Dark Star Safari

by Paul Theroux

  Caia was a settlement of shacks, drink shops, and squatting Mozambicans.. I hopped ashore and held the boat for Karsten, but he stuck out his arm to shake my hand.

  ‘We are going back,’ he said.

  Just turning around, hurrying upstream to the Shire and heading home. There was still time for him to get back to the confluence of the Shire and the Zambezi; but it was all upstream for him from now on. Karsten was looking at the ragged men and boys on shore - they were pestering him, asking him where he had come from – and I knew he was thinking: There are bad people here. Anyone could see that a ferry landing on a wide river would attract the opportunists and the predators and the homeless riffraff and the lost souls. Instead of helping him land, I palmed some money as a tip and slipped it to him so that the watchers wouldn’t see, and I shoved the dugout back into the current.

  Meanwhile the ferry had docked, its lines secured, and a big top-heavy truck of fat sacks was being driven up the embankment and heading towards a line-up of other trucks. With boys tagging along offering to carry my bag, I went to where the trucks were parked – four of them now. A group of men sat on a restaurant veranda, drinking and eating.

  ‘Okay, meesta,’ one of them said, laughing at the approach of a mzungu.

  ‘Bom dia,’ I said, and asked whether any of them was going to Beira.

  ‘We are all going,’ a man said to me. He was sitting with a spoon in his hand over a bowl of chicken and rice.

  ‘Can you take me?’

  Instead of replying he made a motion with his head and I took this to mean yes. His name was João. I bought two beers and gave him one and sat down with him. We bargained a little about the price, for I had vowed that for the sake of my family I would not ride on top of any more trucks. After a while he wiped his face on his shirt, paid his bill and we left, four of us in the cab, about fifteen Africans clinging to the bags of beans on top. Beira was 200 miles away, on a soft road of sand and mud that led along the old Portuguese railway line. Railways and roads had connected all the provinces in Mozambique. In colonial times there had been a plan to build a railway bridge across the Zambezi at Caia. Part of the foundation had been set into the embankments, but the idea was premature and perhaps grandiose. Even in Caia and its outskirts there were tipped over railway cars and rusted broken locomotives.

  This hinterland had only recently opened. For twenty-five years two guerrilla actions, one after the other, turned the interior of Mozambique into a war zone. There was first FRELIMO’s decade-long struggle against the Portuguese. After independence in 1974 an anti-FRELIMO movement called RENAMO was formed, supported mainly by white South Africans and an assortment of right-wing well-wishers in Portugal and the United States. In the RENAMO war millions of people were either killed or displaced, bridges blown up, communications shattered, roads closed, towns and villages depopulated by massacres. Because of this civil war, the Mozambican Zambezi, from Zumbo to the delta in the Indian Ocean, and the main tributary, the Shire River, were inaccessible to outsiders as well as to many Mozambicans. Throughout the war, the Mozambican bush was a heart of darkness, just as dangerous and confused and hard to penetrate.

  It was only four o’clock, so we had about two hours of daylight. In those two hours I saw that every bridge along the road had been destroyed – blown up or burned; every railway track had been twisted apart; and all the older colonial buildings were roofless ruins.

  In the middle of nowhere we made a pit stop. Seeing me headed off the road to relieve myself, João said, ‘No!’ And waved me to the edge of the truck. He pointed into the woods and said, ‘Landmines.’

  It was the conventional wisdom in rural Mozambique that you were not to stray off any main road, nor were you to deviate from any path, for only the well-trodden ways were sure to be free of landmines that had been set and hidden by all those different soldiers, all those well-armed factions.

  Darkness fell. We traveled down the wet mushy one-lane road in a tunnel of our own orange headlights. We came to Inhaminga. In Portuguese times Inhaminga had been a good-sized railway town, with a wide main street of two-story shop-houses and large villas enclosed by garden walls. But guerrilla conflict and neglect had turned Inhaminga into a ruined settlement of collapsed buildings and rusted machinery and broken rolling stock. Seeing me in the cab of the truck, youths screamed at me.

  ‘White people never come here,’ João explained.

  ‘How odd.’

