The Fear

by Peter Godwin

  Hubbard, Richard tells me, came to Rhodesia to try to advise Ian Smith on how to resist majority rule, but after two years, Smith chucked him out of the country. The Scientologists bought the house on Gun Hill (the suburb where Mengistu now resides) where he lived, and turned it into a museum.

  Heinrich von Pezold calls to say he has two horses running at the Borrowdale races on Saturday afternoon. His wife, Amanda, now heavily pregnant, is staying at home, and Heinrich has brought his little boy, Christof. The races are a little better patronized than before as the bets are now in U.S. dollars. Both Heinrich’s horses win—one is unbeaten in Zimbabwe, “which isn’t saying much, these days,” he hastens to add. He poses in the trainers’ enclosure for photos, with the horse and jockey, a tiny white man, dressed in the von Pezold colors: yellow with a giant black polka dot. Behind them a double rainbow appears, ending in a flame tree behind the Mashonaland Turf Club.

  With Christof still on his hip, Heinrich gives a TV interview to a young black dreadlocked commentator. Christof is fractious, frowning, and pulls his dad’s arm, but Heinrich blithely continues. Then he glances down in distaste as a wet patch grows across his white shirt and down his pants. Christof is peeing on the 1,337th in line to the British throne—on national TV.

  Upstairs, in the members’ bar, Heinrich toasts his victory with JC Le Roux “champagne.” “The champagne made to be shared,” he declares, grimacing, “so you never have to drink more than one glass yourself.”

  “Still hanging in there at Forrester?” I ask.

  “Yes, it’s tough, but we’re still managing to farm.”

  “What currency are you paying your labor in now?” I inquire.

  “Food,” he says. “We pay them in food. More than they can eat, and they barter the rest. They’re very happy with that.”

  DINNER IS AT Paula Worsley-Worswick’s house. Her marriage to John has collapsed under the strain of everything, his campaigning work on behalf of farmers at JAG, the continued invasions, the never-ending uncertainty—and they haven’t seen each other socially for months. Tonight, I think, I am there as a sort of domestic blue helmet. But after a few glasses of wine, we get into a political row.

  “People like you are responsible for Zimbabwe’s terrible situation,” Paula suddenly declares.

  “Who?” I ask. “People like who?”

  “You,” she says. “You and John and your whole bloody generation of men, it’s all your fault. You’re responsible for the continuing political hostilities because of your confrontational, hair-trigger aggressiveness, born of war. You’ve been trained as soldiers,” she maintains, “trained to fight in wars, and you’ve never bloody gotten over it—you just don’t see it in yourselves, you’re blind to your own conflict psychosis.”

  John is spluttering in protest, cataloguing more deserving culprits, but Paula has made up her mind.

  “You’re past help,” she says. “Compared to you, the next generation is gentle and spiritual. They’re indigo people—with peaceful auras, not like your violent ones.”

  The dinner ends early.

  “What are indigo people?” I ask John, as we walk to our cars.

  “Buggered if I know,” he mutters. “Some New Age crap.”

  BACK AT THE BEATTIES’, Henry Chimbiri, a former high-school teacher, drops by, looking thinner than ever. Henry is the Zelig of Zimbabwean opposition politics with elements of Forrest Gump and the Scarlet Pimpernel. He was active in the union movement, held various posts in the MDC, then stood as parliamentary candidate in Mount Darwin South. While trying to campaign, he was beaten and imprisoned, during which his mother died. On polling day, as the candidates were waiting for the ballot count to begin, they heard the results being announced on the radio! Unsurprisingly Henry had lost.

  He moved across to the Mutambara wing of the MDC after a falling-out, and then, as a freelance photographer and cameraman, he covered almost every significant event and meeting. He has been arrested so many times he’s lost count—more than sixty. Put it this way: the human-rights lawyer who represents Henry (Alec Muchadehama) is on Penny’s speed dial.

  Also, Henry is funny as hell.

  “I am still trying,” he responds, as he always does, when I ask him how he is.

  “He’s been in trouble again,” says Penny, sighing like a worried parent. “Only recently got out of prison, didn’t you, Henry?” Henry smiles. “This time for trying to investigate the cholera situation.”

