by Neely Tucker
“I don’t know why you’re so surprised. I used to tell you this in Detroit all the time,” I said.
“Well, yeah, but this is Mississippi.”
“Who you telling?”
“It’s just not what I thought it would be. I wouldn’t want to move down here, understand, but I’m actually enjoying this. The other day, I caught myself looking forward to going to Wal-Mart.”
“Whoa.”
“Scary, isn’t it?”
ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WORLD, I went back to the other life I was married to, airplanes and two-bit hotels and a suitcase and a satellite phone set up next to the hotel window. I woke up one morning back in Sarajevo, covering President Clinton’s trip to that city, where there were now stoplights and traffic jams. I had dinner with Aida Cerkez, who had taught herself journalism during the war and become the backbone of the Associated Press operation there. She put her toddler son on a bus out of the city with her mother when the war began, and she rarely saw him for years. When she was out of the city on assignment, she would loan me her apartment. I hauled water and took baths each morning during the war by squatting in the tub, then dumping a bucket of the stuff over my head, gasping and cursing in the cold.
Now the war was over, Aida’s son was back, she was happily married, and we all had dinner in a nice place with tablecloths. The war days seemed another lifetime, something that had happened to someone else. Time blurred and I woke up in another hotel in Monrovia, a steady rain beating down on the Liberian shoreline, the waves rolling in on dirty sand while children in rags played in the shelled-out hulk of a building across the street. In Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, rebels whose modus operandi was chopping off the arms and ears of civilians who didn’t support their cause had been granted a part of the government in a peace agreement that only the United Nations thought would work. To emphasize the bitterness of the agreement, President Ahmed Tejan Kabbah had taken a two-year-old orphan whose arm had been blown off to the signing of the cease-fire.
I worked out of my room at the Cape Sierra Hotel on the waterfront. They charged $125 per night, cash only, for a shabby room that reeked of bug spray, with dirty brown water spilling from the faucets. There was a rat paddling around in my toilet when I lifted the lid. I pulled the satellite phone and the computer into the open courtyard in the moonlight, the roar of the ocean on the other side of the hotel, and bounced a story about the orphan who accompanied the president, Memunatu Mansaray, off a satellite and back down to Washington. I closed down the computer and sat in the soft light for a moment, resting from the day’s work, enjoying the quiet beauty of the shoreline. A moment passed, and I could make out the whisper of footsteps behind me. I swore, silently, as I was sitting alone in the dark with $5,000 worth of equipment. But when I turned, it was only two prostitutes from the hotel bar, looking for a customer. I said no thanks, two, three, four times, and they finally left, sullen, hips in tight skirts turning back to the bar.
ON THE MORNINGS I awoke in Zimbabwe, I found it depressing beyond reason. Being alone in a hotel was fine. But alone in that house, rattling around the kitchen cooking dinner for no one but myself, building a fire to keep warm while I read late into the evenings, engendered a sense of loneliness that seemed to echo in my bones. I had lived alone for thirteen years as a single man, often moving to cities where I knew no one, and was no stranger to long periods of solitude. But this was different. The apartments I lived in during those years had been shells in which I invested little and from which I expected less. But this was a home filled with the smells and scents and voices of the women in my life. I kept waiting for Chipo to come tottering around the corner, or Vita to call out to me from the patio, and there was never anyone or anything there. I opened Vita’s closet and could smell the perfume of her clothes; I saw the ghostly imprint of Chipo’s hand on a window above her changing table. I found myself staring at it, startled back into the present only by one of the dogs licking my hand.
I let them outside, feeling the chill breeze across my skin, but couldn’t place the feeling that was twitching beneath the surface. There was only a well of emptiness, in which I seemed to drown a little more day by day. Reuters photographer Corinne Dufka, a good friend, and I had met again during the Freetown trip. We wound up discussing such things in her apartment there. After almost a decade of photographing some of the most intense conflicts in South America, Africa, and the Balkans, Corinne had just left the media to work for Human Rights Watch. I was surprised, because I considered her to be one of the best—and toughest—conflict photographers working.
