The Fear

by Peter Godwin

  Georgette tries to steer the conversation back to my mother’s situation.

  “Well,” Mum says finally, looking stricken. “I’m so embarrassed to seek charity, but I was in the war, the Wrens, the Royal Navy, you know, and then I worked as a doctor in Africa for over forty years. And then, and then, we lost everything…” She trails off and begins to cry. “I’m so ashamed,” she says, dabbing at her eyes.

  “Don’t be ashamed,” says Georgette. “You deserve this help. I know how you feel. We’ve paid our taxes for twenty years, we’ve never been on the dole, and yet people come here and as soon as they arrive they get a council flat. I was disgusted the other day,” she says, “when a Somali lady tried to sell food vouchers to me. ‘Take them,’ she said. ‘I sell them to you for less than their face value.’ ”

  She places a comforting hand on my weeping mother’s forearm, and repeats gently, “You deserve it.”

  THE NEXT DAY my mother would like me to meet her friend Hildegard Weinrich, who, she says, together with her companion, Anne, was very supportive of her when Georgina was in hospital, bringing a goodie basket. “Not just fancy things, bonbons and stuff,” says Mum, “but things you really need at a time like that—bread and eggs and things. So nice of them.”

  I’m intrigued to meet Dr. Hildegard Weinrich because as Sister Aquina, a Dominican nun, she played a significant role in the rise of Robert Mugabe. We go for tea at her house in North London, where she now practices as a Jungian analyst. In the corner of the front room is a large raised sand tray, and along the walls are shelves stacked with hundreds of small figurines, people, animals, and other objets. This is where she carries out sand-play therapy, she explains. The patient chooses figures and arranges them in the sand, in the re-creation of a world that illuminates their inner state, in much the same way as dreams do. “It gives me a better diagnosis than oral alone,” she says, speaking with the Teutonic precision of a German aristocrat. Her grandfather used to hunt with the last German emperor, Wilhelm II. And she remembers being taken to see Hitler’s motorcade as a child.

  Hildegard became a formidable figure in Rhodesia, a liberation theologist, who decided by 1970 “that the conditions for a just war of liberation had been met.” She worked on the Catholic Justice and Peace Commission with Dieter Scholz and tasked Fidelis Mukonori to infiltrate the “protected villages” into which the Rhodesian security forces had herded black civilians, to gather evidence of the poor conditions there. She remembers hiding documents in her underwear, to avoid detection. When Mugabe was put into detention he wrote to her asking her to get him books he needed to study for his MA thesis on education in Rhodesia. He signed himself “Your brother in Christ, Robert Mugabe.”

  She started visiting him in detention, and on his release in 1974 a close friendship continued. She imitates the way his voice cracks when he gets excited, and shows how he used to thumb the rosary his mother, Bona, had given him.

  One day she received a message from Mugabe, that he was in hiding and needed to escape the country. “Robert believed that I was the only person he could trust…” she says. She suspected that Mugabe’s hiding place, in a presbytery in Rhodesville, northern Harare, had been compromised, so she raced there in her old gray VW Beetle, running through red lights to warn him.

  Mugabe fled to a commune in Chief Tangwena’s district in the Nyanga Mountains. She tells me that, just as the police arrived there at the front door, looking for him, he scrambled through the refectory hatch at the back, and over the border.

  Later, Hildegard clandestinely assisted guerrilla recruits. Tipped off by a Catholic member of the police Special Branch in June 1975 that she was about to be arrested, she was ordered to leave by her Dominican superior, much to her chagrin.

  “I felt that my heroic aspirations had been opposed by opportunistic Church leaders. While I was ready to sacrifice my life for a cause, the local Church decided that it had to be prudent. Hence I had to be silenced; and how better could they silence me than by whisking me out of the country?”

  Hildegard was invited back by Mugabe in 1980, she says, “to serve on two commissions: one to change the capitalist into a socialist system, and the other, under the Lord Chief Justice, to work out a nation-wide voting register for the indigenous population.” Mugabe also asked her to help teach parliamentary procedures to the new black MPs, and to assist them in writing their speeches.

