The Fear

by Peter Godwin

  The road deteriorates sharply into a jagged colander, as we approach Super, a small group of trading stores at a crossroads. One of the abandoned stores here served as a base for Mugabe’s militia—a combination of his youth wing, war vets, and thugs. “This place was very hot,” says Henry. “Until recently you couldn’t get anywhere near here, the militia had roadblocks all along these access roads.”

  He describes a running battle that took place when the MDC was trying to fight a by-election here a few years back. Seeking safety in numbers, Morgan Tsvangirai came down to campaign in a convoy that stretched nearly half a mile. But the CIO had prepared an elaborate ambush. They erected a police roadblock, which would let through only about ten cars at a time. Once the vehicles moved through in small batches, they encountered a huge force of Mugabe’s militia, more than two thousand, he says, arrayed in the Nguni military formation of the “horns of the buffalo,” with flanks ahead on either side of the road. They began stoning the cars and setting fire to them. “There,” says Henry, pointing at the rusting, overgrown wreckage of a car at the roadside. “That’s the Datsun Pulsar of Dr. Tichaona Mudzingwa, the Deputy Minister of Transport in this new government. They hit his doors with iron bars and then set fire to it and he was trapped inside, burning alive. I ran over and smashed the back window and pulled him out. A friend was in a VW Combi, which had stalled, and he panicked. I jumped in and we managed to get it started and reversed for more than two miles, while they chased us, throwing rocks.”

  “Don’t you sometimes feel you’ve just had enough of all this?” I ask Henry. “Enough of the constant danger.”

  “My wife has pushed for me to go and get employment out of the country,” he says. “I have many friends who have done that. We were going to teach in the UK once, and the British embassy gave us visas, but Morgan Tsvangirai convinced us that if we went we would be abandoning him.

  “I’m so soaked into politics now and I’ve realized that sometimes you suffer for others, and it hardens you,” he says. “For me to stop this, I would feel guilty. I would feel there’s an incomplete project that I haven’t finished. If I think of not doing it, I would be just empty. I tried to stop once, to avoid it, and I lost my self-respect, I felt I had walked away from the revolution.

  “I know it’s a dangerous thing, but at least I’ve done my part. Some day they will recognize that we did something for this country.”

  As we progress, Henry points out several more places where Mugabe’s militias were based. Until finally, after a long bumpy stretch of dirt road and a river crossing, we reach Nyava, “Growth Point,” where the militia used the council community hall as their base too.

  “It looks quiet enough today,” I say.

  “Chidziva chakadzikama, ndicho chinogara ngwena,” says Henry. “The quiet pool is the one in which the crocodile lives.” He points to the weeping dwala above. “That’s where they took people to beat or even kill them,” he says.

  Chenjerai Mangezo’s kraal is a couple of miles further, up a rutted track. It’s very modest: some maize fields, groundnuts drying in woven baskets, clucking chickens, a couple of thatched mud-brick huts, and a rectangular building in a damaged state, one of its walls demolished.

  Mangezo’s decision to stand in the last elections as an MDC candidate for Bindura Rural District Council, a hard-line Mugabe institution, was brave to the point of foolhardiness. And in spite of all the chicanery and fraud, and intimidation, he won. Mugabe’s ZANU-PF party officials were enraged.

  Shortly afterward, deep into a starless night, a large posse of Mugabe’s men surrounded this small house. “We have come to kill you,” they chanted, and rained large rocks down upon the roof, preparing to burn it down.

  Realizing that his wife and daughter were likely to be killed too, he ordered them under the beds. Then he burst out of the house, yelling and generally attracting the attention of his predators as he blundered down the hill, away from the house, hoping they would all pursue him, which they did, swarming after him, throwing rocks and spears, until finally one blade felled him, piercing his leg.

