Once we’d touched down a grey-suited man of about 50 stood on his seat and started declaiming, tears streaming down his face as he repeated, ‘Wahdat? Wahdat?’ – Why? Why?
Turns out he was returning from Canada after fifteen years in exile and was saying, ‘Look what we’ve done to our country, how we’ve destroyed it. While other countries were developing we were destroying ours. Why? Why?’ Everyone on the plane fell silent.
The Madness of Mugabe
Zimbabwe 1994–2007
Down to the wire
Sunday Telegraph, 11 August 2002
LATER, EVERYONE BUT farmer Chris Shepherd would admit that they had been scared. Not jibbering-wreck scared but tight-chest, senses-super-alert, not-knowing-what-might-happen scared. The kind of fear that comes with being locked inside a compound on the darkest of African nights when all your neighbours have fled overseas, even the moon has retreated behind clouds, and you are alone in a country that has suddenly turned hostile.
It was Friday evening and the sun had just set over the Shepherds’ farm in the tobacco region of Karoi in northern Zimbabwe, night falling quickly as always in Africa. Mr Shepherd and his wife, Eleanor, were drinking pre-dinner cocktails in the lounge with his parents, Mike and Lynn, while in the television room their four young children were lying on cushions amid their many cats and dogs, watching Walt Disney’s White Fang.
Suddenly the radio transmitter in the next room crackled into life and a panicked voice gabbled in Shona. Mr Shepherd rushed to answer, returning grim-faced. ‘It’s started,’ he said. Neighbouring farmer William Dardigan had been surrounded by about thirty land invaders, demanding to know why he had not left his farm.
Like the Shepherds, Mr Dardigan had stayed on his farm in defiance of a government order for 2,900 white farmers to be off their land by midnight on Thursday or ‘face the consequences’.
No one knew what those consequences might be. But the deadline followed a two-and-a-half-year campaign of violent land invasions in which twelve white farmers had been killed and hundreds more beaten and kicked off their farms, so most feared the worst. The perpetrators call themselves war vets, though many are too young to have fought in the liberation war and are probably just unemployed youths.
The façade of normality crumbled instantly as the Shepherds began discussing strategy if invaders came or police arrived to arrest them for breaking the law.
‘They’re trying to break us down mentally,’ said Mrs Shepherd, holding back the tears as she cuddled her youngest child, Graham, 4, ready for bed in his pyjamas. ‘This whole D-Day was psychological warfare.’
Peering outside, it was easy to understand why the family might break. The only light visible for miles was the fire of the war vets who covet the Shepherd home and have taken to killing the cattle and removing just one leg, leaving the three-legged carcasses to be found the next morning. Although there were thirteen guards out patrolling the lands, no one knew whose side they might be on any more in a society running out of food and rule of law.
‘Even our own labour is turning against us,’ said Mr Shepherd. ‘They stole half my maize crop. My manager is stealing my diesel. But I don’t blame them. They are desperate. They know we might soon be gone. That’s the cunning of Mugabe.’
Such fear left Zimbabwe’s white farmers in a terrible dilemma this weekend. Stay and risk arrest, or leave and perhaps lose everything. Many decided not to take the risk, particularly as today is Heroes’ Day, the annual military holiday to commemorate the war of liberation from white rule. Jenni Williams of the farmers’ organisation Justice for Agriculture said that at least 30 per cent have left the country, while another 15 per cent went away for the weekend.
The Shepherd family is among those who decided to defy the order and stay, fearing that otherwise they would lose all they had worked for. Yet for Mr Shepherd, 36, it was a greater risk than for most. An outspoken critic of Mugabe’s so-called land reform, he had already been arrested last month, and was recently warned by war veterans that he would be killed.
‘We don’t have a conscience about being here,’ he insists. ‘We’re as much African as any black. We were born here, bred here and what we have we’ve worked for. We’re not just going to walk away.’
