The Fear

by Peter Godwin

  “I won’t sulk now that I’m in, I’ll do my best. But I refuse to hide my opposition to going in, in the first place. One of the problems I faced, as an individual, was the labels and conspiracies that were leveled against me. I’m suing the Herald—they ran daily—every single day, from end of December to end of January—an article or cartoon vilifying me, because they’d identified me as the sore point, the resistance to this GNU government.

  “The party said to me, you can’t run away when we need you. My only basis of saying no was to have left the country to start a new, separate life. I wanted to go to Harvard Law School to study for a JD [a doctorate]. On 4th January, we agreed not to go in. Then there was the SADC summit on 27/28th Jan. And our national executive council met, and had a furious debate, but ultimately we went in by consensus.

  “Donor finance is the key to whether this thing works. There is so much that I don’t control. You get donors like Britain and America that wanted Mugabe’s head. And there could be no solution as long as he is in the picture. That didn’t happen.

  “The problem with personalizing the struggle is—what if the person never goes? The people are suffering in the meantime. What’s the higher ideal—the anti-Mugabe mantra, or attempting to make a difference to the people of Zimbabwe?

  “We are in a war situation. We are trying to get rid of something and that thing will fight back. I feel amazement and shock at why Mugabe wants to do such a crazy thing for all these years. This guy must be abnormal to want to stay in power so much.”

  How is Biti bearing up?

  “You know opposition politics is much easier—you can remain true to your feelings—you don’t have to censor yourself, you are not stifled. You don’t have that sense that everything you do is being watched. I hardly use this office—I feel that there are eyes on me here.

  “My budget is a vote of no confidence in what they’ve done. Nearly halving their annual-revenue estimate, for example. The junta elements—Mnangagwa et al.—weren’t in parliament for it.

  “There’s been a terrible brain drain from this country,” but for the time being he’s relying on the present staff. “They’re excited by the new direction, supportive to my face, but I don’t know what happens when my back is turned.”

  The first battle he faces is to wrestle back power from Gideon Gono at the Reserve Bank, who has, as Mugabe’s close confidant, become the country’s financial supremo, sidelining the Ministry of Finance. One of the first things Biti wants is a full audit of the Reserve Bank—but that would shine a light on the extent and details of the Mugabe government’s corruption, and is being vehemently resisted.

  The phone rings. It’s his mother, who’s just returned to the country—all his siblings are in Australia; his wife, an IT manager, is packing up their house in Johannesburg. He rests his shaved head in his hand. “Oh, I’m so tired,” he says to his mother.

  What would make him leave?

  “If they interfere with my job—I’d leave. Or if we get to the stage where we are not allowed to make a difference—in democratizing, in the constitution, in the media—we will pull out. But we are very elastic. What’s so evident is that the battles we’ve fought in the streets are now being fought in cabinet, in the corridors of power—the arena has changed. It’s tough—it’s war. We battle every day. It takes a lot to wrestle real power from the state—which is our central objective.

  “These guys have a lot to answer for. And it’s certainly debatable if we’re doing the right thing to go in and sanitize it all for them.” He tells me, for example, that one of the bills in his in-tray is for ammunition. “Literally, there are bullets to be paid for,” he says.

  Here is Tendai, trying to scrounge the money to pay for the bullets that were used against his own supporters in the last elections. It reminds me of Mengistu’s awful “wasted bullet tax,” where the family of the person executed was forced to pay for the cost of the killing.

  When I ask him how he feels about his own security he says he simply can’t allow himself to worry about it. “Once you do that you’ll never engage against the dictatorship. You can’t allow yourself to think about it. They can take me out in a second if they want—we are very exposed.

  “If I had remained here, but not participated in the new government, they would have imprisoned me again. Only in December did they indicate that they might drop the treason charges against me. But in January they still hadn’t—the prosecutor went on record to say that he was going to ‘fix’ me.