“Why did you stop?” I asked.
“Because I just couldn’t feel anything anymore,” she said. “I mean, what manner of human cruelty have I not witnessed at this point? How many people have I watched be killed in front of me? I can watch an execution, process my film, eat a good dinner, and get a good night’s sleep. Which is fine. That’s how it is. But you reach a point.”
I did not realize it then, but when I was back in Harare in my house of echoes and voices that were not there, it began to dawn on me that I had passed that point myself. Everyone has a limit of how much violence he or she can stand—cops, criminals, firefighters, soldiers, even journalists—and although I had never had any intention of reaching such a point, I now realized I had crossed some barrier the day I picked up Chipo in Chinyaradzo. I never got over how fragile she was, and that fear had turned me into someone else, different, stronger, more resolute, and yet more vulnerable. Before she and Vita had left, I would let Chipo sleep between us, and I would lie awake, watching her sleep, with no desire to do anything else at all. Even in the daylight, I no longer wanted the constant travel, the risks. I no longer wanted to deal with heavily armed, drugged-out sixteen-year-olds at checkpoints in the middle of nowhere; I didn’t want to drive out of a different Sarajevo over a different Mount Igman under a different siege with different people shooting at the truck. I didn’t really care what I did anymore; I just wanted to wake up in a house where my daughter was safe. The tenuous nature of our position in the country was a corrosive acid, eating away at me, and it marked its progress in steady fashion. The possibility of going to sleep without a drink, then two, or three or more, became nonexistent. I would sit by the fire in the darkened house, sipping a whiskey over ice, watching the middle distance, and then the glass would be empty. I would get up, stir the fire, and pour another. I would awake several hours later, unrested and sweaty and apprehensive, walking through the house at four in the morning.
But as our first anniversary of bringing Chipo home came and went, there was no hope of leaving the country at all. Weeks passed with no word from Munautsi. When I finally tracked him down to check on our file, I got the familiar heave-ho out of his office.
With nothing else to do, I turned back to reporting. I tried to throw myself into it, and in most ways it was fascinating. Harare that winter was an odd mixture of political intrigue, rising prices, and, of all things, witchcraft trials and accusations. One self-proclaimed prophet was arrested in the town of Seke after exhuming the corpse of a two-year-old girl and chopping off her arms and legs. He was going to burn them to ashes, which would then be mixed in elixirs for evil powers, for there is no item more potent in the dark arts than human flesh, blood, or organs. There was such a spate of similar incidents that the Herald ran an editorial with this headline: “Let’s Stop These Witchcraft Murders.” Meanwhile, parliament was debating the possibility of lifting the Witchcraft Suppression Act of the colonial era, thus making it legal to call someone a witch, a charge that could result in the accused being stoned or killed on the spot. The use of tokoloshis, a near-invisible, ankle-high gremlin created by traditional healers, was believed to be rampant. Gordon Chavunduka, director of the fifty-thousand-strong National Traditional Healers Association, pointed out in an interview that most of the spirit world was a benign or comforting place, and almost all traditional healers used their work for solace, consolation, communicatin
g with ancestral spirits for guidance, or medical healing. The increased use of menacing forces, he said, indicated an increase in social fear and desperation.
This manifested itself in many ways, and I could see none more tragic than the fear, and resulting waves of almost hysterical denial, triggered by AIDS deaths. The official number of deaths was a rough-hewn guess because so few people would have themselves tested. And while a number of prominent people in Harare worked hard on the issue, there was a larger body of society that often seemed eager to believe almost anything and everything about the disease except what the overwhelming body of medical evidence showed—that it was a disease carried in bodily fluids.
This skepticism drew on a good measure of historical fact, though few Westerners seemed to realize it. In fact, it made a certain amount of sense.
