The Fear Read online

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  This book is dedicated to the many Zimbabweans who have been threatened, hurt or killed in the struggle to be free from the dictatorship. May their sacrifice not be forgotten.

  “I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.”

  Nelson Mandela

  SEARCHING FOR SKY

  MY MOTHER LIES ON HER BED and tries to see the sky. If she cranes her head at a certain angle, she thinks she might just catch a sliver of it, through the high, narrow strip of window. But all she can see is the red brick of the house next door, a few feet away. She falls back on her pillow, defeated, and listens to the densely stacked planes banking over North London on their final approach to Heathrow. It doesn’t really matter—it’s a cheerless, iron-dull sky anyway, more of a lid, a manhole cover, than a sky. Not like the African sky she has been used to these last fifty years. That sky, she remembers, was a soaring cathedral of cerulean. At night, it turned into a star-sprayed window on the universe. And in the rainy season, soft churning anvils of cumulonimbus reared up for the drama of rain. Rain wasn’t such a drama here. Generally you couldn’t quite tell where it came from, even when you could see the sky. But she knows it is raining again now, from the wet swish of the car tires on the street.

  She misses Africa acutely, but she is grateful to be here. She is grateful for Radio 4, where people even disagree in such reasonable tones. She’s grateful for the nice people from Camden Library home-delivery service who keep her supplied with library books (her taste runs to biographies and history, mostly). She’s grateful for the Association of Jewish Refugees, who deliver meals to her, even though she’s a parson’s daughter, and only the widow of a Jew. She especially likes the lamb hotpot, and the chocolate cake, which reminds her of the one her mother used to make.

  She is grateful not to be parked in some institutional home for the elderly, inhaling the odor of boiled cabbage and bleach, cared for by indifferent staff on minimum wages. She is grateful to be living with her own blood-line, her daughter Georgina, and her seven-year-old granddaughter, Xanthe—three generations of Godwin women, together in this small apartment, making the best of their radically altered circumstances.

  She has lived a long and surprising life. As a girl in Kent, she watched the Battle of Britain in the skies overhead. As a rating in the Royal Navy, stationed in Dover, she was frequently under shellfire from the German “big guns” at Calais. As a doctor in Zimbabwe, she has run leper colonies and tuberculosis hospitals; she has vaccinated thousands, saved second twins, held the hands of patients dying of a new disease called AIDS, even as others shrank from them.

  She has lived through a guerrilla war, seen her oldest daughter killed in it. In her old age, she has felt her heart break again. The health-care system she dedicated her life to building lies shattered. She has lost her house and her savings and her friends and her dogs. And she has watched her husband die a difficult death. Now she is determined that death will not cheat her.

  She shows me a document she has been working on. It is called a living will or, now rebranded, like a fickle pop star, “Advance Decision—formerly a Living Will,” a form provided by Dignity in Dying, motto—Your Life, Your Choice. She has ticked all the boxes to decline treatment if she has an imminently life-threatening illness, if she suffers serious mental impairment together with a physical need for life-sustaining treatment, or if she is persistently unconscious.

  But in addition to the pro-forma options, my mother has added a section of her own, carefully written out in her spidery doctor’s hand. Culled from her extensive medical experience in palliative care in Africa, she has tried to recall, and refuse treatment for, all the awful ways that the elderly wear out: “Degenerative disease of the Central Nervous System including multiple sclerosis, motor neuron disease and Parkinson’s disease. Dementia or brain damage from any other cause including Alzheimer’s disease or head injury or stroke. Advanced cancers, diseases linked to those cancers. Severe difficulty in breathing (Dypnoea) that cannot be cured. Incurable double incontinence. Uncontrollable vomiting and nausea.”

  Later we inch up Church Row on an outing to Hampstead High Street. She leans over her aluminum walker, choosing its next landfall with all the care of a rapeller placing a piton into a cliff face, and scrutinizing the pavement for the lethal bumps and ridges which can so easily fell her now.

