The Fear

by Peter Godwin

  He called a friend, who took him to a safe house. “I had to disguise myself in a huge hat and funny jacket and lie on the floor of the car. So I didn’t even know where the house was, it was safer that way.”

  In the meantime, his brother had gone to Borrowdale police station. “As soon as he arrived there, a black twin-cab pulled over at the gate and dropped off my kid. He came running across to my brother, saying, ‘Daddy’s car, Daddy’s car,’ which he recognized. My sister went over to the black twin-cab—there were two huge guys in the front with sunglasses, and in the back a policewoman in uniform, she was a sergeant. My sister said, ‘Where is his mother, tell me where is his mother?’ But they drove off. Ashley said, ‘Let’s go and get Mummy, she’s in the bush. The soldiers left her there.’

  “Later I asked my brother to go to Parirenyatwa Hospital, to see if there were any unidentified bodies there. And he found my wife in the morgue there, her body was swollen and battered.

  “It took us a week to do her burial. We were waiting for the pathologist to ascertain her cause of death, there’s only one left here, and he was away. Then my father-in-law demanded four head of cattle before he would allow her to be buried.” Abigail’s father was a war vet, an avid supporter of Mugabe, who disapproved so much of her marriage to an opposition activist that he divorced his wife, Abigail’s mother, over it. Now, “He said that her death was my fault, because I had opposed Mugabe, I was the cause of it, and I should pay him compensation.”

  Mugabe’s youth militia came and threw stones at the mourners who had come to pay condolences—kubata maoka. “We called the police and they had to fire shots in the air. But then they arrested four mourners, and none of the ZANU-PF youth. So we had to move the funeral to Chitungwiza.”

  But Emmanuel went neither to the funeral nor to the burial at Warren Hills. “Everyone said I had to stay in hiding as it was too dangerous for me to come out. They said to me, ‘You must stay alive to look after your kid, that is the most important thing.’ I really wanted to see my wife before she was buried. But they all said no. The burial itself was very tense, because there were CIO agents mingling in with the mourners, looking for me.

  “Later, Morgan, our President, phoned to see if I wanted to continue as Mayor, if I felt I could manage, after what had happened. I said, ‘My wife has died while we were fighting this election, so I must continue.’ ”

  ON SUNDAY MORNING, I meet Emmanuel out at Hatcliffe. He is something of a folk hero here, lobbying to replace a burnt-out transformer that left residents without electricity for four months. “And we got twenty boreholes done. Fifteen of them came on-line just last week. Hatcliffe has had no mains water for two years. Seven thousand households, thirty-five thousand people living here—and no water!”

  His house is at the entrance of the township, close to the police post. He surveys the ruin and inventories all he has lost. “My home is totally destroyed, and my business, everything I worked for all my life, my wife is dead. Now I live in a loaned council house, and I have to do everything on my own. I have no assistance from anyone to rebuild.”

  There in the small, wild garden that Emmanuel admits he hasn’t set foot in since the attack, I find the burnt hulk of their sofa, and in the overgrown weeds of their front lawn, a charred Zimbabwe passport. I open it to see that it is Abigail’s; her burnt photo smiles back at me, charred at the edges. Nearby are Ashley’s tiny sneakers, and Abigail’s flip-flops, both charred too. All the detritus of a normal urban life—the melted black plastic TV remote, an empty tub of I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter.

  Emmanuel walks around the burnt walls. “I don’t think I can ever live here again,” he says, “but I wanted to turn it into a home for displaced kids—in commemoration of my wife, of her efforts to fight for real independence. Susan Tsvangirai was going to assist—but she’s dead too now. There was an anonymous donor from Alabama, but he’s disappeared.

  “You know, during the attack everyone ran, but Abigail went back to find Ashley and that’s when they grabbed her… It should have been me,” he says sadly.

  His Nokia rings, and the screen lights up to show a photo of Abigail on their wedding day. She’s dressed in an exuberant froth of white taffeta with a diamanté tiara perched on her head, smiling, excited. Into her image, he has a short, urgent conversation. When he hangs up, he is tense. “I’ve just been informed that Mugabe’s militia have reopened up a base here today. I need to find out how many there are and where they’re coming from. We should probably leave.”