Colonial regimes in South Africa and Rhodesia apparently did try to develop some form of biological warfare against blacks. Zimbabwe’s minister of health, Timothy Stamps (who is white), said in a 1998 BBC interview that there was “no doubt in my mind” that South African apartheid agents had “inoculated our population” with diseases such as anthrax, Ebola, and even bubonic plague during the 1970s liberation war. In South Africa, cardiologist Wouter Basson faced charges that he headed an apartheid-era biological warfare unit, before being eventually acquitted. Bioengineer Jan Lourens testified before government committees that the apartheid-era experiments included tests to inoculate blacks with poisons to reduce the birth rate. And the CIA had been up to all sorts of tricks in the Congo, once trying to poison nationalist leader Patrice Lumumba with tainted toothpaste.
Just as blacks in America remember the Tuskegee experiment, so too do Africans remember these events and regard the AIDS epidemic with skepticism. Political leaders, noting that the disease started flourishing in southern Africa during or shortly after the last stages of anticolonial struggles, thought that it was suspicious that blacks were harder hit than whites. This resulted in the beliefs that were voiced by Zimbabwe’s vice president, Joshua Nkomo, who had said that AIDS was a disease white scientists had created to kill black people.
As interesting as these theories were, they did not address the raw facts that were not in dispute. Mary Bassett, a black American who was a senior lecturer in public health at the University of Zimbabwe, moved to Zimbabwe in 1986. The prevalence of HIV-positive blood donors in her surveys at the time was 2 percent. By 1999, it was 15 percent. She also assigned her students to keep track of the mortality rate in Harare, pulling figures from the city morgue each year. They paid closest attention to corpses between the ages of twenty-five to forty-four.
The death rate for that group was up 700 percent in a decade.
The government did try to combat the problem, at least on some level. There were AIDS awareness campaigns, and the government linked with Western nongovernmental organizations to provide condoms at subsidized price. The government also became the only one in the world to tax the populace to pay for AIDS health care costs. Finance Minister Herbert Murerwa announced that a 3 percent levy would be added to everyone’s tax bill, and the Health and Child Welfare Ministry would create a fund for the revenue, expected to total some 26.6 million Zimbabwe dollars (about U.S. $760,000). That was more than double what the country had spent on AIDS the previous year.
“I know that this isn’t as much as some people wanted, but I hope it shows we’re trying,” foreign minister Stan Mudenge said at Harare’s African Diplomats Ball, an AIDS fund-raiser, to a hearty round of applause.
The problem was that the government didn’t consult the population about to be taxed. Neither did they announce how the money would be used. Prevention? Treatment? More nurses and doctors? It was anybody’s guess. There were no bold statements at press conferences and no returned calls from government officials.
I called any number of AIDS clinics, orphanages, and physicians to see what they’d heard. They hadn’t been consulted either. Things were particularly difficult for Ernestine Wasterfall, the matron at Emerald Hills, the orphanage that had so many children with AIDS. The government was supposed to send her a monthly allocation for her charges, now down to an inflation-ravaged twelve cents per day per child. They hadn’t sent her a penny for five months. “We pray some of this tax money comes to us, but we don’t know if it will,” she said. “The government never contacted us about it. Even the money they are already supposed to send us, they don’t. I don’t see how this is going to be any different.”
Her skepticism, which was widely shared, was based on historical precedent. In the early 1990s, a similar tax was imposed to compensate for a devastating drought. The drought came and went, but the tax went on for years. The government never explained how all the money had been spent.
Zimbabweans were no fools, and they now looked at their dilapidated hospitals and poorly paid physicians and were doubtful that the same government that allowed the health care system to atrophy was suddenly going to double AIDS spending. I asked Wasterfall if I might send a photographer, freelance shooter Rob Cooper, to illustrate the story. She said they didn’t allow pictures of AIDS patients. But, she said, do you think Americans might send donations if they saw pictures?