  We pass the historic St. John’s parish cemetery, with its towering cedars of Lebanon, creeping buttercup and hart’s tongue fern, and its leaning mossy headstones. The landscape painter John Constable is buried here. So is the former Labor Party leader Hugh Gaitskell, and John Harrison, inventor of the marine chronometer for measuring longitude. “Where would you like to be buried when you die?” I ask her. “At home,” she says, without breaking stride. “In Africa. Next to your father.”

  one

  The Fist of Empowerment

  2 April 2008

  DEEP INTO THE NIGHT, in pursuit of the westward escaping sun, we fly into a fogbank, where the cold Atlantic breakers curdle upon the warm West African shore below. Consoled, somehow, to have reached the continent of my birth, I lay down my book and fall uncomfortably asleep, my head wedged against the buzzing fuselage.

  I am on my way home to Zimbabwe, to dance on Robert Mugabe’s political grave. The crooked elections he has just held have spun out of his control, and after twenty-eight years the world’s oldest leader is about to be toppled.

  When I arrive the next evening in Harare, the capital, his portrait is everywhere still, staring balefully down at us. From the walls of the airport, as the immigration officer harvests my U.S. dollars, sweeping them across his worn wooden counter, and softly thumping a smudged blue visa into my passport. From the campaign placards pasted to the posts of the broken street lights, during our bumpy ride into the reproachfully silent city. Watched only by the feral packs of hollow-chested dogs, he raises his fist into the sultry dome of night, as though blaming the fates for his mutinous subjects. The Fist of Empowerment, his caption fleetingly promises our insect-flecked beams.

  Somehow, though, his large gold-rimmed spectacles, the little tuft of starched white handkerchief that winks from his brandished clench, and his toothbrush mustache tell a different story. The story of the prissy schoolmaster he once was, a slight, almost effeminate figure, his small, manicured hands given to birdlike gestures. And indeed, if you were casting the role of “homicidal African dictator who fights his way to power and stays there against the odds for nearly three decades,” Robert Mugabe wouldn’t even rate a call-back. This is no swaggering askari, no Idi Amin Dada, heavyweight boxing champion of the King’s African Rifles, nor some wide-shouldered, medal-strewn Nigerian general. This is an altogether more dangerous dictator—an intellectual, a spiteful African Robespierre who has outlasted them all. Eighty-four years old now, with his dyed black hair and his blood transfusions, his Botox and vitamin-cocktail shots, he has querulously dominated his country for a generation.

  But now he is on the verge of an exit. Five days ago, presidential elections, which he has fixed with ease in the past, using a combination of rigging, fraud and intimidation, have gone wrong. Zimbabweans have rejected him in such overwhelming numbers that he will finally be forced to accept their verdict.

  They have many reasons to reject him. Once they enjoyed the highest standard of living in Africa. Now their money is nearly worthless, halving in value every twenty-four hours. Only 6 percent of workers have jobs. Their incomes have sunk to pre-1
950 levels. They are starving. Their schools are closed, their hospitals collapsed. Their life expectancy has crashed from sixty to thirty-six. They have the world’s highest ratio of orphans. They are officially the unhappiest people on earth, and they are fleeing the shattered country in their millions—an exodus of up to a third of the population.

  But throughout this election campaign, Mugabe has remained belligerently unrepentant, blaming the country’s ills on the West—Britain, the former colonizer, in particular—and using the tiny number of whites remaining in Zimbabwe as political piñatas. He thwacks them and out pour the stale bonbons of historic blame to excuse his own shattering failure of leadership, his own rampant megalomania.

  In a few days, he will meet with his politburo to contemplate his own farewell. I’ve been anticipating this moment for so long.

  On my flights across the world to get here, I have reread Gabriel García Márquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch, and relished the scene in which sharp-beaked vultures, maddened by the stink of human carrion, tear their way through the mosquito screens of the imperial palace, alerting the citizens in the city below to the death of the dictator, and allowing their future to begin.

