The Fear

by Peter Godwin

  “I’ve done Afghanistan and India,” says Meister. “But I’ve never heard anything this horrific. As they described their experiences, it struck me that there was never anyone to help them at the time, no police, no health care. They were totally on their own.”

  On her last day in South Africa, Meister bought six cuff bracelets made by Himba women in Namibia from sections of recycled PCV. The women carve designs on them, which they rub with ocher. Back in DC, she had a local jeweller paint on the inside of each bracelet the name of one of the babies of the women she’d interviewed. Each morning she wears a different one, “just to remind me, every day, that those babies are still there.” Today she has a blue bracelet on. The baby’s name is Owen.

  The women deposed by the DLA Piper lawyers are just a small sample of the victims. Betty Makoni, director of the Girl Child Network in Zimbabwe, has compiled a list of over eight hundred names, and these, as they say in Zimbabwe, are just the ears of the hippo. There are many, many more beneath the surface. Women who will never get help, and most of whom will die, untreated, of AIDS. And no one has been prosecuted for these rapes.

  LIKE THE YOUNG lawyers who find it hard to re-engage with their lives when they return, I struggle to compartmentalize my life. Shaken by what I have seen in Zimbabwe, I’m acutely grateful that my family is safe here in New York. That we aren’t awoken by the shattering of glass, the reek of kerosene and the room in flames, that we don’t have to run out into the night carrying our sons, pursued by Mugabe’s henchmen. But I feel guilty and ineffectual too, maudlin and distracted and angry.

  Unable to sleep, I flick listlessly through the cable TV spectrum. Mostly, I watch natural-history shows, but they only feed my preoccupation. A show about mole rats—which tells me that so long as the queen rat lives, all other females are intimidated into remaining infertile, but once she dies, they all become fecund again, and fight for her role—reminds me of the political caste system in Zimbabwe, with Mugabe’s potential heirs sublimating their ambition until the dictator dies and a war for succession erupts.

  A show that tells me how starfish eat, by thrusting their stomachs out through their mouths secreting gastric acid onto their proposed meal, reminds me of our leaders too. I imagine them revealed that way—their bellies bulging out through their mouths to squirt corrosive effluent onto their threadbare constituents before gorging on them.

  I find myself trembling for no reason, getting flashbacks to the parade of torture victims that lines the halls of my memory. Though I am no longer there to witness it, their misery continues.

  I want to hug my sons to me now, spend all my time with them. They can sense something changed in me.

  One morning, newly back, I am playing with them on their bedroom floor. Hugo and I are defending a wooden fort with a force of small plastic dinosaurs. Thomas is attacking us with large U.S. soldiers. The rallying cry of our army of diminutive dinos is “We may be small—but we are many!” To which Thomas’s giant GIs retort, “We may be few, but we are large.” In the middle of the game, I reach to move a little T. rex, and suddenly I see the little boy, Sampson Chemerani, lying in hospital with his eye hanging out, and the T. rex picture the nurses had taped to his medical chart, to cheer him: “The truth about killer dinosaurs.”

  “What is?” asks Hugo. “What’s the truth about killer dinosaurs?”

  Without realizing it, I have spoken aloud.

  I haven’t told the boys much about Zimbabwe this time. Nor have I shared the details with Joanna, who is just back from the Paris collections. “When two worlds collide,” I joke, “couture versus torture.” She suggests that I may be suffering from some form of PTSD by proxy.

  Now I tell Hugo a diluted version of Sampson’s story, how I met a little boy in Zimbabwe who had been hurt. But Hugo is at an incontinently curious age. He wants more detail. “Did he cry?” he demands.

  “Yes.”

  “Can you run out of tears?” he segues.

  I draw breath to answer, but he’s already serially speculating. “Do you have a little reservoir where tears are stored, and when it’s empty, you can’t cry anymore? How does it fill up? Where do tears come from anyway? What are they made of? Did Alice really swim through her own tears in Wonderland?”

  That night he comes into our bedroom in tears himself. He has been awoken by a bad dream. “I was kidnapped by a man in a snake suit,” he sniffs.

  “You’ve upset him with your war stories,” Joanna chides.

