The Fear

by Peter Godwin

  Daniel Moyo, sixty-eight, is the MDC-M local councillor. He shrugs off the division into two wings of the MDC, one headed by Mutambara, which is predominantly southern, and that headed by Tsvangirai. “It doesn’t matter,” he says. “We are hunting the same animal.”

  He pauses while the old lady in the gingham apron approaches with a watermelon. She expertly cleaves it with a machete, and offers the slices to us.

  “Who should be punished for Gukurahundi?” he continues. “The perpetrators had a leader, who was supposed to control them. The one who was leading—who was that? It was Mugabe, and his generals, especially Perence Shiri. There is a pattern to this, you know. They still do it. It’s the same government.”

  Max says, “You know, we are hearing about Charles Taylor being taken to the ICC—why not this bastard, Mugabe?”

  “The soldiers beat me for an hour,” says Mlaga Maposa, who works at the local irrigation co-op. “Even now, this part of me”—he gingerly touches his lower back—“it hurts when it becomes cold.

  “My uncle, a councillor, was killed. We never saw the body. We think he was thrown into Antelope mine. And Nkosi Dube, my cousin who was a headmaster, he was also taken. And we never even saw his body either. Sampson Ncube, a teacher—he also disappeared. All senior ZAPU members were in danger. The strategy was to kill ZAPU—to break it totally. The only men who survived were those who fled to town.

  “If ever we should all die, it will be forgotten now. We were left—but many were killed. I am still so angry today about it.”

  Isabel Ngwenya, who has a goiter on her neck from iodine deficiency, was heading for the Tachani River to fetch water with two other women when they were stopped by Shona-speaking soldiers in red berets, who accused them of “going to meet dissidents.” “We denied it. They said, ‘Today you will tell the truth.’ They made us to lie down with our arms stretched out in front of us, and then they beat us. We were not allowed to put our arms in the way to protect ourselves from the sticks. One of the women was seven months pregnant. But there was no time for reasoning with them. I was too scared to go to hospital afterward, and I still limp even today.”

  “What can be done, after all this time?” I wonder.

  “A human needs a memorial,” she says. “We need to do that.” And after a moment’s thought, she continues. “You know, we have a word in siNdebele, cithumuzi, it means ‘to destroy a family, a people, a nation.’ That is what has happened to us—cithumuzi.” The word is as close as you can get in siNdebele to genocide.

  THE MAIN torture base was a place called Bhalaghwe (also spelled Belaghwe), near Maphisa town. In siNdebele, Bhalaghwe means “a wide rock.” It still strikes fear in my heart. Above it rises Zamanyoni Hill—“The Hill of Birds.” Nyoni, a bird—the word Shiri used to sign in at La Rochelle. I remember crawling up to the top of the hill and looking down at the infernal scene below.

  Thompson, who’s now fifty-four, and still too afraid to use his surname, was working at a local bakery when the army picked him up and brought him here. “They blindfolded me and beat me with sticks. There were hundreds of others imprisoned here too. I was kept prisoner for a month—and they beat me nearly every day. At the end my mother came here to the camp, and she pleaded with the CIOs to release me.”

  “Did she pay some money?”

  He looks down. “I don’t know. Maybe. Yes.”

  There’s almost nothing left of Bhalagwe today. I have an old photo of it which I am using to navigate around the ruins, but Thompson still knows the layout by heart. “This is where the soldiers were keeping their lugagges,” he says, pointing at the only intact brick walls on the site.

  As we talk, a tiny brindle kitten comes bounding out of the bush, and leaps straight up into Georgina’s arms. She walks around the torture site with it purring there.

  “Three years ago, the community decided to gather the bones of the victims, the bones from Antelope mine and elsewhere, and put them in a mass grave,” says Thompson. “We collected money and made these graves by ourselves.” He shows me two improvised graves in a small clearing. They have low cement walls, cheaply built, and already subsiding. Into the cement of each grave, when it was still wet, they have traced the words MASS GRAVE. That’s it. Nothing else. They are still afraid to write more, to name the perpetrators or even the victims, to properly memorialize their dead. Twenty-five years on, and still the fear has them in its grip.

