The Fear
Page 36
To my sister, Georgina Godwin, who is still the funniest, most observant traveling companion I know. My mother, Dr. Helen Godwin, whose fortitude is humbling. My wife, Joanna Coles, and our sons, Hugo and Thomas, who gamely tolerate both my lengthy absences, and my writing purdah.
In Zimbabwe (South Africa, the U.S. and UK) I relied on hospitality, help and advice from so many people. Three of them—Murelle Hayes, Mike Mason and Robin Watson—died during the course of this book, and are greatly missed. I am grateful to them, and to the following, whose inclusion here, however, should not necessarily imply that they agree with all I have written:
Kristen Abrams. William and Christina Anderson. Sara Andrews. Diana Anthony. Betsy Apple. Manuel Bagorro. Brett Bailey. Sebastian and Ruth Bakare. Jeffrey Barbee. Arthur Basopo. Richard and Penny Beattie. Roy, Charles, Heather and Casey Bennett. Rajiv Bhendre. Tendai Biti. Eric and Baila Bloch. William Brandon. Ed Byrne. Angela Campbell. Beefy and Lynda Campbell-Morrison. Guy Cary. Tonde Chakanedza. Takawira Chamauya. Godfrey Chanetsa. Hilary Cheinuru. Joyce Chihanya. Henry and Patricia Chimbiri. Emmanuel Chiroto. Edmond and Precious Chitawah. David Coltart. Paul and Marie Connolly. Laurent Contini. Albrecht Conze. Milos Coric. John “Paddy” Crean. Eddie Cross. Jumbo Davidson. Goof de Jong. Honorata Devlin. Esther Dewe. Miriam Dikinya-Chikoto. Lance Dixon. Tashi Dolma. Denias Dombo. Margaret Dongo. Elmon Dube. Georgie du Plessis. Raoul du Toit. Jonathan Elliott. Comrade Fatso. Grace Gambeza. Donnard Gambezi. Martin Ganda. Tichanzii Gandanga. Shepherd Geti. Zachariah Godi. Xanthe Godwin Summerfield. Lin and Jean Goncalves. Cedric Green. Peta Hall. Jeanette and Forbes Harvey. Rita Harvey. Simon Herring. Beatrice Hitschmann. David Hughes. David Hulme. Augustine Hungwe. Elias Hwenga. Brian James. Daiton Japani. Anna Kadurira. Thomas Kanodzimbira. Reason Kapfuya. Kerry and Iain Kay. Michael and Kim Keating. Shane and Birgit Kidd. Mike Kimberley. Paula Kingwill. Gift Konjana. Lynette Kore-Karenyi. Mike and Roxy Laing. Peter and Diane Lobel. George and Angie Lock. Frances Lovemore. Richard and Susie Lowe. Adrian Lunga. Chris Lynam. Trust Maanda. Lovemore Machengedzera. Owen and Fungai Machisa. Vincent Mai. Theresa Makone. Bright Makunde. Timothy Makwenjere. Jonathan Malikita. Andrew and Julie Mama. Chenjerai Mangezo. Sarah Mannell. Fideus Mapondera. Mlaga Maposa. Xavier Marchal. James Maridadi. Edison Marisau. Daffwell Marumahoko. Reason Mashambanaka. Sharon Mason. Godfrey Matanga. Mduduzi Mathuthu. Lawrence Mattock. Brian Maviso. Wilf and Trish Mbanga. Margaret Mbiriamowa. Murray McCartney. Jim and Sheila McGee. Fraser McKay. Trish McKenzie. Dave and Irene Meikle. Roy Meiring. Brenda Meister. David Mhende. Sipho Mhlanga and all her orphans. Syma Mirza. Diana Mitchell. Joshua Moyo. Kundisai Mtero. Beatrice Mtwetwa. Tawanda Mubwanda. Pishai Muchauraya. Norest Muchochoma. Casper Mugano. Mudiwa and Julia Mundawarara. Tendai and Imelda Mundawarara. Godfrey and Killiana Mungwadzi. Prisca Muomo. Charity Murandu. Martin Murombedzi. Angela Mushore. James Mushore. Marcey Mushore. Pete Musto. Much Musunda. Happiness Mutata. Prosper Mutseyami. Carpenter Mwanza. Shine Mzariri. Isabel Ngenywa. Briarley Nicholson. Max Nkandla. Stanley Nkisi. Stephen Nkomo. Dominic Norman-Taylor. Alex Nunes. Mike Odendaal. Rick and Sally Passaportis. Tendai Pawandiwa. Gavin Peter. Darrel Plowes. Robin and