‘Pishai, you mustn’t come to night. There is going to be an event here and I’m sure there will be some government guys attending. It’s not safe now.’
He could hear Pishai chuckle.
‘Okay, Lyn, thanks for letting me know.’
I realised that in some way my father was now to Pishai and Prosper what Muranda was to him: keeping them informed, watching their back. But I also knew that Dad had crossed a line. He was a bigger target than ever.
For four straight days in early May I didn’t speak to my father. He wasn’t answering the phone. I feared the worst. Then, on 8 May, I got the message I had been dreading. I opened my inbox to find a note from a travel writer friend in London, a fellow Zimbabwean named Melissa Shales.
Dear Doug, it read. I have just seen a blog about a Mr and Mrs Rogers being attacked on a farm in Zim – is this your family? I do hope and pray not. If it is, are they okay?
I wanted to throw up. I knew it was them. How many white farmers named Rogers were in Zimbabwe? There were fewer than three hundred white farmers left in the entire country. I found the story on Sokwanele.com, a pro-democracy website that catalogued the atrocities in Zimbabwe with appallingly graphic images. ‘Mr and Mrs Rogers Viciously Assaulted,’ read the headline. I scrolled down. A photograph of my father, his pale blue eyes staring out of a bloodied face, appeared on the screen. His nose was smashed in, his ear was torn, his thin grey hair was a mess. I scrolled down, my hands shaking. A picture of a woman came on the screen. She was in even worse shape. Her left eye was bruised shut. Her jaw was cracked. But she didn’t look anything like my mother. I scrolled back up again. The man did look like my father. He had the same light blue eyes and thinning wisp of grey hair. But he was younger, and he had a moustache and no beard. He looked like my father ten years ago. And then I realised – with horrific elation – that there was another farming couple in Zimbabwe called Rogers. William and Annette Rogers lived near Chegutu, south of Harare. On 6 May, armed war veterans raided their home, and assaulted and tortured them for several hours. ‘It’s not them,’ I replied to Melissa, my hands still trembling. Then I looked at the photographs of the couple again and wept.
In the middle of this mayhem, my parents suffered a body blow. On 30 May, Sheelagh James, Brian’s wife, was killed in a car crash in Mutare. Everyone suspected an assassination attempt intended for Brian. It was, however, an accident. A motorist drove straight through a stop sign at high speed. My parents were devastated; I couldn’t imagine how Brian felt. The funeral was held around the ninth hole of Hillside Golf Course. Two hundred people turned up, including fifty MDC activists and the MDC Ladies’ Choir, who sang Shona hymns. The MDC had to get permission from the police to attend the funeral: the government still banned gatherings of more than three people.
My parents had become very friendly now with the young fugitives, the two Ps. They often hosted them up at the house for drinks and were awestruck not only by their courage but also by the stories they brought back about how resolute the supporters were in the devastated villages. Dad found out that Pishai had never owned his own suit, and he promised to buy him one if he survived the death squads and made it to Parliament one day. Dad was with him in town the day before Sheelagh’s funeral when Pishai received a call from the leader of the MDC choral group due to sing at the funeral. They apparently had a problem. They had never attended the funeral of a white woman before and didn’t know what to sing.
‘What’s that got to do with it?’ Pishai said. ‘Come on, man. Mrs James was an African, just like you. Sing what you normally sing.’
He snapped the phone closed and turned to apologise for the interruption. He didn’t understand why my father had tears in his eyes.
The danger only grew closer. The squash courts at Odzi Sports Club, a few kilometres down the road from my parents’, were burned down one night. Those were the same courts my father had once played on. The club had been taken over by war veterans years ago, and my parents assumed a wood fire had gotten out of control. A brave undercover reporter for the BBC, a man named Ian Pannell, however, revealed that the squash courts had been used by war veterans as torture chambers. Word had gotten out to the surrounding villages, and it was MDC supporters who burned the courts down.
