The Fear

by Peter Godwin

  As we drive up the sole road, a steep, circuitous fifteen miles cut into the mountainside, Georgina’s eyes widen and she points up the slope. It is infested with soldiers in camouflage, skirmishing through the bush toward us in staggered line, weapons at the ready. They drop one by one from the embankment onto the road, fan out across it, and disappear into the foliage below.

  The route takes us through the mossy, fern-filled Bunga Forest, past hillsides thick with protea, and the botanical gardens, with its dozens of species of Jurassic cycads.

  At the top, the land is mostly divided into small plots, orchards and market gardens, and the vernacular architecture seems to be the thatched cottage or the log cabin, with names like Shangri La and Sans Souci and Mon Repos, used mostly by retirees and weekenders.

  The Queen Mother even stayed here, at Leopard Rock Hotel, on her last official visit in 1953, and looked in on Bvumba’s very own castle, next door—a small hotel now, which boasts a lavatory perched on a granite boulder. “I see you have your own throne,” she is said to have observed, upon viewing it.

  During the height of the diamond rush, Leopard Rock was the favored haunt for the diamond-dealers. “Man, it was wild then,” says Beefy Campbell-Morrison, the groundskeeper, over beers in the clubhouse, which overlooks the kikuyu-grass fairways of the hotel’s award-winning golf course.

  The diamond-dealers were vulgar and loud, and brash with cash, laying such huge bets at the hotel casino that it ran out of chips. There were flash cars revving in the parking lot outside and everyone draped in bling, hip-hop blaring from their car stereos, their baseball caps on backward, long basketball shorts flapping fashionably below their knees. They drank Johnny Walker Black Label, but mixed it with Sprite! And put their Converse high-top’d feet up on the sofas. There were sixty chefs, grilling Mozambican prawns as fast as they could.

  Then the crackdown came—Operation No Return—and the diamond dudes fled or were arrested, and now the hotel is quiet again.

  IF ANYTHING, the land grab up here has speeded up since the Unity government was established. “There seems to be a last-minute feeding frenzy,” says Lynda, Beefy’s wife.

  The latest morsel in that feeding frenzy is Peta Hall, a seventy-year-old widow who lives nearby, on Witchwood. At the bottom of a deliberately ruinous drive we come, not so much to a gate, as to a portcullis across a stone tunnel. I honk, and she peeks from the front door, her movements radiating anxiety, even from this distance. She’s a short, stout, capable woman, with gamine-cut blond hair and khaki Crocs, who’s had one hell of a life.

  “My mother came out from Holland already pregnant with me, and I was born in the Kalahari Desert. I grew up on horseback, cracking whips at livestock,” she tells us as we walk through her almost empty house. Room after room has stunning vistas down into a broad valley four thousand feet below, with mountain ranges stretching beyond it. The mountains reminded British settlers of other ranges they had conquered, so they called them the Little Himalayas, and the land far below us they named Burma Valley, and planted it with bananas. Little clouds float by beneath us, and long-crested eagles glide in lazy spirals below, in a separate world almost, as though we are suspended in heaven looking down at the earth. It makes me feel giddy, lightheaded.

  Beefy, whose family farm is next door, described how they used to watch the war from up here. They would see whole battles, the flash of rockets arching over the valley, and tracer bullets spurting back and forth, and then hear the distant explosions a little later up here on the mountains, like thunder following lightning. A Lilliputian war spread out below them on a map.

  Peta Hall used to be Peta Kearns, married to Basil, a successful farmer in Mtepatepa, west of Harare, a talented polo-player and fluent Shona-speaker. Peta bred and trained polo ponies. Toward the end of the war, Basil was ambushed by guerrillas just near the farm. “He was shot in the head and the stomach, and died nineteen days later, never having regained consciousness,” says Peta. “It was that fellow, Rex Nhongo, who killed him.

  “Almost exactly a year since her father was killed, my daughter Debbie, who was seventeen, was also ambushed. She was driving along in her little beach buggy when she came to a tree they had felled across the road, and they all began shooting. Her jugular was severed and she bled to death…”

  In time, Peta remarried, to Peter Hall, who commuted here at weekends from his printing business, Cannon Press, in Harare. Peter had bought Witchwood from Sir Edgar Whitehead, the former Prime Minister, and the local myth was that it took its name from a tree that grew up through an old burial ground, dislodging human bones. They farmed coffee for a while, and macadamia nuts, and when Peter’s health failed, they retired here.

