When a Crocodile Eats the Sun (10 page)
From the Land Rover, Bennett calls his election agent and friend, James Mukwaya, who says that he has had to cancel the rally. Gangs from ZANU-PF have been there overnight, moving from house to house, warning people that if they attend they will be killed. But Bennett is not downhearted. “They’re all on our side anyway,” he says, “so why risk their lives with public rallies? We know how they’ll vote when the time comes.”
O
N MY WAY
out of the village, early the next morning, I drive once around the old square and there, faded now and chipped, is the little sign to the elementary school I’d attended up on top of the hill overlooking the village. On impulse, I follow the sign and drive up past banks shouting with bright blue morning glories. I get out and survey the long low buildings.
“Good morning, may I be of assistance?” A tall, tidily dressed black lady introduces herself as Iris, a teacher. When she hears that I once studied here, she offers to show me around. Most of the children are away for a long weekend, she says, but one of them has not been reclaimed by his parents. His name is Honest, and he is a tiny boy in a khaki uniform with a green jersey and serious, dog-dark eyes. He is obviously dejected at having being left behind but determined not to show it. I know exactly how he feels, having been in the same position all those years ago, when my mother was frequently delayed by medical emergencies.
“I am pleased to meet you, sir,” Honest says, and he stands very straight, with his chin out, like a little soldier.
On Iris’s instructions, he takes me to the spartan classrooms, their ceiling panels hanging down to reveal the metal ribs of the roof struts, and past the empty swimming pool to the threadbare playing fields with their crooked goalposts. He shows me the shower block with its missing tiles and ruined porcelain toilets, and finally he takes me to the boarders’ dormitory. I point out the bed where I slept when I was six, the first bed to the right of the main door, the bed traditionally reserved for the youngest boy. It is the very same narrow iron bed with sagging diamond wire mesh under the mattress that I once used to wet.
“It is my bed also,” says Honest. “I am the youngest, so this is where I sleep, the same as you.”
Iris comes to say good-bye, and Honest strides away over the gravel driveway. When he reaches the red-cement veranda, he turns and holds his hand up in solemn salutation like an Indian chief in a Western.
“Some months,” Iris says quietly as she looks over at Honest, frozen in his gesture of farewell, “there is no budget left for the boarders’ food, so we have to ask the day students to bring extra food with them, to share.”
As I drive slowly away, I feel the distinct sensation that I am on the stern of a ship pulling away from a dock and that soon I will be separated from Iris and Honest by a vast ocean.
The sun is just breaking through the granite ramparts of the mountain, dissolving the mist, as I drive up and out of Chimanimani to Skyline Junction. But there is no skyline today, just fat gray clouds sitting heavily on the hill, and rain. Work gangs in olive green plastic ponchos dig in the downpour, trying to keep the road open. As I drop down the other side into the Biriwiri Valley, the rain stops, and the clouds lift and the baobab trees begin. I come up behind an old, slow-moving Land Rover pickup. The back is filled with young black men singing exuberantly. They wave me the open-palmed sign of the MDC and throw some fliers up into the air. For a brief moment one sticks to my windshield, and I see the grinning face of Roy Bennett and the headline “
Chinja Maitiro
— Change Your Ways — Vote MDC,” and then it blows off into the bush.
June 2000
T
HE ELECTIONS ARE CHAOTIC
. In the cities, long lines form, with some people waiting for days to vote. There is a polling station at Oriel Boys School, right across the road from my parents’, and they wait for the throng to thin out, but it never does, so they take folding chairs and join the line. It’s a hugely partisan crowd, overwhelmingly in favor of the opposition. There is a carnival atmosphere — a feeling that the old guard is about to be swept away, that we are on the brink of momentous change.
Every few minutes, my parents get up and move their blue-striped camping chairs a few yards on as the line snakes slowly in long switchbacks through the school grounds. The sun blazes down, and everyone shares water and refreshments. Eventually Dad becomes exhausted, stooped with back pain, sodden with sweat.
“You go home,” says Mum. “One vote won’t make the difference here.”
But he refuses, and eventually he casts his vote, and they walk slowly back over the road. He can barely catch his breath, but he is triumphant.