  MY YOUNGER SISTER, Georgina, a broadcaster who now lives in London, is joining me here. We are supposed to be staying at York Lodge, a small pension in Harare’s northern suburbs, but when Georgina calls to confirm, the manager brusquely informs her that our rooms are no longer available, and hangs up. Later we find out that the lodge is being raided by the police looking for Western journalists, who are banned from reporting in this country. As Georgina is on the line, the police are arresting the correspondents from the New York Times and the Daily Telegraph.

  Instead, Georgina has booked rooms under her ex-husband’s surname at the Meikles Hotel, in the city center. Once, all the journalists stayed there. Now none do. Neither of us is really supposed to be here. We are in double jeopardy: not only from Mugabe’s banning of Western journalists, but also because I was once declared an enemy of the state, accused of spying, and Georgina worked for an anti-Mugabe radio station, in London, and she also featured on a list of undesirables, excluded from the country.

  Beneath my window is a park, African Unity Square. The concrete tables which used to teem with vivid flowers are empty now, their sellers chased away as part of Operation Murambatsvina, “Clear Out the Dirt,” three years ago, when Mugabe—scared by growing hostility toward him in the urban areas—forcibly cleared out “informal housing” and street markets, leaving the cities dull and quiet. His police demolished the shops and dwellings (many of them quite substantial) of more than seven hundred thousand people, whom they dumped on barren land miles away, at the onset of winter, without water or sanitation. In all, this sham “slum clearance” operation devastated the lives of more than three million people.

  In the other direction, my view is over a busy intersection, commanded by wildly erratic traffic lights. Sometimes they are resolutely blank. Sometimes they show red or flashing amber to all roads. Oncoming vehicles play a game of chicken, using pedestrians as shields, and auditing a number of factors to determine who goes next. Big scores over small, fast over slow, old over new, dilapidated over luxury, man over woman, black over white. It gets most interesting when the lights, as they quite often do, summon traffic from all directions simultaneously, with a cheery green come-on. Quite regularly, the crunch of metal, the jangle of glass, and the squall of argument summon me to my window to view another accident.

  Everyone gives way to the frequently passing police pick-up trucks overloaded with riot-squad officers. The men are terribly young, riot interns really, not yet fully adult, pupas with brand-new blue fatigues and helmets. They remind me of myself at eighteen, still at police training depot, in the same uniform, “riot blues,” drafted into service of an earlier regime. I wonder, as we all do, whether these underage gladiators will fire at their own people when ordered.

  The atmosphere in the capital is tense with anticipation. How will this end? It’s a state of mind I recognize now, a state I’m prone to myself, a wild swing between the tantalizing taste of change and the dull recognition of continued dictatorship. We call it euphoric despair.

  THE BAR AT AMANZI (it means “water” in siNdebele, the language spoken in the country’s south) is one of the few places in town that’s heaving—here, where people have money in common, euphoria is at least temporarily vanquishing despair. Charles Summerfield and his band, the URJ, pump out electrified Afro fusion. Between sets, Summerfield tells me how he was recently tied up and badly beaten when his house was robbed, but tonight he’s “loose, man, loose.”

  “URJ, like urge?” I ask.

  “Nah.” He shakes his matted dreads.

  “Union of Reformed Judaism?” It’s less of a reach than you might think—he is actually Jewish.

  “Unlimited Resources of Joy,” he says.

  His band plays to a clientele so bizarrely disparate, it could grace Star Wars’ Chalmun’s Cantina, the intergalactic pirates’ water hole. The Cypriot honorary consul presses his embossed card into my palm, Nestoras P. Nestoras (so good, they named him twice), and a gay carpenter who once made me a bed from the carved doors of Tonga tribal huts, high-fives. At the corner of the teak bar, where a Zambezi lager now costs 200 million Zimbabwean dollars (about $4 U.S. in illegal hard currency, on the black market), the average monthly income, some Ukrainian girls with platinum-blond hair cross and re-cross their lotioned legs below black Lycra micro-skirts. And spilling outside, toward the ornamental waterfall, where the musasa trees rustle in a cool evening breeze, aid workers and evicted tobacco farmers, black-market currency dealers and illegal diamond traders, ruling party fat cats, cell-phone magnates and opposition activists mingle.

