The Fear

by Peter Godwin

  “Mutare Remand,” says Roy, “is designed to hold a maximum of a hundred and fifty prisoners. When I was there, there were three hundred and sixty. Cells are packed so tight that, at night, when one turns, all must. Fifteen were foreign, including a South African who’d had his arm broken during arrest, six months earlier, and never had it treated.” On Roy’s release he contacted the South African embassy, and they came and took their national away.

  “I was classified as a Category D, who are dangerous prisoners and have no privileges at all. Every night we were strip-searched, and made to sleep naked in our cell. You have to strip and then stand naked and jump, kicking one leg out at a time and clapping,” to show you have nothing concealed up you. He gets off his bar stool and demonstrates. “It was humiliating, man!”

  Roy’s friend Kurt pours him another Scotch. “This is what you were drinking the night before you were arrested,” he says. He and his wife, Laura, are throwing Roy a small dinner to celebrate his release on bail, but the power is out, so we are sitting in candlelight, while a thunderstorm rages outside.

  EVEN IN THIS appalling prison demi-monde, Bennett was protected by those around him. “The other prisoners in my cell—the D-category prisoners—were in for murder, armed robbery, rape. But they were all helluva nice to me. They looked after me—laid my blanket out for me, gave me extra room. Every morning our prison clothes were returned, scrunched up in a ball, but mine were ironed. I had a water bottle of treated water by the top of my sleeping blanket, and every time I took a sip, they topped it up. They were amazing.”

  And when four soldiers tried to infiltrate Roy’s cell, allegedly as prisoners, his cellmates chased them away, and warned him to be careful, that they suspected they weren’t really prisoners, but were from military intelligence. They spent all day on the outside and just came in at night—but they never got near Roy.

  I ask Roy about Mike Hitschmann, who is supposed to be the principal witness in the terrorism case against him.

  “Ol’ Mike Hitschmann was so badly tortured he can’t control his bladder now,” says Roy. “They kicked him repeatedly in the balls. Burned him with cigarettes on the anus. For his first eighteen months he was made to sleep in leg irons and handcuffs—to sleep in them. But man, he’s one tough individual. I was in the cell he’d been in, and he’d written on the wall MPH Hitschmann—Who Dares Wins [the motto of the British SAS]. He can speak fluent Portuguese too, and he virtually runs that prison now.

  “I used to tell him funny stories, to cheer him up. Like the one about our mate who ran a coffin business and lay down in one of his coffins, after covering himself with tomato sauce, and told his mate to take him back to the farm, open the coffin and tell the nightwatchman he’d had an accident. The watchman went rushing to wake up George, the solemn farm manager, who came over in his dressing gown and peered, appalled, at his dead assistant, who then sat up, threw open his arms and said in a zombied voice, ‘Heee-llo, George.’ And none of the farm workers wanted to go near him for a while as they suspected he really might be a mudzimu, a zombie.

  “Hitch was almost crying with laughter. ‘God,’ he said. ‘That’s the first time I’ve laughed in three years.’ ”

  I tell Roy that I have just visited Charleswood. “How is it?” he asks sadly. “Is it all destroyed?” I describe the state of Mawenje Lodge, how just some walls and the stone chimney breast still stand, and foliage now grows out of it and a forest has grown up around it.

  “Have the guest lodges been looted?” he asks. “Have all the door and window frames gone, are vets living in them?”

  “No,” I tell him, “they’re still intact, their thatch is still on, and no one’s living in them now. But they have been. They had cooking fires on the floor, and the walls are full of graffiti abusing you.” He grins. “And pictures of you in manacles.”

  “You know the guy who burned down my house, Chamunorwa Muusha—a war vet—was inside Mutare Remand Prison, starting a six-year sentence for rape,” says Roy. “He abducted three of my woman employees and raped them for three days.” I nod. I have seen in a Human Rights Watch report that Muusha bound their necks with leather leashes, and tethered them to a tree, like goats.

  “And Muusha also tied several of my guys by the balls with wire and led them around the farm like that, and used a red-hot spear blade to brand the mark of an X into their backs for voting the wrong way, for voting for MDC. And he speared my cattle and burned some of them to death too. When he heard I was in the same prison as him, he shat himself. I used to send him bloodcurdling messages through other prisoners that I was going to ‘get’ him.”

