The Fear

by Peter Godwin

  “So that’s me,” says Roy, with a grim little laugh. “I never wanted to be in the damned government in the first place. I’ll just go back to the party grassroots and help build them.

  “Mugabe is totally intransigent,” he explains. “He keeps saying he won the June election and he’s President and that’s that. On all issues—civil service permanent secretaries, provincial governors, farms, and about me. He doesn’t even consider Morgan in all of this—to him, Morgan is nothing. He’s not even allowed an official Prime Minister’s residence.”

  After supper I ask Roy again about the incident in parliament which led to his jailing in Chikurubi and his exile. Cynthia rummages through a box and finds a tape of it, as parliament here is televised. We sit on the sofa while Roy cues it up, and watch it—with Roy commentating, and rewinding, like an action replay of a sporting move.

  Chinamasa, the Minister of Justice, is at the podium. He says, “Mr. Bennett has not forgiven the government for acquiring his farm, but he forgets that his forefathers were thieves and murderers.”

  “Wa kundi jairira!” Roy roars at Chinamasa, and bears down on him. “You are really getting on my nerves!”

  Roy shoves him. “I pushed him and he fell straight over, toward the Speaker.”

  Didymus Mutasa, Minister of “Anti-Corruption,” sneaks up from behind and kicks Roy in the backside.

  “Very brave man, attacks from behind.”

  Roy turns around and says to Mutasa: “You want to kick me—stand up and be a man, you are so used to sending other people to do your dirty work.” And Mutasa falls back onto the bench and does a frantic bicycle-pedaling motion with his legs to keep Roy at bay.

  “What made you snap?” I ask.

  “That particular day,” he says, “they had stolen the Lupane by-election, and there’d been a lot of violence there, and the guys had just been telling me about it. I had been kicked off my farm three months earlier and they had ignored High Court orders that I be allowed to collect my belongings from it. And now here was the Minister of Justice cursing out my forefathers and me, and yet he doesn’t respect any laws.”

  Roy shakes his head at his former self, and grins. “I was cheeky like a snake then, man. It just all boiled over, you know. Mugabe probably watches that clip every night to keep himself angry with me!

  “Afterward, the House was in uproar. Gibson Sibanda came to me, shook his head, and said, ‘Roy what have you done? They’re going to kill us all.’

  “The sergeant-at-arms [the same man who ejected me from the Speaker’s Gallery] marched me out the house. I got in my car but the guards wouldn’t open the boom to let me out of the parliamentary car park, so I went back and sat on the veranda, outside the chamber, waiting to be arrested.”

  “Was it worth it?” I wonder.

  “I felt better after I’d pushed him. I still feel good. It was worth it. Most definitely. You know, we’ve all got a threshold, and that was mine. Hopefully I’m a bit more controlled now.”

  At the time, the nation was agog, thrilled at the public spectacle of someone fighting back. “It was a missed opportunity,” says Roy. “We could have mobilized around that.”

  We are now watching footage from the following day’s ZTV news. Comrade Winston Zwayo leads a small demonstration outside parliament. “Rent-a-crowd,” says Roy.

  “Bennett hit all of us,” says Zwayo. “He hit the President. He embarrassed our integrity in Zimbabwe. He won’t go back into that parliament.”

  We switch off the TV and Roy walks me to my truck. “You know,” he says, “Mugabe doesn’t accept that this is a transitional government. There’s no way he’s going to leave voluntarily. I’m just gonna have to jack up my security for what’s coming my way, and fight them. That’s what it’s gonna come down to—a physical fight. If I get put back in jail or I’m killed, what will I have achieved? Nothing.”

  We say goodbye. Roy gives me a bear hug, and promises I can be a guest of honor when the new era dawns.

  “Maybe next time we’ll actually get to the ceremony,” I say.

  thirty-nine

  The Hook

  WE ARE DRIVING THROUGH Highfields, to Mukai (“Wake Up!”) High School, where Henry Chimbiri taught geography. Henry’s explaining the different sections of the township: Lusaka, where Zambian migrants lived; Egypt, for former prisoners; Engineering, for railway workers; and Canaan, where many pastors resided. And here, in Canaan, at No. 4475, 89th Street, near the corner of Mangwende, sitting in a small garden, is the unremarkable red-brick house which was home to another Mukai teacher, Robert Mugabe.

