The Fear

by Peter Godwin

  I slide the statement back across the table. “Do you know what happened to him?”

  “We think they have killed Givemore since he smuggled out this letter,” Mubwanda says.

  When I return the next evening, the power is off again. Sharon is trying to get the generator started, but for now, we are all in the dark. Mike looks exhausted. He is still standing on his chair, out in the garden, on the phone, trying to get one of his trucks into Chiweshe with coffins to bury the MDC members who have just been murdered there.

  “It was the most brazen attack,” he says, “at Muzarabani Business Center. They shot three guys at point-blank range, in front of over three hundred people! They said, ‘This is what happens to you when you vote for MDC.’ ”

  On my way out, behind the house sitting by himself, hunched over, rocking, I come across a new arrival. Timothy Makwenjere. One of his eyes is grotesquely swollen. I kneel down beside him and introduce myself. Makwenjere has spent the last few days on the run, and still has a haunted, hunted air. In a hushed monotone, he tells me that he’s a mechanic at Muriel gold mine in Banket, and chairman of the MDC there. “On election day, we won nearly all the votes on the mine,” he says. They were jubilant.

  But the next day there was a knock on his door, and he opened it to find a group of Mugabe’s militia, who set about him with metal bars. Then they smashed all his windows, and went down the whole row of houses doing the same to them.

  As I turn my car to drive away, my headlights shine upon Timothy. He is still sitting outside the window, swollen head in hands, still rocking back and forth. His wife now squats silently on the ground beside him, her face dark and closed and scared.

  THE NEXT MORNING, early, I drive over to the Avenues Clinic and slip back into the children’s ward, to check on the little boy with the injured eye, the boy in Mike Mason’s photo.

  Sampson Chemerani is still asleep, his little knees drawn up onto his VW Beetle T-shirt, his face puffy in repose—one eye massively swollen, surrounded by a gory abrasion and a wound on his temple. He is the youngest of seven kids. They come from Shamva, where their village was burned down last Sunday because they were MDC supporters. The next night at 2 a.m., as they lay huddled in the open, among the charred remains of their huts, they were attacked again, this time by more than twenty ZANU-PF youth with sticks and rocks, and in the melee Sampson was struck in the eye.

  His mother, Margaret, sits in her charity clothes, a headscarf, a bright floral dress, and a wide-lapelled gray jacket that is way too big and sags over her shoulders. She is a rural woman and politely claps her crossed palms together in greeting.

  “Sampson doesn’t really know what happened,” she says, her voice low so as not to wake him. “He is too young to understand.”

  Each night Margaret patiently rocks Sampson to sleep, and once he finally drops off, she drags the thin foam mattress from under his hospital bed and lies just below him, because he has night terrors, she says. He sees Mugabe’s chanting thugs bearing down upon him again, with their flaming torches, their clubs and rocks and whips. And he wakes up whimpering.

  On the end of his bed hangs his medical record, charting his injuries. In an effort to cheer him up, the nurses have glued to its cover a picture torn from a magazine. It is a Tyrannosaurus rex, and it fiercely bares its glinting ranks of teeth. Underneath is a caption: “The truth about killer dinosaurs.” I stand there looking at it and silently fuming. The truth of our own killer Tyrannosaurus—the “tyrant lizard”—is evident all around us. I pray that he too will be the last of his breed of tyrants, soon to become extinct.

  nineteen

  A Regime on the Rampage

  AFTER SIX WEEKS of orbiting Africa since the election, trying to drum up political support, Morgan Tsvangirai finally flies back to his beleaguered home on 24 May. There have been a number of very detailed tip-offs of plots to kill him, which is one reason he has kept delaying his return. En route to the airport I pass through two police roadblocks, and see dozens of their sharpshooters standing in the tall grass on either side of the road. Whether they’re here to protect him or do him harm seems moot.

  At the airport, there are a few local journalists and a posse of Western diplomats waiting. Jim McGee joins us, a little late, he says, because he had to return to his vehicle to take off his pistol and unload it. “I always travel armed when I’m alone here,” he says. “It’s registered,” he adds, “though I’m not quite sure what the laws about concealed weapons are here.”