  We arrived at the coast, the edge of Beira, in the early hours of the morning. Since leaving Blantyre in Malawi I had not seen an electric light, or a telephone, or a paved road, or piped water. I did not lament this, I found it restful, for it was not a country in decline – this part of it, anyway, could not fall any farther. Some months before the people had experienced the worst that nature could throw their way, deep, devastating floods. They had survived, though as everyone said, the worst aspect of the floods was not the destruction of the crops and huts, but the uprooting of the landmines, for these explosive devices had floated and moved into different and unknown positions.

  The town of Beira was also a ruin. João dropped me at a hotel on a side street. I slept until mid-morning and then went for a walk among abandoned buildings along streets where grass had sprouted. The most interesting building I saw in Beira was the one that had been the Grand Hotel – a huge skeletal structure facing the Indian Ocean. The whole place, a big decrepit gambling resort, had been taken over by plunderers and invaders. These homeless people were living in the guest rooms and had cooking fires going on the balconies and rigged up tents on the verandas. Some were emptying buckets of shit over the rails, their laundry was limp on strung-up lines. The building was a vast crumbling pile of broken stucco and rusted railings, filled with ragged squatters. Smoke issued from most of the rooms. I supposed that for some people this looked like the past, but to me it had the haunted look of a desperate distant future, an intimation of how the world would end, the Third World luxury resorts turned into squatter camps.

  In the market, looking for a long-distance bus to Harare, I wandered into a parking lot of battered taxis. A man leaning against an old car said he would drive me the 160 miles to the Mozambique-Zimbabwe border at Machipanda for a reasonable price. He would show me the sights along the way. I said that was fine with me if we could leave soon. We left an hour later. About halfway into the trip he pulled off the road at a junction. An arrow indicated Nova Vanduzi. I said, ‘I don’t see anything.’ Putting on his surliest face he replied that if I did not pay him more money he would not take me to Machipanda. I argued for a while, then agreed, but still he whined at me for more money all the way to Machipanda, while I complained to him that I was often the victim of my own trusting nature.

  17 Invading Drummond’s Farm

  Zimbabwe had a fearsome reputation for political mayhem at the time I walked across the eastern border from Mozambique into Mashonaland and caught a bus to the capital. Everything was wrong in the country, so I heard, and it was growing worse: dangerous, disrupted, dispirited, bankrupt. But I couldn’t wait to see such extreme strife for myself – the journalistic exaggeration, the possible drama of it, ‘these are the lucky ones.’ The way strife makes people talkative was a gift to anyone who wanted to write about it. The admonishment Stay away from farms, in a US Embassy advisory on Zimbabwe, made me want to stay on a farm. I had no names, no contacts, yet I had the idle wanderer’s distinct confidence that having arrived here I was available for some sort of enlightenment; that I would meet the right people; that I would be fine. I had no idea at that early stage how any of this was going to happen, for I didn’t have a friend in the whole country.

  Don’t go, some people said. But they had warned me about going to the Sudan and I had loved that big dusty place. Sitting on the Harare bus, traveling the road through Zimbabwe’s Eastern Highlands, the farming country from Mutare to Marondera, an intimation of distress was visible to me. I made a note at the back of the book I was reading, Not
many cars. It was a beautiful land of tilled fields and browsing cattle and farmhouses; yet it seemed rather empty, as though a plague had struck. Much of what I saw could have been the set of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers for here and there were perambulating Africans, and I got glimpses of Spam-colored settlers, yet apart from these few individuals the place seemed curiously unpeopled and inert.

  The book in my lap, which I’d bought in Mutare, helped me understand a little of what was happening. It was African Tears; The Zimbabwe Land Invasions, written by Catherine Buckle, a woman who had been robbed in installments. Her Marondera farm had been snatched from her in piecemeal and violent intrusions over a six-month period.

  ‘It’s a one-man problem,’ many white Zimbabweans explained to me. Depending on who I talked to they said variously, ‘The president is out of his mind’ or ‘He’s lost it’ or ‘He’s off his chump.’ Even the kindly winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, Archbishop Tutu, said, ‘The man is bonkers.’