  AS WE GET ready to leave, Georgina announces that she wants to keep the kitten. But of course she can’t. We walk up and down looking for its mother, calling for its siblings. But the nearby kraals are deserted, of both people and animals. And eventually we have to leave it at the gate of an empty kraal, the closest one to where it found us, hoping that this might be its home. As we start to drive away, the kitten totters down the dirt road after us, a furry ball of khaki with irregular black spots, and Georgina bursts into tears.

  “Over the kitten? Really?” I ask, gesturing around the ruins of the torture base and the mass graves. “With all of this?”

  “No,” she sniffs. “It’s not just the kitten. It’s everyone here. They’ve all been abandoned. No one gives a fuck about what’s happened to them, they’re completely alone.”

  And I realize that she’s right. The Ndebele have been stranded by history. A remnant people, deserted in the land they had once conquered. In that respect, I suppose, they are similar to the remaining whites.

  As we round the last bend, I look in the mirror, and the kitten is still there, bobbing up and down between the tall grass-tufted median and the overhanging thorn trees, and sprayed with our dust plumes now, but still vainly trying to follow us.

  thirty-three

  The Ordeal Tree

  MAX N KANDLA is subdued on our return to Bulawayo. Hearing all the recollections of the massacres seems to have triggered in him simultaneous feelings of anger and impotence. These days he makes a living driving a taxi. But he spends most of his time trying to help orphans. Zimbabwe now leads the world in number of orphans per capita—produced by AIDS, poverty, health-care collapse, and a repressive ruler, indifferent to the plight of his people. Max and his wife, Sukoluhle, a pre-school teacher, used to board six orphans in their small house in Entumbane township. That was before Sukoluhle left home. “She now has to work as a maid servant in Johannesburg,” says Max, grimly, cracking his knuckles.

  The irony is left unremarked. That he fought in a liberation war against white rule only to find that all these years later his wife must still clean the white man’s toilet, that the flower of amaNdebele nation is reduced to servitude. Their two younger daughters, sixteen and fourteen, live here with Max. “The girls miss their mother so much,” he sighs. “This is her second year of doing it. She would love to come back, and I would love her to, but we really can’t survive.” His widowed sister, Elizabeth, the one who watched their father being shot in the head in front of the entire village, works as a maid in Cape Town. “She used to come back home for two weeks, every December,” he says. “But last year she didn’t come back.”

  Max still helps hundreds of orphans; he wants me to visit one of several informal orphanages he supports. House number E299 is simply another in the endless rows of box houses in Dube township, below the giant cooling towers of the city’s moribund power station. Sipho Mhlanga cares for forty-two AIDS orphans here. She calls her home Csingcino Nkosi, “With God’s Guidance.” Divorced with five grown kids, she started taking in orphans in 2006, “because the country was getting poorer and poorer, and children were being lost, becoming street kids, scattered all over. I want to occupy them and make sure all of them go to school,” she explains, sitting in her lime-green kitchen beneath a poster that reads, I am single but not desperate.

  After we have given Sipho the bags of maize meal and cooking oil we brought, the orphans arrange themselves in size-calibrated rows for a farewell song. “My home, my home, my home,” they sing, “is far, far away.”

  The kids a
re in the same age range as my own, dressed in eclectic Western hand-me-downs. One little girl, Thandiwe, wears a neon-pink T-shirt with the word heiress picked out in silver sequins. From a distance, she has an ever-present, beatific smile, but every time Georgina raises her camera, Thandiwe covers her face with her hand. Only when I get closer do I see that Thandiwe’s smile is a deformity; the flesh of her lips is pared back off her teeth in a fixed rictus. And her eyes are not smiling at all—they glisten with shame.

  NOW THAT Dominic, Georgina’s English boyfriend, has joined her, for his first visit to Africa north of the Limpopo, she wants him to see the wildlife, to show that this place, for all its tragedy, can still be beautiful too. So the next morning we drive northwest from Bulawayo on the Victoria Falls road. Rita sits in the back reconciling her check book. She’s having problems fitting in the zeros. The last check she paid in Zimbabwe dollars was her monthly electricity bill—$865 trillion. Georgina is tapping at her netbook, which is covered in leopard-print laminate and coordinates with her blouse. “It’s my Out of Africa look,” she says. “I’m wearing it in honor of Dominic.”

  The first roadblock is on the outskirts of the city. Spike checks we’re belted in. He and Rita only pretend to be. “I once got out of wearing my seat belt at a roadblock,” says Rita, “by telling them my amazambane were too big.” She laughs as she palms her generous bust.