  One prison experience has amazed Roy more than any other. He speaks of it with a reverence that can only be described as religious, and it shows you just how far up-river he has sailed on his journey of cultural transformation. “There’s an old spirit medium called ambuya Makopa,” he says. “She’s the most important medium in all of the Ndau people, in Zimbabwe and Mozambique, she’s the medium to the Ndau chiefs. She speaks very, very deep chiNdau—even I battle to understand it. She lives up in the hills of Ngaona, past Gwendingwe, and has huge authority. In the last elections, she sent down an edict that there would be no violence in her area—woe betide anyone who transgressed—and there was none.

  “When I first arrived in the district, I went to see her to introduce myself, and I took a bag of maize, and some ginger, she loves ginger, eats it like candy. She told me that Robert Mugabe went to see her during the war [with Emmerson Mnangagwa] and asked her for her blessing. ‘They took our kids,’ she said to me, ‘and then they never came back to say thank you, or to tell me that the war had ended.’ ”

  I have read about ambuya Makopa, how she’s the vessel through whom the whole Mutema chieftaincy is channeled. The Mutema chiefs believe that they are the bringers of rain—their name means “the cutter-of-clouds”—and they have a special ceremonial sword for the purpose. And she is the royal ancestral spirit medium.

  “She brought this little bottle of ‘sacred snuff’ to me while I was in prison,” says Roy. “It was delivered by a guard who gave me her instructions on how to use it, told me I had to break it and rub it on my face, feet, and hands and put the rest back in the bottle and return it to him to give back to her. You should have seen the other prisoners, when it was delivered—their eyes were like saucers.

  “And when I got out, she was there, at the prison gates. She came to me and said, ‘My child,’ and she began to weep. I didn’t know what to say. It was such an incredible honor. She never normally leaves her home. The prison warders were all gob-smacked. They were convinced that she’d sprung me out of there. Then she presented me with this old ebony chief’s stick. It’s a beautiful stick. You flick a little iron latch, and a sword pulls out of it. It’s in the car, I’ll go and get it.” Roy disappears into the rain outside.

  “Roy has a fetish about sharpening knives,” says Laura. “When he’s stressed he sits and sharpens knives.”

  Roy bounds back in, soaked, with the chief’s stick—it is artfully made, obviously antique; its round head is smooth and burnished, and intricate metal strips are inlaid down its elegantly tapered shaft. He flicks the latch and slides out a sword. “Look,” he says, fingering its sharp blade respectfully, “it’s even got a blood channel to stop suction, and give it an easy entry and exit. I’m going to use it as my side arm from now on.” For a moment, he reminds me of Peta Hall, carrying her quartz stone with her everywhere, because it has been blessed by the nganga, and sprinkling rock salt before crossing unknown thresholds.

  And sitting there, seeing Roy so excited about this little old lady who had visited him in prison, an old lady that few outsiders would give a second glance, made me wonder. After all, ambuya Makopa, the ancestral spiritual leader of the Ndau people, chose to come down from her mountain in an attempt to secure the freedom of Roy Bennett, and calls him “my child.” No wonder Mugabe is so afraid of Roy.

  “Why was I arreste
d in the first place?” he asks now. “This thing comes from Mugabe personally. He’s convinced that I want to assassinate him. It’s ridiculous. He’s put war vets in the top three positions of each branch of the security forces in each province. He has no other support now.”

  When Roy arrived back in Harare from prison, having gone via Susan’s freshly filled grave, he walked through Unity Square Park, between appointments, and he was mobbed by well-wishers. And when he went to check in at Harare Central Police Station, as required by his bail conditions, he got lost nearby and went down a little one-way street, the wrong way. It was full of taxi drivers all honking in irritation that he was blocking the road. So Roy rolled down his window and said, in Shona, “Hey, guys, sorry, we’re lost, man.” They immediately recognized him, and a great cheer went up. Then they all insisted on waiting outside the police station to make sure Roy was let out again, and providing him an impromptu honor guard.

  thirty-six

  Bullets to Be Paid For

  THE SPEAKER’S GALLERY in the House of Assembly is so full that at first all I can see is the notice in front of me, which reads Do not: smoke, converse, sleep, applaud, knit, take notes, eat or drink. Then there is a shift of bodies and my view opens up. Below is an extraordinary scene, an almost perfectly preserved colonial debating chamber, a mini-Westminster. Hardwood benches padded in the same shade of apple-green leather face one another across a room that has a high, ribbed ceiling held up by a pair of plain Doric columns at either end.