  I ask if I can look at Abigail’s screen photo, and Emmanuel holds the phone up to show me. “This is my lovely wife,” he says simply. “And they killed her.”

  Ashley emerges from the pick-up parked outside, bored of waiting on his own. He is in his church clothes, a wine-dark corduroy jacket with gleaming bronze buttons, jeans, trainers, and green-and-yellow banded socks. There is a somber, unsmiling quality about him, as though his childishness has been extinguished early. “I don’t like bringing Ashley here,” Emmanuel says. “It affects him badly.” The little boy looks solemnly at the house, and then turns away.

  “In the early days,” says his dad, “Ashley used to say, ‘We were taken by soldiers. We left Mummy there in the bush.’ Over and over, he begged me, ‘Let’s go back and get her.’ He didn’t want to see twin-cabs, they frightened him, and he would cry. He didn’t want to see men in army or police uniforms, or hear men raising their voices. I think they must have shouted at his mother and it reminded him of that. He would get a belt and tie it around his eyes, to blindfold himself, and he would say, ‘This is what Mummy was like.’ He thinks if he blindfolds himself, that maybe he can see her again…”

  I MEET UP LATER with the Beatties for lunch at friends of theirs, Mike and Roxy Laing, who run horse stables close to Hatcliffe, in Teviotdale. Also at the lunch is a group of displaced farmers.

  A microlight buzzes overhead, low, very low indeed, and wiggles its wings, the pilot, a friend of theirs, hanging out, waving. Mike’s a pilot too. He shows me the plane he’s building in his garage—it seems every white man in this country is trying to construct a flying machine.

  The farmers here tell air-crash stories the way the game rangers tell animal-attack ones. Mike has had several himself. He crashed his microlight into the Zambezi, just below Victoria Falls. “The tail wind in the gorge was too strong, and the propellor couldn’t get purchase, and we went down. I had a passenger, and as we were ditching, she tells me she can’t swim! We hit the water, and I got her out. She was bleeding and I was trying to pull her against the current to get her to the bank, but my flying suit was sodden and heavy. We only just made it.”

  A friend of his refused to wear a seat belt in his little plane, and one day when he’d had a few to drink he flew too low over their maize field, clipped the stalks, flipped the plane, and fell out. “He lost a couple of fingers and injured his head. Our grooms carried him to the road, and stood in the middle to stop vehicles to get him a lift to hospital.”

  Every single one of the farmers here today has been jambanja’d. Peter Martin says he still flies over his old farm. “The infrastructure’s completely shot. No electricity now, grain silos filled with water. From the air, all you see across the whole district now is roofless buildings—the whole place has just been stripped, looted.”

  “When I last flew over my farm,” Solly Ferreira says, “they had burned all my citrus trees down. Most of the three hundred workers came from Mozambique, and they went back there after the farm was jambanja’d. Shame, they send over one of their number every few months to see if the farm is back on stream yet. But it never is…”

  FROM WHERE WE sit on the lawn, there is an astonishing view over the Mazowe Mountains, fold after fold of them; I count ten distinct silhouettes in diminishing shades of blue. In this view nestles the lake where I rowed, at school, and above it, the hilltop mansion of the millionaire John Bredenkamp, once the biggest private tobacco merchant in the world, b
efore he fell from Mugabe’s favor. The Laings are telling a story about Bredenkamp’s attempt to add a giraffe to the stock of wildlife on his property. The giraffe had to travel in a horsebox with the roof cut off, its head poking through the top, its eyes blindfolded. On the very last leg of the long journey, just as it was nearing its destination, it was decapitated by a low-hanging power line.

  I tell them I’ve been in Hatcliffe, with Emmanuel Chiroto.

  “Oh,” says Mike, “we found his wife’s body at the bottom of our property, over there, in the thick bush,” and he points into the view where the sun is now nudging the ranks of the Mazowe Mountains. “The kids chopping down trees for firewood found the body. She was a mess, man. She’d been burned.” He takes a swig of his Zambezi. “It’s quite close to the Pomona army barracks,” he says, and leaves the implication hanging.