  “Prison was a disaster for me,” he admits candidly. (He was held in Chikurubi Maximum Security Prison for three weeks before being bailed.) “You sleep on the floor. The sock became for me the symbol of freedom, because they take your socks away from you in jail. That and a clean toilet, which is the symbol of ultimate freedom. The toilet was so full in our cell that you couldn’t even urinate in it. There were five people in a cell meant for one. It’s abuse. There were no blankets even though it was winter. My wife brought me food every day, but you have to share it. The others are so desperate they will sit around you begging for scraps, they will eat your orange peels. The place is not fit for pigs, never mind humans.

  “On Sundays, they have a thing called ‘search warrant.’ Everyone has to come out of the cells and they make you strip and parade past the guards. It’s supposed to be so they can check for contraband, but actually, it’s just to humiliate you.

  “In the new Zimbabwe, we will shut down that prison. We will erase it. People die there. The mortuary in Harare Remand Prison is designed for twenty-five bodies—it usually contains at least eighty. When the power goes, as it so often does, the body fluids from the rotting corpses melt under the door and into the corridor. The stink is indescribable. Bodies are brought there from the other Harare prisons by truck, and they throw them off the trucks like bags of maize.

  “And now,” says Tendai, “there’s no food—the prisoners haven’t been fed for the last two days. So tomorrow I’m going there to see for myself, and see if I can find some emergency funding to buy food for prisoners.”

  THE MINISTRY OF Education is in Ambassador House, an eighteen-story building next to the Defense Ministry, where Mnangagwa and his JOC masterminded the election violence, and across the road from the Anglican cathedral, where self-styled Bishop Kunonga attacked the real Bishop Bakare with his crozier. I wait for the elevator in the gloomy lobby, lit only by a single low-wattage bulb. On the walls are the tattered remnants of the ministry’s glory days in the 1980s, when universal free education was a real goal, and volunteer teachers were pouring in from around the world to help. When Zimbabwe established an astonishing 92 percent literacy rate, the highest on this continent.

  Ministry staffers, some in heels, some in business suits, wait with me for the one elevator that we can hear clattering somewhere above. The other two are defunct, and this one only recently repaired, they tell me. Most of them carry buckets of water, some balanced on coils of cloth upon their heads. There hasn’t been running water here for years, they say, so they need the water to flush the toilets. When the elevator fails to appear, we climb the stairs, and at each stairwell, where the toilets are sited, there is a terrible stench.

  David Coltart, the new minister (a member of MDC-M), bounds in, late from the airport—he commutes weekly from his home in Bulawayo.

  “Congratulations on your appointment,” I say.

  “I’m not convinced that’s the right word,” says David, his self-acknowledged pathological optimism in danger of being overwhelmed. “I knew things would be bad at the Ministry of Education, but still I was unready for how shockingly decayed it was. Of the fifteen vehicles available to head office to visit the schools across the country, only two work. We have no Internet connection. None of the rural schools is operating. (In fact, many were used as torture bases.) Most of those in high-density suburbs are also closed. Ninety-five percent of our teachers are on strike. We have ninety-four thousand of them on our books, but there are
nowhere near that number, in reality. We have no computerized database. So, for example, no one can even tell me exactly how many schools we have!”

  His first order of business is to get the teachers back to work. “There were terrible priorities here—I mean people are walking up the stairs with water buckets on their heads, and yet as soon as I arrived the transport officer was here saying to me, ‘Quick, you must come now as your new white Mercedes is waiting to be collected.’ And then I looked into the water situation here and found that it’ll only take a few thousand dollars to fix the pump.”

  The Government of National Unity, he says, was “the only viable, non-violent option left to us. I’m under no illusions, it’s very fragile—the hawks are doing their utmost to disrupt it, unsurprisingly.”

  LIKE EDUCATION, the health system, once my mother’s pride and joy, lies shattered. Trish McKenzie, who was once the matron in charge of training Zimbabwe’s world-class cadre of nurses, walks me into the flagship three-hundred-bed hospital, Parirenyatwa. The staff clinic, where Mum worked before her retirement, is as I remember, but more tattered. The Alpine scenes from one of Mum’s old calendars that she tore out and taped to the wall “to cheer the place up” are still there. But the hospital is without water. A sign at the toilet over a bucket says “after using please pour water.” Trolleys sit in the stained linoleum corridors with plastic water jugs for patients. Clusters of worn gurneys gather in corners, and rubbish too. Urine oozes from one. The drug stores are empty, as are the linen cupboards.

