When a Crocodile Eats the Sun (7 page)

For three desperate hours, the gun battle rages. Olds was once a soldier; he knows how to defend himself. But he is one against a hundred. He is shot in the leg; he ties it with a makeshift splint and fights on. The attackers lob burning Molotov cocktails through the windows. A neighbor flies over the homestead in a little Cessna and sees the house in flames below, sees the gunmen converging on it, but can do nothing to help. And as the house burns, Olds retreats from room to room, finally to the bathroom, where he fills the tub with water, wets his clothes, and prepares to make his final stand. He returns fire until he runs out of bullets, until he is overcome by the smoke and the heat, and then he climbs out the window, hands raised.

He is barely outside before the gunmen converge on him, beat him with shovels and rifle butts, stones and machetes. Then they get into their trucks and drive back north. Those injured in the attack are escorted by police to a nearby hospital where they are treated and released. Police confirm that no arrests have been made.

Surreptitiously the Congolese businessman leans across the empty seat between us to see what I am studying so intently. He sees the picture and raises his eyes to look at me with an expression I cannot quite recognize at first. Then I realize it is pity. He feels sorry for Olds and for me and for our little tribe of white Africans. I feel embarrassed, humiliated, mortified. I am not used to being the one pitied. I am the one who pities others. I casually close the magazine and pretend to look out at the roiling black clouds we are about to penetrate on our way down to land.

It is raining heavily when we disembark at Harare Airport, which is gently atrophying as plans for a new one are pondered. We jog across the tarmac to line up in the immigration shed. The rain drums down on the corrugated-tin roof, making it hard to hear. Strategically positioned pails catch the gushing leaks. Above us an electronic ticker flashes a message from the Zimbabwe Investment Center: “Welcome to the most favorable investment destination on the continent.” But when it comes to the telephone number for potential investors to call, the ticker lettering breaks up into a jumble of
x
’s and
y
’s and
z
’s.

When I reach the head of the line, I hand my passport to the black official and greet him in Shona, Zimbabwe’s main vernacular. He ripens in smile and demands, “Why don’t you stay here? We need people like you.”

By “people like you,” he means white Zimbabweans. I shrug and feel half pleased, half ashamed. It always has this sweet-and-sour effect on me, this place. Even as it gets poorer, more ramshackle, more dangerous, its slide accentuated for me by my periodic overviews, snapshots separated by absence, I am tempted each time to tear up my return ticket and stay. For whether I like it or not, I am home.

Dad is noticeably more frail; he now has early-stage emphysema. Mum’s back hurts constantly, and she thinks she may need it operated on. Mavis, the housekeeper, is aging with them, stooped and slow now, and being kept alive by expensive hypertension drugs that Mum gets her.

The swimming pool lies green and still and opaque, its pump quiet, with a slimy watermark around its rim. Dad has given up. The chemicals, he says, have increased tenfold in price and are often unavailable. Georgina warned me about this, and I e-mailed them to say that I would arrange to have the chemicals delivered monthly to them, via a Web site I have discovered. It is important to keep exercising, I argue.

“Please let me help?” I say to my father, but he gets angry.

“It is absolute robbery,” he says, “what they’re trying to charge. I will have nothing to do with it. We can do quite well without the pool.”

“Anyway,” says my mother brightly, “we saw a program on ZTV about converting your pool into a fish facility, and we’re going to drive into town, to the Ministry of Agriculture, to pick up a pamphlet on how it’s done. It’s getting increasingly difficult to find fish in the shops, so we’ll breed bream for the pot.”

I
AM SUPPOSED
to be writing an article about the attacks on white farms, and my father has carefully clipped articles he thinks will be of relevance and stored them in a box file that he now pre-sents to me. On top of the pile is a piece about David Stevens, the first farmer to die, on April 15, and another prominent member of the MDC. He was abducted from his farm, Arizona, by forty armed men who arrived in a bus. His hands were tied behind his back and he was driven away. White neighbors who came to his aid were shot at and took refuge at the local police station, but the gunmen followed, dragged them out, beat them and tortured them, forcing Stevens to drink diesel oil.

One was witness to Stevens’s death: “I saw a man step forward and shoot Dave in the back and then in the face with a shotgun — he literally blew him away,” he said.