  And I sit there, thinking of Abigail in her taffeta wedding dress, memorialized on Emmanuel’s Nokia. Of her being bundled, screaming, into the unmarked twin-cab by Mugabe’s hit squad. Of her corpse, blindfolded, beaten, and burned, lying in this stunning Mazowe Mountain view. I think of her little boy, Ashley, who blindfolds himself, even now, in the hope of seeing his mother again.

  thirty-eight

  Delicious

  AT THE SOUTHERN END of Borrowdale Village shopping center is a café called Delicious. It’s one of the few places here to offer a wireless connection, and the tables are peopled with laptop-tappers, tending their email. The owner walks among them, resolving connection hassles, his baby daughter on his hip. On the walls hangs work copied from the Scottish painter Jack Vettriano. They are film-noir scenes of white people in evening dress, dancing or dining on what looks like a rain-lashed deck, with servants brandishing umbrellas over them, serving them flutes of champagne, even while the storm rages around them. The scenes have a fin de siècle feel to them. In Delicious, you get a revealing glimpse into the minds of the strange selection of whites who’ve somehow survived the end of their era.

  “It’s the best cappuccino in town,” declares Ed Byrne, who used to be a cameraman. Georgina once worked as his producer, and had to lie under the camera puffing on five cigarettes simultaneously, in place of a smoke-effect machine. Since then, Ed’s dabbled in prospecting, mining, well-drilling, trading. He rues that I have already pegged him for a latté-liberal, who bemoans the repression, violence, cholera, AIDS, starvation, and hyperinflation, while licking cinnamon-speckled foam from his lip.

  Today Ken Schofield is here. He’s Amanda von Pezold’s brother, and runs a timber outfit in Chimanimani with Heinrich. The last time he was down there, he says, was to inspect their newly acquired lumber “skidder,” when who should appear but Joseph Mwale. Call me sabuku, “headman,” Mwale said, and after appraising the large yellow machine, asked what it cost. $350k, said Ken. Mwale whistled, and shook his head. Why are you still investing in Zimbabwe, he wanted to know. Because in ten years you’ll be gone and I’ll still be here, replied Ken. Mwale just looked at the machine some more, and then walked away. Later on, says Ken, Mwale went to the lumber manager to inquire about getting a job there. Work skills: beating, torture, a spot of arson and murder. A chilling résumé.

  I see a familiar figure in the corner of Delicious. Bull-necked, white-haired now, he is reading an article in the Zimbabwean about Matthew Mufiri, who is claiming to be Mugabe’s pilot, and now wants asylum in the UK as he fears the President will kill him if he comes back.

  “Paddy?”

  His face cracks in a grin, like theater curtains going up. John “Paddy” Crean is an old friend from the 1980s, when Zimbabwe was the brave new world and we were caught up in a whirl of parties, living and drinking hard. So hard that Paddy realized he was an alcoholic one day when he drank so many liqueurs at a French embassy do that he collapsed, and his heart briefly stopped. “I’ve been sober for twenty-two years,” he says now.

  His route has been via art college in Dublin, fire-fighting in Manchester, near-paralysis in a hit-and-run accident, traveling the world until washing up in Rhodesia. Broke, he answered an ad for police recruits. But unlike most white servicemen, Paddy stayed on after independence in 1980, and stayed and stayed. Until, by 2000, he was the last white officer in the Zimbabwe Republic Police (ZRP). Some suspected he must be working for the CIO. In the end, says Paddy, he fell into disfavor for trying to investigate a drug ring, which involved senior police officers. Very senior ones. He was punished by being put in charge of the special constabulary, part-timers, who run neighborhood watches. When Paddy boosted the rag-tag force from one thousand to six thousand, as ordered, his superiors became uneasy, accused him of planning a coup, and relegated him to the Commissioner’s Pool, to which were sent senior officers who had incurred the wrath of Chihuri, the chief of police.

  “There were ten of us there, most suspected of MDC sympathies, only one desk and nothing to do. It was designed to humiliate you and make you leave.” But Paddy stuck it out for two years, to reach his magic twenty years’ service, in 2007, and collect his full pension as a chief superintendent. Now he has a Lithuanian wife, and runs a small team of Swiss-trained black Zimbabweans who repair antique watches, sent to them from all over the world. Paddy waves his large rectangular wristwatch, delicately spinning flywheels visible through its glass window. “Ingersoll 1920s repro,” he says.