  It’s Saturday and he’s in mufti: blue jeans, a peach sweater, and a gold neck chain, and he’s alone, having given his staff the weekend off, because they’ve been working under such pressure for so long, he says.

  We are still trying to pay for our coffee—at Z$600 million a cup—handing over banded bricks of banknotes, when Morgan sweeps through the arrivals hall below us, and climbs into a waiting Prado SUV. A pick-up truck of bodyguards squeals off behind him, so quickly that one is left behind, and has to sprint after it and vault in, breathless.

  A ZTV crew train the barrel of their camera at McGee. “Why are you here?” shouts the reporter. The game, as McGee knows perfectly well, is to get him to admit that he’s here to meet Tsvangirai, and so confirm the notion that the opposition leader is a stooge of Washington and the West.

  “Me?” says McGee, with an “aw shucks” expression. “I’ve come to see off the Spanish ambassador,” and he claps the surprised Spaniard on the shoulder.

  “You’re not here to meet Morgan Tsvangirai?” accuses the reporter.

  McGee feigns surprise. “Morgan Tsvangirai’s here? Really?”

  TSVANGIRAI first makes hospital bedside rounds of torture victims, and then addresses the hundreds of displaced supporters who have crowded into his party headquarters, Harvest House, in central Harare, where they have sought sanctuary from the violence.

  In the vast gloomy cavern of the open-plan offices, tier upon tier of supporters are carefully organized by size, small children and nursing mothers seated on the floor in front. Many are badly injured, some in wheelchairs, or on crutches. The lethal white gleam of plaster casts and bandages is everywhere, even on some of the children.

  The walls here are lined with black plastic bin bags containing what little clothes they could flee with. The questions they ask him are mostly practical ones; they want blankets, clothes, food, sanctuary. One woman has her hand raised patiently throughout the Q&A session, and he eventually gets to her last. Trembling with grief, she tells him that when she fled Mugabe’s assailants she became separated from her two-year-old child. “Please, please, help me find my baby,” she sobs.

  A few hours later, Tsvangirai gives a press conference at the Mirabelle Room in Meikles Hotel, furnished with brass sconces and mirrored ceiling. There are no foreign reporters here—they have all fled—but a full contingent of local ones.

  “I return with a very sad heart,” he says. “Democrats have been targeted by the dictatorship. This regime is on the rampage… Forty of our people have been killed, more than twenty-five thousand have been beaten, tortured. Not since Gukurahundi have we seen such violence. They are targeting our brightest and strongest activists, hunting them down.”

  And he makes a direct appeal to his rival. “Mugabe is a failed liberation hero. He can set his people free again. He can open the door to a new Zimbabwe.”

  MORGAN TSVANGIRAI lives in a cul-de-sac in the Harare suburb of Strathaven, in an unremarkable house, with pale pink walls and a red tiled roof. Outside the gate, two bodyguards in dark suits sit on a concrete culvert. More mill around inside. After being out of the country for a month, since the first round of elections, evading death threats and lobbying African leaders to his cause, Tsvangirai looks exhausted. He has a large, round, slightly pockmarked face, with deep-set eyes and a ready smile. Today he wears an open-necked checked shirt.

  He tilts back in his office chair in the converted garage at the back of the house and yawns heavily. He tells me tha
t his wife of thirty years, Susan, a stalwart of the party, has remained behind in Johannesburg with the two youngest of his six kids, fourteen-year-old twins, until the security situation up here improves. But, he says, “Susan has been unwavering.”

  Despite the pressure and danger, he is clearly relieved to be home. “Zimbabwe is special,” he says. “When you compare it to other places in Africa, it has such potential, the infrastructure, the people—compared to the chaos in west Africa.

  “In the last eight years there has been such anti-white rhetoric from Mugabe, but we Zimbabweans are non-racial now. It’s unlike South Africa—here the racial barriers have been broken down. There is really no desire to settle old scores.”

  But much of the pressure on Mugabe from the West has been counter-productive, he admits. Because Mugabe and his cronies champion anti-white attitudes, support by the West of the Zimbabwean opposition can backfire. “Which is why we have been trying to work through African institutions.”

  In many ways, Mugabe’s nemesis is also his antithesis. Physically Morgan is a bear to Mugabe’s mamba, his face round, his smile quick. Always a good performer in Shona, he has become an increasingly articulate and charismatic speaker in English too.

