The Fear

by Peter Godwin

  THE RAIN moves off again, grumbling thunder as it does, and we pack up ready to move on at first light. We are sleeping in thatched rondavels on a bend in the Mkwasine River. It’s barely a river, just a trickle that meanders through a sandy bed. I fall asleep to the croaking of frogs. But just before dawn, I wake, alerted by a presence of some sort. I grab my flashlight and walk out onto the veranda. The audioscape has changed somehow; a background roar fills the air. It’s not rain. I cast my beam up. It’s not wind either—the trees are eerily still. It’s coming from in front of me. I point the light toward the sound, and there, where the sandy beach used to be, is a rushing torrent of water, bursting its banks and lapping up the lawn toward the veranda. I lie in bed, dozing fitfully, ear cocked to the newly mighty Mkwasine, until the wood hoopoes start up at first light, with their yuck, yuck, yuck cry, which the Ndebele people call umfazi uyahleka—the laughing woman. Ring-necked doves and harlequin quails and red-billed hornbills join in.

  After breakfast we drive to the ford across the Mkwasine. It was barely wet when we crossed it on our way in. Now the river is surging four foot high over it, and vehicles are stuck on both sides. The low-level bridge over the Turgwe river to the north is also flooded. So, for the time being, we are stranded.

  We drive over to Signal Rock, a large granite dwala which is the one place on the whole property we can get a phone signal, and walk up it, past a stinking elephant carcass. Around us stretches the Mopani woodland. Dark clouds sit heavily upon the kopjes that circle the horizon. Spike identifies the bush around us, long-pod cassia, marulas, white syringa, wild sesamum, bird plum, squat sterculia, wing pod, knob-thorn acacia. We recline on the granite warming our backs, and look up at the birds rushing around feeding on the insects that have come out in advance of the storm. Eurasian bee-eaters, black cuckoo shrikes, go-away birds, flappet larks. Guinea fowl dizzy through the sickle bushes, and white-backed vultures sit patiently in a mopani tree. A lone marshal eagle spiraling reminds me of Roy, and we call, to find that he is still in prison.

  I try to phone home. Miraculously, I get an international line. Joanna has been out buying Hugo a new winter coat. He chose a camouflage one, she says. Then he stood in the middle of his bedroom, put on the coat, and asked, “Can you see me now?”

  The line cuts out and I lie there, my back warm on the granite, as the coming storm rustles the trees. The smell is of rain, but closer and more pungent is the smell of Matabele ants, of the formic acid that they exude as a defense. I think of Hugo standing solemnly in the middle of his New York bedroom, convinced that his new camouflage coat is an invisibility cloak. And I think of all the chaos around me here, the kids dying of cholera, the diamond-diggers and the gold-panners, and the army and the police and all the rest of the aged dictator’s agents running around, and Roy still behind bars in a fetid jail cell, shitting into a bucket. The vultures are waiting in the mopani trees and the Matabele ants spewing their acid to ward off predators, and over in the meat room Fabian the game scout is hacking at a bloody zebra for ration meat to feed the staff.

  THAT EVENING, Mugabe’s birthday interview, President R. G. Mugabe @ 85, is broadcast on ZTV, having been heavily trailed for weeks. He is now the world’s oldest national leader. First, there is a short warm-up act—a young man from the “21st February Movement” (Mugabe’s birthday) tries to entice people to attend celebrations the following week in Chinhoyi, to mark “the life of our icon, President Robert Mugabe.”

  The interview itself takes place on the lawns of State House in the shade of a musasa tree. He’s still sprightly, for eighty-five, although he uses a little dance move to disguise his difficulty with steps as he strolls into position. Once again, he is in his high-backed, thronelike armchair, his slender legs tucked back, and pressed together at the knees, in a coltish, effete manner. He wears a well-cut charcoal suit, burnt-crimson tie, striped shirt, and glazed loafers.

  Mugabe peddles his imperial musings for an hour and a half straight, with only the lightest of cues from his simpering interlocutor, who smiles, fawns, nods approvingly, and even giggles appreciatively throughout. Mugabe fiddles with his gold wedding band as he drones on, and his hands flutter and join again with ecclesiastically laced fingers. It is a repetitive, circuitous performance, geriatric maundering, garnished with non sequiturs, the brain-shavings of the dictatorial dotage. And he slides further and further into the depths of his outsize chair, becoming more and more diminutive, his trouser legs riding up his shins to reveal a nasty case of swollen ankles.