Jennifer Plunket. Tyrone and Lucy Plunket. Andrew and Julie Pocock. John and Cynthia Pybus. Jan Raath. Kate Raath. Allen Radford. Bev and Tony Reeler. Ann Reid. John Robertson. Maud Samoyo. Jeremy Sanford. Weldon and Kathy Schenck. Ken Schofield. Kim Schofield. Dieter Scholz. Blessing Shambare and the congregation of Christchurch, Borrowdale. Belinda and John Sharples. Angus Shaw. Gabriel Shumba. Kurt and Laura Slight. Karl Snater. Irene Staunton. Sharon Stead. Trudy Stevenson. Clive Stockil. Roger Stringer. Paul Thistle. Tree Society of Zimbabwe. Morgan and the late Susan Tsvangirai. Doug and Tempe van der Riet. Leon and Mags Varley. Lester Venter. Paul Verryn. Heinrich and Amanda Von Pezold. Ellah Wakatama Allfrey. Pius and Winnie Wakatama. Glenn and Randee Warren. Sydney, Fiona, and Alasdair Watson. George and Tanya Webster. Hildegard Weinrich. Iden Wetherell. Lynne and Martin Wilkins. Pebbles Williamson. Spike Williamson. John Worswick. Paula Worswick.
I am obliged to these and all the people who were brave enough, in dangerous times, to talk to me.
Peter Godwin
New York, 2010
Reading Group Guide
THE FEAR
ROBERT MUGABE AND THE MARTYRDOM OF ZIMBABWE
by
Peter Godwin
A conversation with Peter Godwin
You traveled back to Zimbabwe even while you knew there was a very real threat to your personal safety. What were your strongest reasons for doing so? Would you do it again if necessary?
At the time I returned to Zimbabwe, it looked like Mugabe would accept his electoral defeat, but once I got there it quickly became clear that he wouldn’t. Instead he began a ferocious crackdown on his political opposition. He also banned the foreign media. But once I started to hear the testimony of those opposition activists who had been tortured by the regime, I wanted to do what I could to give a voice to these who he had tried to silence. Personal risk in these situations is a complicated matrix of things. But where others were sacrificing so much, helping to amplify their plight seemed like the least I could do.
What were the most challenging aspects of researching and writing this book?
I did much of the research for this book while the torture campaign was still going on, so it was difficult and scary. That’s why I wrote the book in the present tense, to convey the confusion and the fear as it happened, in real time, and to avoid the sterility that can sometimes clothe writing with the bogus certainty of hindsight.
Who is the one person you most wish you could have interviewed but were unable to?
I suppose I would have to say Robert Mugabe himself, the man at the center of this dreadful web of repression, although, in truth, he says very little of real substance in most of the interviews I’ve read. He tends to magniloquent grandstanding instead.
There are great heroes in this story as well as villains. How would you define the heroism of Mugabe’s citizens who have stood up in the face of his tyranny?
Many of them were accidental heroes, insofar as they didn’t set out to be political martyrs, and some seemed almost surprised at their own courage, and then justifiably proud that they had stuck their necks out when so many others were ducking. These are inspiring stories, the stories of everyday people who find courage in their own hearts.
In the opening of the book, you ask your mother where she would like to be buried when she dies, and she replies: at home, in Africa. Would you answer similarly? Do you still think of Zimbabwe as home?