  After almost toppling Mugabe’s party in several finagled elections, in 2000, 2002, 2005, he stumbled over the decision whether to participate in elections for the senate. Tsvangirai favored a boycott, but two of his top MDC officials, Gibson Sibanda and Welshman Ncube, disagreed. In the end Tsvangirai bulldozed his way through, but Sibanda and Ncube split from the party as a result. They formed a new group, composed mostly of the MDC’s Ndebele leadership, under Dr. Arthur Mutambara, a Shona Rhodes scholar, with an Oxford doctorate in robotics, who later taught at MIT. Confusingly the offshoot is called MDC-M, M for the Mutambara faction.

  Notwithstanding Tsvangirai’s refusal to be overruled in this case, he appears to share none of Mugabe’s messianic entitlement.

  “This has been an evolution for me,” he tells me. “I was politically conscious, yes—but never in my wildest dreams did I expect to be in this position.”

  This afternoon Tsvangirai attended the funeral of Tonderai Ndira—the thirty-two-year-old MDC official who headed the party’s security department for Harare, and who had been arrested more times than anyone else in the party, the man they called Zimbabwe’s Steve Biko. “I’m so saddened by these indiscriminate, callous killings—there’s no ideology to it,” he says. “It’s just state-sponsored violence against defenseless citizens.”

  But even the savage spasm of violence won’t cow the people, he believes. “ZANU-PF cannot beat people into submission. Matabeleland proves it—they massacred people down there, but still those people vote against Mugabe.”

  What does he think motivates the man he has worked so assiduously to unseat, the man who has turned Zimbabwe into his personal fiefdom? “Robert Mugabe is an enigma—he evokes conflicting emotions in people. Liberation hero versus cruelty; the unleashing of violence, in Matabeleland, Murambatsvina, and now this post-election violence. I think he’s driven by power—nothing else.”

  twenty

  Canon War

  A FEW HUNDRED YARDS from Dandaro clinic, where Denias Dombo lies with his broken limbs encased in plaster chrysalises, and Gandanga nurses his tumid legs, crushed under the truck wheels of Mugabe’s agents, Bishop Sebastian Bakare lets me into his apartment, one of those that make up Dandaro’s gated retirement community. After my father died, this is where we hoped my mother might live, before we lost that plan to the cancer of hyperinflation.

  While his tall German wife, Ruth, makes tea, Bakare, who is a black Zimbabwean from Manicaland, explains how he was brought out of retirement to head the Anglican Church in Zimbabwe, after a schism engineered by Mugabe. Like the farms here, the Anglican Church has been jambanja’d, with most of its buildings illegally confiscated. “We have no premises, we are seriously displaced.” He smiles.

  This strange state of affairs began after the Anglican Church publicly condemned Mugabe’s actions, and one of its priests, Bishop Nolbert Kunonga, a Mugabe apologist, broke away.

  The matter is in court, sighs Bakare, though he has no faith in the country’s pliant judges. “We say that Kunonga left the Church, committed schism, to found his own Church, and he has no claim on Church property.

  “When I was appointed, I wrote to all our priests and asked them to declare themselves. All but seven of them stayed loyal to the Province of Central Africa. Since then, Kunonga has elevated four of those renegade priests to bishops.

  “He put St. Mary’s Cathedral under siege on the day of my installation,” says Bakare, “supported by hired thugs, hooligans. I was supposed to be taking a service, but Kunonga was inside and wouldn’t budge. He was sitting up at the altar with his miter on his head and a crozier [the heavy, hooked staff that is a bishop’s symbol of office] in his hand—it looked unreal—he was on his own, with no congregation.”

  When Bakare tried to begin his service, Kunonga “charged at me with his crozier, using it as a weapon, and said I had no right to be there, that he was the only bishop. I told him he had been stripped of his office. He screamed at me, snatched the missal from me, and threw it on the floor.”

  He swung his crozier at Bakare again. The image of rival bishops dueling with their croziers seems ludicrous, but that is almost what it came to. Even the police officer was embarrassed, says Bakare. “He said, ‘Look, this is no good, priests fighting in front of the congregation, let’s go into the office.’ But Kunonga wouldn’t budge, so in the end we had to hold our service in the hall, while he stayed inside the cathedral.”