  Hardbound Hansards line the room, and on a wall above the legislators’ heads this African parliament has a stuffed leopard crouching on a fake rock ledge, gazing across at two mounted kudu heads, which look back, glassily perturbed. The Speaker, Lovemore Moyo MP, the first opposition one ever, sits on a mahogany throne, beneath an arch of intricately carved elephant tusks. Behind him stands the sergeant-at-arms, severe in countenance, attired in white tie and tails.

  In their behavior too, the local MPs channel their unruly British counterparts. The debates are in English—still the official language—and there is boisterous back-chat and banter, some in Shona, with cries of Nyarara! Nyarara! [“Shut up!”] when a member bores. And there is much giggling and talking, notwithstanding the Speaker’s periodic cries of “Order. Order! Order in the House!”

  This current term of parliament got off to a controversial start when MDC MPs threatened to boycott Mugabe’s opening session in protest at his bloody campaign, which forced Tsvangirai to pull out of the presidential contest. They eventually attended (since they had a majority), but refused to stand when Mugabe entered the chamber, and loudly sang opposition songs, and jeered him while he tried to speak. He was trembling with rage by the end of it.

  In front of the Speaker is the shimmering golden mace—his symbol of office, which he lifts down now, to show that parliament is in session. The trappings of a British-style democracy may have been retained, but this country has effectively been a one-party state for many years, since the days of Ian Smith and his Rhodesia Front. Mugabe passes the bulk of his contentious laws by emergency decree. Yet there is still something about this pomp and circumstance that clearly appeals to the elderly autocrat, a faint echo of constitutional propriety.

  Today is Wednesday 18 March 2009, and Tendai Biti, the newly appointed Minister of Finance, is presenting his first budget—trying to roll back the utter shambles he has inherited. Afterward I am to meet him to hear how he’s been faring as one of the most senior goats in the leopard’s lair.

  As Biti winds up his presentation, I become aware of a figure looming disapprovingly over me. It is the sergeant-at-arms. “It has come to my attention that you have been taking notes,” he declares. I draw breath to argue, though it’s true I made what I thought were a couple of surreptitious jottings, but he looks me up and down and adds, scandalized, “Are those jeans?”

  “Not really,” I say. “They’re a sort of dark green moleskin that aren’t jeans as such.” He cocks his head to the exit.

  “I am ejecting you,” he says, and turns on his heel, leaving it to his underling to carry out the diktat.

  I think better of making the point that there seems something particularly preposterous about an over-fussy parliamentary dress code in a country where voters and opposition candidates are bludgeoned into submission.

  As the clerk escorts me down to the visitors’ lounge, he apologizes. “Some of the rules here are a bit stiff,” he concedes. “Mind you, none of them are new.” It’s true, all these fusty and contradictory rules are inherited from the old ways, the old days, the white days.

  But not all is the same. The pantheon of dead Zimbabwean heroes that lines the corridors I am led down is certainly different. White pioneers have been jettisoned in favor of liberation fighters and ZANU elite. The only live person, at least for now, memorialized here is Mugabe himself. Next to his portrait is a large framed oil painting entitled The opening of the parliament of Southern Rhodesia. 30 May 1924. There is not a single black face among them, and they are backed by jaunty bunting in the colors of the Union Jack.

  The clerk walks me past open offices where desultory secretaries play at solitaire on their screens, and down a hardwood staircase, whose balustrades end with a pair of elephant-tusk finials.

