The Fear Read online

  And then, in an effort to provide a rousing finale, Zimbabwean performers appear: the dance troupe Tumbuka; Thomas Mapfumo singing his old Chimurenga song “Mhondoro,” invoking the ancestral spirits to save the nation; and Comrade Fatso, a slam poet, urging Zimbabweans to “rise up.” But with so many freshly bloodied themselves from trying to do just that, tonight, I’m afraid. We are all afraid.

  fourteen

  You Can Never Go Home Again

  GEORGINA WANTS to go home. Well, she wants to visit the places she still thinks of as home, starting with her little stone cottage, a converted stable, on Summerfield Close, in northern Harare. The house is at the bottom end of her ex-parents-in-laws’ property, but they have left the country too now, and put the whole place up for sale. Sungura music blares from the big house on the hill; goatskins are pegged out on the lawn to cure; maize cobs dry on the veranda. The cage inhabited by a golden pheasant that Georgina called Terry Waite, because it had been in captivity so long, is now occupied by a brace of fluffy white rabbits being bred for the pot. The swimming pool is almost empty, vines growing down into it. The trampoline frame is vacant, its drooping springs rusty. Through the dirty windows of the big house, we see the gold-plated wall sconces and dusty chandeliers, and the carpet faded in the shape of the absent grand piano.

  We walk across the overgrown lawn, littered with pine cones. The wooden slats of the fence around the cottage are broken, the palm tree has collapsed against the side of the house, and the thatch has shredded, patched now by black plastic weighted down with rocks. In the new extension that Georgina had built, the kelp-green paint is peeling off the corrugated-tin roof, and voracious bamboo shoots are growing into it.

  Georgina goes over to the tall teak drum that serves as the door bell. She beats it, to see if anyone is around. But the brittle drumskin is ruptured and it gives out only a thin, weak thump.

  While we wait, Georgina runs her hands over the intricately carved Zanzibari front door. “We found it in the capital, Stone Town. I went there for Christmas with Jeremy,” she says, and suddenly she grins. “We wanted to visit the birthplace of Freddie Mercury. Our hotel was dry, and it had a Christmas tree operated by motion sensors that sang ‘Jingle Bells’ every time you walked past.”

  No one comes to the feeble beat of the drum so we walk round the side of the cottage and duck into the home-made greenhouse. Its torn plastic sheeting luffs against the creosoted log frame. The delicate orchids are dead now, but the elephant ears have run amok, filling out the whole space, pressing against the ripped plastic walls as though to liberate themselves from the constraints of the conservatory. Getting down on our hands and knees, we start to brush away the dust and leaves from the bright Gaudíesque mosaic floor that Georgina created from shards of tile, interspersed with family mementos: an old watch of Dad’s and his old tortoiseshell comb; bits of broken floral crockery; frames from Jain’s sunglasses; miniature perfume bottles; shells from Mozambique; old keys to forgotten locks; bits of broken jewelery (some of which Georgina notices have been dug out of the floor); a magnetic medallion of St. Christopher, patron saint of travelers, that my mother used to put on the dashboard of her Mini as she drove on her rounds in the tribal reserves; Georgina’s first toothbrush; the bell from her first bike; a horseshoe from her chestnut pony, Top Ace; family handprints; and paw prints from Spot and Boy, Georgina’s Dalmatians. And the date, 19/05/1998. It is like a family album in the floor, a sentimental map of her identity.

  Georgina runs her finger over Boy’s paw print. “He died in Edmond’s arms, after we had gone,” she says. Taking the hem of her skirt, she starts to polish part of a broken mirror sealed into the mosaic. “I hoped to mitigate the effects of seven years’ bad luck by giving the mirror a purpose,” she says. “Don’t think it worked…”

  Lloyd, the gardener from the big house up on the hill, finds us there and unlocks the cottage. Inside, it is almost empty. In her absence, Georgina’s in-laws have auctioned off her furniture, and all that remains now is what didn’t sell. A Cape Dutch daybed, and Mum’s old kitchen sideboard, which the auctioneer has labeled “This dresser was made in 1847—came up with the Moodie Trek,” a lie.

  We peer through the window into Georgina’s office, which is now occupied by an unofficial tenant. “Her name is Pestilence,” says Lloyd. Pestilence is meticulously neat. A little iron bed, a tiny TV on a box. A faded Toulouse Lautrec print on the wall.