  Mukai was once a model school, and the grounds and buildings are robust and well laid out. But it has just reopened to find that most of its furniture was stolen and its classrooms vandalized; its lawns are overgrown, and the adjacent cemetery is now an informal garbage dump, which is spilling over into the school. Scum-scabbed pools of raw sewage line the road. But still, demand is so desperate for a place here that it “hot seats”—half the kids learn from 7:10 a.m. to 12:10 p.m., when the other half take their places until 5:10, effectively doubling its capacity. The siren wails and the grounds fill with children in green and gray uniforms, changing classes.

  After his unsuccessful run for parliament, Henry returned to his classroom. He was explaining the intricacies of the Stevenson screen to his pupils when four CIO agents in dark glasses burst in and wrenched him away from the blackboard. “The kids were shocked,” Henry recalls. “They cried out, ‘Teacher! Teacher! Leave our teacher!’ ” The agents tried to bundle Henry into the boot of their car. “You can’t load me in there,” he shouted. “What do you think I am? Groceries?” and he hooked his legs and arms around a tree to prevent them from abducting him, so they began hitting him with the butts of their pistols. He was bleeding copiously now, a bib of red spreading down his crisp white shirt. The kids were crying and screaming.

  “And I thought to myself, Chimbiri, you are dying here. So, in desperation, I grabbed one of the agents by the balls, and he yelled to the others to stop beating me.”

  After the riot police had been summoned, Henry was finally hauled off to the police station, and beaten so savagely that he lost consciousness. He awoke to hear a senior CIO agent admonishing his men: “Guys, you’ve gone and killed him. I told you—know your limits.”

  TO DRIVE AROUND Harare with Henry is to get a conducted tour of the violent reality of Mugabe’s rule. As we drive past State House, Henry points to the house opposite, another official government residence. A few years ago he was in a convoy of supporters on the way to a rally for Tendai Biti when his truck was passed by Mugabe’s cavalcade, and the people chanted and jeered. Shortly afterward they were pulled over at gunpoint by soldiers and ordered in here. “They beat us so badly, using planks and sticks they had cut from the pine trees, one man had to have his arm amputated afterward, it was so badly injured,” says Henry.

  One of the policemen warned them that they were going to be killed, taken to the garden of that house and thrown into the kugomba, “the hole,” a concrete-lined pit, like a septic tank, filled with a deeply corrosive alkaline solution, into which they throw bodies. Later they were herded into the central courtyard at the police station, where Senior Assistant Commissioner Ndou addressed them. “He said—‘You guys are the ones making trouble at State House—you were lucky—you were going to be taken to the Hole.’

  “I am one of the lucky ones,” Henry admits. “I am still alive. But there are other people not so lucky, who didn’t get word out to the party, who don’t have Penny to call a lawyer. If no one talks about you, then no one will come to your rescue. Many of these cases haven’t been followed up, cases of people being tortured, people being killed. The little people have disappeared and no one follows up.”

  Henry lives in a small house on the edge of Budiriro 5, with his wife, Patricia (who lost her job in the Attorney-General’s office, due to Henry’s politics), their two kids, and a cat called Merry, which he broug
ht home after it hid behind him when soldiers were beating up patrons at the Speedie bar, where Henry was having a beer one Christmas Eve, hence the name. Patricia didn’t take to Merry initially, until the night the stove was left on and caught alight, and Merry came into their room yowling and scratching Henry’s leg until he awoke.

  Now Merry sits with three kittens of her own, with blues playing in the background from PowerFM, and Patricia coming in from the garden with a yellow mitt of bananas. There is chocolate cake too, compliments of her sister, who has gone back to South Africa, where she and her husband, a science teacher, now live. The house is full of their furniture.

  Patricia offers guava cocktail. “We boil the water,” she adds, quickly. Penny remembers Henry coming to her, “really scared, saying there were mobile morgue vans coming round each morning to pick up the dead, and no one had any idea how cholera spread, how to prevent it or treat it.” So she found a document online produced by the Center for Disease Control and printed out dozens and dozens of copies for him to hand out.