His widow, Maria, is a friend of ours, so I call her. “I’m also supposed to be writing a piece on . . .” I swallow back my embarrassment. “On all of this,” I say. “So you don’t have to talk to me if you’d rather not. Or at least not on the record. Or if this isn’t a good time . . .”

“Why not?” she says. “They’ve already killed my husband, what else can they do to me?”

David Stevens came up to Zimbabwe at independence from South Africa because he wanted to live in a free country. Here he met Maria, a Swede, recently arrived as part of a Scandinavian aid program. Now a handsome woman in her late thirties, I visit Maria in her temporary Harare refuge, a suburban house owned by the Swedish Embassy. Her twin twenty-month-old boys crawl restlessly over her.

“They don’t really understand that their father has been killed,” she says. Her voice is flat. “I don’t really know how to explain it to them.” She arbitrates a squabble between the boys, and sits one on either thigh.

“We bought our farm from a black man in 1986. It was a rundown overgrown mess,” she remembers. “No rivers flowed there. It was called Arizona because it was arid and rocky. Now all the rivers flow. We grew tobacco and corn, and I bred ostriches. We employed seventy-five families. David spoke fluent Shona and was on the local council trying to sort out the roads in the communal area. Eventually he got involved in opposition politics and joined the MDC. There was even an MDC rally held on our farm.

“When the war vets first invaded, we had fairly good relations with them. But then one weekend when I was away they raped a little girl in our compound, and our workers got the hell in with them.”

That’s when the trouble started. The workers chased the wovits off the farm, and soon they returned with reinforcements and seized Stevens.

“When David was taken away by vets, the last thing he said to me as he left was, ‘Don’t worry, darling, I’ll be safe.’ I never saw him alive again. I haven’t been back to the farm. The vets have burned down the compound and looted our house. They took the bag in which I had packed all our valuables: birth certificates, passports, jewelry. So now we have nothing.” And then she is crying, for the first time this afternoon, and it’s her tears that capture her sons’ attention as the abstract news of their father’s death cannot. On her lap, they finally still; they look up at her in alarm.

“David always said that he was not a hero or a missionary,” she says, “that if it got dangerous, we’d leave.”

N
EARLY A THOUSAND
white-owned farms have now been invaded by the wovits, but the CFU has told their members to sit tight while they negotiate with Mugabe. The CFU has warned the farmers that any of them named in the media will risk being singled out for reprisals by the government. And the wovits themselves are very hostile to strangers coming onto the farms, especially anyone suspected of being from the media. Photographing farmers is hugely problematic; photographing war vets is almost suicidal. Nonetheless, the
New York Times
has sent Antonin Kratochvil, a Czech photographer, now a New York resident, to cover this story with me.

Antonin cuts an unlikely figure here. Corpulent and bearded, he speaks American English with a Czech accent. He usually has a cheroot in the side of his mouth and he laughs constantly, a booming rumble that rises from his belly. He is a tropical Santa, able to suck the tension from a room. His very strangeness makes him a perfect choice. I collect him from the Meikles Hotel, where he stands waiting on the lion paw-print carpet in his sleeveless khaki camera jacket, his little Leica over one shoulder.

W
E HAVE FOUND
one farmer, Rob Webb, who’s willing to talk. He owns Ashford Farm in the Centenary district, a hundred miles north of Harare. The drive takes you through the lands of milk and honey: neatly trammeled fields of corn standing eight feet tall, manicured groves of fruit trees on the vast Mazowe citrus estates, black-headed sheep and plump Hereford cattle shining with good health. In the fields, black workers are stooped over the rich red earth, planting winter wheat. Huge metal irrigation gantries spritz the contoured grooves of the earth with water.

And, periodically, bursts of gaudy bougainvillea mark the houses of white men. Bougainvillea is exotic to Africa, just like the white man. It hails from the rain forest of the Amazon. From the air, you can trace the progress of the European by the bright scarlets, mauves, and pinks of bougainvillea. The corrugated-tin roofs of the homesteads peek through thickets of musasa trees.