  “But then I woke up,” says Hugo, rallying, “and I realized that it was just a fake life.”

  A fake life. Maybe that’s what I’m living. But which is my real life and which is my fake one? Zimbabwe seems so real while I’m there. But even while I’m there, I’m not really. Soon I leave and it fades into my past again. It reminds me of working as a foreign correspondent, shoulder to shoulder with photographers and cameramen. How they became so integrated with their cameras, they feel they aren’t really there in the flesh. You have to hurry them away as the danger grows.

  And I remember one cameraman, George D’ath, a friend who was killed that way, years ago by the witdoeke, the “white cloths,” a vigilante force used as surrogates by the old white South African police. It was in the black squatter camp of Crossroads outside Cape Town, and George was filming them for ITN as they toyi-toyi’d past him, brandishing machetes. Right at the end of the jogging column, one of the witdoeke attacked, flicking his blade to slice George’s throat. The last image on George’s camera, before he fell in a pool of his own blood, was the face of his murderer. The cops took his videotape “as evidence,” but when they returned it, they’d deleted those last images, so that his murderer couldn’t be identified. There but not there.

  Hugo’s bad dream, his first in ages, has come because his dream-catcher is full, he reckons. His sleep used to be stalked by a malign character he calls “the fat lady,” who taunted him and threatened him, though didn’t appear to do him actual bodily harm. But the bad dreams stopped once he made us buy him a Mohawk dream-catcher from a farm stand in the Greene County in the Catskills. He hung it on his bedside light from its leather thong—a suede-bound willow ring with indigo beads strung on a twine web within it, and feathered tassels twirling slowly below—and the fat lady went on sabbatical.

  “My dream-catcher needs to be emptied,” he announces now. “You have to shake it over running water.” Apparently, you can’t just release bad dreams into the air, or they will escape to plague someone else. “It’s like Ghost Busters,” he says, “the way they have to store the captured ghosts in that special tank.” So we walk down to the Hudson River and solemnly empty his bad dreams into its fast olive water.

  I wish it were that simple. I wish that I could commit all the horrifying images and stories—things that will live with me forever now—into the dark currents as they slide swiftly under the twisted metal hulk of the old New York Railroad pier, and have them borne away, past Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty, and out into the gelid gray sea.

  twenty-four

  Like a Candle in a Dungeon

  ALTHOUGH MUGABE dodges the bullet of UN sanctions, the U.S. and many other countries, as well as the EU, refuse to recognize the legitimacy of his continued rule.

  Even Mugabe himself appears to realize that his regime is now widely regarded as profane. He has been shocked by the extent to which his own people have turned against him. Fewer than 12 percent now support him, according to a Freedom House MPOI poll. His government is bankrupt, inflation is exploding exponentially, and now cholera has broken out. The failed state is here; there is little left for even Mugabe’s elite to loot.

  So he tasks his ministers to seriously explore plan B, a way to survive by co-opting his opponents, via Thabo Mbeki’s hitherto moribund inter-party negotiations, his so-called “quiet diplomacy,” which has formerly served the chief purpose of fending off further international action, with the pretence that there is a negotiated option in the works, one th
at robust action would derail. Now Mugabe has to grasp the cactus of “power sharing,” though, of course, he doesn’t want to share real power at all.

  The opposition, for its part, is exhausted—bankrupt, battered, traumatized, intimidated. Its structures are shattered; thousands of its tortured officials have fled their homes. Their only other option is war, something that Morgan Tsvangirai still recoils from.

  To many, going to war is preferable to sharing power with a blood-drenched Mugabe. And in the senior ranks of the MDC there is resistance to any joint rule. Roy Bennett, who had told me in the MDC office in Johannesburg, where he was in exile, that a Government of National Unity would only happen over his dead body, and Tendai Biti remain the two main hold-outs. Stop-start negotiations drag on for months.

  A South African friend of mine, Vincent Mai, now a New York–based investment banker and philanthropist, who knows Tsvangirai, and once rescued him when he got stranded at JFK, calls me in late January with the news that he’s just had a long phone conversation with him. “Morgan says there’s absolutely no way he’ll agree to any coalition government with Mugabe,” reports Mai. “He says that day has passed—the only way it would work is as part of a complete transfer of power, because no aid will be freed up otherwise.”