  Neither is the Chimbiris’ home as cozy as it seems. The house next door is occupied by the local ZANU chairman. At night fires are lit in his garden, and food cooked there for dozens of Mugabe’s young militiamen. Often they shout insults across at Henry, and five times they have attacked, the last time at 4 a.m., when they hurled heavy rocks onto the roof, breaking the asbestos sheeting. One rock came right through and fell on his sleeping daughter’s head, gashing it, so that she had to get stitches. The front door is shattered too, temporarily patched with cardboard.

  Henry walks us out into the township. A youth, Morev Chamunorwa (it means “Why do you fight?”), is breaking rocks by the side of the road. He breaks big ones into little ones—prison hard-labor fare—and sells them for $2 a wheelbarrowful. He’s been at it for two years now—the only way he can think of to pay his $30 monthly room rent.

  At her street corner post, where she can usually be found, is Joyce Chihanya. She’s sixty-five years old and used to work as a final checker at a textile factory that made Van Heusen shirts for export. Hers were those little pieces of paper with an inspector number you find in the pocket of your new garment. She’s been a member of the MDC since its formation in 1999. Now she sits on the culvert wall, distributing party membership cards and T-shirts, and canvassing passers-by—telling them to support the MDC, “so we can see change.” She’s a Budiriro institution, the MDC Chairperson of Ward 43, the Masoja Branch. “ZANU-PF want to beat me, an old woman, they want to cut my head off. I was supposed to die for supporting the opposition,” she says. “But this one”—she pats Henry on the shoulder—“he protected me.”

  In the presidential elections, ZANU-PF thugs threw bricks at her house too. “They climbed over my wall and smashed my windows. I switched off all my lights and closed my windows, and pushed my wardrobe against the door.” She was also attacked in 2005, 2006, and 2007. The riot police threatened her too, she says. “ ‘You, old woman,’ they said, ‘you are for the MDC, we will kill you.’ But I said, ‘You can kill me. I don’t even mind. I am ready to die.’ I would even give our party sign when the ZANU-PF passed by. Their fist sign is no longer just a fist, but it has now become a hammer to destroy the country. I don’t fear anymore. Though they come in their dozens and I will be alone.”

  DRIVING HOME, later, we are talking about revenge and justice for torture victims, as we have done before, when Henry says, “It happened to me too.”

  “What did?”

  “Torture.” He is speaking so softly I can barely hear him.

  “How?” I ask, hesitantly.

  He rubs his eyes with the backs of his hands, and lets out a decisive sigh.

  “The time I was arrested together with Raymond Majongwe, the head of the teachers’ union—they said that I was involved in mobilizing teachers against the government.

  “They handcuffed me and blindfolded me with a piece of black cloth, and threw me into the back of a vehicle.” They drove fast out of the city, he says, and he tried to work out where they were going. He heard the clatter of expansion joints as they crossed a bridge, and the tar road turned into a dirt one, and they stopped. He could hear cattle mooing, the smell of pigs, so he knew this was some kind of farm. Then they threw him into an empty room and locked the door. After an hour, they removed his blindfold, and the interrogation began.

  “I could hear Majongwe crying in the next room—I know his voice—and they were beating him there. I could hear the sound of big belts, those heavy army ones. They brought in a small blue enamel plate with a silver crochet hook on it, and a cotton reel with white thread. And they said, ‘Tell us the truth. Only the truth will release you from this. Or else we will work on you the whole night, and you will not be a man when we are finished.’

  “So I tried to tell them what I knew about the strike, that there were fliers floating round the school calling for the strike. They asked who distributed them—I didn’t know. Then they blindfolded me again. I was sitting on a small bench. Again, I promised to tell them everything I knew. But they removed my trousers down to my ankles, and I started shivering, knowing that something terrible was going to happen. They called to someone, ‘Skipper,’ they called, ‘get ready, we are waiting for you.’