  Last year was their annus horribilis. Peter had a stroke and became paralyzed and bed-ridden. Peta returned to Witchwood one day to find the gate down, four vehicles in the garden, and the house full of war vets, chanting. “My husband was upstairs, Ruda, his carer, had locked herself up there with him. He was aware of what was happening.” Their leader was a war vet called Francis Mazivikeni. The police refused to evict him.

  The vets began to loot the house downstairs, loading furniture into their red truck and taking it away to the local auction house to sell. They found an old .303 rifle, plugged and rendered unusable, hanging on the wall as decoration, and took it, together with some dusty shotgun cartridges, to the police, who charged Peta with illegal possession of firearms, with intent to commit sabotage, insurgency, and terrorism, the same charges now faced by Roy Bennett. “The police said I was trying to create an insurgency in the Bvumba,” says Peta.

  Peter was ailing fast now, and Peta did a deal with the vets that they would let her stay until he died. Peter had chosen his grave six months before, near the house in a grove of trees, but when the war vets realized what it was, they became agitated. “Why don’t you go to a cemetery, like ordinary people,” said Francis.

  The next day Peta heard the doors below being smashed, and then the vets trooping upstairs. Francis’s bodyguard, Magaya, shoved his way in and grabbed me by the neck of my blouse. I was trying to call my daughter, Pebbs, in South Africa and he grabbed the cell from me, and she pleaded with him to let us go.

  “They had drums and began to beat them and to dance around Peter as he lay in bed, about twenty of them banging pots and pans from the kitchen, and chanting, ‘Out now! Out now!’ They were all high and drunk too, having worked their way through the twenty cases of wine in our cellar.

  “Peter was looking on in terror—he was in diapers by then, you know, and had only one leg—he lost the other in a car accident in 1995. His arms and hands were bent in permanent claws. But he could smile and he could understand and he could talk, too, in a slurred way, but that I could follow. He used to sing a lot too—as a youngster he had attended Chichester Cathedral School [the Prebendal School] and had sung in the choir there.”

  Now he groaned as they danced around him drumming and chanting and banging their iron pots together. “I really thought he wouldn’t make it,” says Peta, “that he was going to die then and there. Lynda and Beefy came, and were frantically helping me to get our stuff out.” They put Peter on a mattress and slowly eased him down the stairs, while the vets watched and chanted, “Go! Go! Go!” each time Peter thudded down another stair.

  As Peter was pulled out of the front door, across the lawn, he looked up at the house and said to them in a voice that was suddenly understandable, “Do you know how long I’ve lived here?” And lying there, in his soiled diapers, with his clawed hands, he began to sing in Latin, his voice strong now, clear and beautiful, the hymns of his youth. And he sang as Beefy and Lynda and Peta and Ruda dragged him on his mattress across the lawn and loaded him onto the pick-up, and drove him away through the broken portcullis.

  The following night, Peta sneaked back to Witchwood, coming in the back way. Farnie, who had worked for Peter for twenty-five years, had arranged for her to consult the local nganga.

  “I
was pretty distraught at the time, so I thought it was worth a try. We sat in the dark, in a circle, four men, Ruda and me, with our arms crossed over our chests, holding hands, and the witch doctor murmured some incantations. In the middle there was a bottle of rock salt and a small pile of stones, quartz rocks, which we had found when we were digging Peter’s grave. I picked out one of the stones, and the witch doctor blessed it, and the rock salt too. He said, ‘Before you cross any new threshold, sprinkle the rock salt on it, for protection. And take the stone with you everywhere. Then the spirits will keep you safe. No harm will come to you, Mrs. Hall.’ Then we all melted away into the dark. He never asked for payment.”

  Peta produces the stone now—it is about the size of her fist, a pink-and-white-tinted quartz. “I keep it with me all the time,” she says. “At night I put it under my pillow, or on the bedside table. When I go out, I keep it in my handbag. It’s foolish, I know, but I believe in it.”