Until the radio alert on Friday evening, the Shepherds had begun to hope that the weekend might pass uneventfully. They had been buoyed by a High Court decision on Wednesday declaring illegal the Land Acquisition Act which set the eviction deadline.
Thursday started off badly with the vicious beating of another Karoi farmer, Kevin Smith, accused by invaders on his land of trying to poison them after he put gypsum in his dam to increase the alkalinity for his tobacco seed.
The Shepherds, on hearing the news, decided to leave their four children aged between 4 and 10 in Harare. Dinner that evening was a strange mix of forced jollity punctuated with long silences and edgy laughter as people tried not to think about the impending midnight deadline.
But the night passed uneventfully, even if everyone appeared at breakfast the next morning with dark circles under their eyes. I guessed they had lain awake as I had, listening to the distant drumming and imagining men with machetes creeping up to the windows.
With all calm on Friday the children were brought back, happy to be reunited with their nine dogs and seven ponies. As the house filled with noise and laughter it almost seemed like an ordinary weekend.
The radio message changed all that. ‘It’s the grandchildren I worry about,’ says Mr Shepherd’s mother, Lynn. ‘Chris and Eleanor have this daring in them, but what about the children? It’s already affecting them.’
The local Rydings School where the children study has seen the number of pupils fall from 320 to fewer than 200 over the past year.
The Shepherds’ second daughter, Terrileigh, 9, has found it particularly hard. The school psychologist gave her a Homes and Gardens magazine and told her to cut out pictures of a house and a garden to stick on a sheet of paper. Asked why she had chosen the most luxurious, she said: ‘This is like our house and I am scared war vets will come and destroy it.’
Even 4-year-old Graham, whom they have not told that they might lose their home, has been affected. Mr Shepherd said: ‘He begs me, “Don’t play with the war vets, Dad, because they will cut your head off.”’
The tension has caused some marriages to collapse, particularly where one partner wants to leave and the other to stay. Driving around the Karoi area yesterday with Mr Shepherd, I saw that one farm after another lay abandoned or taken over by war vets, the owners fleeing to Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, often to manual jobs.
One of the Shepherds’ former neighbours now drives a council digger in Australia, his vast gum plantation and bougainvillea-covered house abandoned. Coffee beans lie rotting on bushes, fields of wheat have been turned to burnt stubble, and fences have been torn from game parks and the wildlife poached. As Mr Shepherd gives me a tour around the tobacco sheds and pigsties, the stables and pony jumps of his 800-hectare farm and what had clearly been an idyllic life, he says: ‘It’s very hard to abandon all this knowing we’ll probably never be compensated. When we got married, all we owned was a car. But we worked hard managing farms, then leasing them until we could afford our own. We bought this in 1995, building it up from nothing, and had just got to a point where we thought we were getting somewhere when the war vets arrived two years ago.’
To leave would mean financial ruin. ‘We borrowed money to build the dam, the animal sheds, new tobacco sheds at 26 per cent and within a year the interest rate had gone up to 46 per cent,’ said Mrs Shepherd.
Her mother-in-law shakes her head. ‘We whites have outstayed our welcome in this country and it’s time we realised,’ she says. ‘Both our daughters and their families have already moved to New Zealand. Mike and I are just waiting to see Chris and Eleanor safe then we will join them. The most important thing is your life. I wish they would just leave.’
But her son re
plies: ‘We can’t let Mugabe get away with such a large-scale heist of farms.’
Yet while no one wants to give in to a dictator, many are deciding it is not worth the struggle. The Shepherd family spent yesterday at yet another farewell party for a neighbour moving to America. One of the farmers took children up for joyrides in his small plane, attesting to the lifestyle they had all once enjoyed. Then it was back for another night of tension, expecting police or war vets to arrive at any moment.
As the radio crackled into life again, with a message from a guard reporting a gun missing, Mrs Shepherd looks exhausted. ‘I am frightened to let the children go riding on their own in case they get raped or their throats slashed. And I live in fear of Chris being arrested or killed, or a petrol bomb being thrown through the window. I long for a life without fear.’