  “Well, I heard that at Parirenyatwa Hospital, they were throwing bodies out of the windows,” he says. “There were so, so many bodies, because of the cholera, and it took too long to get them out of the hospital to the morgue below, because the lifts were broken.

  “So I went to the hospital pretending to be a visitor, and I saw it was true. I was outside and suddenly from above bodies came tumbling out of a window on the third floor. Some were in plastic body bags. Others were not. One and then another and another, at least nine of them! I got my camera and started to film it. I was shocked. I mean how can one human being throw another human being out of a window like that, even if he is dead. It’s taboo.

  “But I had been spotted filming, by a CIO agent in a security guard uniform, I didn’t realize that sometimes they disguise themselves as security guards.”

  Henry was tailed and eventually pulled over.

  “Four guys surrounded my car and told me to open the door. I refused, so two of them pulled out pistols. One of them started to screw another barrel onto the barrel of his pistol, you know this thing called a—a silencer? Yes, that’s it, a silencer. So, remembering my James Bond, I realized that these guys are killers, so I got out of my car.”

  They took Henry to Morris Depot, where police officers are trained, where I once trained myself, as a young conscript. In the grounds there is a wooden cabin all draped with vines, so it is almost invisible. Henry was locked inside.

  “They put handcuffs and leg irons on me, and started interrogating me. They asked why I was at Parirenyatwa, and I told them I was visiting a sick relative.”

  They slapped him repeatedly across the face until he was bleeding, then they left him there for five hours, when suddenly the door swung open, “and then this giant of a man, with very long arms so his hands hung down past his knees, came in. His hands were huge, one hit from those palms, man, you were sent reeling! I knew who this guy was. His name was Makendenge. He’s behind many of the political abductions.

  “He looked at me sitting in cuffs and leg irons and said, ‘You, give me your phone.’ I stood up and gave it to him. He placed it on the ground, went outside, and returned with a large rock, which he smashed down onto the phone. It burst apart, and he smashed each piece, the battery, the phone, the SIM card, smashing, smashing, smashing, until it was in tiny little pieces. Then he looked down at me, and said, ‘You, you are a nuisance. What were you doing in the hospital? I have three minutes. After that, if you don’t talk, you won’t be alive.’

  “ ‘Okay,’ ” I said—I believed him—“ ‘I’m a freelance journalist. Sometimes I don’t know if what I’m doing, if it’s allowed or not.’ ”

  Makendenge left the cabin, and the three policemen returned and beat Henry with truncheons and kicked him with their boots in that small room, hidden beneath the carpet of vines. And when they grew tired, and Henry was covered in blood, they allowed him to go, but first he had to wipe the blood off himself with an old mutton cloth.

  Henry hobbled back into town; he had no phone and no money and his face was covered in blood again. He asked several people for help, and no one would. Finally he made it downtown and staggered into an office and used their phone to call CSU, who sent a car to take him to Dandaro—where he was admitted with internal bleeding, cracked ribs, and concussion.

  When he was discharged, the irrepressible Henry went to Harare Central Police Station to ask for his cameras back. They shoved him into a police van and dumped him in the Remand Prison on Enterprise Road. After several da
ys, during which Henry went on hunger strike, a sympathetic prison guard lent him his cell phone to call his wife, and she called his lawyer, Alec Muchadehama, a veteran now at representing him.

  “I was charged with trespassing in a public place likely to cause public alarm,” says Henry. “But the case was dismissed.”

  With no money, Henry walked all the way back home to Budiriro township.

  “I was covered in lice and fleas from prison, so I shaved off all my hair and had a hot shower…”

  He grins again, and shrugs: “And that’s how I spent my Christmas and New Year.”

  ON MONDAY morning, I have an appointment at the American embassy. It’s on Herbert Chitepo Avenue, but don’t try parking there—the road is lined with hefty concrete planters to prevent car bombs. I park around the corner and walk through Harare Gardens, annual home to HIFA. This far end of the park is rundown now. Nestled in the corner is an overgrown playground with rickety swings, a wobbly roundabout, and a half-subterranean concrete submarine, angled in the midst of coming up to the surface, its fore gun pointing at the embassy.

