The Matatu affair, or rather non-affair, rumbled on. The NUJ chapel wrote asking what I planned to do about this evident breach of The Observer’s editorial safeguards and insisted that if Matatu was to write for the paper he should be on the editorial staff, not paid for by Lonrho. I wrote back saying Tiny Rowland had neither asked nor ordered me to make such an appointment, and it wasn’t going to happen, so there had been no breach of the paper’s editorial safeguards. Dick Hall accused me of using ‘some dazzling gamesmanship’.
I couldn’t resist adding in my reply to the NUJ that I found it strange that journalists on a liberal newspaper like The Observer should be so opposed to a black African writing about Africa. My irony did not go down well. The last thing I wanted was Matatu’s salary and drinks bill on my editorial budget.
It was all a storm in a tea cup, or perhaps a wine glass. Whatever he might or might not have said to Zvobgo, Tiny had never asked me to appoint Matatu, and I think I knew why. He was as aware as I was, perhaps more so, that Matatu simply couldn’t do the job, or any job for that matter, because he was a helpless alcoholic and incapable of staying sober for more than a few hours in a day. The whole storm had been created by Dick Hall’s heightened sense of drama. He was a Walter Mitty character who had to be seen at the centre of things.
Dick told me he was writing a book about Tiny, so I said he would have to leave the paper to do that. Matatu did have some pieces published in The Observer, but he was never described as the paper’s Africa correspondent. When he drank himself to death a few years later, I spoke at his memorial service at the Africa Centre in Covent Garden.
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My first and only really serious row with Lonrho took place at Easter 1984 when I went out to Harare to interview Mugabe on his fourth anniversary in office. The interview was set up by a TV production company to be broadcast on Channel 4. I had already presented a number of programmes for the company in Brussels, Paris and Moscow, and later I was to present two series of sports programmes on the same channel, called Running Late. It is important for the origins of the Mugabe interview to be properly understood. It was not true, as stated confidently in a number of places, that Rowland set up the interview.
My friend Robert Edwards, who had been editor of the Daily Express and the Sunday Mirror, said that if he had ‘pissed on a parade organised by Lord Beaverbrook’, he would have expected to be sacked. When I told him that Rowland had not been involved in setting up the Mugabe interview, and it wasn’t, therefore, his parade, he changed his mind.
It was a spectacular row. The story began in the parched earth of Matabeleland, among the cactus and the baobab trees, and ended over lunch in a Park Lane casino owned by Lonrho, served by long-legged girls in fishnet tights. For two hectic weeks, the battle was monitored in every news bulletin, causing anguished debates about press freedom in Parliament and the media – and almost led to The Observer being sold to Robert Maxwell.
The row between Rowland and me became a Fleet Street soap opera that overshadowed the tragic human story that provoked it – the suffering of the minority Ndebele people at the hands of the North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade of the Zimbabwe Army. Although my travel and hotel expenses were not paid by The Observer, I had always planned to write an article for the paper. I told Rowland about the interview as a courtesy a few days before I travelled to Harare.
That was a mistake, since it gave Rowland an opportunity to ingratiate himself with Mugabe (‘I have arranged for my editor to publish an interview in The Observer’) and repair relations that had been seriously damaged by his long support for Joshua Nkomo. When I arrived in Harare, I was unpleasantly surprised to be met by Matatu, who whisked me off for lunch at Lonrho’s office, where I discovered that Tiny had arrived ahead of me.
I had arranged to meet Neal Ascherson, who had been covering the drought and famine in southern Africa for the paper, and took him along to the lunch. I think he must have been amazed at the deference shown to Rowland by his lickspittle local board. Tiny said my interview had been delayed, but he had been in touch with Mugabe’s office to reschedule it for a day later. The interview was clearly to be a Lonrho production, with Rowland himself as the producer and Matatu cast as my minder.
Rowland even turned up at Mugabe’s heavily protected office, though thankfully he didn’t sit in on the interview. It turned out to be disastrously dull, unusable for Channel 4, though parts of it were later used by PBS in the States and the text appeared in a specialist African magazine. Mugabe was mostly monosyllabic. He only came to life when I raised the subject of Matabeleland, where a curfew had been in force for ten weeks.