On the sides of the road, black men in yellow fatigues try to keep Africa at bay, slashing at the elephant grass that plumes out of the shoulders and threatens to envelop the road completely. Coming in the other direction, straining back up the escarpment toward the capital, Harare, are trucks piled high with bales of golden Virginia tobacco, destined for the auction floors. Zimbabwe is the world’s second biggest producer of Virginia tobacco, and the crop provides nearly half of all the country’s foreign exchange. Buses too groan up the hills on their way to the capital, their roof racks towering with luggage, ears of corn, bicycles, chicken coops, and the odd hobbled goat.

Centenary farming district has seen more than enough trouble in its half century of white settlement. Originally opened to the white man in 1953, it was apportioned and sold mostly to commonwealth ex-servicemen fresh from World War II. In late 1972, its farms came under guerrilla attack in the first shots of the decisive phase of the Rhodesian civil war.

Ashford is one of the last farms before the earth falls away dramatically down the escarpment to the great Zambezi River, which is only ten miles away as the fish eagle flies. Just inside the farm gate are dozens of rough grass shelters erected by the “war vets” who have invaded the Webbs’ farm. “If they challenge you, say you’re a fertilizer salesman,” Webb had told me.

The wovits are sitting, sleeping, listening to a radio, washing their pots, sharpening their pangas. They stare at me, and one gets up and walks toward my car. He squints at my license plate and jots it down. Antonin and I wave blithely and drive slowly on, and he makes no move to stop us. At the top of an avenue of flame trees is a lawn of lush Durban grass around a hacienda-style homestead where Rob and Jenny Webb sit on their barred-in veranda. Behind them is a wagon wheel, a common household emblem embedded in walls or gateposts by pioneers when they finally arrived at their destination, their trek over.

“Sorry my house is a bit bare,” apologizes Jenny. “I stripped it of anything that meant anything to me and sent it to Harare for safekeeping.”

They are a good-looking middle-aged couple, tanned and fit from an outdoor life, surprisingly calm and considered, given their current situation. We sit down at the dining table for lunch, and Jenny reaches to tinkle the bell to summon the cook, and then remembers it is not there. She apologizes for the second-best cutlery we are using too.

Rob slices the rare roast beef. “This place was mostly unpopulated when we arrived,” he says. “There were tsetse flies, so no cattle could survive. No cattle, so no people. Whites used to come here to hunt lion, that’s all.”

His grandfather came out to Africa as a veterinarian with the British cavalry fighting the Boer War. His father served in the police force of old colonial Bechuanaland (now Botswana). Rob’s uncle wrote the Kenyan constitution.

After lunch, the Webbs take us for a drive to show us the lay of the land. Rob points to a prominent rock outcrop, Banje Hill, visible across the district. It provided the main navigation point for the guerrillas as they infiltrated the country during the independence war.

“We survived seven years of war,” says Jenny. “The roads were land mined, and I was here by myself with the children when the house was attacked.” But after the war ended and Mugabe asked white farmers to stay on, the Webbs did.

At its height, Centenary boasted 154 commercial farms, but that is now down to 96. At independence, the eastern area, which abuts a crowded communal land, was handed over for black resettlement.

“We told the government,” says Webb, “if you’re going to take land, do it in a planned way, rather than just extending subsistence farming.”

But as we drive through it, most of the land — once some of the most productive in the country — stands empty of crops, choked with undergrowth. Farms lie abandoned, their buildings stripped of their tin roofs.

“Just look at it,” says Webb in dismay. “It’s such a terrific waste.”

Webb shows me the Farm Development Trust, an old commercial farm converted into a tobacco training center by white farmers. More than a thousand black farmers pass through it every year taking courses to learn how to grow tobacco commercially. “Some of the farmers being trained there are those now invading us,” he says. His wife choruses this hymn of despair. “This will never end. If they get more farms, in five years’ time when our corn is ten feet tall and theirs is only two feet, they’ll come again and say, ‘We want your land.’ ”

Only now does Rob take me on a tour of his own farms — he has three, combined into one unit. Here he grows coffee, paprika, wheat, sugarcane, soybeans, asparagus, tobacco. At his tall brick tobacco barns, workers are busy grading and packing leaves. “There’s millions of dollars’ worth of tobacco here,” he says. “And they’ve warned me that they’ll burn it all down if they lose the elections.”