  And as he lay on the ground, they loomed over him and smashed rocks down upon him, and they beat him with logs, lifting them high to get in good meaty bone-breaking blows, and he knew then that this was what it was like to be killed. He could feel his legs being broken, his arms splintering, his skull gashed and the taste of his own blood as it flowed down over his eyes into his mouth. Lying here among the fresh green stalks of maize that he had planted but would now not live to eat, he uncurled his arms from where they had been protecting his head, and he managed to hoist himself up a little so that he could look at his assailants, now lit against the newly emerging moon. And he said to them, “You had better be sure to kill me. Because if you don’t, I am going to come after you, all of you. I know who you are.”

  I can’t stop myself. I lower my pen. “Why? Why would you do that? Why would you lie there and provoke them like that? If it were me, I would be pleading for mercy, promising them I’d seen the error of my ways, begging to join their gang of goons. Why would you be so defiant, when they held your life in their hands, when they were about to kill you?”

  Chenjerai listens while I vent my incredulity. He is a short, smiley man in his mid-forties, with wide-set eyes, and the sturdy back that comes of a life of labor. His head is cocked to one side, regarding me as though I’m the crazy one.

  “Why?” He frowns, perplexed. “Why did I say such a thing? Because it was true! That’s why.”

  And that is that, as far as he is concerned; it requires no further explanation.

  He lost consciousness soon afterward and he was dragged by his feet over the rough ground to the base in Nyava, where he was saved by a disagreement among the hit squad. The militiamen were supposed to kill him there, at his house, in the dark, the CIO officers berated. Now everyone had seen them bring him here.

  When Chenjerai eventually made it to hospital, he was barely alive. His legs were shattered and his body was pulverized by rocks. Penny visited him in Dandaro and was immediately struck. “He was one of the most positive, cheerful, determined people I’ve ever met,” she says. “He was totally immobilized in plaster but never felt sorry for himself. In fact, the first thing he did was to get all his mates to write MDC slogans all over his plaster casts.”

  And when he heard that the swearing-in ceremony for Bindura Rural councillors was due to take place, he was determined to be there, defying doctors’ orders. He insisted that Penny find a way of getting him there. His plaster casts meant he couldn’t fit in a car, so she piled foam mattresses in the back of the pick-up and they loaded him onto them. Henry drove him out over the juddering road.

  When he arrived, there was consternation among Mugabe’s councillors. They had assumed that either he was dead, or at the very least that the attack would have rendered him too terrified to take up his seat. Yet here he was, in front of them, unable to walk, his plaster casts adorned with MDC slogans, taking great delight in telling the local journalists there for the opening how ZANU had attempted to eliminate him.

  Once the meeting was over, Henry took him to see his mother. She hadn’t heard from him since the attack, and thought that he was dead. She was beside herself when she saw him, thinking at first that he must be a ghost.

  After three months, the doctors finally cut off his casts, and he immediately set about trying to rehabilitate his wasted legs, determined to walk again.

  “Not long after he left hospital,” says Penny, “a number of new patients arrived from his home area. A young gym teacher told me that Chenjerai had sought out people who had been beaten, but had been prevented from seeking help. He organized for them to get into town and seek assistance from CSU.

  “He has only ever asked me for one thing, a bicycle. Unfortunately, I couldn’t provide it.”

  And he continues to sit on the Bindura Rural District Council among councillors from Mugabe’s party, including some of those who oversa
w his beating. “I see those who tried to kill me, every day,” he tells me now. “They are from my village, I walk past them on the road.”

  I still don’t really understand it. The insane bravery of it, this man lying there in the hot dark night as his life ebbed away, taunting his own assassins rather than suing for survival. And yet, when against all the odds, he does survive, he hauls himself back and sits with them in council chambers.

  Chenjerai’s bravery is beyond doubt. But what is this other quality, the one that allows him to sit here with these venal people, his persecutors. Is it forgiveness? Reconciliation? I think not. At least, not yet.