  “Our standards have fallen very low,” says the hospital’s chief of nursing, Matron Ann Marufu. “I’m not exaggerating. Very low.” I decide not to ask about the bodies that Henry Chimbiri had seen being thrown from an upper floor. Marufu is Grace Mugabe’s aunt. She is also English-trained, and fiercely proud of it. “We lost it when we changed from the English system in 1980. It was better before,” she says sternly.

  The pediatric ward is heartbreaking. Torn stickers of Disney characters line the glass wall-divider. Lying listlessly in their cots are kids with severe burns, kids with drips attached to their arms, kids with AIDS, malaria, cholera. Some have family in attendance, but there are no nurses to be seen. In the corridor, a little girl with a bandaged head and an eye patch disconsolately kicks a deflated football to a small boy with broken arms.

  Casualty is chaotic. A young girl sits with a bloody plaster across her mouth, like a gag. Her mother is dabbing at it with an old mutton cloth. No nurses are in sight.

  We find them clustered around a notice board, peering at a memo saying that the Crown Agents will now pay them $100 a month, in U.S. dollars. That’s why they have dribbled back to work now, after a lengthy strike. Nurses here are bonded for three years after training—and then they usually scarper into the diaspora, helping to run British NHS hospitals, for example. Zimbabwe pays to train nurses and then exports them to the developed world. It’s crazy. In a double blow, insulting both the venerable British broadcaster and refugees from his own ruinous rule, Mugabe taunted such fleeing health workers, calling them the BBC. “British Bum Cleaners,” he explained, giggling.

  thirty-seven

  Behind the Blindfold

  THERE’S A MOTTO on the old Salisbury coat of arms, which still stands beneath the lion’s mouth gutter spout at the entrance of Harare City Hall: Discrimine Salus. We used to joke that it meant “In Discrimination Is Safety,” a declaration of the racial segregation this city practiced for decades. It actually means “Safety in Danger.” Salisbury was originally Fort Salisbury, built by white pioneers around a defensible kopje. In the lobby stands the carved granite capstone of the original town hall. Its inscription tells us that it was laid “on Occupation Day, 12th of September 1902.” Back then, the word “occupation” didn’t have quite the same connotation.

  The terracotta-roofed building surrounds a Mediterranean-style courtyard with high arches and white walls, and in one corner, emerging from a quartet of potted palms as though from a bedraggled jungle, stands a crudely fashioned duo of his ’n’ hers guerrilla statues, Kalashnikovs at the ready. The lady insurgent, her mouth agape in battle cry, wears her beret perched on the very back of her head. Her male colleague wears a long peaked baseball cap, and staggers slightly under the weight of his bullet-heavy backpack. A municipal cleaning woman in a white coat sweeps impassively around them.

  The walls of the corridors inside are lined with gold-framed oils presented by old white mayors, mostly of bucolic English scenes. I am asked to wait in room 103. The sign on the door says it is the “Mayoress’s Parlor and Lady Councillors’ Retiring Room,” and it is furnished with floral armchairs, a divan, and a dressing table.

  Much Musunda will see me now. The poster on his office wall proclaims: A man who wants to lead the orchestra must turn his back on the crowd. He’s a prominent commercial lawyer, and an old friend. He tells of his efforts to restore the city’s water supply, fend off cholera, and fill in the pox of potholes—all with no budget. Musunda has agreed to stand in as acting mayor (without salary) while the man originally voted to the job, Emmanuel Chiroto, serves as his deputy.

  “The idea,” says Much, “is that I guide and mentor Emmanuel. He usually sits in on all my meetings. My aim is that within my five-year term, by year three, I hope, he will take over as mayor himself.”