When I asked him if he would consider a political rather than a military solution in Matabeleland, he replied bluntly: ‘The solution is a military one. Their grievances are unfounded. The verdict of the voters was cast in 1980. They should have accepted defeat then.’ He added chillingly: ‘The situation in Matabeleland is one that requires a change. The people must be reoriented.’
My interest in Matabeleland had been quickened by Mugabe’s comments, and I told Ascherson this afterwards. He said he had a good contact who knew what was going on there and gave me his telephone number. When I returned to Meikles Hotel with the camera crew after the interview, I was met in the lobby by a small group of Africans, who asked if they could speak to me. One of them took me aside conspiratorially: ‘You should go to Matabeleland to see what is happening to our people there. There are terrible things. Stay at the Holiday Inn in Bulawayo.’ He hurried away, as if afraid to be overheard.
No media had been allowed inside the curfew area, but there had been rumours about brutal treatment of the population by Mugabe’s troops, ostensibly searching for ‘dissidents’ from across the Botswana border. I said to Matatu: ‘Let’s go to Bulawayo in the morning.’
We found little sign there of military activity, just the odd ‘hippo’ armoured personnel carrier trundling along a dirt road with mounted guns, or a truck-load of troops with rocket-propelled grenades on their AK-47 rifles. Rain had made the Lowveld roads almost unpassable. Schoolgirls were marching quietly in green check dresses or lying in the shade; old men were scratching with hoes; cattle stood in the dry river beds; goats, donkeys, marmosets, even a kudu bull, dashed across the road.
The sight of the kudu bull took me back twenty years to a time when one of them had almost killed me and my whole family as we drove towards Bulawayo on the edge of the Wankie Game Reserve (now the Hwange National Park). It had emerged from the bush at the side of the road and seemed certain to crash into the car – until it suddenly took off, rising majestically over the vehicle, its hoof just touching the roof a few inches above the windscreen, then dashed off into the bush on the other side. A few inches lower and the windscreen would have been shattered, almost certainly forcing us into one of the many trees lining the road. The memory seemed like a bad omen.
We knew we weren’t allowed officially into the curfew area, but asked our driver to brave the roadblocks anyway. We passed three without bother, all manned cheerily by policemen in brown boots, then Matatu did some name-dropping to persuade a tough-looking soldier to let us through. We were able to drive through the no-go areas, past Kezi, Antelope Mine, Bhalagwe Camp – all names, I learned later, that filled the Ndebele with dread. We saw nothing unusual and returned to our hotel.
Around 10 p.m., there was a call from the hotel reception to say that a man wanted to deliver a letter. An African tapped on the door and handed it over. It read simply: ‘Please accompany this friend.’ Moving quietly to avoid disturbing Matatu next door, I followed the man to the car park, where a headlight beamed in recognition. I had no idea where I was going, or who with; and nobody knew where I’d gone. I knew instinctively that I couldn’t take Matatu with me. Apart from the Lonrho connection, he was a Shona and close to the government and his presence would have deterred people from speaking honestly.
I climbed nervously into the van and was taken in silence for sev
eral miles out of town into the curfew area. There – after a semi-comic interlude in which we gave a lift to a policeman – we stopped at a remote house, pipped the horn for ages, and finally changed cars with another man. He took us for another long ride to a Roman Catholic mission where, for much of the night, I was given a series of eyewitness accounts and signed statements from victims of the Matabeleland atrocities. These were graphic, horrific and profoundly moving.
One name kept recurring, as in a nightmare. Brigadier Shiri, known as Black Jesus, was head of the Fifth Brigade. And there was one recurring story, about a major who held up a dead baby and told villagers: ‘This is what will happen to your babies if you help dissidents.’ He then dropped the tiny corpse in the dust.