  Is it fatalism, a quality that Westerners see in Africans? Westerners often mistake African endurance, and the lack of self-pity, for fatalism. No, I think the other quality in Chenjerai Mangezo is patience, a dogged tenacity. He hasn’t given up on getting justice. But he will wait for it. And when it comes, as I pray it will, I hope it is a dish that tastes all the better for being marinated in time, for cooking slowly on the stove of his resolve. He has that most unusual pairing of strengths, passion and persistence, and as such, he makes an implacable foe.

  And I realize that people like Chenjerai are the real asine mabvi—the men without knees. Not only were his legs covered by plaster casts for months, but he has refused to kneel, refused to prostrate himself before the dictatorship, whatever the consequences.

  forty-one

  The Axe Forgets but Not the Tree

  ON MY LAST DAY in Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, Henry drives me to the airport in his battered pick-up truck. The windscreen is patched with plastic where it has been stoned, and we list steeply to one side. Some of the street lights along the route still bear posters of Mugabe. They are old now, tattered and weather-beaten, his image faded and indistinct. But still people are afraid to be seen pulling them down.

  On the way, we stop off at the wild grounds of a Catholic convent on the southwestern edge of the city. Among the boulders and trees, Gift Konjana sits in the “agreement circle,” with eight other torture survivors, working out the rules of engagement by which they will share their stories. After this, they will each retreat to their own tree to reflect on their personal journeys, and pick out a totem for the exercise—it could be a pod, a seed, a twig, a leaf, a handful of earth—that they will use to represent themselves over the next three days. Then they will join the “trauma circle,” where they will share their horror stories with one another. And finally, they will try to help one another wrestle to rebuild their shattered minds, their self-worth.

  After what they have been through, most of them are suffering from a toxic residue of fear, anger and depression—undiagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder. How do you work to forget an experience like torture? How do you prevent it from defining the rest of your life? Montaigne said, “Nothing fixes a thing in the memory so intensely as the wish to forget it.” Facing their memories like this helps to strip them of their malign power.

  Konjana, thirty-nine, a handsome, muscular, former physical education teacher, is a facilitator for Tree of Life, a self-help organization trying to assist Zimbabwe’s legion of tortured to heal themselves, as no one else seems interested in helping them. He has been tortured himself—all the facilitators have—it’s a job requirement.

  The idea for Tree of Life came to Bev Reeler, a Zimbabwean ecologist, when she was in exile in South Africa with her husband, Tony, who had run a human-rights NGO, Amani Trust, in Zimbabwe—before Mugabe closed it down. One day she found herself the only white woman on a protest march in Pretoria, and she was chaperoned by a group of young black Zimbabweans. Most of them had fled the country after being beaten and tortured, but they did not talk about it, even to each other.

  Reeler began to work with Zimbabwean refugees living abject lives under the bridges of Johannesburg. She took a group of them to Groot Marico, to sit for three days and share their experiences, and in so doing, ease the burden of their trauma. (The first group was reported to the police by nervous Afrikaner farmers, who thought they were Zimbabwean insurgents training!) The people seemed to benefit from reconnecting with nature, and from being heard. It gave them a shot at recovery, at redemption, even. She used the tree as a metaphor for their lives. It wasn’t about forgiveness, though; it was about healing. Forgiveness, she believes, has to happen on its own.

  When she returned to Zimbabwe, she established the workshops there. In the last six months they have grown quickly, as the ranks of the tortured have swelled, and no formal counseling is available.

  In order to establish the trust of the group, Gift must first share his own story with them—to enter “the trauma circle,” and show them that they are not alone in their suffering.

  As soon as he became MDC administrator for Mashonaland West in 2000, he drew the ire of Mugabe’s enforcers. “They searched my office, took computers, party cards, pamphlets, and those red cards which said ‘Mugabe must go’—and they charged me for possessing those things.” Then he was tortured. “They used falanga on me—beating the soles of my feet with batons, and tying my testicles in a noose and pulling it tight—and they also used the ‘submarine’—they put me upside down into a drum of water up to my shoulders,” he tells the group. He was arrested several more times, and tortured again. “The police used to take me from my cells and drive me to the bridge over the Hunyani River and threaten to throw me over into the river if I didn’t tell them where our leaders were hiding, where arms caches were, who was funding us.

