the bodyguards of Winnie Mandela, Nelson Mandela’s increasingly erratic wife, and hadn’t been seen since. After a few weeks, his body turned up. Later, we found out that her bodyguards had murdered him.

  Verryn has been providing sanctuary for Zimbabwean refugees at this church for several years now, much to the annoyance of the local authorities, who want them moved away before the 2010 World Cup. Three months ago the police raided this church and arrested hundreds of them, before a court appeal forced their release.

  The church has never been this full before, says Verryn. He is brown-bearded, with glasses, a purple surplice and white clerical collar, clever and funny. When I use his episcopally correct title—Your Holiness—he hoots with laughter. But mostly tonight, he’s angry.

  “You can’t have a nation that sanctions prejudice for over fifty years and then imagine it’s a walk in the park out of it,” he says. “But these xenophobic attacks, they’re organized, I’ve got records. It’s a combination of elements of the police, councillors, ANC, Inkatha. Someone came up to me on the first day and said, ‘Watch out, this thing is going to spread.’ ”

  And spread it certainly did.

  Other, temporary, refugee camps have sprung up all over Gauteng and beyond. One of them is in the old town hall in Boksburg, on the East Rand. They call it the Pink House—its roof is a startling shade of salmon—and most of the Zimbabwean refugees crowded inside have fled from the nearby Angelo squatter camp. It is suppertime and they have formed a long orderly line for the beans and thick maize porridge they call posho here, being doled out at trestle tables.

  In the line is Arthur Basopo, twenty-two, who has been in South Africa for fifteen months, working in a bed shop. At 11 p.m., a few nights ago, he says, “they broke down my door.”

  “Who?”

  “Citizens of South Africa—they came in, grabbed me by the neck, searched me, took my money belt, stole my TV and my radio and my generator, and then started beating me, but I managed to run away to save my life. The next day, I went back there but my house was broken down.”

  Casper Mugano, twenty-one, from Rusitu, near Chimanimani (the area overlooked by Chris Lynam’s old farm), has been in South Africa for sixteen months, working as a welder. He was also attacked, looted of all his belongings, and his house was burned down. Which was the fate of Godfrey Matanga, also from Rusitu, working here as a house painter. “The only solution is to go home,” he says. “I’m too scared to stay here now.”

  Brian Maviso, twenty-six, worked as a freelance plumber and electrician. Ironic, I suppose, given that his shack had neither running water nor electricity. Ten people were killed in Angelo in those first attacks, which, he says, were launched by the Pedi (a Northern Sotho people, who were corralled by the apartheid authorities into the “homeland” of Lebowa), who dominate Angelo squatter camp. “The Pedi know us, they know who we are.” He wants to go home too. “If only I could get my tools,” he wishes, “so when I go back to Zimbabwe, I could keep working.”

  That’s what’s remarkable about these refugees. Although they’re surrounded by jobless locals—South Africa’s unemployment rate is over 25 percent—most of these Zimbabweans manage to find jobs, or to create jobs for themselves. Sure, this is partly because they’re prepared to work for lower wages. But it’s also because, like so many migrants, with the wolf at their backs, they are industrious, ingenious, indefatigable. And this has stoked the jealousy of their attackers, many of whom, complains Maviso, “sit around playing dice and drinking.”

  In return, South Africans blame foreigners for the high crime rate here—often unfairly.

  For me, the irony of this all is completed by the sci-fi movie District 9 (sponsored by Peter “Lord of the Rings” Jackson), now being shot on location in southern Soweto, at Chiawelo, during the worst of the xenophobic attacks. The director, Neill Blomkamp, a South African himself, says in interviews that the film is an allegory of apartheid and xenophobia, that the District 9 of the title is an echo of District Six, an old-established mixed-race inner-city neighborhood on the slopes of Cape Town’s Table Mountain, which the authorities declared “whites only” in 1966. Police forcibly removed the sixty thousand mostly mixed-race “colored” residents to the Cape Flats, about fifteen miles away. Then they bulldozed the houses of District Six, and renamed it Zonnebloem—“Sunflower”—though no one ever called it that.

  For years, District Six stood as a graphic reminder of the pernicious realities of the Group Areas Act, a flattened urban wasteland with only its churches and mosques spared, their spires and minarets rising like the few lonely teeth in a punched mouth.

  In District 9, tall, wheezing, mucus-trailing, prawn-like aliens, whose giant spaceship has stalled in the skies above Johannesburg, are evacuated to Earth and confined to a slum outside the city. There they are hunted down by furiously xenophobic locals. Even as the actual residents of those slums are hunting down the human aliens who have landed among them. Blomkamp no longer has to reach back to apartheid days for his allegory. It has been horribly updated by today’s South Africa. Life has imitated art imitating life.

  Eventually, ten days into the attacks, with sixty-two recorded deaths, hundreds badly wounded (six hundred and seventy-two officially recorded), and more than a hundred thousand foreigners huddled in churches and community halls, police stations, and tented camps, Thabo Mbeki finally does what he should have done at the start of the violence; he authorizes the army to go in and restore order. By now, the harsh hymn of hate has been clearly heard: aliens, especially black Zimbabwean ones, will never feel completely safe here again.