For all the Shepherds’ hospitality, after three days I have rarely been so glad to leave anywhere. Mugabe’s prolonged use of violence to keep himself in power is turning one of the friendliest countries in the world into a land of fear where even the fields have eyes.
As I watched a war vet hammer a white-painted window frame clearly purloined from a farmer’s house on to the thatched hut he was building in the middle of a corn plantation, another man waves his thumb at me. A thumbs-up is the symbol of Mugabe’s ruling party. ‘You whites came with nothing,’ he spits. ‘You should leave with nothing.’
The Shepherds were driven off by war vets a few months after I stayed with them. Their farm was occupied by Francis Nhema, Zimbabwe’s Minister of Environment, who was chosen by other African nations to become chairman of the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development in May 2007 amid international outrage.
When the invasions started in 2000, I, like many, could not believe that Mugabe was serious about seizing all the white-owned farms. Zimbabwe’s land distribution was undoubtedly unfair, with most of the productive land still in white hands more than twenty years on from independence. But the 5,000 commercial farms produced most of the food for the nation, were the country’s biggest employer and brought in 40 per cent of its export earnings.
I underestimated Mugabe. By 2007, less than 200 white farmers remained on their farms and evictions were continuing. Yet it was never really a racial issue. We in the western media played into Mugabe’s hands by initially portraying the land seizures as such, focusing on white farmers like the Shepherds, perhaps because they seemed people like us. But the real victims were the hundreds of thousands of black farm workers who lost their homes and jobs. With nowhere else to go, they fled to the rural areas where they struggle to survive on baobab pods, wild fruits and fried termites. Many were beaten by marauding youth brigades who accused them of supporting the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). In August 2002, on a journey that took me from the Zambezi Valley in the north-west to Manicaland in the east, I discovered something even more horrific.
For four hours Dora, aged 12, was gang-raped by Mugabe’s men
Sunday Telegraph, 25 August 2002
‘THE GAME WE are about to play needs music,’ the Zimbabwean police constable said to the 12-year-old girl. But as he tossed a mattress on to the ground it was clear that it was no game that he was planning. For the next four hours the girl’s mother and younger sisters, aged 9 and 7, were forced to chant praises to Robert Mugabe and watch Dora* being gang-raped by five ‘war veterans’ and the policeman.
‘Every time they stopped singing the policeman and war vets beat them with shamboks and sticks,’ said Dora, crying and clenching her hands repeatedly as she recalled the ordeal which took place behind her family hut in a village in the dark shadow of the Vumba mountains of Manicaland, in eastern Zimbabwe. ‘They kept thrusting themselves into me over and over again, saying: “This is the punishment for you who want to sell this country to Tony Blair and the whites.” When they had finished it hurt so much I couldn’t walk.’
Now in hiding, she spends most nights in frightened wakefulness, remembering the rough breath on her face, the hands forcing apart her thighs, and ‘that animal thing’ as she calls it slamming into her underfed body. Dora was raped because her father is a supporter of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). He is not a candidate, not a party official, just a carpenter who had mistakenly believed that he lived in a country where he could vote for whom he liked.
Dora’s story, as she tells it, started with a Land Rover full of war veterans drawing up at the door of the hut around 10 p.m. one evening in June, while her father was away, and ended with her left bruised and bleeding at 2.30 a.m. ‘There had been a bad luck owl in the msasa tree that day,’ she said. But the real beginning of the horror can be traced back to March when her village voted against Mugabe in the presidential elections. For rape has become the latest weapon in Mugabe’s war on his own population. Dora’s echoing screams on the African night were a warning to all the other villagers as to what might happen to those who even think of defying the President again.
Dora is one of hundreds of young girls who are being raped in the fields and mountains of rural Zimbabwe every month as part of what human rights workers are calling a ‘systematic political cleansing of the population’.
Many of the girls are taken to camps run by Mugabe’s youth militia, the Green Bombers, a sinister parallel to the rape camps of Bosnian Muslim women established by Serb forces in the early 1990s. And with half the country facing starvation, more and more youths are being lured to join the militia by the prospect of food.