  “I’m glad it’s being used,” says Georgina. She wants to go to the shed where her remaining belongings have been stored, so Lloyd pushes his way past the giant banana fronds, through the waist-high grass. It grows up through the abandoned wrought-iron garden furniture.

  “Are there nyokas [snakes] here?” Georgina asks nervously, eying the overgrown desolation.

  “Ah, no,” laughs Lloyd. “Now that the big dogs are no longer here, cats are not afraid so they come and kill the rats and then snakes have nothing to eat. Snakes and cats are enemies, you see.” Lloyd seems understandably relieved the tan Ridgebacks have gone. They were the ones that the madam used to sic on him so they didn’t lose their fear of blacks.

  The shed door is locked but it has been substantially eaten away by white ants. Lloyd gives it a gentle shove and it disintegrates in a shower of sawdust. Inside there is tack for Top Ace, Georgina’s old riding boots, her acting awards and drama-college photos, dark-room equipment, and her daughter Xanthe’s Mary Poppins–style baby carriage—an original Silver Cross. She starts to tear up and we go outside.

  “Well, the placenta tree’s still standing,” says Georgina, looking up at the head-high red mahogany she planted on Xanthe’s afterbirth.

  “We had built our little dream house, and I was desperate to put down roots here. I thought I was married for life, and I wanted Xanthe to look at her tree at twenty-one. I thought I was here forever. And I wanted to give her roots too.” She laughs.

  “Rather too literally, perhaps.”

  Turning to Lloyd, she explains the mahogany’s significance.

  “I will take good care of it, medem,” he promises, and gives the tree a reverent little pat.

  Edmond, who was the housekeeper and generally managed the place, isn’t here today. “He is gone to church,” says Lloyd.

  So we get back into the car and drive slowly away in silence.

  THE SUN HAS gone now, dropping behind Heroes’ Acre, and the unlit city quickly sinks into crepuscular gloom. On Ridgeway North, Georgina gives a shout to stop the car. She has spotted Edmond walking back from church. He is easy to recognize, even in the gloaming, because he and his wife, Precious, are both dressed in Mum’s hand-me-down white doctor’s coats, which they use in lieu of the white robes worn by the vaPostori, one of the African Initiated Churches. Edmond carries their new baby, whom they have named Memory.

  “Because life was better before,” he says.

  Precious and Memory have just returned from their tribal home out in Mt Darwin. “Ah, it was terrible there,” she says, keeping her voice low, even though we are alone in the dark at the side of the road. “At each roadblock our bus was stopped and we were forced to get down and shout slogans for Mugabe before we could pass. And there are torture camps there too. Our chief was asked to provide names of all those who were MDC supporters in his area, but he said he didn’t know. So groups from outside came in, burning houses, cutting cattle’s legs, destroying grain stores and dragging people to the torture camps. People were having their wrists and knuckles crushed there.”

  THAT NIGHT I CAN’T SLEEP. In the morning we are to return to St. Aubins Walk, our family home for twenty-five years. It’s the last place I saw my father alive. Even as I was hugging him, and we were promising each other that we’d meet soon, I remember thinking, I’m never going to see you again.

  I find it hard to go back too, in the knowledge that we let the house—my mother’s only asset—go for next to nothing. When she sold it, the money, principally in Zimbabwe dollars, went into an escrow
account while my father’s estate was wound up. And there it sat for nearly a year, apparently because a clerk of court wanted a U.S.$10 bribe to release it. By the time I realized what was happening and went out to Zimbabwe, it had been so massively eroded by hyperinflation that it was worth almost nothing, less than the cost of an economy-class flight from London. Now I lie awake, listening to the nightjars trill, and alternating between sadness and frustration at it all.

  I am looking forward to seeing Gomo again, my parents’ housekeeper. The last time I was here, I worked with him and Richard, the young gardener, for four days straight, emptying the house of two generations of our stuff, dividing it between things to go to London, to my mother and sister, and things to come to me in New York. Anything that didn’t make the cut, which was the bulk of it, I gave to Gomo and Richard. On a big bonfire in the garden, we burned papers, decades of my father’s meticulous bills, and receipts, and admin, dealing with amounts that now seem archaic, before it metastasized uncontrollably into its multiple zeros.