  He acknowledges, almost in passing, that agriculture has “underperformed” and that there had been “a ah…”—he searches for the right phrase—“a period of hunger,” hunger in the way one might feel peckish before lunch, if one hadn’t had a hearty breakfast!

  But much of his soliloquy is reserved for his favorite parlor game, Britain-bashing. I’ve noticed that when he speaks of Britain, he subconsciously lapses into a magniloquent sub-Churchillian cadence—betraying his agonizing Anglophilia. “We are not an extension of Britain,” he thunders now. “I will never stand for it, dead or alive, even my ghost will not stand for it.” He is increasingly invoking the specter of his ghost, as though he is trying to extend his stranglehold on us, even after his death. “If they [the Brits] want, then we will give them the graves of their dead,” he taunts.

  Later, at his lavish eighty-fifth-birthday banquet in Chinhoyi, a banner across the street reads, “Age Ain’t Nothing But a Number.” A hundred cows are slaughtered for the feast. He and his family are filmed eating bulging slices of a cake weighing a hundred and eighty pounds, slathered with vanilla icing. Mugabe wears a red kerchief around his neck, like an elderly cub scout, and slumps in an olive velour sofa with Grace and the kids, while waiters in white jackets crawl on their knees to serve them.

  Behind Mugabe, if you look closely, there is a familiar figure. It is Joseph Mwale. For years now there has been a warrant out for his arrest on charges of murder, yet the police claim they can’t find him. And there he is, publicly standing right behind his master, licking vanilla icing off his homicidal fingers.

  THAT NIGHT, still trapped by the flooding rivers, we light a fire under Rapunzel, and open the bar. David Hulme, the son of Hammond’s current manager, joins us. He’s in his mid-thirties, and has a hunter’s license himself (and has written a book, The Shangaan Song, about his experiences). There’s a large white bandage around his biceps. “I was bitten,” he says.

  “Bitten?”

  “Yes. By an African. The guy was a bit penga [mad] and he had AIDS. So I’m on ARVs.

  “It’s not the first time I’ve been bitten by a human,” he says, revealing two scars beneath his collar. “I caught a guy stealing from my car, and grabbed him, but he bit a big chunk out of my neck. We fought for ages—a big crowd gathered to watch. He came at me with a brick, so I grabbed a tire lever. And the doctor said I might be infected with AIDS after that one too, but it was back in 1994, before ARVs, so he told me to return in three months to be tested. It was three months of hell. Later, that guy was shot dead by police. He came at them with a butcher’s knife.”

  Rita is telling us how her mother and brother are doing in their little cottage in Masvingo. “She still misses Dad. We put him in an unmarked grave, under an acacia tree out on the farm, covered it over with thorn bush. Francesca, the maid, is alone at the farmhouse now. The roof’s falling in and there are black mambas in it, and swarms of bees. There are too many ghosts there now.

  “Occasionally we take Mum there. She walks around the garden, picks flowers, arranges them in a vase on the table, and my sister Kate still goes there to paint. She paints the only trees left standing there, a little grove of six monkey orange trees. She calls them her ‘girls,’ and paints them again and again. Over the election, there were rumors that white farmers had come back from New Zealand, to our house. So the youth militia came and checked under all the beds.”

  We’ve had quite a bit to drink now, sittin
g there under the thatch looking out at the downpour, and laughing about how Africa resets your calculus of chaos. I tell them of a catch-up email from a childhood friend, “DB” Warren, who used to farm near Silverstream before leaving for Zululand. He reports that he’s just got divorced after thirty-two years of marriage. “Kind of the cherry on the top for 2008,” he goes on, “as we were attacked on the farm here and I was stabbed through both lungs… managed to kill one [of the intruders] on the bedroom floor, before making a dash for the hospital. Have to love Africa,” he concludes, with amazing insouciance.