  Inside the embassy, which sits adjacent to its old Cold War rival, the Russians, a marine in camouflage fatigues and forage cap sits in his teal-tinted bullet-proof glass pen, like a seal in an aquarium, the light from his computer screen playing across his downturned face like sun dappling through the sea. The ambassador will see you now, he says.

  No matter how long it’s been since our last encounter, I always seem to take up with Jim McGee in mid-booming conversation, as though I’ve just popped out of the room for a minute. He sits there with a shelf of Schulz cartoon books on one side and Old Glory behind him, telling me how he’s been trying to get his embassy driver released—the same one who drove the decoy car that day we went on the torture road trip. The minister concerned had promised he’d be out this week, “now he won’t take my calls.”

  He’s also working the phones to get Jestina Mukoko and the other abducted activists out of prison. There is evidence that they too have been tortured, and Mukoko is gravely ill. He feels that the MDC should use the leverage they have now, to refuse being sworn into the new government until all the political prisoners are freed. “But apparently the folks in prison are not a showstopper,” he sighs. “The inauguration of the new government will still go ahead. That’s just the way it is, unfortunately.

  “There are no losers, apparently, in African elections—just a tie,” he says. “I fear we’ve given Mugabe a life-line.”

  twenty-six

  After Forty Years in the Desert

  A FTER THREE YEARS in exile, Roy Bennett has flown back into the country last week. His wife, Heather, will follow once she’s packed up their house in Johannesburg.

  “Not exactly incognito.” I smile when he collects me from the Beatties’ in a cherry-red Jeep Cherokee.

  “I have South African guarantees,” says Roy. “When I came back in, President Motlanthe [who has now replaced Mbeki as interim South African president, until Jacob Zuma takes office] told Mugabe’s people, ‘Touch Bennett and this whole thing’s off.’ ”

  Roy is in his town gear, in so far as he’s not barefoot. He’s wearing Timberland deck shoes with white ankle socks, khaki chinos, and a gingham-checked short-sleeved shirt. A tattoo of a dove curls into the crook of his elbow. Next to him is his pale-blue-eyed son, Charles, twenty-three, and just back from Cirencester Royal Agricultural College. Charles has the impeccable manners of Zimbabwean youth. Over my protests, he calls me Mr. Godwin. He presses the remote and the metal gate slides open to admit us to Roy’s sister Cynthia’s house. There’s a small boat on a trailer in the drive, and at the back, Cynthia’s husband, John, is using a gap wedge to chip golf balls down the lawn for their German Shepherd to fetch.

  Inside the house, beneath prints of English fox-hunting scenes, we drink tea while Bennett talks at a torrent about how amazing it is to be home. He is giddy, high on it.

  I remind him that when I last saw him he was swearing he would never agree to a power-sharing deal with Mugabe. “You know, Peter,” he says, “had Morgan not signed it, this country would have been plunged into war. Morgan took this country back from the precipice. Of course, it’s a shit deal, Morgan understands that—he told me that to my face—but it was the only way forward. He phoned me from the airport and said, ‘I wanted to tell you and Tendai last,’ because he was scared of us, because we were both seen as hardliners. SADC forced both sides into this. They told Robert Mugabe, ‘If you don’t accept this, we’ll close all the borders and switch off the power.’ I sat with President Motlanthe and he said, ‘You have to do this.’

  “At our National Executive meeting, the first five speakers were dead against it, and then it was my turn. I got up and I said, ‘We have to do this—to keep SADC onside and for Zimbabwe. It’s our only option.’ Of the eleven speakers, eight were against, and I swung it. When they saw that I was in favor, they conceded.” (Tendai concurs—but was annoyed with Roy for changing his mind to support the deal.)

  Roy talks of a new constitution, with accountability and transparency and a neutral police and army. But he warns, “We’re entering into a very dangerous phase. ZANU-PF will do everything it can to stall, to undermine. Man, I’ve got a headache just thinking about it.”

