The Fear

by Peter Godwin

  An old friend, Beatrice Mtetwa, is here too. A feisty human-rights lawyer with sharp post-modern glasses, she is representing Roy. Last time I saw her, we were in New York, being buffeted down the icy canyon of 29th Street, after she’d accepted another of the many human-rights awards she’s garnered for continuing to defend Mugabe’s enemies—political activists and journalists mostly—despite being harassed and beaten by police herself. Her other growth area, she says, is divorce. “The diaspora splits couples, and so the divorce rate has soared—there’s a huge cost to family life because of this crisis.”

  Beatrice is fifty-one; she’s originally from Swaziland (she came here after marrying a Shona Zimbabwean she met at university), as Mugabe’s mouthpiece, the Herald, never tires of pointing out. And when she speaks Shona with a Swazi accent, Mugabe’s people do mocking imitations of her. Her father, a prosperous Swazi farmer, had six wives and more than a hundred children. Beatrice is the eldest, and the first in her family to go to university.

  During the evening, she’s frequently interrupted by calls. From Mutare, she hears that ten activists have now been arrested. From South Africa, the lawyers with whom she’s working Roy’s case want to refine legal tactics. When she hangs up on them, she fumes, “They just don’t understand, this is not about the law, it’s about politics.”

  On the other side of a few beers, and distressed about what’s happened to Roy, and how once again a white man is being used by Mugabe as a pretext to attack his opposition, I suggest we should just butt the hell out, leave, move on. “Maybe it would be better for all of you.”

  Beatrice leaps from her chair and draws herself up to her full five foot one. “Nonsense!” she cries. “Whites have been here for a hundred and twenty years. You’re as much a part of this place now as anyone. If you all go, then who’s next? You guys have to stay involved, for the sake of all of us.”

  WE LEAVE EARLY for Mutare. So early that the squads of police recruits are still jogging through the city streets near Morris Depot, in their white shorts and singlets and heavy boots, chanting. The low sun dazzles through the web of cracks in our windscreen, and it reflects off the Superman shields of white fur on the skinny sternums of the local dogs, and the white shirts and blouses of the kids straggling along the roadside to teacher-less schools, and off the white banner flapping across the road in Rusape, advertising last week’s Valentine’s dinner dance. To the northeast, the saw-tooth skyline of the Nyanga Mountains draws near, where Hildegard Weinrich, as Sister Aquina, had helped Robert Mugabe escape all those years ago, across into Mozambique through Chief Tangwena’s land.

  Just before Nyazura, on the right, we pass Tikwiri Hill. Its name means “Let us climb.” I’ve always loved its history, and I used to think about it on my way to boarding school when the Harare-bound sleeper train stopped at Tikwiri siding to pick up urns of milk, and mail. Tikwiri Hill, I had been told, was sacred to Chief Chiduku’s people, who lived here. When the more powerful Chief Makoni pressured Chiduku to move further south, Chiduku replied that his people would not leave their sacred hill. An irritated Makoni said, “Then take it with you.”

  So they tried to. They erected scaffolding on the summit of Tikwiri, and they dug a trench around the base to “loosen” it. They plaited tree bark into ropes and then they waited for the next new moon, and when it rose low in the sky they climbed the scaffolds, to cast their ropes up around the horn of the crescent, like lunar cowboys, hoping it would tow the sacred hill south to their new territory. But the scaffolding collapsed, and many were killed.

  I always loved the story, the poetic lunacy of it all, Chiduku’s celestial cowboys trying to lasso the moon. The story may even be true—you can still see diggings at the base of Tikwiri Hill, and Chiduku’s people do live some distance to the south of it now…

  On the brink of Mutare is Christmas Pass, where a monument used to stand to Kingsley Fairbridge, a local settler and poet who founded a scheme to ship poor British children out to new lives in the bastions of empire. It featured the young Fairbridge standing with Jack, his black companion, whose arm is protectively around him, and his dog, Vixen.