  But when she decided to establish a Center for African Culture, Socialism and Practices in Early Christianity, “as described in the Acts of the Apostles,” one Catholic bishop complained to the leadership of her congregation, and Hildegard was ordered to drop socialism from her agenda. She refused. “There was a clash,” she says. “I had a nervous breakdown and was ordered back to the UK.”

  The day before she left Zimbabwe, she visited Mugabe in the State House. In the context of a discussion on South Africa’s attempts to undermine his government, Hildegard said to Mugabe: “Robert, I want you to have power.” At that, she says, he exclaimed in a crazed falsetto: “Yes, power, I want power! Power! Power!”

  “He was like a demon, punching the air with his fists,” she says. “It was a revelation to me. I had never seen him like that before.”

  Six months later when his wife, Sally, came to London for kidney dialysis, Hildegard visited her. “Sally called Robert and handed the phone to me—and he just screamed at me. I think he was still furious that I had left.” Hildegard shakes her head sadly. “That was the last time we spoke. I don’t know what happened to him. I’m deeply distressed at the way the political situation of Zimbabwe has evolved.”

  THE NEXT DAY, as I prepare to leave London, my mother hands me two documents. One, which she asks me to post, is a letter. This is a ploy. The pre-printed address is the General Medical Council’s. “What is it?” I ask, as she expects me to.

  “They are forcing me to renounce my retiree’s honorary membership, which I was awarded in 2004, after having been a member of good standing for fifty years,” she says. She gags on her words and her eyes well up and spill over. “It’s just my thyroid imbalance,” she says, angrily wiping away the tears. “Pay no attention to them, they’re not real tears.

  “The European Court ruled that it is age discrimination against the young for the General Medical Council to continue giving retired doctors honorary membership. If I don’t pay the new £500 [about $900] annual fee, or formally resign in writing, they’ll register me as ‘dishonorably leaving.’ ”

  I take the envelope from her. But once in the mini-cab to the station, I tear up her resignation letter, and put in a check for £500. It’s more than my flight to Harare, but I can’t bear to see her break her last link with her profession. It would seem a formalization of her inutility.

  THE MINI-CAB DRIVER taking me to Paddington to catch the Heath-row Express is Ugandan. So we talk about things there and soon I start boasting about how I once knew the President, Yoweri Museveni, how as a foreign correspondent I had accompanied the young guerrillas of his National Resistance Army as they had taken Kampala and fought their way north, against General Tito Okello’s forces. And how I’d been wounded in the face by shrapnel from a rocket-propelled grenade when they counterattacked.

  He listens patiently to all of this, and when we finally pull up at Paddington Station, he says quietly, “Myself, I am from the north. I am an Acholi, same as General Okello. We were the ones that were overthrown by Museveni. That is why I am now driving a mini-cab in London.” Feeling mortified, I over-tip him and flee onto the Heathrow Express, and back to Africa.

  twenty-five

  The Day of the Wildebeest

  5 February 2009

  I ARRIVE IN A CITY once more on the brink, a city hoping to be delivered from the jaws of oppression. That strange atmosphere of euphoric despair has taken hold again. Real change, which seems so certain a prospect when you view this place from outside through the lens of the foreign media, seems suddenly less likely from within—a sort of p
arallax syndrome.

  For the last few months, the parties have jostled over the distribution of cabinet posts, who will control the treasury, the military, the police, the justice system, the media. And even as Mugabe ostensibly prepares to share power, his men continue to seize the last few white-owned farms, and to arrest civil-rights activists. Jestina Mukoko, from the Zimbabwe Peace Project, has recently been dragged from her bed in the middle of the night and hauled to jail, barefoot, in her nightdress, without her essential medication. She is one of at least thirty political prisoners.

  Already there are many naysayers of the new Government of National Unity, the GNU, which some have nicknamed the wildebeest, after its acronym, an animal so ungainly—with its huge, broad muzzle and humped shoulders, its back sloping sharply down to a disproportionately small hindquarters and oddly dainty legs—that it, too, could only have been created by warring parties.