Zimbabwe was where I was born and raised. And I think it will always be what formed me. I remain bonded to the place, in an emotional sense. But more and more of us have hyphenated identities; we are not exclusively tied to one place or another, as more and more of us move around the world. I think we may look back one day and see ‘nationality’ as a nineteenth-and twentieth-century concept.
What are the lessons of the Zimbabwe tragedy for the rest of the world? What is the world’s responsibility to Zimbabwe and Zimbabweans?
Here you have a people who have been struggling for democracy for ten years now, and the world has done very little to help them. Zimbabweans have had great violence visited upon them by a brutal dictator, and yet they have remained nonviolent themselves. That the world has largely ignored their plight is a moral stain on an international community which publically espouses humanitarian ideals but is, in reality, primarily motivated by more narrowly defined strategic interests.
Do you foresee uprisings taking place in Zimbabwe and southern Africa on a similar scale to the Arab Spring of 2011?
I’m afraid that is unlikely. The tipping point in the successful Arab ‘uprisings’—like Tunisia and Egypt—has been where the army has proved reluctant to put down pro-democracy demonstrations. In Zimbabwe, the soldiers and policemen remain loyal to the dictator. Any flower stems you may try to place in the barrels of their rifles will be met with live bullets coming the other way.
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What do you think will happen in Zimbabwe when Mugabe dies? How can the country be saved?
The death of any dictator is a time of great danger and instability but also of great opportunity. Since its independence in 1980, Zimbabwe has known only one leader, and he has created a personal cult around himself. But it is the hubris of the dictator that he cannot face the prospect of his own mortality, and so refuses to ordain a successor. Hence his death may well trigger a conflict among rival claimants to the leadership of his own party. It is also possible that with his demise, his party, which he has so dominated for so long, will simply wither and die on the poisonous vine of repression.
Questions and topics for discussion
In the prologue of the book, Peter Godwin asks his mother, now living in London, where she’d like to be buried. She replies, “At home. In Africa. Next to your father.” What do you think of her determination?
Godwin compares Mugabe with Robespierre, a figure in the French Revolution who was instrumental in the Reign of Terror. How would you compare Mugabe’s “revolution” in Zimbabwe with the famously bloody French Revolution?
Over the course of Mugabe’s long tenure, Zimbabwe has gone from a land of plenty to one where destitution and disease run rampant. What factors led to this situation? How do you imagine things could have gone differently in Zimbabwe?
When Godwin returns to Zimbabwe, he finds a country he no longer recognizes as home. How are the ideas of homeland and belonging woven into the book?
Foreign journalists had been banned from entering Zimbabwe, yet Godwin and his sister Georgina return anyway. Is their act of defiance justified or reckless? Would you have done the same, in their shoes?
Do journalists have a responsibility to put themselves in personal and/or professional danger to uncover and disseminate the truth?
Godwin speaks with several white farmers—holdouts in a dwindling population that has been largely persecuted and evicted. What keeps them there?
Roy Bennett is a champion of the black community in Chimanimani who was voted into the parliament by the people and then forced off his farm and into exile by Mugabe. How can an exiled political figure wield power, and how does it differ from power wielded within the state?
Godwin visits the hospitalized victims of Mugabe’s political crackdown. Why do you think he chooses to repeat their stories here?
Georgina visits the mahogany tree she planted to mark the birth of her daughter, Xanthe. What is the significance of “putting down roots” in this story? Will Xanthe will be able to visit her tree again?
What do you think of Godwin’s conception of “bearing witness” in this story?
How is Mugabe’s power tied to violence and fear? Would he be able to rule without recourse to them? Where else in the world do you see parallels with this combination of power, fear, and violence?
What do you make of the opposition leader of the MDC, Morgan Tsvangirai?
When police try to arrest him outside of a church, Godwin is joined by members of the congregation, who insist that the police will have to arrest all of them. How is united resistance more effective than solitary defiance?