Back in the car again, I was taken to another Catholic mission, where I met a man from Esigodini village who had been beaten close to death by agents of the Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO) in front of his family. They were warned they would be shot if they uttered a sound. ‘They began beating us with sticks and guns,’ he said, ‘bayoneting us, burning plastic against our skin while our hands and mouths were covered. They tore curtains, put cushions into our mouths. We were tortured for about four hours.’
A man called Jason was brought to the mission. He had been chopping trees at Welonke when two soldiers turned up with fixed bayonets and whips on their belts. They asked if he and his wife had seen any dissidents and grew increasingly angry when they said they hadn’t. They beat his wife and grandmother and took him away. Neighbours were collected and they all marched on, their progress broken by periodic beatings and a fight they were forced to stage for the soldiers’ entertainment. At the village school, the soldiers shot two children who had tried to run away. Eventually nine of them were forced to dig a hole to a depth of two or three feet and ordered to jump into it.
Jason told me: ‘The commander leaned against a tree, opened his radio cassette and shot five men. On the grave, we put branches. I also saw a big grave which had stones in it. There are sixteen buried in this grave.’
Earlier I had come across Peter Godwin, of the Sunday Times, who said bodies had been thrown down a nearby mineshaft owned by Lonrho. (Later Roy Hattersley was sued by Rowland for making this claim in a speech – what Rowland never knew was that I had helped to draft Hattersley’s speech.)
Godwin had already got some atrocity stories into print, but he was inhibited by the fact that he couldn’t betray his presence in the curfew area for fear of being expelled or, as a white Zimbabwean himself who had been conscripted to Ian Smith’s rebel army and fought against the Africans, suffering even worse retribution. Once he understood that I hadn’t been sent by Rowland to put a Mugabe spin on the situation, we exchanged useful information.
I returned to the hotel at dawn, checked out without waking Matatu, then flew to London via Harare, leaving on Friday evening and arriving on Saturday morning with my story written. While waiting for my plane in Harare I had two meetings. One was with a military attaché at the British High Commission, who wasn’t at all surprised by the news from Matabeleland.
The other was with a South African director of Lonrho, Nick Kruger, who wasn’t surprised either. ‘What you have discovered, Donald,’ he said in a guttural Afrikaner accent, ‘is the eternal truth of Africa. Stuff them, then they stuff you. For centuries, we stuffed the blacks; now it’s their turn to stuff us. The Ndebele stuffed the Shona; now it’s the Shonas’ turn.’
My dilemma on returning – should I publish an anodyne interview with Mugabe or tell the truth about Matabeleland, thereby damaging the commercial interests of my proprietor? – has since been written up as a classic case by the Institute of Global Ethics. For me, there was no choice.
I wrote the story in longhand on the plane and typed it up when I arrived at an empty Observer office, too early for any other editorial staff to have appeared. I made two copies, one for Magnus Linklater, the executive editor in charge of news, and one for Pat Ferguson on the foreign desk. I told Tony Howard about the story and asked him to keep quiet about it, but didn’t show it to him. I didn’t want to risk word of the story somehow reaching Lonrho through office gossip. I planned to ring Tiny around 5 p.m. on Saturday afternoon, too late for him to do anything to stop publication.
Things didn’t turn out as neatly as that. Terry Robinson rang Tony Howard to hear what was going in the paper, and Tony told him about my Matabeleland article, even though I had expressly asked him not to tell anyone. Within minutes I had an angry Tiny on the phone, asking what I had written. So I told him.
There was a few minutes’ silence while he digested this. Then he made the point that brutalities of this kind could not be understood in isolation. It was the fifteen-year civil war started by Ian Smith’s UDI that had distorted Zimbabwe’s history and created a pattern of violence that was now playing itself out. There had been violence on all sides. I thought this was a fair point and said I would include it in the article, which I did.
He was not mollified, however. Far from it. I could tell he was choking with rage and unable to find the right words to express it. Finally he said: ‘You are deliberately trying to destroy my business. You must expect me to defend myself.’
‘I am only doing my job,’ I replied. ‘This is a story that has to be published.’