  IN THE MORNING, Richard lets us in at the gate. After we greet he tells me that the new owners are away and the house is locked. I ask him where Gomo is. He looks at me strangely.

  “Ah, he is gone, Mr. Peter.” Richard casts his eyes down at the lawn. “He is… dead, since last year.”

  I can’t believe it. Gomo died and no one told me. My father had relied on him increasingly as he had declined himself. Softly spoken and gentle, smiling and reliable. His wife had died some years before.

  “He became sick,” says Richard. “His girlfriend, she was sick too, and she died first.” He lowers his voice. “I think she made him sick with the AIDS. He told me, ‘I am going home now because there is no one to look after me here.’ He reached home in Mt Darwin on Monday. And by Friday, he was dead.

  “Even me, I get very lonely now, because I remember the way we all used to live, doing this and that, staying all together here, looking after the medem. It’s now dark days.”

  Richard has returned yesterday from his home in Mudzi, visiting his three young children, and he is still shaken by the experience. “Each family must give a bucket of mealie meal and Z$50m for the soldiers who are coming there. The chief collects the moneys to buy goats for the soldiers to eat. They say they are providing security to prevent massacres, yet they are ones hunting us.”

  He reaches into his pocket and brings out a frayed and tattered letter, unfolding it for me to read. It is an attempted laisser passer from his local sabhuku, his headman:

  Richard stays in my village. He is going to Kotwa to see his

  brother, who is sick. After that he will proceed to Harare.

  Please don’t disturb or harass him or beat him. I am the

  headman, the ZANU-PF secretary of my village.

  Please comrades,

  Pamberi neUnity!

  Pamberi understanding!

  Pasi neMDC!

  How are you comrades?

  I am well.

  Yours, secretary for ZANU-PF

  Headman.

  “He is not really ZANU-PF in his heart,” says Richard, “but he is afraid of being killed. Most of the headmen and the chiefs do it like that.”

  I hand the letter back.

  “If I don’t have this letter,” he says, “I will be pulled off the bus, and they will make me disappear for good and I’ll never be seen. Those without letters were pulled off the bus, and taken away, to be beaten. They say we are MDC spies. They won’t let us bring our families to town. They just burn our kraals and tell us not to come back again.”

  Fastidiously, Richard folds the headman’s letter and replaces it in its envelope, and buttons it securely into his breast pocket, as if it is his own little Schindler’s list.

  fifteen

  Wounds of the Heart

  OUR OTHER HOME was in Mhangura in the northwest of the country, on the edge of the Zambezi escarpment. To get there we set out on the old Great North Road. It originates in Cape Town, continues the length of South Africa and up through Zimbabwe. At Harare, it veers west and goes up over the Great Dyke mountain range (a uniquely stratified chrome-rich igneous ridge, over three hundred miles long, visible from space). It winds through the once-productive farming areas of Banket and Chinhoyi, and down through Lions’ Den, and Karoi—which means “little witch,” so called because it was the site of witch trials by immersion (if you sank you were innocent)—to the Zambezi River at Chirundu, where it crosses into Zambia, with a left fork to Lake Kariba.

  A thicket of cardboard placards along the roadside outside Harare bear scrawled messages competing to sell us bait to fish there. Anaconda worms for sale; Lekker Fishing Worms; Worms Depot, Quality Worms; Red worms of note. The ones offering Puff Adder Worms and Malawi Worms, Georgina says, are actually selling marijuana.

  The district to the left of the road between the towns of Banket and Chinhoyi is Zvimba, Robert Mugabe’s heartland. This, in Shona custom, is his kumusha—his spiritual home, where his ancestors are buried, where his clan totem, garwe, the crocodile, resides. Here, he had his new Chinese friends build him a rural mansion, near his state-of-the-art pig farm. Here, he is building a grandiose shrine to himself. The size of a football field, it will house such mementos as his clothes, copies of his speeches, photos, and letters, and a sixteen-foot crocodile, trapped in Lake Kariba—stuffed and mounted—and presented as a birthday gift last year, by one of his craven cabinet ministers, Webster Shamu, the Minister of Policy Implementation, who said it represented the President’s “majestic authority.”