  The road soon empties of traffic, except for bony livestock, which emerge without warning from the head-high elephant grass. This used to be commercial ranching and forestry land, but most ranches here have been jambanja’d, and the Gwaai Valley conservancy too. The roadside is punctuated now with freshly fashioned, higgledy huts of red mud, and tiny plots of wilting maize. But the new settlers tend only to colonize a narrow strip on either side of the main road, seldom venturing into the interior. From time to time, we see government-issued tractors lurching along, festooned with passengers. War vet company cars, Rita calls them.

  There was some spirited opposition here to the land takeovers, Spike says, smiling—notably the Gwaai Valley Resistance, the GVR, which consisted of several young white farmers who entrenched themselves in some sort of bunker, with a large supply of beer, vowing that they would never be evicted. But when the beer ran out, their tenacity drained with it and they re-emerged.

  Four and a half hours up the Falls road, we reach the Gwaai River. On its southern bank is the Gwaai River Hotel. I remember it as a gracious thatched building, resting on pillars of smooth round river stones, run by a Jewish couple, the Broombergs. There was an Indian-style punkah flap in the dining room, and in season, fireflies in jars replaced candles on the tables. Semi-tame zebra drank from the swimming pool. Now the place is a charred ruin; the river stone pillars stand alone, watch towers to the destruction around them.

  We turn left here into Hwange Wildlife Reserve, the flagship of Zimbabwe’s game parks and, at the size of Wales, its largest. Spike grew up here, at Main Camp. He and his three rumbunctious brothers were called the Demolition Squad. His father, Basil, was an elephant ecologist who died at forty-one from bladder cancer. As we pull in, Spike points to the sign outside the pub, the Waterbuck’s Head. “My father was famous for being able to piss over the top of that sign,” he says. No mean feat, given that it’s eye height.

  We just have time to take Dominic to the Nymandlovu game pan for the sunset congregation of thirsty animals. From a distance, we see that the viewing platform is already full of tourists, though oddly there is no sign of their vehicle. They seem to be jumping up and down, dancing perhaps, but we hear no music. As we approach, we see that they are actually baboons, sitting on the chairs, scampering up and down the steps, dangling from the rafters, copulating and grooming one another on the tables. And they have pissed and crapped everywhere.

  They reluctantly lope off, barking and shrieking resentfully, and we sip our sundowners up there, trying to ignore the reek. The last time Rita was here, the Bulawayo Symphony Orchestra was playing a benefit under a full moon, in aid of hyena research. As they played, a huge elephant herd came down to drink at the pan. “They didn’t seem to mind the music,” says Rita, “except the flute solo, when that started they were a bit freaked out.”

  We are the only people staying at Main Camp. These government-owned lodges used to provide a tidy, utilitarian, low-priced alternative to the elite safari market, whose luxury camps are out of reach to most locals. The chalets are still scrupulously clean, if threadbare now, but the bar and restaurant are derelict, with broken windows and thatch shedding in great moldy clumps. In fact, little that requires capital investment or actual resources has been kept up. There is only one working light bulb in our section, and Lameck, the camp attendant, moves it around. He says he hasn’t been paid for three months. His khaki uniform is disintegrating. His shoes are antique boats, bound together with twine, the heels steeply sloping, from years of supinating.

  In the morning, there is no water, so Lameck insists I trek across to the other side of the camp where there is a working shower, with hot water, he promises, from the fire he has stoked up in a donkey boiler. He turns on the tap and we both hold our hands under the stream of cold water. “It’ll get hot,” promises Lameck, and we solemnly continue to feel the cold water. “I work here since 1971,” he says. “It was better before. Now it is too bad. This government is useless.” Still, the water remains icy. “It will come,” says Lameck, but I can see that he is starting to lose faith now. “It’s fine, really,” I say. “I’ll just have a cold shower.” He lowers his head in defeat and withdraws.

  I splash myself with icy water and step out of the stream to soap. And finally, just as I’m finishing, the water does turn warm, and then actually hot. Lameck has triumphed after all. On our way back across the camp, he dances a little victory jig.