  One of his three cell phones rings, a retro bell. “That was Morgan,” he says, when he hangs up. “I’m going to be Deputy Minister of Agriculture in the new cabinet—phew!” He shakes his head. “I told Morgan, ‘Mugabe’s guys are going to go berserk.’ But he said: ‘Listen, you know about agriculture, so that’s why I’m appointing you.’ ”

  As news of the announcement spreads, all three of Roy’s phones begin chirping, and he tends to them in quick succession, his message the same to all the inquiries: “No, no. I’m not going to Ministry of Lands—that’s the one that deals with the former white farms—I’m going to be Deputy Minister of Agriculture, to help black communal farmers to get the inputs they need to feed the country.”

  In the background, Cynthia has put on ZTV news, which is squirming with the sensitive matter of how to portray the new dispensation. “Comrade Mnangagwa says all is set for the swearing-in tomorrow—a major feat of African diplomacy,” says the newsreader. Then, with visible relief, he moves onto safer ground: a lengthy report on the anniversary of the Islamic Revolution in Iran. There is extensive footage of the birthday party at the Iranian embassy, complete with a towering cake in red, white, and green, the colors of the Iranian flag.

  We switch off the TV and sit looking out over the garden. A pair of plump turtle doves are diligently pecking at the grass seeds, when suddenly, with a whoosh, a large raptor swoops down from nowhere, seizes one in its talons, and flaps away. “Martial eagle,” says Roy, squinting into the sky. “That’s rare.” It leaves me feeling unsettled.

  As I leave, he turns away from his chirping phones to wave a white embossed invitation at me. It’s to the swearing-in of the new government, to be held at the polo grounds behind State House tomorrow afternoon. The invite says Roy Bennett + 1.

  “You wanna come?” he says. “It might be interesting.”

  ROY PICKS ME up the next day in an SUV with his security guy, a burly black man, at the wheel. Roy is dressed for the ceremony, squirming in his collar and tie, as though in sackcloth. He is sitting up front, not in the back as most do when chauffeured.

  We roll down Borrowdale Road past Dandaro clinic, through whose wards Denias Dombo and Norest Muchochoma, Tichanzii Gandanga, Tonde Chakanedza, Henry Chimbiri and all those shattered people have passed. They are the “collateral damage,” the price paid for this “power-sharing” ceremony today, which, depending on your faith, is either the final way station to real democracy, or just another sleight of hand by Robert Mugabe, in his violent game of political poker. Roy’s cell phone begins its familiar retro chime. Something about his tone of voice, a mixture of intimacy and respect, makes me realize that he’s talking to Morgan Tsvangirai. I lea
n in. Morgan is telling him not to come to the inauguration, to turn around immediately.

  Roy is flabbergasted. “Why?” he asks.

  “Because they are planning to arrest you, to disrupt the ceremony. They have placed roadblocks around State House and you will be picked up there, Roy,” says Morgan. “We have good information that’s what they are going to do.”

  Roy begins to argue. There are many reasons to do so. “We can’t let them dictate how this will work, if we set out like this, they will have the upper hand, it’s a bad precedent. If they’re going to arrest me, then let them do it on the day when all the VIPs, the foreign leaders, are here, for maximum impact.”

  But Morgan cuts him short. “I’m not asking you, Roy,” he says gently. “I’m telling you.” Roy concedes and instructs the driver to do a U-turn. He is already yanking off his tie, undoing his collar, and shucking off his jacket.

  He calls Tendai Biti, who agrees with Roy’s reasoning that he should have gone ahead, and Nelson Chamisa, who agrees with Morgan. “We have to think strategically,” he says. “Wait until you’re sworn in as Deputy Minister of Agriculture, then they’ll be arresting a minister…”

  Roy’s theory is that Mugabe’s securocrats are divided about what to do with him. There’s a renegade faction, he’s heard, led by Mnangagwa, who want to arrest him as a show of strength, even if it means disrupting the birth of the GNU.

  Back at Cynthia’s, Roy sits with some Manicaland friends, who’ve come up to welcome him home: from Chimanimani, Bad Hair Day Birgit and Allen Radford, owner of Heaven, the backpackers’ lodge there; from Mutare, Belinda Sharples, an MDC activist, and Brian James, that city’s newly elected MDC mayor.

  We’re watching the inauguration on ZTV—via a SATV feed. It’s running late, very late. The chiefs of staff are boycotting the event, balking at saluting Morgan, their bête noir. The war vets have put out a statement saying they will only support the unity government if all three leaders “respect the values of the revolution.”