  The clerk leaves me in the visitors’ lounge, where I will wait for Tendai. It is a musty, threadbare place, cruelly lit by a flickering neon tube. Mugabe’s image appears again on the wall here too, in youthful iteration—it seems that every room in this parliament must play host to his glowering eminence. Above the fireplace is a large ornately gilt-framed photograph of the entire parliament, including senators, fanned around Her Majesty the Queen, to commemorate her visit here, for the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting, in October 1991. The Duke of Edinburgh rubs shoulders with Emmerson Mnangagwa, the man who, as the head of the CIO, helped mastermind the Matabeleland massacres a few years earlier.

  Tendai finally ducks in and we arrange to meet in his office at the Ministry of Finance.

  Someone tries to rob me as I return to my car. It’s a double act. One young man approaches, saying he has been “guarding” my car and that he scared off a guy trying to loosen and steal one of my wheels. He cocks his head to one side, expectantly, wanting a reward for securing the car. I give him a U.S. dollar as I point the fob at the car and press the button—which opens all doors. I get in, throw my backpack down in the passenger-side footwell, and as I do, I notice the front passenger door is opening, and through the crack a hand is reaching in to grab my backpack. I reach over and pull the door sharply and there is a squawk from the crouching intruder. He pulls his arm out and canters away down the pavement, while my vigilante parking “guard” halfheartedly pursues him for a few paces, and shouts, “Musatanyoko!” which means “You devil.” “Bad people here,” he says to me, clucking sympathetically.

  I’m a bit shaken by the incident, but then I think—if it had happened in South Africa my brains might now be spread across the inside of the windscreen. Later, when I’m waiting to turn into Fourth Street, I see the two of them, my vigilante and musatanyoko, strolling companionably, chatting together, across Africa Unity Square. Musatanyoko is favoring his good hand. I roll down my window and hail them, and when they look over and recognize me, I lift my arms and bump the insides of my wrists together to mime handcuffing. They both wave, and laugh, and jog slowly away.

  TENDAI BITI flops down onto the claret chesterfield, in his large south-facing office. He looks exhausted.

  “There’s no money, no resources—it’s a disaster. You are hustling all the time, that’s what I’m reduced to, I’m just a hustler. It’s worse than I expected—seeing it from the inside at last. The extent of the dilapidation of the economy.

  “I’ve gone through round one—the policy framework and budget. But it’s a never-ending catalog of fire-fighting.” Doctors and nurses and teachers and soldiers and policemen to pay, power to restore, water to be rehabilitated. “It’s a
sewage pool the size of Lake Kariba, and I’m supposed to try to clean it up with a mop.”

  The in-tray on his large wooden desk towers with folders. The electric wall clock doesn’t work here either. The second hand just wavers back and forth, without making any progress. On another wall hangs a gold-framed organogram of the Ministry of Finance. At the top of it now sits Tendai Biti, who, until a few weeks ago, had a treason charge hanging over his head.

  “What I’ve come to understand is that Mugabe had no choice but to be in bed with us. It’s a self-defeating move for him, but the problems are just too great. The majority of his party realize the game is up. If there were elections tomorrow, they’d be wiped out. But there are others in the party with a junta mentality, who think they can continue reproducing themselves. Mugabe is a prisoner of the junta forces—they worry he has sold out—that he is just trying to secure his own future and that of his family—and left them to hang. I don’t think he can persuade them.

  “It’s an experience, I tell you, we are on a knife-edge. Clearly, there’s a huge chunk of people in ZANU who want this thing to collapse. They want us to fail. They have laid a trap to destroy the GNU, which makes it all the more desperate that we succeed. There is this strong cabal that doesn’t want this thing to work—who are hugely irritated by our very presence, and want us out. Those are the ones we are in a war against, the ones who are against democratization. If we give in, we are allowing them to win. Our credibility as a party, and as individuals, is at stake. We just have to deliver.”

  Does he regret going in to it now?

  “Regret doesn’t arise because I was forced into this thing. I’m not here voluntarily. But now I have to do the job to the best of my ability and sacrifice my own opinions.

  “You have to bear in mind the pressure put on Morgan by SADC. His options for maneuver were very limited. SADC used Mafia-style pressure—they told him he was totally on his own if he didn’t succumb. History is irony—here I am leading the GNU that I opposed. Also—I am thrust into the position of Chancellor of the Exchequer—all the problems are mine, directly. There’s a madness to this irony, it’s very cruel.