  “Also, they drove me home, to Chegutu, at night and threatened to abduct my family. They would drive up to my house, where my wife and my new, two-week-old baby were. They would say to me, ‘You see, we know where you live, you will never be able to escape from us.’ They would knock at the door, and my wife would answer. I would be watching from inside the vehicle, behind tinted windows, gagged and bound. They would ask her, ‘Where is your husband? Where is Gift?’ She would say, ‘He has been arrested.’ And then they would come and say to me—‘We can take her any time, so tell us what we want to know.’ ”

  On his next arrest he spent six months in police cells—this time accused of burning down ZANU-PF provincial offices. “The whole time—six months—I wasn’t allowed clean clothes. My clothes became disgusting. They forced me to eat my own soiled underpants until I vomited. They tied me to a bench and beat my buttocks so severely that I could neither sit nor walk. They beat my back with batons until I was covered with wounds all over. The entire time I had no access to lawyers.

  “I couldn’t see my newborn second baby—when my wife visited me in prison, she had to leave him at the gate, she wasn’t allowed to bring him inside. My wife named him Tinomuda—We Love Him—because he was born in my absence—I was arrested before I could see him.”

  By the time Gift was released, he had lost his job as a teacher. “No one else would hire me because I was a well-known activist. Even my friends—though some offered help—wouldn’t give me a job, they said they would all get problems from the authorities. I couldn’t support my family. By then, I was suicidal. I came to Tree of Life myself.”

  At the workshop, he says, “I began to see that, like a tree, I had been through all these things—droughts, fires, limb-cutting, and that I too could survive, despite all this. Like a tree, which still gives fruit and shelter to birds and insects and man. I can also do that, I can fend for my family. I am still someone. A human being. There is still a reason for me to live. I can still be something in my society.

  “And at the end,” says Gift, “we have a ritual—we discard our totems—burn them or bury them or put them in the river or throw them over our shoulder without looking back—it’s about starting anew.”

  The group is singing now, in harmony, a song with the chorus “You are just like God,” and each time, they add the name of a circle member. Their voices rise, soft among the balancing boulders, as they sit in their circle of hard-back chairs with their newly issued koki pens and their pads
of paper, trying to draw away their suffering, struggling to heal themselves, because no one else will.

  LIST OF ACRONYMS

  CIO Central Intelligence Organization

  CSU Counseling Services Unit

  GNU Government of National Unity

  GPA Global Political Agreement

  IMF International Monetary Fund

  JAG Justice for Agriculture

  JOC Joint Operational Command

  MDC Movement for Democratic Change

  MDC-M Movement for Democratic Change—Mutambara

  NGO non-governmental organization

  SADC Southern African Development Community

  ZANU-PF Zimbabwe African National Union—Patriotic Front

  ZAPU Zimbabwe African People’s Union

  ZBC Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation

  ZIPRA Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army

  ZNA Zimbabwe National Army

  ZRP Zimbabwe Republic Police

  RESOURCES

  If you want to help the people of Zimbabwe, or just to follow their continuing struggle, please go to www.petergodwin.com for links to charities operating in Zimbabwe, and for news of the latest events there.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am indebted to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, whose fellowship enabled me to complete this book, and to the MacDowell Colony for a writing residence.

  My thanks to: Andrew Wylie and his staff at the Wylie Agency. Judy Clain and Nathan Rostron at Little Brown. Charlotte Greig, Paul Baggaley, and Nicholas Blake at Picador, UK. Terry Morris and Andrea Nattrass at Macmillan, South Africa. And Cullen Murphy, Graydon Carter and Aimee Bell at Vanity Fair.