  Like so much else in this blighted country, the National Parks Department is hanging on by its fingernails. When rangers aren’t paid enough, or indeed at all, they help themselves to the wildlife they are sworn to protect. Hwange Reserve is nicknamed National Parks Department’s pantry. But the real picture is more nuanced. There are many here doing their best under terribly straitened circumstances, those with a memory of institutional integrity, and pride in their job, even as they struggle to survive and feed their families.

  THE NEXT DAY we drive slowly through the reserve, through fields of yellow hibiscus, while Spike answers Dominic’s questions about the animals we see. The cory bustard is the heaviest flying bird in the world, weighing in at over forty pounds, and the male’s call is like the throb of an African drum. The black-and-white pattern on zebra helps them to blend in with one another and confuses their predators trying to single out a quarry. A spur-wing goose is really a duck. The difference? Among other things, two more vertebrae. The sun-strobing shoals of butterflies congregate on mounds of elephant dung because elephants’ digestion is so inefficient that their dung is rich with nutrients. The birds that remind Dominic of pterodactyls are ground hornbills. The giraffes that loom at angles over the terminalia brush, like cranes over a harbor, were thought by the ancient Greeks to be a cross between a camel and a leopard, hence their scientific name: camelopardalis. An impala doe can reabsorb her fetus during the first three months in a drought, or extend gestation from six and a half to nine months after that, if necessary.

  The ordeal tree, oppositifolia, under which a trio of tawny lion are napping, is highly poisonous. The San use it on the tips of their arrows. In the old days, if you were accused of witchcraft, you were forced to drink a potion made from it. If you died, you were innocent.

  We talk about what to do if we are injured out here in the bush. To stop a wound becoming septic, honey works, says Spike. Sugar and salt too. Termites can be used as sutures. You pinch the wound closed and make the termite nip onto it with its mighty mandibles, then break off its body, and repeat, along the wound. But none of us has actually seen it done.

  THAT NIGHT we stay at the Hide, one of the luxury
private lodges. Again, we are the only guests. On the deck, over drinks before supper, Georgina and Dominic page through a coffee-table book entitled Zimbabwe—Africa’s Paradise, which displays the country at its post-independence zenith. In the section on Chimanimani, there’s a double-page vista of a bountiful coffee plantation, perfectly aligned ranks of coffee bushes with the mountains shimmering behind them. The picture is of Charleswood, whose ruined coffee fields are now destroyed and whose lodge is burned down.

  We have just heard that the Mutare magistrate, Livingstone Chipadza, ordered Bennett to be freed on bail, but a senior prison officer refused to carry out the court’s instructions. Now the magistrate himself, the one with thick glasses and owlish eyes, has been arrested “for exceeding his powers.” His colleagues in Mutare have gone on strike. Bennett remains in prison.

  At supper, the black rangers, hosted by Daffwell Marumahoko, the acting manager, vent their fury at Mugabe’s policies, for destroying the tourist industry. Then talk turns, as it always seems to in wildlife reserves, to animal attacks. The American girl who was taken by a crocodile on Lake Kariba. Her parents came and cast red rose petals upon the water at the site of the attack, and as they sailed away, the guide turned back and saw an eerie sight, crocs’ eyes emerging through the floating carpet of petals. Leopards always feature prominently in these recitations, because they have adapted most successfully to the proximity of man. Spike’s brother was scalped by a leopard. Daffy’s aunt was attacked by one. She was saved by a village dog, which bravely nipped at it. “Ah, ah, she really loved that dog,” he says. The friends who returned one evening to find a leopard in their bedroom, trying to scoop their Jack Russell from under their bed where it was cowering, just beyond reach.

  After supper, the guides slip away to listen to Studio 7, a nightly broadcast Voice of America transmits about Zimbabwe. They return looking grim. “Terrible news,” says Daffy. “Morgan and his wife Susan have been in a car accident. Their vehicle has collided with a truck.” With the long history of “car accident” assassinations in this country, foul play is almost immediately suspected. We troop to the office and huddle around the radio, but details are scarce. Then one of the guides manages to get online. Susan Tsvangirai is now dead, he says, and Morgan is in the Avenues Clinic, where so many of his tortured supporters ended up. We also read that Mugabe and his wife, Grace, had rushed to his hospital bedside and stayed there for nearly an hour. That Grace wept when she saw him. “She was probably weeping to see that he was still alive,” says one of the guides.