  Jeremy Sanford is a regular here. He helped to hide Emmanuel Chiroto when he was on the run, after Abigail was murdered. “I thought, he’s gonna get killed if he sticks around here, so I got one of my drivers to take him down to Bulawayo.”

  He is harsh in judgment of the remaining whites, especially himself. “I think we’re like the dregs who didn’t get out. Idleness and fear stopped us leaving. The caliber of my parents’ generation was far higher. There are maybe 20k of us left, tops. It’s a debate we used to have all the time—what the fuck are we still doing here? I’ve let myself down. I should have left in my twenties. But it’s been so interesting—and horrifying too—watching a place melt in front of your eyes. I drive past the public pool in Avondale and have happy memories of swimming there as a kid. Now it’s a cesspool. There’s this continual sense of loss. And it’s accelerating as the country becomes more degraded.”

  At fifty-four, he looks back and declares, “I wasted my life. I wanted to be a journalist, after studying law at Cape Town, I went to Israel and Greece to skip the army here. My mother said, ‘There’s no way any of my sons are going to get killed for this twerp, Ian Smith.’ I started as a journalist on the Diamond Field Advertiser in Kimberley, and lasted six months. I hated it.” After independence, he came back to Zimbabwe. His mother had cancer and was given six months to live—she lasted thirteen years. He became a public prosecutor, an accountant, and an antique-furniture restorer, flirted with Johannesburg, lost what money he’d made, had a nervous breakdown, saw his marriage disintegrate, lost his kids, and went into self-imposed rehab and came back.

  He has a house in the Western Cape. “I built it with Shona border-jumpers—sixteen of them. It’s a Kenyan colonial with a view of the Outeniqua Mountains, but unfinished. I ran out of money. Anyway, I won’t retire there—I’ll stay here. Why leave?”

  Now he’s a miner. “I’ve been reading Viktor Frankl. He says a man needs a passion. I’ve become quite passionate about mining. Mining’s like a treasure hunt—shall we try here or there? I mine for gold, tin, and tantalite. The strike rate is one in ten. We have this guy, mad Mike, a black guy, a mental case, pretty much, a burrowing rabbit with this phenomenal ability to nose out gold and tantalite. I have seventy people working for me up there, in the Maramba-Pfungwe area, past Mutoko. The original prospector called it God’s Gift mine. You can see why. I live on my own, in a wooden prefab house on the hill there, and it has an amazing three-sixty view. I have a local cook, and he makes the same supper for me every night—goat, sadza, and rape. There’s no TV or electricity. I eat my goat and sadza and then I read.

  “I have a right-hand man ca
lled Ishmael, who helps me run things. I built a house for him in town, but the police came and broke it down during Operation Murambatsvina. I had had quite a lot to do with the local community around God’s Gift, helped them in various ways, employed them. I remember when I first arrived there, they were so welcoming. One old guy walked all the way up the hill to give me a watermelon.

  “I had noticed before the election that the MDC seemed to be getting a foothold in our area, and I thought, this is too good to be true. Francis, my foreman, came into my office one day and sat down at my desk and said, ‘I don’t know if you have the stomach for this, but I want to show you what’s happening just down the road from here.’ He started showing me cell-phone pictures—they were horrific—of naked men so badly beaten they were just slabs of meat. When I drove out into the area, I passed house after house after house, burned to the ground. I was just appalled.

  “What I saw there in Mutoko, if I had any balls, I’d be sitting in jail. Every aspect of my life is compromised now. It’s the thing that fucks me up the most, that I’ve compromised my morality.”

  ROY BENNETT is still on bail, waiting for his treason trial to begin. He has to report to the police station three times a week.

  This evening, as I am leaving soon, we’re having what we’ve been calling the Last Supper, and there is something about the atmosphere that feels final, that speaks of endings. His sister, Cynthia, has roasted a joint of beef, but Roy is kept late at an emergency meeting of the MDC executive, so John, Cynthia’s husband, says grace and we start without him. When Roy arrives, he’s fuming. At a meeting to resolve Roy’s ministerial appointment, Mugabe is still refusing “point blank” to swear him in, because he is facing charges. When it was pointed out to Mugabe that Roy might be found innocent, he replied vehemently, “That will never happen.”