  We’re on the brink of something historic here. Everyone is waiting for it.

  Robert Mugabe and his generals are being lured with plump exit packages. I discuss them the next day with Andrew Pocock, the British ambassador, at his residence. As representative of the former colonial power, Pocock has a starring role in Mugabe’s demonology—chief imperial agent of “regime change”—and he is shunned and excoriated in the state media. He exists in a kind of enforced political purdah. Here but not here, isolated from high-level contact with the host government, even though the UK provides food aid to many of Zimbabwe’s starving.

  Pocock knows well the feel of the ex-colonial outpost—he is Trinidadian born and raised. His clipped elocution hints at exfoliated traces of a West Indian lilt, and his mufti dress-code, short sleeves and thonged sandals, is more Caribbean than Cotswolds. He handles the heat better than most British envoys I’ve encountered. He’s far from the archetypal Morgan Leafy, William Boyd’s pudgy Britlomat abroad, whose ham-pink brow beads sweat at the first solar glance, whose taupe “tropical” linen suit is contoured with damp creases.

  Under the gentle pealing of gamelan wind chimes on the cool, colonnaded veranda of the official residence, looking north toward Lunar Ridge across the green pelt of lawn, Pocock seems in his element, his hair immaculately coifed, brushed sharply back off his brow.

  As a newly minted diplomat on his first posting, to Lagos in the early 1980s, Pocock was finishing an Oxford doctoral thesis on his Trinidadian compatriot, V. S. Naipaul, whose novel A Bend in the River portrays the cultural confusion of post-colonial Africa.

  The Big Man in that book stays just offstage, cultivating an isolation that feeds his mystique and adds to his power. His ubiquitous photographs grow ever larger in the course of the book, says Pocock, like lengthening shadows. And they morph, from soldier to statesman to king. And so it has been with our own Big Man, Mugabe, who sheds his skins for the times. The olive military fatigues in his early official portraits have given way to Italian suits, now accessorized with an operatically pompous green silk sash, and the ludicrous mustache that begs for Adolfian allusions, ones he is not averse to making himself.

  “I am still the Hitler of the time,” he o
nce boasted, when criticized for land takeovers. “This Hitler has only one objective, justice for his own people, sovereignty for his people, recognition of the independence of his people, and their right to their resources. If that is Hitler, then let me be a Hitler tenfold.”

  Pocock and I have heard that the opposition leader and presidential rival, Morgan Tsvangirai, has lured Mugabe’s top brass with generous index-linked pensions, immunity from prosecution for human-rights abuses, continued ownership of one farm each of those they have recently confiscated from white settlers—if only they will accept their defeat. Mugabe himself is reliably reported to be tired and tempted. His young wife, Grace, a woman of prodigious retail appetite, the Imelda Marcos of Africa, known unaffectionately by her people as the First Shopper, is said to be keen for a negotiated exit too.

  I wonder if we can dare to hope. It’s been so, so long and Zimbabwe has known no other leader. The ambassador is telling me he has just converted his squash court (built to the wrong dimensions by a previous owner—interior dimensions mistaken for exterior ones) into a crisis command center. It is equipped with its own generator and communications systems, in case it “all goes up in flames here,” and he has to supervise an evacuation of Britons. What his Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, has just called “a doomsday scenario.” Pocock reckons there are about ten thousand Brits left here. And for those who don’t make it out alive, the residence has a new addition, a large walk-in cold room, which could serve as a morgue.

  After hooking his three phones to his belt—a local cell, a UK BlackBerry and a satellite phone—Pocock drives me back in his wife’s acid-green Prado. Strangely, for the wheels of an ambassador’s wife, it has silver hotrod flames painted along the hood.

  “There was a scratch on it when we got it, so Raj, the best Indian detailer in Harare, said he would deal with it.” He grins. “This was his solution.”