  “These talks are just symbolic,” he told Mai, “because of the tremendous pressure the South Africans are putting on him.

  “Don’t worry,” Morgan assured him, as he concluded their chat. “I won’t sign anything.”

  A few days later he signs the so-called Global Political Agreement to enter into a power-sharing government with Mugabe.

  THE GLOBAL Political Agreement is a nebulous deal. Mugabe is to continue as President and chairman of cabinet of a Government of National Unity, GNU, with Tsvangirai in the newly created post of Prime Minister and Arthur Mutambara, from the other MDC wing, as deputy PM. But the shape of a new constitution is postponed. Like the power-sharing deal reached between rivals in Kenya, Zimbabwe’s deal shelves any real resolution.

  Jim McGee emails me: “Tendai [Biti] is saying this is the worst day of his life. Morgan is upbeat and looking forward to being PM. I think he’s being set up for failure. We’ll see.”

  I am on my way to midtown Manhattan to take part in a panel hosted by the Global Center for Responsibility to Protect, R2P (the principle that the international community has a duty to intervene to prevent crimes against humanity), to discuss how to invoke the R2P principle in Zimbabwe, when I hear the news of the deal.

  Mugabe’s envoys are usually allergic to these events, but today Chrispen Mavodza, the chargé d’affaires of the Zimbabwe mission to the UN, shows up. He listens politely to the graphic evidence of human-rights abuses in Zimbabwe, and when he speaks, it is not to deny the evidence, but just to hope that it is all over. Afterward, he seeks me out. “I hope we Zimbabweans can all come together now, Peter,” he says. “It is time for Mugabe to stop hunting enemies, real and imagined,” and he proffers his hand. But I can’t bring myself to shake it. Not yet, not so soon after what they have done, after what I have seen. So I glance away, pretending to be looking for something inside my briefcase.

  TSVANGIRAI says the agreement is just a transitional arrangement, that he will quickly sign off on a new constitution, under which free, international-monitored elections will be held. It is, he says, “like a candle in a dungeon.”

  My worry is that he has given Mugabe a reprieve, time to draw breath, re-appraise, and reload, that this GNU will be nothing but an interlude, a short intermission in the repression.

  And indeed it quickly becomes apparent that Mugabe doesn’t anticipate that the deal will ease him out; quite the contrary. Selling the power-sharing plan to his party Central Committee, he castigates them that if they hadn’t blundered over the elections, “we wouldn’t be facing this humiliation.” Then he quickly rallies: “Anyhow, here we are, still in a dominant position which will enable us to gather more strength as we move into the future. We remain in the driving seat.”

  THE INAUGURATION of this “hybrid” government is something I want to witness for myself. Georgina does too. After conferring with friends in Zimbabwe, we calculate that the changed political situation there should mean that, despite my hurried exit last time, we can now go back without being arrested. But as I am about to leave New York, my mother calls me, in tears. Georgina is in hospital with bad pneumonia. She was diagnosed at her doctor’s, who ordered her a taxi, straight to hospital, as she might be developing a pulmonary embolism, says Mum. The taxi driver squeals across North London to the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead, and pulls up outside the casualty department—where a security guard curtly informs him that Georgina may not disembark there, because of building work.

  A row ensues, and eventually Georgina gets out and promptly collapses onto the pavement. Now the hospital staff heatedly debate whether she is already in Casualty, in which case they must admit her, or still on the street, in which case they will need an ambulance to take her there. Mum, meanwhile, is trapped inside the taxi, between the traffic and Georgina’s prone body on the pavement.

  Finally, Georgina is loaded onto a stretcher and wheeled inside, while Mum retrieves her walker from the trunk. Georgina is seen by a nurse, who inserts a shunt into her arm but doesn’t connect it. They sit there for four hours, when the staff from the respiratory ward come down themselves to find her. She still hasn’t been X-rayed or assessed by a doctor. My mother can’t get a signal to call Georgina’s boyfriend, Dominic, to ask him to collect Xanthe from school. The hospital won’t let her use their phone—no exceptions. Finally, another elderly lady lends her a phone. Then she waits forty-five minutes outside in the winter cold for transport home, and now she is racked with flu.

