The Fear

by Peter Godwin

  By the time we drive up to Victoria Falls the next day, to fly from there back to Harare, Morgan has been moved to Botswana to “recuperate,” but obviously for his own safety.

  thirty-four

  Dynamics of Distress

  WHEN SOMEONE DIES in Zimbabwe, you must go to their house for a mourning vigil, kubatamaoko, to hold the hands of their family. We park half a mile away from the Tsvangirai house, unable to get closer due to the crush of cars. As we walk through the dark, we hear the pulse of the funeral drums. At the gate, MDC security personnel are frisking a group of women in red-and-white Methodist Church uniforms. They continue singing, “Tichasangana kudenga, neropa raJesu,” to the tune of “Auld Lang Syne.” “We will meet again in heaven, through the blood of Jesus.”

  The garden has been colonized by tents and canopies. Morgan’s red battle bus, from the election tour he was forced to abandon, is parked in the driveway. On its side, the outsize image of his face grins at us. Smoke drifts over from large open cooking fires, which are bubbling giant black cauldrons of sadza and beans. Lynette Kore-Karenyi, the MP who took us to the diamond fields, hails us, and escorts us to a line of people waiting to sign the condolence book in Morgan’s office, out at the back. “It’s ironic,” says Georgina, who knew Susan quite well, and had written speeches for her. “She supports him through his treason trial, and at least four assassination attempts, and several beatings—and now she’s the one who’s killed first.”

  When our turn comes and we are ushered into the darkened room, we are surprised to see that it’s not a condolence book at all, but Morgan himself, back from Botswana, his head swollen and bruised from the crash. “Thank you for coming,” he says, rising gingerly from his chair. Georgina is close to tears, and he envelops her in a hug. “What can we do?” he sighs. “Nothing. There is nothing to be done.” I shake his hand, and it turns into a bear hug. His breathing is ragged with repressed sobs. He is a man still in shock. For now he refers to Susan’s death as “the Accident,” at least until the serious business of the burial is conducted.

  We know her body has arrived when the ululating and drumming swell in a crescendo. The coffin is placed on a table in the sitting room and mourners rush to the French windows for a glimpse of it.

  All the MDC hierarchy is here, from both wings. David Coltart, the new Minister of Education; Giles Mutsekwa, the Minister of Home Affairs, battling vainly to control the police force. Even some of Mugabe’s men are present. Georgina points out ZANU-PF’s Herbert Murerwa, the new Minister of Land Resettlement, who now presides over the farm chaos. His presence brings to mind an old Shona saying, Moyochena ndowei bere kugarira munhu akafa? “What kindness is it for a hyena to mount guard over a dead man?” Before we can slide away, someone presents us to him. He appraises us coolly. “I hear what you say, and I see what you do,” he says, and moves off. Neither of us can decide if this is an olive branch or a threat.

  That night we are followed again. And again, it continues for miles. Is it the CIO, or just an opportunistic hijacker? I’ve no idea; I just concentrate on driving fast, looping this way and back, through the dark, while Georgina calls ahead to the people we are visiting for supper. As we arrive, the guard pulls the security gate open, and slams it closed behind us. He is wearing a pith helmet.

  AFTER A LONG absence, Georgina must get back to Xanthe and Mum in London. She and Dominic are scheduled to leave the next day. She jokes that she knows it’s time to leave when she starts asking for the “bull” instead of the bill, and “yes” becomes “yis,” as her accent creeps back to its Zimbabwean default.

  We spend their last evening at the residence of Andrew Pocock. Jim McGee is here too, and Albrecht Conze, the German ambassador who gave Roy sanctuary before his arrest. The unholy trinity is complete. All of them are having to advise their governments whether to lift the personal sanctions on Mugabe and his inner circle of two hundred henchmen, now that the “inclusive government” has been established. Tactically, it’s a tough diplomatic call. Mugabe says that he won’t make the further concessions required of him until the sanctions are dropped. Keeping them in place gives him a pretext for blocking reforms, but dropping them prematurely undermines his motivation for further reform.