  Emmanuel Chiroto sits in an office next door, under—as the law requires in every office—a scowling portrait of “His Excellency, the President of the Republic of Zimbabwe, Comrade Robert Gabriel Mugabe.” A poster promotes Harare—Sunshine City. His clock has stopped at 11:45. A small, intense man, in a purple shirt and dark suit, he has an open, troubled face.

  Chiroto used to live with his wife, Abigail, twenty-seven, and their four-year-old son, Ashley, in Hatcliffe, a working-class township twelve miles out along the Borrowdale Road, from which he ran a little textile business—screen-printing logos on T-shirts, mostly. Abigail sold eggs and freeze-its (frozen drinks), and was training to be a tailor.

  In the last elections, he stood as a city councillor. “There were warnings about my security,” he says, “but I didn’t take them seriously, I thought it was just rumors. I was such a small fish—why would they want to kill me? After I won the ward in Hatcliffe, MDC youth said that they’d heard more death threats against me, so they’d decided to send a group of seven youths to guard my place. And, just to be safe, I told my wife to go and stay at her mum’s place in Chitungwiza.”

  In Zimbabwean cities, the mayor is voted in by the other city councillors. The MDC had won forty-five out of forty-six seats in Harare. That’s how hated Mugabe is here. Three days before the mayoral election, some of the councillors suggested Emmanuel put his name forward.

  “I asked my wife, and she said, ‘Why don’t you go for it.’ So, I agreed, though I didn’t actively campaign.” He even missed the caucus meeting itself, because he was in Epworth, a slum east of the city, collecting some MDC women who had been badly beaten. “When I came back from Epworth, they told me, ‘Congratulations, you have been elected mayor!’

  “I was happy, honestly. I phoned my wife and said, ‘I’m now the Mayor of Harare!’ She said, ‘I won’t congratulate you on the phone, I’m coming to do it in person.’ ”

  They met in town and drove out to Hatcliffe together, where he dropped her at home and went to park his pick-up truck. As he walked back from parking the car, he got a call. “One of our guys—Jairos Karasa, our ward chairman—had been attacked by Mugabe’s militia at their torture base in Hatcliffe—they had three there—and he was being carried back in a wheelbarrow. So I turned back, got my car, and went to collect him. I phoned my wife and told her I was taking Jairos to hospital, so I’d be late…

  “When I found Jairos, he was in agony, he couldn’t stand or sit, he had been beaten so badly, he was covered in mud, water, and blood. I took him to Avenues Clinic. While I was there, I got a call from an MDC guy out in Hatcliffe saying that my house was on fire. The first thi
ng I said was, ‘Where is my family—are they safe?’ But no one knew what had become of my wife and my little boy.”

  Emmanuel took refuge at the closest foreign mission, the Namibian embassy, getting in by fibbing that he was meeting someone there. Then he alerted the African Observer Mission, and returned with them to his house.

  “The fire was out by then, and a large crowd had gathered outside. No one knew where my family was. I went straight into our bedroom, but there were no burnt bodies in there. And then I knew they had been taken. We heard the approaching chanting of a big column of Mugabe’s youth militia, so we left the area.”

  One of the youths who had been trying to guard his house told him what had happened. At 7 p.m., just as they were listening to Voice of America’s Studio 7 program on Zimbabwe, three twin-cabs without license plates arrived. A group of men ran out, some of them in army fatigues, armed with AK-47s; there were party youth too, brandishing machetes.

  “No one knows exactly how many, my maid counted at least nine. She was in the garden filling a bucket of water when they came—they asked her where I was, and before she could even answer they smashed down the front and back doors. She heard three loud bangs and looked back to see the whole house on fire. Then she heard the doors of the twin-cabs slamming shut and heard them drive away, very fast.

  “An MDC guard said that they carried both my wife and young son out of the house, that my wife was struggling and screaming. It’s one of those things I don’t want to know about in any more detail.”

  Emmanuel got the election observers to drop him off in town, at his nephew’s flat. But the CIO were waiting for him there, “so we had to run for our lives and jump over wall after wall, from house to house, until we lost them.”