  Rita reminds us of the apocryphal story about how you can tell when a missionary’s “gone native,” by the fly-in-the-tea test. When he’s newly arrived and a fly buzzes into his tea, he fishes it out. After he’s been here a while, he drinks the tea with the fly in it, and when he’s gone native he grabs a passing fly and puts it in the tea, then drinks. Maybe this place turns everyone nuts in the end? Kate obsessively painting the last few trees. David saying he’s been bitten by an AIDS-infected man—twice—and just taking it as commonplace. Or DB Warren mentioning casually that he killed one of his assailants before driving himself to hospital with his blood-filled lungs. Belinda telling Georgina that she’s grown so used to filthy toilet seats that she doesn’t even bother with them now, and has trained herself to “poo standing up.”

  “She has incredibly strong thighs,” says Georgina. “I felt them.

  “I’ll tell you something I’ve never told anyone,” she ventures, somewhat the worse for wear. “I’ve had sex on Rhodes’s grave.”

  “That’s sacrilegious!” squeals Rita.

  “We were watched by rainbow skinks,” says Georgina.

  “Beach sex is overrated,” says Rita. “You get sand in your guava.”

  THE NEXT DAY the river falls. We help clear the branches and other flotsam from the ford, and gingerly drive across, water tugging at the doors, and then we drive back up to Harare, through Zaka, up and over a rugged spine of hills, past the barracks of 4:2 Battalion, near Gutu. On the right, stretched out over a large granite dwala, we see tens of thousands of people lined up—it’s a scene of biblical proportions. It turns out to be a CARE international food aid registration. This is the reality of Zimbabwe today. So many of its people now rely on this foreign food aid to stay alive. The local CARE officials are terrified to talk. “We don’t want to say anything to jeopardize the feeding,” they say. “The government can suspend our operations at any time. And then these people will starve.”

  AT VIC’S TAVERN in Chivhu there are cholera alert posters on the wall, next to antique farming implements, and a notice that chides: We don’t provide toilet facilities for people just loitering about. The deserted dining room is all made up, the tables laid with white cloths, cutlery, and napkin crowns, the chair backs wearing little white linen sleeves. We order tea out on the veranda. The milk is powdered and lumpy and the tea leaves free-floating. “There is no strainer available.” The waiter shrugs. I absently shoo away a pair of mating flies, buzzing around my face, and they land in Georgina’s tea. “Fucking flies,” she says, and takes a long, deliberate sip from the chipped cup.

  thirty-two

  If Ever We Should All Die, It Will Be Forgotten Now

  SPIKE AND I SIT in his truck on the dark, deserted corner of Fort and 4th Streets in Zimbabwe’s second city, Bulawayo, which is experiencing one of its frequent power cuts. “Don’t leave your car, it’s a very dangerous part of town, even when the street lights work,” Rita’s brother-in-law has warned us. The back door opens and out of the night appears Max Nkandla, the man we’ve been waiting for. He used to be a guerrilla in Joshua Nkomo’s army, ZIPRA, fighting against white rule, and saw combat twenty-eight times. He’s dressed all in khaki, and though his epaulettes are empty now, at fifty-four, he still carries himself like a soldier. He’s President of the Zimbabwe Liberators Peace Initiative, which represents two thousand of his former guerrilla comrades.

  At independence in 1980, Max was integrated into the new Zimbabwe National Army (ZNA). As his name suggests, Nkandla is amaNdebele, and when Mugabe unleashed his Fifth Brigade in Operation Gukurahundi to attack the south in 1983, Max, by then a captain, was arrested. “The Military Police took me and accused me that I had an arms cache somewhere. I was put in leg-irons and handcuffs. Five days after my arrest, I heard from a fellow prisoner what had happened to my father—that he had been shot, executed.

  “He was a primary school teacher, and the Vice-Chairman of ZAPU for his district, and when the soldiers searched his home they found a photo he had by his bed of me in my camouflage uniform—and they accused him, saying I was a dissident, and asking, ‘Where’s your son?’ And he tried to tell them I was in the ZNA.

  “He was forced to attend a rally, and at the rally the soldiers took him and three of the other elders, and they shot them, in front of everyone, the whole village—about two hundred people. They were seated and just shot.

  “The community buried him, near his cattle pens, just outside our family kraal. My sister, Elizabeth, now forty-seven, witnessed his murder. She still cries about it, even today.”