In Zimbabwe, though, there is an extra dimension to the ordeals that the women endure: with 38 per cent of the population HIV positive, rape is often the start of a death sentence.
‘We’re seeing an enormous prevalence of rape and enough cases to say it’s being used by the state as a political tool with women and girls being raped because they are wives, girlfriends or daughters of political activists,’ said Tony Reeler, clinical director of the Amani Trust, a Harare-based organisation that monitors and treats torture victims. ‘There are also horrific cases of girls as young as 12 or 13 being taken off to militia camps, used and abused and kept in forced concubinage. But I suspect the real extent of what is happening is going to take a long time to come out.’
Rape goes unreported in many countries but more so in Africa, particularly in rural areas where a raped daughter is seen as bringing shame on the family and hard to marry off. The pressure to remain silent is even stronger in a police state where the police are often the perpetrators. Dora’s family did go to the police station only to be laughed at with the words: ‘We’re not fools to arrest one of our colleagues.’
Nor do many rape victims receive medical treatment. In Dora’s case the local clinic had no drugs and her family did not have money to take her to hospital, so she is being treated with traditional herbs.
Her story is far from unique. In a harrowing month-long investigation, photographer Justin Sutcliffe and I interviewed rape victims in villages throughout the Zambezi Valley, Matabeleland and Manicaland.
Among those we met were a teacher beaten so badly that she had lost her baby, and a former militia member who had participated in the raping and pillaging intended to pacify the countryside. We found a population living in terror, some towns completely ‘cleansed’ of all opposition.
We spent an uneasy night ourselves when we underestimated the time it would take to reach a safe house in the Zambezi Valley and broke down on sandy tracks in the dark, forty miles from the nearest telephone. Not far away we could hear drums and chants of ‘Pasi ne murungu’ (‘Down with the white man’) and other slogans of Mugabe’s ruling Zanu-PF party coming from a group around a fire. In the end we were towed out by men who turned out to be war vets.
Fear and hunger are what passes for life in much of Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. In the capital Harare there is a façade of normality – workmen repaint the blue trolley shelter in the gleaming new airport terminal, the traffic lights work, and pavement cafés serve the best cappuccino in
Africa. The roads are full of gleaming new BMWs, known as ‘Girlfriends of Ministers’ cars’, bought by government officials profiting from privileged access to foreign exchange at subsidised rates.
The only signs of anything amiss are the long snaking queues for bread, sugar and fuel, the absence of maize (previously the country’s staple food) from all shops, and the number of people simply hanging around. Unemployment has now reached 70 per cent of the working population.
In the rural areas that Zimbabwe’s Marxist President regards as his stronghold it is a different story. Furious that so many of ‘his’ people voted against him in elections – which he knows he did not really win – and incensed by calls such as that from the Bush administration demanding a rerun, he has unleashed his forces to wreak revenge in the most horrible manner.
When he was sworn back in as president in April, the 78-year-old, who has ruled the country since independence in 1980, warned the opposition: ‘We’ll make them run if they haven’t run before.’ Assuming that his declaration of victory would bring an end to the violence which had dogged the campaign, no one then realised the lengths to which he was prepared to go.
Officials now speak of ‘taking the system back to zero’ and reducing the country’s 12 million population. It’s a chilling echo of what the Khmer Rouge did in Cambodia in the 1970s and they seem to be employing similar tactics of emptying cities and targeting teachers. ‘We would be better off with only 6 million people, with our own people who support the liberation struggle,’ said Didymus Mutasa, the Organisation Secretary of Zanu-PF.
The situation is particularly bad in Manicaland, or the Eastern Highlands as the settlers called it, its misty mountains reminding them of Scotland. In almost every village where people were known to have voted against Mugabe, we pieced together the same story of beatings of teachers and wanton destruction of property. Everywhere we saw the charred skeletons of burnt bicycles, the main mode of transport of rural MDC workers.
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