  Kunonga also busied himself sanitizing the cathedral of its history—it was built around a capstone brought from St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, damaged by fire during the Nazi blitz in 1941. But now he ordered the ripping out of plaques to those killed in action in World War II. And the removal, too, of memorials to white pioneers.

  “Then,” continues Bakare, “the riot police started turning up at dozens of our churches and beating and chasing away our congregations. When we challenged them, and said they had no legal basis to evict us, they said, ‘We are getting our orders from above.’ We said, ‘What, above God?’

  “Kunonga has been campaigning for ZANU-PF, and when they lost the first round, they attacked us as scapegoats, just like they attacked people in the rural areas.

  “At a recent gathering at St. Michael’s of three thousand two hundred members of the Mothers’ Unions from all over Mashonaland, the riot police came again. Kunonga was with them, hanging back, directing them.”

  The congregation was forced to disperse, and as Bishop Bakare drove slowly away, the women worshippers, in a gesture of support (meant to echo the palm fronds placed under the hooves of Jesus’s donkey), laid their jackets and sweaters down on the road for his car to drive over. I find myself thinking of Gandanga, a few yards away in Dandaro hospital, a human frond beneath the devil’s wheels.

  ON SUNDAY, I go to Christchurch in Borrowdale, where my father’s funeral was held, thinking of attending a morning service. But Sokiri, the church gardener, explains to me that the Rev. Harry Rinashe, the pastor, has defected to the rebel side. None of the Christchurch congregation has gone with him, and they are now led by the assistant pastor, Blessing Shambare.

  It’s all starting to make sense now. Rinashe had seemed oddly hostile at the prospect of my father’s ashes being interred here. First, he claimed the church cemetery was full, which was patently untrue. Then he said that there was no record of the burial plot I’d reserved for Dad, next to Jain, and he was somewhat annoyed when the parish secretary duly dug out a receipt that proved otherwise. Even then, he insisted that I produce written statements from other prominent parishioners that my father had attended services there.

  “He doesn’t want any more white people in the cemetery,” Sokiri murmured to me at the time, but I didn’t believe him.

  I wait outside for th
e service to begin; the only other congregant, a solemn black man in a tightly knotted tie and a lumpy tweed jacket, several sizes too big, clutching a crumpled felt trilby, is studying the parish list on the vestibule notice board. He approaches me, and pours out his predicament. “I used to be the gardener of Mr. Roderick, but Mr. Roderick went away to Australia, and I have lost his address, I used to keep it always in my pocket and then my wife washed my trousers and the paper, it got wet so I cannot read it now, I want to write to Mr. Roderick, for him to help me, but I no longer have his address.” He looks crestfallen. “He used to attend this church, so I thought to come here. Do you have his address, please?” he beseeches. Together we scan the parish list, but there is no Roderick.

  “Is Roderick his first name, or his surname?” I ask.

  He thinks for a while, scrunching his eyes, and pressing his temples in concentration. “I don’t know,” he says, miserably. “For me it was his only name.” He walks away, muttering to himself, and furiously beating his leg with his old trilby.

  When the service begins, I slip into a pew at the back. With Mr. Roderick’s gardener gone, there are only four congregants besides me. All are members of Rinashe’s family, says Sokiri later, and they swing round and peer at me as I enter. Then they begin to sing. The only musical accompaniment is the desultory susurrus of a solitary maraca, deployed by Rinashe’s wife. Recently elevated by Kunonga, Rinashe now wears a scarlet and gold bishop’s miter on his head, and holds a crozier of his own. His new position obviously agrees with him—he seems to have put on more than fifteen pounds since I last saw him.

  Today he preaches a sermon about turning the other cheek. “Human nature prompts me to want to hit back—to revenge—but we must not.”

  Afterward, I slip away to find that the loyalist congregants, about a hundred of them, black but for a couple of white pensioners (who soon depart), are standing in all their Sunday finery on Crowhill Road, outside the church, with Rinashe’s former assistant pastor, Blessing Shambare. They wish to hold their service next, but their way is blocked by a dozen blue-helmeted riot police, armed with batons and whips and pistols. The congregation mill around for a while, their resolve hardening.