And Stalin Mau Mau does not become the member for Harare East. Stalin Mau Mau comes away with less than 20 percent of the votes cast, trounced by Tendai Biti. In fact, the ruling party gets almost no urban seats at all, and none in the entire southern province of Matabeleland, and few in Manicaland, where Roy Bennett romps home to become member of parliament for Chimanimani.
I leave a few days later for New York, as the last results come in, from constituencies deep in the bush. The MDC has just failed to tip over into outright victory — they are four seats short, fifty-seven to ZANU-PF’s sixty-two. And according to the constitution, the president gets to appoint another twenty seats.
My father insists on driving me to the airport, and on our way we are overtaken by the police motorcycle outriders of the presidential convoy. A policeman jabs his finger toward the side, and Dad veers off the road, as we are required to do by law when the president approaches. More squad cars stream by, lights flashing, sirens wailing — the locals call the presidential convoy Bob and the Wailers, after Bob Marley’s band, which played at independence celebrations here. Now truck upon truck of soldiers from the presidential guard roar by, bristling with machine guns and AK-47s with which some of them take beads at cars and people as they pass. I count ten trucks of soldiers before Mugabe’s black armored Mercedes finally reaches us.
“I saw the inside of his car once when I worked for the Ministry of Transport,” says my father as we wait for the convoy to pass. “It was specially modified in Italy. It has a bomb-resistant floor, bulletproof windows, no outside door handles, an intercom for passengers to speak to those outside. The glass is also one way.”
I imagine what it must be like for the president looking out of his smoked-glass windows at the city around him, knowing that not a single constituency voted for him in the entire metropolitan area — knowing that he is driving through enemy territory. Knowing that the only way he has been able to stay in power at all is through massive electoral fraud. In the coming months, court challenges show the extent and detail of the cheating, especially in the rural areas, where his men used intimidation and bribes and vote rigging. In some constituencies, the vote tally exceeded the entire population.
A
FEW MONTHS
later, after secret negotiations, Georgina finally leaves her job at ZBC and joins Capital Radio, a new independent station, Zimbabwe’s first, which will be critical of the government, moving into what the political commentators are calling “democratic space.” They import a transmitter from South Africa and set it up in a rented room on the top floor of the Monomotapa Hotel. They scramble up onto the rooftop to erect the antenna, and then they realize they have no idea what frequency to broadcast on, so Georgina phones Dad, and he looks it up in his radio manual and tells them that 100 FM is free, so they begin broadcasting on 100 FM that night.
And while Georgina broadcasts her show, and Xanthe rolls around on the carpet at her feet, she looks out the window toward Pocket’s Hill and sees the towering antenna of ZBC, whose monopoly they have finally broken. Sunset streaks the sky with ocher, and across it sails a hot-air balloon. It is one of those moments of pure happiness, she tells me. One of those moments that you must commit to memory and savor in the dark days ahead. For those days will come soon enough.
The morning after her epiphany, Georgina and her colleagues are tipped off that they’re about to be raided, that the president is signing a special decree to close down Capital Radio. As a precaution, they set up to transmit prerecorded programs and leave the hotel. One of the technicians, Brendan, goes back up to check on the studio, and as he enters the elevator, a posse of armed policemen crowd in behind him. When they get out on the same floor, Brendan pretends to be going to another room and watches as the policemen kick down the door of Capital Radio.
It has been on the air just six days.
T
HE PRESIDENT’S RHETORIC
gets steadily more incendiary. At his party’s congress, he says the whites have “declared war” on the people of Zimbabwe.
“We must continue to strike fear into the heart of the white man, our real enemy,” he tells his audience of party faithful, and they cheer him wildly and chant, “
Hondo! Hondo!
” — “War! War!”
And Hitler Hunzvi takes the stage to warn, “Whosoever is killed, it’s tough luck.”
I phone my parents from New York and say it might be time for them to think of leaving. But my father is still unimpressed with the president’s blood-curdling threats. Ordinary people don’t hate us, he says. They couldn’t be nicer.
And anyway, he says, he’s no
soutpiel.
It’s an Afrikaans word meaning “salt penis,” a term for us Anglo-Africans who, they say, have one foot in Africa and the other in Europe, causing our genitals to dangle in the ocean where they pickle in the brine of cultural confusion.
Soutpiels
are not “real Africans.” We are the first to cut and run.