  WE SET OFF, Max, Spike, Georgina, and me, early the next morning, through the wide city streets lined with flame trees and silver oak, and tree-wisteria, laden with purple blossom, past the Esoteric Beauty Salon and the Scoff Box, the Heads ’n’ Hooves Butchery, and, above a petrol station, the Underground Cabin Company, a coffin shop with its caskets displayed prominently in the window, and headstone samples around the corner. One suggested epitaph: YOU LEFT A GAP THAT NO-ONE CAN FILL. We drive southeast on the Matopos road, past the faux-Tudor Churchill Arms Hotel and its Inglenook Restaurant, and the Musketeers Lodge, and a sign welcoming us to Matabeleland South. Three inches of rain have just fallen and it is uncharacteristically green. Baboons scamper away into the tall blond grass; a convoy of Lutheran Aid trucks pass by. And in a clearing, ZANU officials, judging by their banners, are holding an open-air meeting. But this area is an almost completely ZANU-free zone—for one overwhelming reason.

  Even though the Matabeleland massacres were perpetrated twenty-five years ago, they still loom large to the people here—an unrequited tragedy that shattered their society, and festers at the heart of everything. Roy Bennett reckons that what happened in Matabeleland remains Mugabe’s biggest motive for holding on to power: he fears that if he leaves office he will become victim to what the Shona call kudzorera pamavambo—retributive justice, the real blood-revenge, the kind that doesn’t need the Hague to happen.

  Mugabe used a small and sputtering “dissident” problem, some of which is suspected of having been staged, as a pretext to wipe out the entire leadership of Joshua Nkomo’s ZAPU party. This was to the Ndebele people what the Katyn massacre was to the Polish, and the casualties were similar, around twenty thousand civilians, although out of a much smaller population (two million) than Poland’s (thirty million).

  “It’s not easy to give it [the massacre] a name because it was so distressing,” says Max. “And even during the last elections, some of the original victims were visited again and harassed, so they are still scared to talk.”

  We pass through the town of Kezi, and on through the village of Maphisa, where the road turns to dirt. In spite of the rain, the land here is thin and tired. “Nothing is developed in this area,” says Max looking around, disgusted. “Mugabe just vandalized it, and sent all the money to his own region—not to ours. The ones between eighteen and forty, they all fled this area to South Africa to work. They are the ones who are helping us—sending money back—they are the only reason we survive.”

  We turn off after a few miles and head along a track made by carts pulled by dainty Jerusalem donkeys with gray crosses along their backs, until we reach the kraal of the local MDC councillor. Chickens scatter, clucking in alarm, and small children dart indoors and return with an old lady in a frilly green-and-white gingham apron, a floral headscarf, bare feet, and a pronounced limp. She s
eats us on small wooden stools and sits herself on the bare beaten earth. Only then does the greeting ritual begin.

  “Salibonani” [“Hello”], Max says.

  “Salibonani” [“Hello”], she says.

  “Unjani?” [“How are you?”], asks Max.

  “Ah, mbijana” [“just a little”], she replies, which is what people here say now, instead of the traditional ngisaphila [“I am well”]. They haven’t felt well for twenty-five years.

  Summoned by the kids, a group of men return from the fields, including her husband, Elmon Dube, seventy-six. “I am the head of this kraal,” he says, smoothing his dirty Billabong T-shirt, a hand-me-down from some Western charity drive.

  Like many here, he is still nervous talking about Gukurahundi. “I walked to Bulawayo to escape during that time,” he says. “My wife was assaulted by those Gukurahundi, and even up to today, she is crippled. She was beaten on the hips. They told her to lie down, then they whipped her with sjamboks. Most of the women around here were beaten at their kraals by those ones with the red berets. They were Shonas. And they assaulted the men here too—seventy strikes per man, hitting us with logs.”

  “The soldiers accused us of harboring dissidents,” says Stephen Nkomo. “They had someone in their vehicle, who we couldn’t see, who identified us—those he identified were taken away and we never saw them again. So many were killed—they just never came back. No one has asked about this, even until today. No one spoke to us about it. The soldiers’ intent was to shorten the number of Ndebele-speaking people as a tribe.”

  “Since my wife is crippled for life,” says Elmon, “an apology is not enough—they must pay for what they did. There should be a trial and compensation.”

  “I’m not willing just to forgive,” says Joshua Moyo, defiantly. “There must be some sort of punishment against the perpetrators.”