By mid-June I hadn’t spoken to my mother in six weeks. Dad said Mom didn’t want to have a stilted conversation by the side of a road over a crackling connection. I didn’t know it at the time, but she had in fact been badly shaken by the very first visit of the war veterans. She sneezed for days after their visit, a nervous reaction. She felt exhausted. The death of Sheelagh James knocked her even further. It followed hard on the death of Mary Ann Hamilton, Hammy’s wife, from cancer a few months earlier. Mom’s country was dying, but so were her friends. Time was running out.
By some miracle, in mid-June, ten days before the runoff, their land line was suddenly repaired. The electric power was out, of course – it had been gone for days – but I finally got to speak to my mother on 18 June. Her voice was soft and gentle, but it no longer contained any trace of a theatrical air.
She spoke clearly and plainly, and she said something to me I will never forget.
‘Darling, I want you to know that your father and I have lived through a lot in our lives. We’ve seen some things. But nothing, nothing has ever come close to what is happening around us now. Not in my wildest dreams did I think that even this government could resort to what they are doing.’ The line crackled. I pictured her sitting in the darkness. ‘It’s getting closer, darling. I can feel it. For the first time in my life I have to say I am genuinely scared.’
Then the line went dead.
In the end it was Mrs Muranda who delivered the news. It was a Saturday morning, 21 June 2008, less than a week before the presidential runoff, which now hung over the nation like a bloodied axe. So often it had been Mr Muranda who brought them word: ‘Sa! An important man has moved into Mr Frank’s place, a very important man!’ ‘Sa, that is the minister, sa!’ ‘Madam, we have customers – many customers!’
Now it was Naomi, and it caught Mom by surprise. Mrs Muranda rarely came up to the house, and certainly not on a weekend, when the staff tried to take it easy. Mom was standing in the living room flipping channels for television news. She had heard, through the two Ps, that there was a possibility Tsvangirai might pull out of the vote. More than eighty MDC agents had been killed now, and hundreds more were missing. Their structures were being decimated. MDC headquarters in Harare had turned into a hospital ward, filled with battered supporters fleeing the violence. To contest the election would mean certain death for hundreds if not thousands of voters.
Mrs Muranda was on the veranda, head down, hunched like a bird. Her hands were trembling, and when she spoke it was in a whisper, not out of politeness but out of terror.
‘Madam,’ she wheezed, ‘you must to leave now. They are here!’
Mom put down the remote and smiled at her through the French doors.
‘Hello, Mrs John,’ she said. ‘What’s the problem?’
‘They are here, madam. The war vets. They are looking for you and Mr Rogers. You must to leave now, madam, it is not safe.’
My mother wasn’t sure she had heard correctly. Then she saw the whites of Naomi’s eyes and her trembling hands.
‘Lyn!’ she screamed. ‘Lyn!’
Dad had been fixing the coffee roaster at the back of the house, but he had already sensed something was wrong, for he came barrelling onto the veranda that very moment.
‘Who are they, Mrs John? How many?’
Naomi rubbed her hands nervously in front of her, as if they held worry beads, and moved her weight from foot to foot, like a little girl jogging on the spot. She couldn’t keep still.
‘Many, sa! There are many!’
‘How many, Mrs John? Six, eight, ten?’
‘Twenty-five,’ she said. ‘They are looking for Mr Rogers.’
‘Twenty-five? Fuck me. Do they have weapon
s?’
‘Sticks, sa. Some sticks. Some slashers for cutting grass.’
‘Are they from Frank’s place? Is it the Commissar and his men?’
She shook her head. ‘No, sa. I don’t know these people. Mr John say he don’t know these people. He tells me to come to house to tell you to leave. You must to go now.’
For eight years they had waited for this day, and now it had come on a glorious morning, the news delivered to them by a beautiful old woman in the voice of a terrified angel. The fact that she was here and John wasn’t sent a shiver down Dad’s spine. He wondered what was happening down at the camp, what the war vets might be doing to the two Johns. He thought of the three farmworkers he had taken in and his fugitives, the two Ps. Had they come for them?