  Tsvangirai is calling it another animal, “a union of donkey and a horse… a mule—not very pretty but functional.” Which also implies that one party is screwing the other. It looks likely to me that it’s the MDC that’s getting shafted. They won the initial election, even after all the fraud, yet they have been bludgeoned out of their victory. And Tsvangirai doesn’t pursue his analogy—that mules are sterile.

  Two other animals come to my mind, from an old Shona saying: Manjeni, kuona ingwe ichitamba nembudzi—“It’s astonishing to see a leopard playing with a goat.” What it means, really, is that it’s suspicious, unnatural, that it will not end well—for the goat.

  PENNY BEATTIE, my architect friend, picks me up from the airport in her little red Suzuki, and drives me across to their house in Borrowdale, where I’m staying. The city is even more disheveled since my last visit. The rains have been more plentiful than usual and the whole place is overgrown. Water collects everywhere, except in the city’s leaking dams. It spills out of clogged storm drains, and pools on the broken pavements. And the roads, the runoff tears at them, creating jagged edges and huge potholes, new ones almost daily, so that you can’t remember the geography of them well enough to slalom around their minefields.

  No one likes to travel at night now. Between the potholes and the lack of street lights and the broken traffic lights, people prefer to lock themselves into their houses by the fall of darkness.

  And as the surrounding farmers have been evicted, and their lands fallen fallow, the bush has encroached, and is re-colonized by wildlife. Eagles wheel overhead, adjusting their wingtips for sudden plunges onto rodents below. Snakes slither through the thickening undergrowth. There are more insects: scorpions and mosquitoes, flies, bees. A man stands in the middle of the road, unperturbed when we drive within inches of him, holding a placard on which he’s scrawled in large red letters: BEE REMOVAL. Monkeys and even baboons have reappeared in the city, scampering through the suburbs, rustling through the trees.

  Working street lights are rare now, and at night bats flourish, as the city grows profoundly dark, in a way that no modern city ever really does. Without light pollution you can see the stars pulsing, limpid and glistening, unusually near. And the luminous craters on the moon are startlingly clear even to the naked eye. With most industry closed and traffic dwindling, the city’s background hum, that urban tinnitus, has relented, and at night it falls eerily silent.

  Most people survive without electricity now. Women walk the streets carrying thick bundles of wood on their heads, their backs and shoulders perfectly straight, the posture so sought after by Western debutantes, perfected here in the impoverished streets of Africa.

  And the natural rhythms of the bush have started to return to a capital of two million people. Hungry residents now plant maize on every available patch of land, even along the highway medians. And you see the soft glow of fires as people cook their meals in front of their houses, and on the curbside. And they come to work in the morning, those few with jobs, reeking of wood smoke, as though they have been camping. And in a sense, they have. They’ve become urban foragers, hunter-gatherers reverting to a pre-industrial rhythm of life, maximizing daylight, walking miles to collect untreated water, to cook with it and to bathe in it, and to flush their stagnant toilets. Their lives are returning to the old way, the way people used to live out in the countryside, a hundred years ago.

  The country is being ravaged by an epidemic of cholera, an utterly preventable medieval disease that hasn’t been seen on any scale here in modern times, and is symptomatic of acute poverty. But of course it has nothing to do with the collapse of water supplies and sewage systems and medical facilities. No. According to Mugabe’s current information minister, Sikhanyiso Ndlovu, it is a “serious biological chemical war… a genocidal onslaught on the people of Zimbabwe by the British… Cholera is a calculated racist terrorist attack on Zimbabwe by the unrepentant former colonial power which has enlisted support from its American and Western allies so that they can invade the country…”

  He has deduced all this from the public warning issued by Jim McGee of the likely spread of cholera, after the first cases were reported, and the need for urgent preventive action. (Although why McGee would choose to reveal his dastardly secret plot, pre-emptively, is not immediately apparent.)

  Before it ends, the epidemic will have stricken a hundred thousand people—killing four thousand of them, to add to Mugabe’s roster of deaths. Cholera kills fast, through extreme diarrhea. People are just keeling over in the street and dying of dehydration. The hospitals are overflowing with their corpses.