  Jim McGee is recalling his last Tex-Mex party, to celebrate Cinco de Mayo. His staff had invited Gideon Gono, Mugabe’s personal banker, as a formality, and were amazed when he showed up.

  “Was he the piñata?” I ask.

  “We forced him to wear a sombrero and do the Mexican hat dance,” says Jim. “But he said he hadn’t had so much fun in years.”

  Andrew Pocock looks a bit green at the memory.

  “Andrew asked to be airbrushed out of the photo,” says Jim.

  Albrecht Conze says that he felt nauseous, and kept washing his hands afterward. Later, he tells Georgina that he’s had postings all over the world, but this is the only place he’s felt tempted to put down roots. For the first time in his life, he finds himself wanting to get a puppy, a horse. “That’s what this place does to you,” she tells him. “It makes you want to belong.”

  SUSAN’S FUNERAL is held on the hot afternoon of Wednesday 11 March, at the Tsvangirais’ home village of Humanikwa in rural Buhera, a hundred and fifty miles southeast of Harare. Most of the ambassadors are content with attending the official service at the Harare Methodist Church, or the stadium event. But Jim McGee feels that the rural schlep is the real gesture. “I really want to do this,” he says. But he has thrown his back and is in agony. He winces into his office chair as his health officer arrives armed with painkillers, Fexidon, and super-strength ibuprofen. McGee palms them.

  While we wait for the pills to kick in, he talks about the irony that the truck which hit Morgan’s vehicle (the middle one of a convoy of three) was actually a USAID truck coming back from a supply run. But it was operated by local licencees, says McGee, not by the U.S. government. This hasn’t stopped Jonathan Moyo, Mugabe’s once and future Goebbels, from suggesting that Susan’s death was an attempt by the Americans to get rid of Morgan, for supporting the GNU.

  The Herald is also suggesting that white farmers must be involved in the conspiracy, because one of their members had been arrested trying to film the accident scene. That, and the highly suspicious fact that the company which owned the truck had an office in the same building as the Commercial Farmers’ Union (CFU).

  Closely observed by his office manager, Lori Enders, and Glenn Warren, his chief political officer, McGee slowly rises to his feet, and exhales. “I’m going to do it,” he announces, and begins a stately descent of the embassy stairs to the waiting Land Cruiser. The armored BMW can’t get there and back on one tank.

  We are just nosing through broken traffic lights when a pair of police motorbike outriders with sirens ablaze go speeding by, then another pair. Around us, cars are reversing to get well out of the way. This can only mean one thing. The President is imminent. Two pairs of police cars follow, and a truck bristling with soldiers. Then a school of black limos, going two abreast, taking up both sides of the road—and somewhere within the decoy cars, the gerontocrat-in-chief swaddled in his plush leather cradle—and finally an ambulance, followed by more troop carriers, their central benches crammed with AK-wielding soldiers in motorbike helmets. They yowl past, north, toward his residence. “Christ,” says McGee, “even Obama hasn’t got anything like that, and he’s leader of the free world.”

  AT THE 84KM PEG, by the sign to Ngezi, we pass the accident site. Black-rubber skid marks veer off the road and red fragments of rear lights litter the verge. We look at it in silence. At Chivhu—opposite Vic’s Tavern—we turn left to Buhera. There are dozens of other vehicles going to the funeral. From late-model Mercs and BMWs to pick-ups, trucks, buses, most of them have posters of “Amai [mother] Susan Tsvangirai—mother of our struggle” taped to them, and from their rear-view mirrors flutter strips of red cloth, the sign of the funeral mourner. The passengers make the open-handed MDC gesture at
us.

  As we approach Buhera, the countryside opens up, with undulating plains sloping east to a low range of hills. We join the convoy of vehicles jostling to get into the funeral. There are hundreds of vehicles—a whole soccer field is filled with buses. Parking for Terminal 4—Heathrow—Park and Fly is emblazoned on the side of one bus.

  Morgan’s kraal, Humanikwa, is spread out, several brick buildings with corrugated roofs among the neatly thatched huts surrounded by banana groves and maize fields. A satellite dish and a security fence distinguish it from its neighbors.