In Zimbabwe, Godwin is repeatedly singled out for his whiteness. How has race been a part of the crisis there?
What shocked you most in Godwin’s account? Who were its greatest heroes?
How have your ideas about Zimbabwe changed since reading The Fear?
What do you think will happen in Zimbabwe when Mugabe dies? Or do you think he will be pushed out first? Which seems more likely to happen?
CONTENTS
Front Cover Image
Welcome
Dedication
Epigraph
Map
Searching for Sky
1. The Fist of Empowerment
2. A Nation of Gentlemen
3. People Smell Power and Run to Where It Is
4. The Last Goats
5. No Oil to Give
6. The Tears of a Clown
7. Down the Rabbit Hole
8. Birgit’s Bad Hair Day
9. Boys to Men
10. My Blood Is Too Heavy
11. Chronicles of Narnia
12. What Fear Smells Like
13. Dreamland
14. You Can Never Go Home Again
15. Wounds of the Heart
16. Defense Injuries
17. Alone, Unarmed, Afraid
18. It’s Hard to Play Cards with Two Broken Arms
19. A Regime on the Rampage
20. Canon War
21. They Laugh While You Burn
22. The Final Battle for Total Control
23. Where Do Tears Come From?
24. Like a Candle in a Dungeon
25. The Day of the Wildebeest
26. After Forty Years in the Desert
27. Lassoing the Moon
28. Don’t Trade Me for Anything
29. Blood Diamonds
30. Witchwood
31. The World’s Oldest Leader
32. If Ever We Should All Die, It Will Be Forgotten Now
33. The Ordeal Tree
34. Dynamics of Distress
35. The Cutter-of-Clouds
36. Bullets to Be Paid For
37. Behind the Blindfold
38. Delicious
39. The Hook
40. Men Without Knees
41. The Axe Forgets but Not the Tree
List of Acronyms
Resources
Acknowledgments
Reading Group Guide
About the Author
Also by Peter Godwin
Praise for Peter Godwin’s
Copyright
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PETER GODWIN is the award-winning author of When a Crocodile Eats the Sun and Mukiwa. Born and raised in Zimbabwe, he was educated at Cambridge and Oxford and became a foreign correspondent, reporting from more than sixty countries. Since moving to Manhattan, he has written for National Geographic, the New York Times Magazine, and Vanity Fair. He has taught at Princeton and Columbia, and in 2010 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Also by Peter Godwin
When a Crocodile Eats the Sun
A Memoir
Mukiwa
A White Boy in Africa
Wild at Heart
Man and Beast in Southern Africa
(PHOTOGRAPHS BY CHRIS JOHNS, FOREWORD BY NELSON MANDELA)
The Three of Us
A New Life in New York
(WITH JOANNA COLES)
“Rhodesians Never Die”
The Impact of War and Political Change on White Rhodesia c. 1970–1980
(WITH IAN HANCOCK)
Also by Peter Godwin
When a Crocodile Eats the Sun
A memoir of Africa
“He creates an indelible picture of life in that besieged and battered land…. A powerful and deeply affecting book about a family trying to ride the tsunami of change in a country that is coming asunder.”
—Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
“This saga about one family’s struggle in a Zimbabwe spinning apart under dictator Robert Mugabe melds political and personal history into a compelling whole…. Godwin offers a haunting look at the persistence of evil—and the power of family love.”
—Michelle Green, People
“An eyewitness account of a cataclysmic time…. Godwin masterfully weaves the political and the personal.”
—Wendy Kann, Washington Post Book World
“An enthralling memoir.”
—Joshua Hammer, New York Review of Books
Back Bay Books
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PRAISE FOR PETER GODWIN’S
THE FEAR
“Peter Godwin’s latest book is the most powerful indictment of Robert Mugabe’s regime yet written, marking out the author as one of the sharpest observers of modern Africa. He is tough but sympathetic, aghast at the horror yet still hopeful that Africa’s resilient, long-suffering people will somehow win through against the gangsters led by Mr. Mugabe.”