  The extent of the government’s response is to tell Zimbabweans to stop shaking hands. When you meet now, you use a special cholera handshake, which is either a fist bump or even—by the particularly cholera-phobic—an elbow or shoulder bump. The public-health ads by the WHO, warning you to boil your water, render cholera in Shona as “korera,” the language having no resident “L”—so they morph into Rs.

  The Borrowdale shopping center is even more faded; the banks there are almost empty. I look at the uneven brick plaza and see the ghosts of the long line outside the Standard Bank, in which I used to accompany my mother, and where once she took a terrible tumble, even though I was holding her arm at the time. Everything has now moved over to U.S. dollars, and no one here wants Zimbabwe dollars, not even the freshly minted trillion-dollar note. Enterprising Zimbabweans in the diaspora are selling it on eBay as a curiosity—the world’s largest-denomination note—for more than its black-market face value here.

  An elderly white man totters up clutching a check to deposit, made out in Zimbabwe dollars. “How much is this number?” he asks me, his rubber-tipped aluminum stick clattering onto the parquet floor. The check has twenty-one zeros before the decimal point. I try to calculate. Six digits is a million. Nine digits is a billion. Twelve is a trillion. Fifteen is, a quadrillion? Eighteen is… hmm. “About five U.S. bucks,” I say, and he chortles. The cashier slides across a handy laminated chart. Twenty-one zeros is a sextillion.

  “One of my friends who emigrated left me this,” says Penny Beattie, showing me a bulging backpack. “Go on. Open it.”

  Inside are wads and wads and wads of money, in ever-ascending denominations. Like the lines of sediment in a geologist’s drill bit, they represent each phase of the Zimbabwe dollar’s hurtling collapse—the fastest currency collapse of a nation not at war the world has ever seen. “Bloody worthless,” she says.

  Richard Beattie drives me over to his office to access email, and on the way we look in at what had been one of the main safe houses, when I was last here, a low rambling green-roofed complex in Highlands. It belongs to a church group, and today they are preparing to screen a film about Angus Buchan, the “miraculous South African farmer who grew a bumper crop of potatoes in a famine, on faith alone,” says Wendy, the white woman running the church. “Do stay for it.”

  She has adopted a quadriplegic black baby, Richard says, and to support themselves she makes jewelery. She hands him a small bag of tiny silver earrings in the sh
ape of an open hand, the sign of the MDC.

  When I was here last, dozens of fearful and wounded political refugees cowered inside, fed by John Worswick’s group, Justice for Agriculture (JAG). But as the successful torture campaign wound down, all the refugees were dispersed. Well, almost all.

  “Shame,” says Wendy, wringing her hands, “one lady we had here with her small baby, she came back, saying she couldn’t find anywhere else to stay. We told her we no longer operated as a safe house. We gave her some food and she left. I just heard that she and her baby have both died of cholera.”

  When we reach the gate of his architectural office, Richard honks. “I have a security guard now, ever since I was shot at here,” he explains as the guard unlocks. There are twenty-six architects left in Zimbabwe, down from a peak of about two hundred and fifty in the 1970s. Richard and Penny struggle to keep going, with little new work in this shattered economy.

  While Richard battles to get online, I notice a Scientology DVD set on his desk. “Who’s dabbling in this?” I ask.

  “Ah that,” he says, arching his brow. “We’re supposed to be converting an office block they bought on First Street. But they left it empty for nearly three years and it was totally vandalized, picked clean of all fittings and fixtures. Anyway, we’ve done six months’ work for them and they haven’t paid us a bloody thing. In the initial contract, there was a confidentiality clause saying that every time we said anything at all about the Scientologists, they would fine us $20,000,” says Richard. “I just deleted that bit.

  “Did you know that each Scientology church has to have an office for L. Ron Hubbard—just in case he returns? We went down to their HQ in Johannesburg, which used to be a golf club, and there are portraits of Hubbard in every room, it’s worse than bloody Mugabe.”