  We park at some distance to the white marquee of the funeral, and an MDC security official leads McGee through an apparently impenetrable crush of mourners. “Move aside, move aside,” shouts the official, and the crowd turns in annoyance, but when they recognize the U.S. ambassador they start chanting, “Ma-Geee! Ma-Geee!” They cheer, and whistle and salute, and miraculously part to allow his passage, reaching out to shake his hand as he goes by. He is right to have made this pilgrimage.

  There are more than ten thousand people packed into the gravesite. Some of them wear black T-shirts with slogans reading “Free Roy and other political hostages.” The Chief Justice is due to announce today whether Bennett can come out of prison on bail. Others read: “You have the right to hold different opinions,” and “Our Heroine, rock, idol, mother.”

  We file past the open coffin. Susan’s face is smooth, serene, waxy, in a white-cotton church beret, red blouse, white daisy pinned over her heart. Her head rests on an ivory satin pillow. Then the coffin is closed and hoisted on the shoulders of the women of her congregation. Morgan throws a single red rose onto the casket.

  AT THE OFFICES OF CSU, back in Harare, the staff are bracing themselves for more violence. A white board on an easel identifies “Nine Areas Where Violence Has Started.” Dr. Frances Lovemore says that ten MDC villages have been burned down by Mugabe’s youth militia, the day before the funeral. And in Zimunya they petrol-bombed the house of an MDC security guy, and his kid was badly burned.

  Any return to normality threatens Mugabe’s power, she explains. Improvement in conditions is associated with the MDC coming into government. If it continues, Mugabe and ZANU are undermined. So they will likely try to destabilize things.

  Together Lovemore and her colleague Zachariah Godi paint the bleakest picture yet of where we are in this tussle to unseat the dictatorship. The continued incarceration of political prisoners shows where the real power lies. “You know,” says Lovemore, “Morgan Tsvangirai looked across the table from me and said, ‘I will not be sworn in unless the political prisoners are released.’ He looked across the table at me and said that. So, the week before the inauguration we were all expecting them to be released. The deputy head of prisons told me that they had been expecting it, but then, he said, ‘We got an order that no, they would stay behind bars.’ And at that point, we realized that JOC is still in control. That nothing had really changed. And still, that Friday, Morgan went ahead with his marriage vows to Mugabe.”

  Who is really in control of ZANU-PF now?

  “Mugabe,” they both say at once. But he has taken a step back to allow Mnangagwa and others to deal with the main threats they face at the next elections, which come from Morgan himself, and Roy Bennett, who is a key mobilizer. Mnangagwa very much wants to be the next President. Mugabe will give Mnangagwa his head—he plays with his ego—and allow him to do his dirty work, until he becomes too much of a threat and later he’ll be dealt with.

  “ZANU-PF won’t give up,” says Godi. “It’s not wired that way. They are already gearing up toward the next election, on their own terms. Mugabe’s not like other African dictators. He’s well educated, capable of planning. Every Friday he buses in his youth militia and war vets for strategy briefings at Jongwe House. Mugabe was there all day yesterday.

  “He has a think-tank that meets every day in one of their Borrowdale houses. They analyze, consider options, role-play. And they keep MDC off balance, reactive.” The GNU can be suspended at any point by one of the parties leaving it, Godi reminds me. Failing that, the constitutional process will run its course, leading to a referendum on a new constitution, followed by elections.

  Mugabe has a number of ways of pulling the plug on the opposition, at a moment of his choosing. If he feels his power slipping away, he can invent an insurgency or other national-security threat and declare a state of emergency, taking back power to deal with it. “Two months ago,” he says, “CSU was suddenly besieged by traps; calls from people saying that they were under extreme threat and had been given our numbers by British soldiers, who told them to ask us for protection. We traced it back to Charlie Ten [CIO]. We had to close our office for three weeks, after they arrived with sixteen police officers to question us about the detainees.”

  Another way to trigger a state of emergency would be a bogus attempted military coup.