  In the meantime, her children had spoken to Roy and the MDC, and the next day the local MDC youth league chief told her, “What’s happening to you is illegal. We’ll sort it out.”

  “I was afraid,” admits Peta. “I had had enough. I was worried about the consequences of fighting back.”

  As soon as the MDC supporters arrived at Witchwood that weekend, Mazivikeni and his entourage fled. The police escorted the MDC away the following day, but some hid and stayed behind, and the vets were too scared to return.

  “Peter was in a terrible state that Sunday. I didn’t think he’d make it through the night.” But he survived, and early the next morning, Peta had to come down the mountain to be interrogated by the police again. “They spent all morning trying to get me to admit that I was the leader of the Bvumba insurgency,” she snorts. When she got back to the Bvumba that afternoon, she found Peter had died. She was determined to bury him on Witchwood, as he had wanted.

  “I got the doctor to issue a death certificate and he explained to me what I had to do with Peter’s body—to bandage the jaw closed and bind his feet together, so that rigor mortis didn’t distort the body position, and to plug the orifices. Ruda helped me. Then we wrapped him in a white sheet that was beautifully embroidered with roses.

  “We loaded him into the back of the pick-up and brought him back home to Witchwood. We buried him that day. There were about ten people there. We laid out a table with drinks, and hit the gin and Scotch even before the service started! There was quite a funny moment when Pebbs, who had just flown in from Johannesburg, and was still in her Jo’burg clothes, wanted to get into the hole to see her dad—so I lowered her in, and then she couldn’t get out.

  “And while we were standing there, the police and the CIO, and the Support Unit and Canine Unit arrived in about four trucks. We had left the gate open for funeral guests, so they just drove straight in.”

  Peta just lost it. “This is a private service, get out now!” she yelled. Chief Inspector Chinyoka, the officer in charge, said that he’d had an anonymous call to say that she was conducting an illegal funeral. “He demanded to see the death certificate, and the burial certificate, but I had all the right documents.

  “You know, they really didn’t want Peter to be buried on the farm. Mazivikeni and his guys are very superstitious and they knew that once Peter was buried on Witchwood, his spirit would guard the place.”

  There was a power cut, so they played tapes of Peter’s favorite hymns from childhood on the car stereo, with the doors open. “The Lord’s My Shepherd” and “Abide with Me,” and popular numbers he liked, “Kiss Me Goodbye,” and “Send Me On My Way,” by Petula Clark—they played that one just as the police convoy left.

  “After that,” says Peta, “my whole attitude changed. I’m fighting for this place for my family. If I have to die for it, I will. Peter’s spirit protects this place.” We are standing in the empty bedroom upstairs. His wheelchair is still in the corner by the window, facing the sublime view south into the Burma Valley, and the Little Himalayas beyond, and to the east, Chikamba Real dam down on the Mozambique flood plain. And for the first time in the telling of it all, Peta’s eyes grow wet.

  thirty-one

  The World’s Oldest Leader

  WE ARE LOOPING SOUTH from Mutare, through Chimanimani, on our way to the Savé Valley to see our friend Rita, and then to the southern city of Bulawayo. I have heard that even while Roy is still in prison, diamonds have now been discovered on his farm, Charleswood, in Chimanimani. It seems too bizarre a stroke of irony, but Doug van der Riet confirms it. Russians came in with a thirty-ton bulldozer, he says, to take soil away for assay. It seems to be an oblique-angled kimberlite pipe, not a random scattering of alluvial stones, like Chiadzwa. The Russians are in partnership with Joice Mujuru, General Nhongo’s wife.

  Nestling into the base of the mountains, Roy’s coffee bushes, those that haven’t been wrenched out of the red earth, are now overgrown and choked with weeds and vines. The hillside above them, once thick with musasa and mjanji trees, has been shaved and prepped for invasive diamond surgery, and stands barren and eroded.

  You can’t see Roy’s main house, Mawenje Lodge, until you are almost upon it. A forest has grown up in and around it, of musasa, fast-growing invasive wattle, ferns, and bracken, some of the trees already twenty feet high. The lodge is a ruin; only the chimney stack stands intact. Broken and charred ceiling beams jut from the walls. Georgina brushes away the cinders and leaves from the entrance, to reveal, etched into the threshold, a message.