  “A person came in, this Skipper, and he got hold of my penis, and said, ‘You tell us, there is a tape recorder, tell us.’ I told him about Majongwe, and whatever I could think of. Then he said to me, ‘You are a fuck-up!’—he said it in English—‘And we are going to teach you a lesson.’ He held my penis very firmly, and he pushed the crochet hook inside, and then he twisted it—that was when it was so terribly painful, I screamed with the pain—he had hooked it inside my penis—I could feel the blood spurting down onto my thighs—I fell off the bench and he punched my mouth repeatedly, telling me to shut up. I tried to pretend I was having an epileptic fit. He called his colleagues to bring some water. They came in running, and poured water on me, and then they removed the blindfold and said, ‘Now tell us.’

  “I looked down at my penis and saw the crochet hook was still inside it. Blood was everywhere. I looked at them, and I was weeping. And Skipper said, ‘Kusina amai hakuendwe—Your mother is not here to listen. There is no one to help you.’ Then he wrenched the hook out. Blood flowed even more. I screamed and screamed and screamed and there was blood all over. They all left the room, and I was remaining on my own, just looking at my groin. I tried to hold my penis, to stop the blood, but it was no good, the blood just kept on flowing.

  “They came back a few minutes later, blindfolded me again, pulled up my trousers, took me outside, and threw me in a vehicle, saying to me, ‘Shhhh. Shhhhh!’ I was lying on the floor, in such pain. I was covered in sweat and blood. They drove me for a few minutes and then removed my blindfold, removed the handcuffs, but tied my hands again with the blindfold, and threw me out on the ground, and drove away. It was still dark. I could see lights and I started walking toward them to find help.”

  Henry is staring straight ahead, still speaking in a quiet monotone.

  “My penis is still painful. Even now, it hurts when I try to have sex with my wife. There is a lump inside, I can feel it there. I am now disabled…”

  I have pulled over to the side of the road while he has been talking. And now we sit there in silence for a moment while I struggle to respond. How does one—this is beyond all the clichés of empathy. There seems something ghoulishly intimate and premeditated about this particular torture—the pseudo-surgical instrument: the silver hook, like a sharp dental explorer, gleaming malevolently in its dish.

  “Jesus, Henry, I’m so, so sorry. I had no idea.” I pat his shoulder inadequately.

  “About four months later,” he continues, still looking straight ahead, “I had gone to the Star Bar at the Elizabeth Hotel, and was having a beer with a friend when I saw this guy sitting there, and I recognized those holes in his cheeks, from acne or chicken pox, and the big scar on his left hand, the cleft i
n his chin, and then I knew for sure that it was Skipper, the man who had tortured me. I heard one of his colleagues call him Sikovha. He looked up and saw me, and he knew that I had recognized him. Immediately he jumped up and left, even before he had finished his beer.

  “I told my friend, ‘That is the guy that tortured me, and one day I will take his photo and report him, in order to bring justice, for me to be settled in my whole life, because he disabled me.’ ”

  forty

  Men Without Knees

  TO GET TO THE DISTRICT of southern Bindura, Mugabe’s hard-core heartland, you drive north on Borrowdale Road, past Hatcliffe township, where Emmanuel Chiroto’s burnt-out house stands empty, and through the swelling granite outcrops of Domboshawa. On your left, painted in large white letters on a boulder, you will see the sign to the Rescue Club Shop & Bar, and a little later, the Chicago Drive-Inn.

  Today is my second-last day in Zimbabwe; after three months here I am returning to my family in New York. But as we drive, Henry is still doggedly trying to rehab my Shona. “Ndege,” he says, as a plane flies overhead. If you say it in a drawn out way and a falling pitch, it describes the noise of a plane flying high overhead. When the word was coined, that was about as close as most black people got to a plane.

  “Asine mabvi.” Henry grins, pointing at me. It translates as “Men without knees,” which is what the Shona called the first white men, because we always wore long trousers so they could never see our legs.

  “Tambo ye magetsi,” Henry says, as we pass under power lines.

  “String for the lights,” I translate literally.

  “Magetsi,” Henry claims, is from the fact that when you switch on a bulb, it “gets(i) light”! I’m not sure I trust him, though—he and his friends at St. Albert’s Mission School once convinced a Jesuit novitiate that the Shona word for a woman’s genitals actually meant thank you, causing subsequent consternation in the staff room when the priest was trying to thank a female teacher for a cup of tea.