  Of all the settlers in this corner of the country, none lived larger and more eccentrically than the Courtaulds, Sir Stephen and Virginia. Up the Penhalonga road just a few miles north is their château, La Rochelle, left in death to the National Trust, and run today as a thirty-bed hotel by Simon Herring, in his genial early forties, key bunch hanging from his belt, pen clipped to the front of his polo shirt. Tea is served on the veranda under an ornate Islamic wall mosaic, which reads, in Arabic script, “Allah Is Great,” while Herring tells me of this extraordinary couple.

  Stephen Courtauld was the youngest of six, born into a family that had made dizzying wealth manufacturing artificial silk—rayon—and he was left a fortune. Shy and reserved, he met Virginia on the piste at Courmayeur in the French Alps. An Italian-Hungarian divorcée, ten years his senior, impulsive, stylish, racy, with a tattoo of a snake coiling up one leg, and a belief you could chat to extra-terrestrials, she was most unsuitable. He was immediately besotted. They embarked upon a three-year honeymoon, much of it on their steamship, Virginia (later to become the presidential launch of Liberia), accompanied by their ill-tempered ring-tailed lemur, Mahjong, purchased at Harrods, where else?

  After renovating Eltham Palace, in South London, they grew bored of England and began scouring their favorite continent, Africa, for somewhere suitable to settle. One day they were flying over eastern Zimbabwe, near the Mozambique border, and saw below them the enchanted Imbeza valley, and they were smitten.

  Stephen had wanted to call his new African home La Rochelle, in homage to his family origins as French Huguenot silversmiths, who fled to England to avoid persecution in the seventeenth century. And when he and Ginnie saw the property deeds, they were amazed to see that it already bore that name. If she was smitten before, Ginnie was now convinced this was predestined, and they set about designing and building their dream house—a French-style château in the lush bush of the African highlands.

  They shipped in three Welsh tilers and had the roofs laid in imported Welsh slate. They installed radiant heaters within copper cupolas in the ceiling. Lady Courtauld’s boudoir looked out onto a conservatory teeming with orchids, and beyond to the swimming pool. The cabinetry was of swirling honeyed bird’s eye maple, the rings from her G&Ts still visible on the bedside table. Cedric Green, a young South African architect who had fled that country after the Sharpeville uprising, designed Ginnie’s studio—her folly, she called it—which, at her request, riffed off Great Zimbabwe, complete with curved walls and chevron borders.

  And the gardens, they were splendid, fifty acres of exotic plantings gathered from across the world, roses and sweeping lawns, and a lake. People came from all over the land to see them, even the blind, for it had a Braille trail. Fifty-two full-time gardeners toiled to trammel the fecund.

  But they didn’t just spend on themselves; the Courtaulds were huge philanthropists, favoring the arts and progressive, multi-racial institutions. Simon walks me over to the large drawing-room window, on which many of the guests etched their signatures, using Ginnie’s diamond-tipped stylus. It’s a who’s who of Zimbabwe’s leaders, black and white.

  In the snuggery bar, Simon reaches up and pulls down one of the hidden wooden screens on which once hung Sir Stephen’s collection of thirteen Turners, to protect them from the harsh African sun. You can still see the faded rectangles where the landscapes used to be.

  Together we inspect the château’s tower—it was supposed to be one of a pair, but the other was never built. Ginnie would be proud to know that it’s the site of an extra-terrestrial encounter. “La Rochelle is cataloged as the second-best UFO sighting in the country,” Simon tells us. “Seriously,” he says, parrying our grins. “In August 1981, there was a bright ball of light at the top of the tower, which was already derelict by then, and the staff thought it was on fire and came running, only to
encounter three figures in silver jumpsuits, who dazzled them with some kind of ray, and they then fell down and were unable to move.”

  We walk the gardens now, past the stone obelisk, set among the rose beds. Carved into its base is a likeness of Mahjong, the temperamental lemur, who appears to be biting his own tail, with the inscription Companion in our travels over many lands and seas. “It’s hard to run an inn,” sighs Herring. Where once there were fifty-two gardeners, now there are two. “And we’ve had power for only six out of the last thirty days. They keep stealing the wire, we’ve lost five miles of wire.”

  And though the property belongs to the state, via the National Trust, he has to keep explaining that to various war vets who want to take it. “The whole thing is sheer craziness,” says Herring. “While Pete Hurrell, seed-producer and farmer-of-the-year, was in the USA looking into advances that enabled satellite-directed fertilizing, his farm here was jambanja’d and looted by machete-wielding Mugabe mobs—from the space age to the medieval!”