‘And I have to do my job,’ he said menacingly, and threatened to close the paper down if I went ahead with the article. I said I was not prepared to talk in those terms. He slammed down the phone.
Next morning, I turned on the BBC radio news to hear my story condemned as lies in an official statement by Mugabe, supported by a letter of apology from Rowland: ‘I take full responsibility for what in my view was discourteous, disingenuous and wrong in the editor of a serious newspaper widely read in Africa.’ He described me as ‘an incompetent reporter’ and announced that I would be dismissed.
Nevertheless, I went ahead with a planned holiday to Guernsey and spent most of the Sunday morning hunting for a favourite doll that my daughter Laura, aged three, had lost on the ferry. I found it and went to the house of my then parents-in-law, where we were staying. Reporters from the BBC and ITN were waiting for me. When Lord Goodman saw my interviews on the midday TV news, he rang me to say that I should return to my office right away. ‘You must be seen on the bridge of your ship. If people see you at the seaside they will assume you have given up already.’
The story was front-page news for a fortnight – ‘the most entertaining hullabaloo’, as one writer put it, ‘since Harry Evans fell out with Rupert Murdoch.’ Rowland wrote me an open letter, which he distributed to all papers before I could see it, saying Lonrho would not go on supporting a failing editor who showed no concern for their commercial interests. I replied in kind, pointing out that the circulation had actually gone up by 22 per cent in the eight years I had been editor. The Daily Mail published both letters in full under the headlines ‘Dear Donald’ and ‘Dear Tiny’.
Rowland insisted that I should go back to Zimbabwe for a longer investigation. I refused, on the grounds that I had already established the truth of my story and that to do so would endanger the lives of my sources. I received dozens of letters of support from Observer readers, who said they would give up the paper if I was sacked. The shortest letter came from Martin Amis, saying simply: ‘Snooker him.’
The Zimbabwe Three. This Guardian cartoon infuriated Tiny Rowland.
The Foreign Office, more concerned about relations with Mugabe than with human rights – and doubtless sensitive that Britain had provided some training for the Fifth Brigade – was briefing against me. I learned this from Prince Charles, with whom I happened to have lunch around this time. ‘The Foreign Office tell me your story about Matabeleland was greatly exaggerated,’ he said airily. I ate my soup in silence.
At the pre-lunch drinks I had talked to Princess Diana, while Peter Preston, then editor of The Guardian, had spoken to Prince Charles. The princess and I talked about babies. I asked her, ra
ther cheekily, if they would have any more children after Princes William and Harry. Her reply was chilling: ‘We’ll have to – because of the IRA, you see.’
I got to know the Princess better later. I attended a briefing for editors at Buckingham Palace, at which we were asked to go easy on her as a newcomer to the royal family. After the briefing, we were joined by the Queen and by Prince Charles and Princess Diana herself. When we met she said: ‘I can see your halo, Mr Trelford. Your paper doesn’t have to write all this ridiculous stuff about me.’
This was the famous occasion when the Queen reprimanded the editor of the News of the World, Barry Askew, in front of his fellow editors, for suggesting that Princess Diana should send a servant to buy her sweets, rather than go to the shop herself and run the risk of paparazzi. Her response – ‘Oh, what a pompous man you are’ – prompted Rupert Murdoch to sack him. I had known Askew on the Sheffield Telegraph many years before; he never recovered from this career setback and became an alcoholic.
Because The Observer sponsored the Olivier Awards, I got to meet the winning actors and actresses and had my picture taken with them all. When the Princess attended a theatre evening for the presentation of the awards, I got to sit next to the guest of honour. She arrived wearing headphones playing loud rock music by Wham!, but politely took them off for a chat.
I had to present the paper’s Kenneth Tynan Award to a Russian troupe, the leader of which wouldn’t stop talking. I could see the TV producer slitting his throat in a gesture meant to make me shut him up, because the show was going out as live, but there was nothing I could do about it. When I got back to my seat, I found the Princess rolling around in fits of laughter at my discomfiture.
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Shouting in the Street Page 27