  AMONG THE ZIMBABWEAN refugees in South Africa are many of the MDC’s most senior leaders, driven south of the Limpopo in fear for their lives, during these last few weeks of state-sponsored attacks up north. They include Tsvangirai’s top two lieutenants, Tendai Biti and Roy Bennett.

  Tendai Biti is an old friend, a former student leader, now a lawyer and secretary-general of the MDC, and its chief election strategist, Tsvangirai’s tactical wizard, who clearly relishes the detail in the poll data. But as the level of state-sponsored violence has risen, he realized that Mugabe has no intention of giving up power at the ballot box.

  The last time I saw Biti, we were on the same team in an IQ2 Debate at the Royal Geographical Society in London. The motion we were asked to support was: “Britain has failed Zimbabwe.” We won, largely because of Biti’s bravura performance and contagious enthusiasm.

  Today we meet at the five-star Michelangelo Hotel in Sandton, a world apart from the Angelo squatter camp
out in Boksburg. Biti takes off his Kangol houndstooth flat cap and through angular, post-modern German glasses looks around uncomfortably at the faux-Renaissance opulence. “It’s a convenient place to meet.” He shrugs. He fields calls on his constantly buzzing BlackBerry, and taps away at his laptop.

  Both of us are reeling at the xenophobic pogroms, which, he admits, took him by surprise.

  “I didn’t expect their anger to be channeled against foreigners, rather I thought it would be directed at the state, as the freedom train has passed most black South Africans by. I think that given the poverty levels in those communities, juxtaposed with obscene wealth, there has to be anger, pent-up frustration in knowing that you are a fourth-class citizen, that for the poor, the geography of apartheid is still intact. I mean, what have these ANC guys been doing since 1994?”

  Like Verryn, he too suspects that the violence was not spontaneous. “The magnitude of it, the extent of the displacement of entire communities—fifty thousand people uprooted at a stroke. This thing is being done on a large scale, it has to have some backing, planning. You know, the definition of genocide includes displacement. And wherever there’s genocide, there’s a plan. In Rwanda there was a plan.”

  He warns that it won’t stop with foreigners. “Once you let the genie out of the bottle, next time the South Africans will be doing it to each other.”

  Biti flew down to Johannesburg the week after the elections, nearly three months ago, to address a press conference and go straight back to Harare. But while here, he was tipped off that Mugabe’s regime intended to assassinate him on his return. “They want to make an example of me. If they can attack me, then anyone is at risk.

  “Nobody wants a run-off,” sighs Biti. “It means more suffering for our people, more deaths, murders. The number of those already displaced in Zimbabwe is over a hundred and thirty thousand.

  “A run-off,” he predicts, “means you are creating conditions for a war. Mugabe will lose, so he will resort to guns and bullets. If we win and he does that, I wonder to what extent we can rein in our youth, the radicals in the MDC, we might not be able to control them.

  “Zimbabweans down here are saying, ‘We are ready to go in at any time.’ At a public meeting at Wits [the University of the Witwatersrand], the biggest applause was for a guy who said, ‘There’s only one thing dictators understand—the gun.’ We’ve tried everything else, courts, elections—we won and yet…” He trails off, suddenly dejected.

  “Mugabe is demented. He genuinely believes that we are puppets, he genuinely believes he’s in a grand fight with imperial lords and that the country needs him more than ever, it’s a reflection of his insanity, his disconnectedness.”

  And even Mugabe’s death is unlikely to deliver us, he says. The delusional psychosis spreads throughout his henchmen. General Constantine Chiwenga, the head of the army; Emmerson Mnangagwa, the head of the Joint Operational Command (JOC); Gideon Gono, the Reserve Bank chief; and Augustine Chihuri, the head of police: “these are his courtiers who depend on the king for everything, so even if he dies, they would stuff his body and prop it up on the throne. Just these few courtiers are holding the rest of the country to ransom.”

  Biti intends to return to Zimbabwe next week. Apparently, the South Africans have intervened, and now assure him that he won’t be assassinated by Mugabe’s men.

  “But you’ll be arrested,” I warn.

  “I know,” he sighs. “But I have a mandate from the people. I must honor that.”

  ROY BENNETT, the party’s treasurer, has been continually arrested and assaulted and threatened with death. He famously lost his temper in parliament, when the Minister of Justice, Patrick Chinamasa, taunted him, calling his forefathers “thieves and murderers.” A shoving match ensued, and instead of the small fine that such a fracas would normally attract from the court, Bennett found himself sentenced by parliament to a year in Chikurubi, the country’s maximum-security jail—where he was forced to wear a shit-encrusted uniform and routinely humiliated.

  On his release, in mid-2005, his hair now turned polar white, he sought refuge down here. It took a long court battle to make the South African government grant him asylum. Today he sits in Bryanston, northern Johannesburg, at the MDC office, like a caged bear, out of place and uncomfortable behind his desk, clearly pining for home. He spends his time trawling the diaspora and other sympathizers for donations to keep the MDC going.