  The Robert Mugabe rumors, which I solemnly collected, depicted the poor thing as demented as a result of having been tortured in a white-run prison: long periods in solitary, lots of abuse, cattle prods electrifying his privates, and the ultimate insult – his goolies had been crimped. Another rumor had him in an advanced stage of syphilis; his brain was on fire. ‘He was trained by the Chinese, you know,’ many people said. And: ‘We knew something was up when he started calling himself “comrade” ’. He had reverted, too – did not make any decision without consulting his witch-doctors. His disgust with gays was well known: ‘They are dogs and should be treated like dogs.’ He personally banned the standard school exams in Zimbabwe ‘to break with the colonial past.’ Some rumors were fairly simple: He had a life-long hatred of whites and it was his ambition to drive them out of the country Of the British prime minister he said, ‘I don’t want him sticking his pink nose in our affairs.’ But noting all this I kept thinking of what Gertrude Rubadiri had told me, ‘We called him “Bookworm.” ’ Really there was no deadlier combination than bookworm and megalomaniac. It was, for example, the crazed condition of many novelists and travelers.

  The long lines I saw at gas stations told part of the story: there was a serious gasoline shortage. The new $500 million Harare International Airport had run out of aviation fuel. No hard currency meant a severe reduction in imported goods. There had been food riots in Harare. The opposition parties had been persecuted by the ruling party’s goon squads. The unemployment figure had risen to 75 percent, visitor numbers had dropped by 70 percent, the irrationality of the president was so well known his accusations had ceased to be quoted in the pages of the world’s press, except for his maddest utterances, such as ‘I have a degree in violence.’ But also foreign journalists had been attacked and some seriously injured, others had been deported for trying to cover stories of intimidation and disruption. Fearing the same fate, under ‘Occupation’ on my entry visa application I wrote ‘Geography teacher.’

  Zimbabwe had been for years one of the great African destinations, for it had the Zambezi, river rafting, bungee-jumping off Victoria Falls Bridge, and so many wild animals that big-game hunting was freely available. Gun-toting hunters banged away at the Big Five – elephants, rhinos, leopards, lions and giraffes. A Zimbabwean guide told me that some foreign hunters were very fussy and would decline to shoot certain elephants if the creatures’ tusks were four feet instead of five feet long. Zimbabwe was perhaps the only country in Africa where you could legally buy those elephant’s foot wastebaskets that gave environmentalists the horrors. Huge newly chopped-off ivory tusks were also available in Harare shops, and so were the skins of lions and leopards, crocodile belts, elephant or hippo hide wallets, and such curiosities as a yard-long giraffe femur with an African landscape scratched on its shank in scrimshaw.

  But tourists and curio collectors and travelers were staying away. The problem was land invasions. The president had actively encouraged veterans of the guerrilla war – ‘landless peasants’ – to invade, occupy and squat in the fields of white farmers and to take their land by force. Many black Zimbabweans had done so to white Zimbabweans, some of them violently. Eight white farmers had been murdered by these intruders, none of whom had been prosecuted – indeed, they were congratulated for achieving their objective, having seized the whites’ land and become landowners and gentry themselves. When a High Court judge questioned the legality of the farm invasions he was attacked by the government and he eventually resigned. As for the stolen farms, in some cases the government had failed to supply the invaders with free maize seed, fertilizer and tractors, and so they had left the land and returned to city life. Almost 2000 properties had been invaded and occupied; more were promised, so the threat was real.

  Whenever a local paper wrote critically of the land invasions the journalist on the story was arrested or harassed. Foreign journalists were thrown out of the country or their work permits revoked. The editor of the independent Daily News and two of his reporters were charged with ‘criminal defamation’ after reporting a well-sourced story about kickbacks connected with the new airport. The briber, a Saudi Arabian, had whined publicly that he had not received a fair return for his bribe of $3 million.