And suddenly he remembered: the soldier. Dad had run into him four days ago on the road a kilometre or so from the entrance to the farm. He had been driving to the cellphone point, and a passenger in the back seat of a white Toyota Corolla speeding in the opposite direction had waved him down. It was Walter. They pulled over on opposite sides of the road and stood facing each other for a minute as a couple of cars clattered past. Then the soldier bounded over.
‘Mr Rogers,’ he boomed, patting Dad on the back. ‘Good to see you again!’
‘Hello, Walter,’ said Dad, less enthusiastically. ‘Good to see you.’
The soldier looked exhilarated. His eyes were alive. My father had never seen him so happy before.
‘I saved you, you know,’ said the soldier.
‘What’s that, Walter?’
‘I saved you.’
‘What do you mean, you saved me?’
‘Your name came up in a security meeting. They said you were MDC.’
My father’s stomach twisted into a knot. He felt an involuntary smile come to his face.
‘Uh, come on, Walter,’ he said, exasperated, throwing his hands in the air. ‘Come on! You know that’s not true.’
Walter stared at him impassively for several seconds, saying nothing. Then he smiled and said softly, ‘I know. I told them that. I made sure they remove your name from the list.’
Dad didn’t know what to say. He didn’t know whether the soldier was bluffing or not. Part of him suspected that Walter wanted money from him and had simply made up the story. But he didn’t want to give him money any more. Instead, there was just an awkward silence.
‘So which way are you going, Mr Rogers?’ the soldier eventually said.
‘This way, Mr Sebenza. To make a phone call. You?’
‘That way, Mr Rogers. Towards Rusape. I am working.’
And they said goodbye.
But now my father’s mind was racing. Perhaps his name was on a list but the soldier had just been bullshitting about taking him off it. Was that why the war veterans were looking for him – they knew he was MDC?
He had to think fast. Were they going to go down fighting now, just when they were in sight of victory? Or would it be better to lie low in town for a few days, find a safe house of their own until things blew over? My parents were both still strangely convinced that the MDC was going to win the runoff. Spending time with the two Ps had convinced them of that. But in the end, it was something else that made Dad decide. It was more than just wanting to survive: for the first time in his life, for the first time in his seventy-two years in Africa, he knew that he was on the right side. In fact, it was bigger than that. For the first time in 350 years that his people had been on this tormented continent, they were – at last – on the right side of history.
It was easy in the end: they chose life.
‘Rosalind, get a bag together and pack some clothes. I’ll get all the documents.’
‘You must to hurry, madam,’ whispered Mrs Muranda. ‘They are here!’
Mom packed a sports bag with clothes for both of them for three days.
Where will we go? she wondered. To town? To Nyanga, to our friends Joe and Claire? Who knows, we might finally go to Mozam bique, just as Douglas suggested all those years ago. A familiar pit of fear hit her in the gut. She suddenly recalled something Unita Herrer had told her: that the war vets had smashed her family pictures. She ran to the passageway and took three framed photographs off the wall: Teo, Neo, Madeline and Barnaby, her grandchildren. She wanted more, but there was no space. She peered into the living room and saw the piano, the antique rocking chair, the shelves filled with her beloved books. Would they burn it all?
Dad was in his study. He got the title deed for the farm from the safe, along with the huge file of documents from his meetings. It’ll still come in handy, he thought. There’s no official govern ment right now. This invasion is definitely illegal.
They ran together to Dad’s twin-cab bakkie in the carport. They were about to get in when Dad remembered something.
‘Shit, Rosalind, the shotgun!’
‘The shotgun?’
‘I have to get the fucking gun!’
‘Why?’
‘Because we might have to shoot our way out of this.’
She rolled her eyes.
‘Well, hurry, Lyn.’