  The Catholic bishop of this province is Dieter Scholz, a stern, ash-haired German Jesuit who came to this country forty-five years ago. Much of that time he spent at the isolated Marymount mission in Rushinga, on the cusp of the Zambezi valley. It was there he learned to love the dialect of Korekore Shona they call Budya, a haunting, ideophonic tongue, garnished with onomatopoeia. “It’s pure poetry,” he eulogizes. “But now only the old people speak that deep Shona. The rest speak Shonglish—peppered with English words.”

  During the civil war, recalls Scholz, “Rushinga was a real hot spot. The whites beat local people, but so did Zanla, and when Zanla killed ‘sell-outs,’ they refused to let the bodies be buried.

  “The roads were land-mined so Father Gregor Stephanz learned to fly. I was his navigator. We rented a Cesna 182 Skywagon from the Mashonaland Flying Club to get in and out.”

  When Scholz began to work for the Catholic Justice and Peace Commission, monitoring human-rights abuses by the Rhodesian government forces, “they used to tap my phone, but it wasn’t very professional. Sometimes when I picked up the receiver, I would hear the recording of my past conversations played back to me, and once when they intercepted our mail, by mistake they put a copy of their intercept in the envelope forwarded to me.”

  Scholz worked out of Silveira House, the Jesuit headquarters in Harare, named after Dom Gonçalo da Silveira, an early Portuguese Jesuit who ventured into the Zimbabwe hinterland in 1560, establishing the first Christian mission here. Silveira managed to convert the reigning Mwene Mutapa, after the king had become enraptured with his glistening icon of the Virgin Mary, and insisted on hanging it on the wall of the royal hut. Sadly, the following year, the Mwene Mutapa spectacularly backslid, goaded by jealous Swahili gold-traders. He ordered Silveira murdered as a sorcerer. Though he was tipped off, Silveira refused to flee, preferring to meet his fate, and his body was tossed into the Musengezi River that flows through Rushinga, and down into the Zambezi. Scholz’s relationship with the current big man describes a similar trajectory.

  For Robert Mugabe, says Scholz, “Silveira House was like a home during the war… We employed his two sisters, Brigit and Sabina, to give them an income, to give them work, and above all to give them protection. Robert Mugabe hasn’t forgotten that.”

  Once he took power, “Mugabe went to the cathedral every Sunday. He would kneel throughout, except for the homily, when he sat. And he always took communion.�
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  And when Scholz was consecrated Bishop of Chinhoyi in 2006, Mugabe attended, whisked in by helicopter. He even brought a present.

  “After two and a half hours, Mugabe needed to go to the toilet,” he recalls of the ceremony. “So he got up from his own little stage and went to his bomb-protected limo, and all his bodyguards trooped around him. And I asked myself, how free is this man? He sits there behind his tinted windows. He has never trusted the people. It didn’t have to be this way. I think he is tortured as much as his people, by the life he has to live.”

  Scholz remembers asking him then, “What would you like to do when you retire?” Somewhat wistfully, Mugabe replied, “Read, write my memoirs, farm…”

  But in Easter 2007, when the Catholics finally published God Hears the Cry of the Oppressed, a pastoral letter critical of Mugabe’s violently repressive rule, relations quickly soured. From then, says Scholz, “our priests were persecuted, threatened, constantly intimidated.” Some of them—he has thirty in his Chinhoyi province, twenty-two of them black Zimbabweans—had to flee their parishes. “Lawlessness prevails. If I go to the police, I will be arrested for ‘disturbing the peace,’ ” says Scholz.

  “That is another mystery in his life, which I am unable to fathom—how is Mugabe able to reconcile in his conscience his faith and his politics and his actions.

  “In a sense, I would say that Robert Mugabe is a prisoner of his own past and he is a prisoner of his own political generation. I see in his character many similarities with Ian Smith—[particularly,] obduracy…

  “ZANU has never really changed from a guerrilla movement into a political party. In all elections since the mid-’90s, even when they won, they still assaulted those who voted against them. Mugabe never managed that transition. He’s a civilian front for the generals, especially Perence Shiri and Constantine Chiwenga. He’s always relied too much on people who bear arms, he has an obsession with security. The generals are running things now. We are living under a military dictatorship.”