I told her I had no idea, but if someone should send along donations, I would certainly relay them. But, I cautioned, this was a remote possibility.
“Send Mr. Cooper over anyway,” she said, ever hopeful. “I don’t see how it can hurt, and it might help.”
Rob went over and took pictures, including shots of two terribly ill little boys. A decent man, he made prints of some of the nicer shots and took them back as small gifts for the boys, along with a donation to help. Wasterfall accepted the donation but not the pictures.
The little boys were already dead.
17
BETRAYED
LATE IN THE DRY SEASON of 1999, the beginning of the end made itself apparent to me in two ways, large and small. The latter was a travel article a freelance reporter had written from Zimbabwe and sold to the Chicago Tribune. In it, she told of a bizarre flight on Air Zimbabwe, in which the pilot first told passengers over the intercom that the copilot had not shown up, but not to worry, he could handle the jet for the short flight. Once airborne, he told them he was going to the bathroom, but not to worry because the autopilot was on, and so forth.
The only problem with this little bit of airborne legend is that it was just that. The story wasn’t true. The government was unhappy, especially since tourism had been declining for more than a year, and the Tribune ran a correction. The government was not mollified, as an editorial in the Herald made clear: “American and South African newspapers, driven by a pathological hatred of the present Zimbabwean Government, fell for this chicanery and ran the story . . . such mischievous reports must be taken seriously and remedial action taken.”
Pathological hatred? Remedial action? That had my attention, all right. The way this was going, one word from Kaseke and I could be charged as a malicious hack who was abducting a helpless Zimbabwean infant. “Wouldn’t that make for a cheery headline,” I muttered.
The second item was far more serious.
Many Zimbabweans had tired of Mugabe’s administration. Of course they admired his heroic past. But that was twenty years ago. The Poles had tired of Lech Walesa, the Nobel laureate who led them to freedom, in a single term. Now, in vast numbers, Zimbabweans were turning to an opposition political party that was taking shape. Morgan Tsvangirai and Gibson Sibanda, the leaders of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions, had resigned their labor posts to form the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), a coalition that would draw on its leaders’ high profile among the working class. It also drew immediate support from several international agencies who were alarmed by the nation’s collapsing infrastructure under ZANU-PF. Tsvangirai, who had already been severely beaten by unknown assailants after he organized national strikes and stay-aways, announced that his nascent party would field candidates for all parliamentary seats
when elections were held in eight months.
The government, accustomed to a badly fractured and tiny opposition, recognized the threat immediately. They lambasted and insulted the new party at almost every turn. Chimutengwende, the information minister, ridiculed the MDC as “fake . . . political upstarts . . . It is boys’ work to think that just because they have succeeded in organizing a stay-away, then you can run the country.”
Initially, I didn’t give such statements much credence. But the more I thought about it, the more the government’s reaction took on troubling overtones. The new party was going to be far more powerful than any electoral challenge Mugabe had ever faced. The elections would be sharply contested; Tsvangirai was clearly hoping to use success there as a platform to run for president in 2002. He had good reason to be optimistic. The power of labor movements to shake off unwanted regimes in developing nations had been demonstrated by Walesa in faraway Poland and by Frederick Chiluba in next-door Zambia. People in Harare and in towns across the country were bursting with optimism that Tsvangirai was well poised for a similar turn to elected office.
But to any interested observer, Mugabe had demonstrated that he was not going to campaign and lose. He had identified his pressure valves in the past twelve months—white farmers, journalists, the American and British governments. It seemed equally clear that he would intensify his punching of those buttons as the election approached. How? When? Who knew? Professionally, in another country, I would have regarded this as a compelling story to cover. But here, it spelled personal disaster. The anti-Western, antimedia climate would be certain to escalate. Anyone could see that foreign reporters were going to be one of the first targets. It was imperative, I realized, that we get out of the country before the elections.