But people of all races are starting to leave — even Thomas Mapfumo, troubadour of the liberation war, who virtually invented
chimurenga
music, a blend of electric guitars over
mbiras,
the traditional metal-pronged thumb pianos.
When I was a teenager, and my father worked at Mhangura Mine, I used to sneak down to the beer hall in the black township to hear Mapfumo play with his band, then called the Hallelujah Chicken Run Band (because some of them had day jobs in the mine chicken coops). I was an avid guitarist, and I could barely contain my excitement when, on occasion, he would let me jam with them. Later they called him the Lion of Zimbabwe, and he played at the independence celebrations in 1980 with Bob Marley and the Wailers.
But Mapfumo becomes disillusioned. His new songs attack corruption and nepotism. So the government bans them and threatens to arrest him and Mapfumo leaves for Oregon. There is only “disaster” now in Zimbabwe, he says. “The government has done nothing good for the people.”
And then the war vets come to town. Hitler Hunzvi, now a member of Parliament, announces that the party is establishing “mobilization bases” in the cities, as part of “an aggressive plan.” The plan is put into practice by one of Hunzvi’s lieutenants, Joseph Chinotimba, a huge bull of a man, with an attempted-murder charge hanging over him. His first task is to bring down the last of the independent judges who have been trying to curb the government’s excesses and are hearing the MDC cases that challenge the election results. Chinotimba leads a column of war vets to the supreme court building in central Harare, where he threatens to kill Chief Justice Gubbay unless he steps down. And when the government says it cannot, will not, protect Chief Justice Gubbay, he reluctantly resigns, and the vets stand on the steps of the supreme court and they hoot and cheer and whistle. Mugabe appoints one of his own cabinet ministers to replace him.
The pace of violence picks up too. Gloria Olds, the seventy-year-old mother of Martin Olds, is herself gunned down by wovits, her body riddled with eighteen bullets. Again, just as they did after her son’s murder, the police wave the departing gunmen through their roadblock. At her funeral, the priest says that Gloria Olds’s blood is on Mugabe’s hands. A week later the priest is expelled from the country.
From the rural areas come reports of opposition witch hunts. Some of these incidents rise to a new level of the grotesque — clearly designed
pour encourager les autres.
When Mugabe’s youth militia catches Robson Chirima, a young opposition supporter, they gouge out his eyes before killing him.
Chinotimba declares himself the new leader of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions and organizes the wovits and party militias to do to factories and businesses what they have done on the farms. They invade in force, punching and kicking managers and owners, spitting on them and pelting them with rocks, and forcing workers to do the same. They set up kangaroo courts for labor disputes and use them to extort money, taking half of anything handed over by the frightened managers. The Avenues Hospital and Meikles Hotel are both targeted. So are nongovernmental organizations, including the Red Cross, where the son of the director is abducted from the Harare International School by war veterans and assaulted.
When wovits invade Lobels Bakery, the country’s main bread maker, they are assisted by the police, who arrest a white manager, Ian Mel, after finding MDC e-mails on his computer. The vets gather the bakery workers together and tell them that if they don’t support ZANU-PF, they will be “beaten to death.” They also tell them that all whites are to be driven from Zimbabwe.
M
Y ANXIETY GROWS
as I watch all of this from afar, and I call my parents every few days from New York, just to check. But they assure me they’re fine. And that I really shouldn’t worry. But of course I do. I discuss it with Georgina, who is thinking of leaving the country herself.
“Maybe they’re falling victim to the boiled-frog syndrome?” she suggests.
I have never heard of this.
“Well, apparently, in experiments, if you put a frog in a shallow saucepan of water and heat up the water very slowly, the frog will never quite notice how hot it’s getting. It won’t actually jump out. Until it’s too late. Until it’s boiled alive.”
“Perhaps it’s time we told them to jump,” I say.
“Oh, I’m constantly pestering them to leave. But you know what they’re like. They won’t even consider it.”
This is their home, and they’re damned if they will allow Mugabe to drive them out, to win. They still believe that change is coming soon and that they have an obligation to stay to help usher it in. Besides, they feel responsible for so many people — colleagues, friends, employees — people they will not abandon, a way of life they will not surrender.
To find out for myself just how hot the saucepan is getting, I look for another assignment to get me to Zimbabwe. I find one for
Men’s Journal,
a feature on Victoria Falls, “adventure capital of the world.”
At least it will take me home.