  “You know I wake up every morning with a panic attack about what might happen,” says Lovemore. “Fridays are always the worst, as that’s often when they act. Last Friday I had just arrived from a trip to Johannesburg when I got the call about Susan and was asked to deal with the air evacuation. We, here at CSU, we knew what might happen. The MDC youth were very worked up, they were running through town in large groups and we were concerned that the whole thing might just blow. Mugabe has been targeting the MDC security guys. Chris Dhlamini, head of MDC security, and ex-Charlie Ten, in Avenues Clinic under prison guard, until he goes back to Chikurubi, was horribly tortured. He was beaten then hung by the feet from a tree and repeatedly dunked headfirst into a drum of water.”

  When I ask about conducting follow-up trips to see some of the torture victims, they both ask me not to. “We have suspended our own follow-up trips,” she says. “We did one, in Zaka, and the people involved are now under bad threat. We were trying to follow up on medical cases, see how they were faring, also to look for ones we might have missed. In just one day in Zaka, we discovered another eighty serious medical cases of beating and torture, some of them ZANU-PF members beaten by their own colleagues for not showing enough loyalty.

  “We’ve been writing a medical plan for a disaster scenario,” says Lovemore. “But we don’t know how or where or when it’ll happen. Will it involve the army or the police or South African–based hot bloods from MDC? We sit here like scared rabbits. We don’t know how this will all end, but one thing’s for sure, it won’t be a hand shake. Mugabe still has his freelance killers. And there’s a lot of fear of how they will be unleashed. There are so many danger points. ZANU-PF has its own dynamics of distress. The final scenario could be awful.

  “I fear we haven’t seen the darkest days yet.”

  thirty-five

  The Cutter-of-Clouds

  IT WAS Dostoevsky who said that you could tell the degree of civilization in a society by entering its prisons. Yet another calculus by which to measure the depths of depravity of Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. Like so many who come out of jails here, Roy Bennett is filled with anger at the conditions inside, and the prisoners “lost” in the system. It completely eclipses any anger he has at his own predicament.

  Mutare Remand Prison, in fact any remand prison, is better than the other jails, as at least you’re allowed to receive food from the outside, which wasn’t the case when Roy was in Chikurubi, when he only got to see Heather every two weeks for fifteen minutes—through bars—and she wasn’t allowed to bring him food. But most prisoners don’t have family support: their families are too poor to help, or they don’t know where they are. Those ones, says Roy, have to survive on prison rations alone, which have been cut from three meals a day to only one—consisting of a modest sliver of sadza, scooped from the drum using the plate itself, with water and salt.

  You can tell how long people have been in by their stages of physical deterioration, he says. Most suffer from pellagra—a severe vitamin B3 deficiency that was common in Soviet labor camps. The symptoms are awful: alopecia, aversion to s
unlight, aggression, insomnia, diarrhea, and terrible skin lesions—it used to be called Asturian leprosy. Many of the inmates are already suffering from untreated AIDS, and its opportunistic diseases, TB, malaria, pneumonia. Without outside help, the average inmate is dead within a year. In the four weeks that Roy was in Mutare Remand Prison, five prisoners died, and it took days for their bodies to be removed from the cells.

  The death rate across the entire prison system is appalling. Khami Prison in Bulawayo has forty-eight deaths a month on average, and there are more than fifty a month at Chikurubi—seven hundred and twenty in the last year. Rats and lice infest the place, and the makeshift mortuary, the old TB ward, is next to the kitchen. The noses and eyes and lips of the corpses are routinely gnawed off by rats, before they are given anonymous paupers’ burials in mass graves. This appalling deterioration of what used to be a respectable prison system, which fed itself from productive prison farms, has happened during the watch of Major-General (retd.) Paradzai Zimondi, head of prisons since 1999, and a hard-line Mugabe supporter.

  Recent photos smuggled out by sympathetic warders show dull-eyed, rib-racked prisoners who would look at home in Auschwitz portraits. With Zimondi’s help, Mugabe has achieved his own gulag.