  GOD BLESS THIS HOUSE ROY, HEATHER, CHARLES, CASEY BENNETT 1996

  On another panel, a picture of the family dog (barking at imaginary intruders) and its name, GUNNER.

  Georgina and I stand there with Tempe and Doug, looking at the indented blessing, now kohled with ash and open to the elements. No one speaks. There is nothing left to say.

  The thatch on the guest cottages is rotting; there are holes in the baths; it has a forlorn, desolate feel, with the Haroni River rushing past, down into the Rusitu, past Chris Lynam’s old farm and out over the Mozambique flood plain to the sea. Inside the cottages, the walls are darkened with soot from cooking fires that have been lit on the floors. And Mugabe’s men have daubed crude graffiti that pillories Bennett, calling him an mboro—a dick. There are charcoal-drawn pictures of him—childish and unrecognizable, but you know they’re supposed to be him because they have little arrows labeled “Bennett,” pointing at the figures, drawn in shackles, as indeed he is once again, even as we stand here, in the ruins of his old farm.

  THE FOLLOWING DAY we drive south to the Savé Valley Conservancy. The Savé River valley used to be a vast collection of white-owned cattle ranches, on dry, marginal land, inherently unsuited to cattle. So, more than a decade after independence, the ranchers combined twenty-four adjacent properties, totaling 1,300 square miles, into the largest private wildlife conservancy in Africa.

  By 1995, the conservancy was surrounded by a double-electrified fence and restocked with indigenous wildlife, including a successful breeding program for the critically endangered black rhino. Now, most of that two-hundred-mile border fence has been ripped down and the conservancy is under acute stress. Subsistence farmers have moved onto a third of it, and poaching has soared. Generals and judges and cabinet ministers are circling the safari lodges.

  Rita and her boyfriend, Spike Williamson, used to manage Hammond, one of the properties on the conservancy. Its American owners, Weldon and Kathy Schenck, had stickers printed up which said Just Ask Spike, because he knew the answers to all things ecological. For his birthday, Rita once bought him a CD of frog calls, and one wet night, she surreptitiously put the croaking medley on. He didn’t appear to notice for a while, then raised an eyebrow at one call, and declared, “Wait a minute, that frog’s not indigenous.” He and Rita now run Ardan Safaris, specializing in designing and running bespoke wildlife trips, in Zimbabwe and elsewhere in Africa.

  Tonight we are having supper under a tall cathedral of thatch, ben
eath a trophy buffalo head. Spike calls it Rapunzel, with its thick horns curling down like long armored bangs. Dr. Godfrey Mungwadzi and his heavily pregnant wife, Killiana, have joined us from Chiredzi town, nearby. Godfrey has dreadlocks, ankle boots, and a precisely trimmed goatee. He has treated many of the victims of political violence in this Chiredzi area, working for human-rights services such as CSU. In the elections last year, he stood as an independent candidate, and found himself on a hit list. “The actual hits were being done by guys from Angola and the Congo. I was warned to get out of the country, so we collected my daughter from Hippo Valley primary school, in case she was used as a hostage. CIO agents came to my house the next day…

  “I didn’t understand what I’d done wrong. I didn’t understand why this country could be so much theirs, and not mine. And then I realized it was because they had the power of the gun. All of a sudden, we had become people who should be eliminated. We got killed, our friends got killed, our property was destroyed.

  “The violence this time was on a much larger scale, our paupers’ graves were filling up with the victims. People were killed and their bodies ferried to mortuaries in other districts. There were dozens of unclaimed bodies, unheard-of in our society—it was because people didn’t know where the bodies of their relatives were, they had been moved away.

  “I’d only read about PTSD, but even now I still worry I’m being followed. Or when I’m sleeping, I’m peeping through the curtains, not sure of what’s going to happen. I have asylum papers in SA. I’m an HIV expert. We had a business, a way of life, kids in school.

  “Now the MDC goes along with ZANU-PF. They have joined the gravy train,” he sighs. Rain starts to patter lightly on the thatch, and Killiana pats her belly, big with child. “I think we’d better go,” she says, “in case the river rises.”