  “You know the worst thing for me during my exile here,” he says, “is to go to a restaurant, and the waiter is a Zimbabwean lawyer, or an accountant, or a lab technician—we simply have to restore their dignity.”

  Roy shows me a sheaf of documents that have been leaked from inside the government. One is a CIO overview of the coming presidential run-off elections, marked SECRET. After a very pessimistic assessment of the real mood of the electorate, it answers the question, Who is likely to win the run-off? “President Mugabe will lose the election as the people now have the confidence to come out and express their feelings without fear.” This newfound confidence, it urges, should be broken. It ends with a section headed “Covert Operations to Decompose the Opposition,” which recommends, among other things, “harassing MDC activists and driving MDC supporters out of ZANU-PF strongholds, and massive rigging by any means possible, e.g. manipulation of postal votes in ZANU-PF’s favor and reduction of polling stations in MDC strongholds…”

  Like Biti, with whom he works closely, Bennett believes that Zimbabwe is now on the brink of full civil war. When I ask him about Mbeki’s attempts to cobble together a Kenya-style composite government of national unity, a GNU, of all parties, Bennett won’t even let me finish the question.

  “We won’t touch a Government of National Unity—over my dead body, under no circumstances. The people will never accept a GNU. They saw what happened to ZAPU.”

  Instead, he lays out an apocalyptic scenario.

  “If Mugabe steals this election, what’s our option? There’ll be a war, we’ll be forced to go violent. They’ll underestimate us. If we mobilize, you’ll see what will happen. It’ll be vicious. The people will slaughter their oppressors if they get the upper hand. We’ve already decided, Morgan Tsvangirai, Tendai Biti and me, that if Mugabe steals this election, we’ll form a government-in-exile, delegitimize his regime, and move to a military confrontation.”

  And then, he says, there will be no middle ground. “Those making money out of the regime—whites too—are real bastards. I phone them, and say, ‘People are being murdered and tortured—you’ve got their blood on your hands, for what? A few pieces of silver?’ I’m gonna phone them now and tell them to choose—we’re heading to war—you side with the people, or with the regime. You answer to some colonel, or to the people of Zimbabwe. I’m gonna phone them myself.”

  As I leave for the airport, to catch my flight back to New York, he is trawling through his contacts list, doing just that, calling Mugabe’s backers directly, and warning them that their time is nigh.

  JOHANNESBURG’S Oliver Tambo International Airport judders with jack-hammers, part of an ambitious project to vastly expand it in time for the 2010 World Cup. I find myself wondering what the slogan will be for the ad campaign to attract foreigners to a country where rampaging mobs have spent the last fortnight hunting and killing black foreigners. I think of the image of the burning man, now identified as Ernesto Nhamuave, as he slowly topples over to die. A Warm Welcome awaits you in South Africa…?

  twenty-two

  The Final Battle for Total Control

  TENDAI BITI does just as he told me he would—on 9 June, he goes home. And it happens just as I feared. When he arrives at Harare airport, he doesn’t even make it to passport control. As he steps off the plane, ten armed security agents in cheap suits seize him. They handcuff him, bundle him into a car, and speed him away. Biti vanishes. MDC colleagues worry that he is being tortured. They send lawyers to police stations to look for him, and prevail on a judge to issue a habeas corpu
s order, declaring he must be produced in court.

  After two long, anxious days, the police finally comply. They have been interrogating Biti at the Goromonzi torture center just outside Harare—a facility nicknamed by former inmates, with gallows humor, “the swimming pool,” because the cement floors of interrogation rooms are hosed down to keep them wet, in order, they say, to boost their conductivity, facilitating electric-shock torture.

  Biti is moved to Chikurubi maximum-security jail, and police spokesmen announce that they are charging him with treason for writing a document (which Biti says is fake) describing how a transition of power to the MDC would work, and also for revealing the results of elections “prematurely”—the equivalent of announcing exit poll results. These charges carry a maximum penalty of death, so he will stay in prison while awaiting trial.

  IN THESE LAST WEEKS before the 27 June election re-run, Mugabe’s men clamp down on Morgan Tsvangirai, making it almost impossible for him to campaign. He tries to launch a country-wide tour in his bright red battle bus, the Morgan Mobile, which has huge pictures of himself on the sides, grinning over the motto Morgan Is the One, and signs on the fenders declaring it to be a Victory Tour. But riot police follow him wherever he goes, dispersing well-wishers and canceling his rallies. They arrest him three times in a single day and finally confiscate his campaign buses.

  Meanwhile ZANU-PF rallies become compulsory, turning into all-night pungwes—indoctrination sessions. In Harare, behind the Triton gym, in which the diplomats and fat cats pound their running machines, the open patch of land where Georgina used to ride Top Ace is turned into a ZANU-PF base. The nannies and cooks and gardeners of the northern suburbs are herded there by Mugabe’s youth militia, forced to sit on the ground and chant themselves hoarse until dawn, in praise of the octogenarian dictator.