  During the first round of the election, he says, Lieutenant Colonel Tsodzai, in charge of the national vote-count center for Manicaland, stayed here. He was a ZANU-PF guy, but a day after the count he shook his head, and told Simon, “There’s no way Mugabe’s back in. He has been resoundingly defeated.” He was upset because many of the junior soldiers were already giving MDC open-hand chinja salutes.

  But a few weeks later, when the violent re-run campaign was launched, the one they call the Fear, Air Marshal Perence Shiri (a.k.a. the Butcher of Matabeleland) rolled into La Rochelle, with his soldiers and vehicles full of AKs. The men stayed in the cottages here while Shiri holed up in Lady Courtauld’s old boudoir. Simon was away then, but the staff say that each evening, as darkness fell, Shiri and his men would leave La Rochelle and wouldn’t return until the next morning, their fists swollen from having spent the whole night beating people up in Nyanga for voting the wrong way in the first round. When he left, instead of signing the guest book under his real name, which in Shona means bird, Shiri wrote Nyoni, which means bird in Ndebele, the language of the Matabele people he decimated.

  He returned a week later, when Simon was back, and asked how much the rooms were. U.S.$400 a night, Simon told him, which was ten times the previous rate. “Why so high now?” demanded Shiri. Herring looked at him evenly and said, “Because there is so much uncertainty here as people have been badly beaten up.”

  twenty-eight

  Don’t Trade Me for Anything

  WHEN WE ARRIVE in Mutare, the opposition vigil is gathered outside the central police station where Roy Bennett is in the cells—without access to a lawyer, or food from the outside. The crowd of supporters stands across the wide, flame-tree-lined Herbert Chitepo Avenue, which slopes northward up toward Cecil Kop. In the day their numbers swell, and they surge over into the street itself, singing and chanting. When darkness falls, most of them gather at the small MDC office up on the ridge by Cross Kopje overlooking Mozambique. Two impressive young local MDC MPs, Pishai Muchauraya, a former teacher, and Prosper Mutseyami, who used to be a fitter and turner, struggle to contain their frustration. Roy’s arrest has completely shattered any illusions these people had about the new “inclusive government.” “It’s like sleeping with the devil,” says one man, to cheers.

  “Isn’t that supposed to be ‘supping’?” Georgina asks me.

  “Not if you’re getting screwed,” I say.

  Their placards stacked there sum up their feelings. Free Our Roy Bennett Today, Happy Valentine’s Day Roy—We Miss You!! and Roy Is Our Hero.

  Soon, even the police reinforcements brought in from outside to contain the situation start to soften. When they complain of hunger to Kurt, a displaced farmer who has come down from Harare to join the vigil, he promises to get food for them.

  “It’s like feeding your own executioner,” I laugh. But Kurt says, “Maybe they won’t bite the hands that feed them.” And Memory, another opposition member, is giving loaves of bread to the local cops. “So they can be strong to beat you later?” I joke. “No,” she says, “they told me they would give us tear-gas cans to throw.”

  The local police do seem torn—uneasy at the confrontation that has been dumped in their lap. One cop says to us: “Now I’m going to speak to you harshly, and you must move away,” while he was watched from a distance by superiors, and he winked. “But then you can come back as soon as I leave.”

  His superior, the local police boss, Chief Superintendent Kasikakore, is more hard-line. Flanked by armed paramilitaries, he walks over to the crowd with a rolled-up copy of this morning’s Herald tucked under his arm, like a swagger stick. It bears a banner headline hailing the Government of National Unity, A New Beginning. One of his men hands him a megaphone and he orders us all off the street. Then, noticing a young man at the back taking photos with his cell phone, he dispatches a snatch squad to seize him. They sprint down Main Street after him, beat him to the ground, and haul him away.

  The crowd whistles and boos and surges forward around us, and I become aware of a tapping on my shoulder. “Will you please get off my foot,” Georgina says. “I just put sparkly nail polish on it, to remind myself not to take myself too seriously.”