The gun was in the cabinet where he usually locked it during the day unless there was a baboon around or he heard the poachers’ dogs. He ran to the study and fumbled for the key, missing the first time in his rush to slide it into the lock. He pulled out the weapon. It felt cold and heavy in his hands. He thought for a second of loading it. No time. Instead, he took a handful of cartridges from the ammo box and stuffed them into his pockets. He ran out again.
Mom was smoking furiously by the open car door as if her life depended on it, one eye on the front gate, waiting for the mob to appear, praying that they wouldn’t.
Where has Mrs John disappeared to? she wondered. She should come with us.
Dad tossed the shotgun on the back seat. ‘The car keys,’ he said. ‘Where are the fucking car keys?’ He fumbled again. They were in his pocket. He dug them out, and the shotgun cartridges fell to the ground. He picked some of them up, but others had rolled under the bakkie. There was no time to get them.
‘Right, Rosalind,’ he said, clambering into the bakkie. ‘Have you got the passports?’
She stared at him blankly. ‘I thought you were getting the passports.’
‘I was getting the farm documents! I don’t have our passports!’
They were always forgetting things. It took them forever to get going on a holiday or a simple trip to town.
‘I don’t have them!’
‘Who had them last?’
They had to think back to their last trip out of the country.
Was it to Mozambique for fuel or to South Africa for food? Suddenly they remembered: Mom had managed to get an emergency travel document, a temporary replacement for her invalid passport; they had gone to get Mozambique visas three weeks before.
‘They’re either in your desk drawer or in the bedroom,’ she said.
‘You check the bedroom, I’ll check the study!’
They ran back to the house. Mom looked in the mahogany chest and dresser table in the bedroom. Nothing. Dad searched the safe and his desk drawers. Not there. He saw his old leather briefcase leaning against the wall and opened it. Their passports fell out, along with her travel document.
‘Got them!’ he shouted.
They were bounding through the living room when Mom saw Mrs John sitting hunched on the veranda steps, her head between her knees, rocking back and forth, mumbling to herself. She ran over to her.
Mrs John, come, you must come with us. We are going into town.’
She didn’t look up.
‘No, madam, I am to stay. I am to stay.’
‘Naomi, please, it’s not safe for you. You must come with us.’
‘No, madam, you must to leave. I am to stay.’
They stared at each other. What were they to do? Mom tried to grab her by the shoulders, to lift her up. But she resisted. They left her there, rocking on her haunches, humming to hersel
f. In the end it didn’t really matter. By the time they had raced through the kitchen back to the car, twenty-five war veterans were striding purposefully through the front gate and up toward them. It was too late. Mom froze by the passenger-side door; Dad did the same next to her.
‘This is it,’ Dad muttered to her under his breath. ‘Let’s just try to stay calm.’
He was surprised at how young they were. Except for two or three whom he judged to be in their forties or fifties, quite possibly genuine war veterans, they were mostly youths in their twenties; a few were even teenagers. One was a tall, good-looking, well-dressed man with long dreadlocks. They recognised him instantly – the dying horse was alive and well. But mostly they were a ragged bunch: tatty jeans, dirty T-shirts, rubber sandals, laceless running shoes. None was in uniform, which was a relief. He had been worried that they were soldiers or militia: Green Bombers. Several of them carried clubs and sticks, but he saw no guns.
As they got closer he noticed, walking to the side, purposefully, angrily, John Agoneka and John Muranda. Muranda’s shirt was torn. Agoneka had a slight limp. They looked shaken but otherwise okay. Dad was glad to see they were alive.
In a few seconds the mob had come to a shifty, nervous halt around them. It occurred to my father right then that he and my mother were at a crossroads in life, that rare moment when the decisions they made over the next seconds might determine whether they lived or died.
Dad spoke to Dreadlocks, who stood front and centre. It was like old times.
‘Can I help you? What seems to be the problem?’
‘In our culture one is first invited inside for discussions,’ spat Dreadlocks. He spoke surprisingly good English and held a notebook and a pen in his hand.
The Last Resort Page 33