  The editor in chief of the Daily News had been the target of an assassination attempt. Zimbabweans said that the proof that it had been government-inspired was its cack-handedness. That it had been botched was certain evidence of government connivance, since the government could not do anything right. Another paper, The Independent, was being sued for ‘contempt of parliament’ for its verbatim reporting of an incriminating parliamentary debate. Another bill had been passed stipulating that music, drama, news, and current affairs programming on Zimbabwean radio and TV had to be purely Zimbabwean ‘in order to foster a sense of Zimbabwean national identity and values.’ Since Zimbabweans had already established themselves as some of the greatest innovators in African music, and its musicians played to large crowds in the US and Europe, the intention of this bill was to make white Zimbabweans nervous.

  ‘Everything Mugabe says and does is intended to drive the whites away,’ a white Zimbabwean told me. I replied that it seemed to me that black Zimbabweans were enduring an equally bad time, with such high unemployment, high inflation, unstable currency and an economy in ruins. Blacks were being driven away too – many had fled to South Africa.

  But Harare did not look like a ruin. Even in its bankruptcy, Harare was to my mind the most pleasant African city I had seen so far – certainly the safest, the tidiest, the least polluted, the most orderly. After traffic-clogged Cairo, overheated Khartoum, crumbling tin-roofed Addis, crime-ridden Nairobi, disorderly Kampala, demoralized Dar es Salaam, ragged Lilongwe, desperate Blantyre, and battle-scarred and bombed-out Beira, Harare looked pretty and clean, the picture of tranquility, and the countryside was an Eden.

  Much of Harare’s apparent peacefulness was due to the extreme ension in the city, for its order was also a sort of lifelessness, the unnatural silence of someone holding his breath. I had the premonition that something was about to happen, in months or a year perhaps, and this was an historical moment of silence and inaction before an enormous collapse, a violent election, social disorder, even civil war. It was wrong to mistake this silence for obedience and belief, since it was more likely the natural reserve of people who had already been through serious upheavals. British rule had ended abruptly with the white minority’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence in 1965, sanctions had followed thereafter, and the ten-year guerrilla war which ended in the black majority taking power in 1980, and brought about twenty years of Comrade Bob.

  Years of sanctions had made Zimbabweans resilient and self-sufficient. Zimbabwe was at its core an independent and proud place, a country that had a manufacturing industry. There was hardly any gasoline or diesel fuel for sale but most other necessities were avaiable. Even in these hard times, Zimbabweans were still making things -stationery, clothing, household furniture, shoes, frozen
chicken, canned beans; they had dairies and bakeries and breweries. There were many good hotels, though most of them were empty.

  Zimbabweans, black and white, grumbled openly. This was new to me. Tanzanians and Malawians had seemed much more supine and oblique, they had surrendered, and having abandoned any hope of things improving were reduced to unapologetic beggary that contained a subtext of entitlement: My country has failed me, therefore you must help. Some exasperated Zimbabweans talked of leaving. The man who had sold me my bus ticket asked me where I was from and responded promptly, ‘I want to go to America.’ Another said, ‘Three years ago this was a good place – but, ah, not any more.’ An African woman tapped her head and said in that accent peculiar to black Zimbabwe, ‘You will be laining a loat’ – learning a lot.

  Malawi had lowered my spirits. My interlude on the Shire and Zambezi rivers had lifted my mood. In central Mozambique’s blighted bush and decayed coastal city my guard had been up. Now, in Harare, I could indulge my passion for walking, for it was a city of sidewalks and parks. I felt stimulated, sensing that I was witnessing something that did not yet have a name; yet the very absence of drama signaled the suspenseful onset of a period of historical change. Something radical was going to happen – no one knew what. At that point catastrophe was just a warning odor, a tang of bitterness in the air, the sort of whiff that made people put on a listening face and wrinkle their nose and say, ‘Do you smell something?’

  I walked, I began eating good meals – a great novelty on this trip. I went through the market, I stopped in shops to look at merchandise and note the prices. And at each opportunity I encouraged people to talk about what was happening here. The fuel shortage was on most people’s minds, but inflation was at 65 percent and salaries were staying low. A recent strike by government workers had been broken up by police, many strikers had been injured. For most black Zimbabweans the issue was money – the collapsing economy; for most white Zimbabweans the issue was security, for the lawlessness of the farm invasions made all whites, even the urban business people, feel insecure.