  Later I get an email from Georgina from her hospital bed. She is on a drip and can’t talk because she has an oxygen mask. When I call through to her ward, the nurse who answers has a distinct Zimbabwean accent. His name is Bright Makunde, and he used to be a teacher in Zimbabwe before retooling as a nurse in the UK, one of the flood of Zimbabweans fleeing to the UK. Bright promises to take good care of Georgina, and I feel happier knowing that she is being watched over by a compatriot.

  I route my flight to Zimbabwe through London, and arrive at the tail end of the BIGGEST SNOWFALL FOR 18 YEARS as every newspaper shouts, and the city is paralyzed by it.

  GEORGINA is out of hospital, still looking wan and ill. Xanthe comes bounding back from school, in her blue Hampstead Parochial sweatshirt and corn-yellow hair. “Where’s Uncle Peter going to sleep?” she asks Georgina, looking round the crowded flat.

  Georgina points to the wooden Swahili daybed in the sitting room.

  “But he hates that,” says Xanthe. “He says it feels like sleeping in a canoe.”

  “Well, at least this one won’t sink,” says Georgina curtly.

  My mother is still unsteady on her feet and furniture-surfs around the flat. She only goes out now reluctantly. She finds living in England as an elderly person one long parade of indignities: being shoved on the pavement because she walks too slowly, tutted at when she takes too long to retrieve change from her purse at the till, or to step up onto the bus, or climb the stairs on the Tube. It has resulted in her becoming agoraphobic. Outside, there lurk only dangers and rudeness. When she does venture out, she often returns offended and querulous, armed with tales of her latest brush with boorishness, and many slights.

  When I try to change the subject by mentioning that I saw the playwright David Hare walking down Church Row carrying his Tesco bags, this only fuels her theme. “His wife, Nicole Fahri, the designer, was followed home by a couple of thugs who tried to wrench her necklace off her, at her own front door, and nearly strangled her,” she says, presenting this as crowning proof of the lethal world out there, where yobs lay in wait for easy marks. “She’s Persian,” she adds.

  The impatience and discourtesy with which the elderly are treated here is in sharp contrast to the attitudes
in Africa. My theory—quite untested—is that it’s not so much cultural in its origins, but arithmetic. In developed countries like the UK and the U.S., growing old is common, and there’s a big demographic bulge of the elderly. In Africa, very few are lucky enough to live into their fifties or sixties, never mind their eighties—Zimbabweans are usually dead by thirty-five—so the grizzled are a statistical rarity there, admired and venerated for their life experience, and their sheer survival skills.

  MY MOTHER asks me to sit in on an interview she must give to be assessed for charitable help. Her last few interrogators have been foreign, she says, and she’s struggled to decipher their accents. She has found them to be peremptory and dismissive, and the whole experience humiliating. I try to tease her about the irony of her returning to England from the Third World only to find that the Third World has followed her here. “It’s revenge for colonialism,” I laugh, but she finds it quite unfunny.

  There is something bizarre about the spectacle, though. Partly, it’s that despite (or maybe because of) her fifty-year life in Africa, my mother still speaks in a now quite unusual antebellum upper-crust English accent. Xanthe does an amusing imitation of it, dancing around Mum chanting: “Heylio, it’s Hillin. Would you like some parsta in a plahstic berl and a glahrs of miylk out on the payshio,” which translates as: Hello, it’s Helen. Would you like some pasta in a plastic bowl and a glass of milk out on the patio?

  The examiner today is a chic middle-aged lady wearing a sloping black beret, a red jumper, leather boots, and plum lipstick, her smooth mocha neck coddled by a turquoise scarf. She opens her briefcase to begin, while I make coffee. But my mother tries to keep the conversation all about the examiner, Georgette Emilieu. She is from the Seychelles, off the east African coast, where her brother is the vice-president. Her husband came to the UK to join the British army. She volunteers for four charities, and acts as a translator in the courts.