  LATER I WAIT AT the barricaded main entrance to the police station to visit Bennett. I am with Brian James, the new Mayor of Mutare, a slim, compact man, with silver-framed glasses and a mild, unflappable disposition—a good man in a crisis, which is just as well, because in addition to trying to get Roy out of jail, he is also trying to stop the cholera outbreak here. Brian’s phone rings, with a sonorous chant: “O Great One, how may we serve you?” “That ring was downloaded by mischief-makers.” He grins, embarrassed. “I’m not sure how to change it.” It’s George Lock, Roy’s lawyer, who’s accompanying us. He is tall and blond, with a mustache, and the lanky wide-shouldered physique of the ace tennis player he was when we were classmates at St. George’s.

  We have brought food for Roy, sandwiches, a bunch of bananas, groundnuts, a bottle of water, corn curls, and a box of premium Swiss chocolates, a gift that the EU ambassador, Xavier Marchal, has asked me to give him.

  The inner courtyard of the police station is crammed with luxury cars, Mercs and Beamers, mostly, confiscated from diamond-dealers. We squeeze sideways between them to a small, grimy concrete cellblock. Though it’s not yet 4 p.m., the captives have already been herded back into their cells for the night. The jailer unlocks a door, and Roy and his cellmates emerge into the small caged area, blinking in the sunlight. Roy wears shorts and a T-shirt with the slogan Climbing Around the World. He is barefoot.

  Through the blackened chicken-wire fence, he tells us that initially there were twenty-five people crammed into a tiny cell, and he had refused to go inside, so they summoned the riot squad to force him in. The lavatory is blocked so they must use a bucket, which frequently overflows. “It stinks so bad in there,” he says, “that it gives you a headache.”

  We hand the food to the jailer, who takes it through, and Roy distributes it to his cellmates, those arrested at the protest, demanding his release. He saves a single banana for himself. The rest, they fall upon and devour.

  George briefs Roy about his forthcoming appearance in court, but Roy interrupts him to ask if we can do something about one protester who was bitten by a police dog, and whose wounds are badly infected. He still hasn’t been allowed to see a doctor, says Roy. And then we are told the visit is at an end, and we are escorted away.

  We have also brought a can of insect repellent, which Roy had requested, as the cells are infested with both mosquitoes and fleas. As we leave, I turn to see that instead of applying it to himself, Roy has dropped to his knees and is spraying the legs of his cellmates, one by one, as they scarf the food. It is a striking scene, Bennett on his knees, spraying the legs of these black men, outside their fetid jail cell.

  I realize, in that moment, why Roy Bennett, more than anyone else, scares and appalls Mugabe and his party, why they s
ee him as such a threat. Black MDC members, they reason, can ultimately be co-opted, bribed, or brought within the collective umbrella of the same racial and historical back-story, a narrative of colonial subjugation that can be hammered into a common political identity.

  But Bennett—a white man behind whose back you cannot talk, one whose chiNdau accent is so unnervingly authentic that his race is undetectable over the phone—is the champion of a rural black peasant constituency, with a strong provincial base here in Manicaland. He has black populist appeal, yet a Rhodesian back-story. He has not reached his pre-eminence as a politician through the usual route of white liberalism. His is not the Albie Sachs, Joe Slovo, comrades-in-arms story. And this, for Mugabe, is more than just an affront. It shatters his own mythology. His whole framework of control is rocked by Roy’s very political existence. Roy exposes the lie of what Mugabe pretends to be.

  And I realize, too, what I have missed in all these years of looking at it: that despite appearances, the Roy Bennett story is no longer about race; it has moved beyond that.

  ON THE WAY OUT, George asks Inspector Florence Marume if we can send a doctor to see the injured prisoner. But she refuses. “He will see our police doctor, if necessary,” she says curtly.

  “We will hold you responsible if he dies,” I say, ludicrously—as if she cares. She just shrugs with monumental indifference, and shifts her huge haunches on the creaking plastic mushroom of her old diner stool.

  WE ARE STAYING with Belinda and John Sharples in Fairbridge Park, named after Sir Kingsley, the pioneer of child emigration to the British colonies. The streets here, more eroded gullies than roads, have the names of poets—Kipling, Shelley, Keats. The Sharples got the bard himself: they live on Shakespeare Drive.