The Fear Read online

  And once again, Scholz is being monitored by spies.

  “CIO agents come and listen to my sermons, to see what I’m saying. Normally I try to explain the gospel. For example, the multiplication of the loaves and fishes lent itself to a sermon on the greed and selfishness of our leaders. But no parishioners will speak out freely unless they are on their own with me. It’s the Fear. They all live in fear.”

  Now, in the rural areas of his province, Kariba, Hurungwe, Rushinga, Dande, “things are really bad. My priests report that people are being brutally beaten. It’s like the People’s Courts during the war, people are accused of being ‘sell-outs,’ stripped naked, beaten with planks, forced to shout ZANU-PF slogans, some are beaten until they are dead.”

  In the months after the elections, says Scholz later (on gloriaTV, a Catholic broadcaster, motto: the more Catholic the better), “there was an attempt to physically eliminate the opposition to the ruling party, the MDC, to eliminate that opposition through physical beatings, torture and killings.

  “Such cruelty,” he muses, “it’s a mystery. Anybody who has had difficulty in believing that there is not only evil in the world, but the Evil One who sends out his other evil spirits, as St. Ignatius says in the Spiritual Exercises, the First Week… Ignatius speaks in the images and language of his time, about Lucifer sitting in the great plain of Babylon, on a throne of fire and smoke, calling together all the demons of the world and then sending them out with his instructions to commit evil.

  “During those three months… I understood that the images and language in which St. Ignatius spoke in the sixteenth century, they are more real than I had thought. We’ve seen evil running through the whole country, from north to south and east to west.”

  How does he keep his faith? He sighs deeply before answering.

  “When I’m angry in the evening, I go to the chapel and I pray for my equilibrium to be restored, to let my anger pass. A third-year seminarian, who is to be ordained deacon, comes to me, and says, ‘My father was murdered yesterday, sixty-three years old, because they suspected him of being a member of the opposition, which he was not. The militia came and beat him to death in front of his wife.’ How can one not be angry? And when I phoned the police to report it, they said they could not open a docket because they didn’t have a photocopier!

  “This is what I mean when I say that the truth will have to come out, the perpetrators will have to be named, they will have to be confronted with their actions and then we can begin with the process of reconciliation, perhaps even of an amnesty.

  “There cannot be reconciliation without truth, the truth has to come out, it has to be acknowledged. I think forgiveness has to be asked for, and [only] then, it will be given.

  “The wounds of the heart heal much more slowly than the wounds of the body,” says Scholz. “I see that now.

  “Pray for Zimbabwe,” he pleads in farewell. “Pray for peace, pray for the courage of the leaders who lost the elections, to let go.”

  After lunch around a lazy susan, we set off again, intending to take the spur road at Lions’ Den, north to Mhangura, a copper-mining town, where our family once lived. Scholz warns us that there is now a torture base there too.

  GEORGINA is reading aloud from our borrowed copy of Dr. Mostert’s Jumbo Guide to Rhodesia 1972. It tells us that Mhangura is “a thriving township in its own right,” with a population of 7,730 including 640 “Europeans.” We do a slow, sad lap of the town, past the Ingot Inn, the old single quarters, the town school where Jain once taught. All of it is now decrepit, and the rows of houses are dilapidated. We pass people chopping down the avenues of trees, to use as firewood, as there is no electricity. Soon the town will be entirely deforested.

  We pull into the Catholic church, which is just across the road from the police station. But the local priest is nervous to have us there. He confirms that there is a torture base here, to which people are sent from other areas, because Mhangura is so isolated. “Be careful,” he warns, as he shuts the door firmly behind us.

  We pull in at the Mhangura Mine Club, where we whiled away much of our school holidays. The swimming pool is defunct. In the deep end, the collected rainwater is black and choked with rubbish. Over it still looms the high diving board.

  “It used to seem so scary,” says Georgina. “Now it looks quite small.”

  The thatch umbrellas that provided shade over the garden tables have rotted and fallen onto the lawn, and now all that remains are their rusting metal ribs, like the hoops under Victorian skirts.

  Georgina is dying to go to the loo, but the stinking toilets in the pool changing rooms are without water. Porcelain basins and cisterns lie shattered on the floor, amidst metal ballcocks and dismembered taps.

  As we walk over to look at the overgrown bowling green, two ragged kids amble up, one with a bird’s nest in his hands.

  “What happened to the pool?” I ask them.

  “Ah, it is buggered,” says the taller boy. “There is no mains water supply for the town, these days, just a borehole.”

  “Are there any white people still living here?” I wonder.

  “Uh uh,” he says. “They ran away, long time back, when the mine closed down.”

  “What’s inside your nest?” inquires Georgina.

  He shows it to her. Three hyperventilating baby birds peer from their down-lined sanctuary.

  “Did the nest fall down?” she asks.

  “No.” The boy grins. “We climbed up and pulled it off the tree.”

  “But now they will die,” says Georgina.

  The boy shrugs, and they run off, giggling.

  “Bastards,” she says mildly.

  OUR OLD HOUSE is at the top of the hill, by the now defunct reservoir, looking down on the town. The gate lies open. In the driveway stands a very battered pick-up truck, with bald tires, broken lights, no wiper blades. It lists heavily to one side, where its suspension has clearly collapsed.

  We knock on the door and call out, but the place seems deserted. The garden is crispy and parched and khaki, and littered with junk. The doorframes are damaged and many of the windows have broken panes, some of them roughly patched with cardboard inserts.

  The garage door yawns open; inside are a few bags of fertilizer and other farm supplies.

  “Remember your sixteenth birthday?” asks Georgina.

  My father had presented me with a gift-wrapped manual for the Suzuki 125 motorbike. When I opened it, he beckoned me to this garage and lifted the door. Across the floor was the motorbike, disassembled into its component parts. “You put it together, it’s yours.” Dad grinned.

  Of course, I threw it together too fast and there were pieces left over at the end. I had to break it down, and start over. But after that, I knew that motorbike so intimately, literally inside out, that I could always repair it. Which had been his intention all along.

  Just as we are about to leave, a woman emerges from the old staff quarters and tells us to wait. Then a man in worn blue fatigues and bare feet comes out to greet us, rubbing his hooded eyes with the backs of his hands, clearly just awoken.

  We introduce ourselves and explain that we used to live there, and that we just wanted to see it again, to remind ourselves of our childhood.

  “I only work here,” he says. “The owner is away. But you can look from the outside.”

  We walk around the back, and peer into the veranda. The insect screen is in shreds, and great whorls of cobweb drape the many tears.

  “It is just as I remember,” lies Georgina.

  Ahead of us, he is now unlocking the door, and invites us into the gloomy, unlit interior. The ceiling panels are stained from old leaks, and many of them sag. The baths store muddy brown water, and chigubus, big plastic containers, line the floor next to them.

  “When the mine closed in 2000,” he explains, “they had no money. All they offered us was our houses. And soon our pensions became worthless.”

  “Our father, George Godwin,
used to be the chief engineer on the mine,” I say.

  “Really?” He smiles. “Mr. Godwin,” and finally he can contain himself no longer. “That was my job too,” he says proudly. “I was also the chief engineer. I was his successor. My name is Paul Shumba. I have my engineering degree from Coventry in England.” And he puts out his hand to introduce himself.

  Once his job disappeared, Shumba jambanja’d a farm in the nearby Doma area. “You remember the old Erasmus farm?” he says. “That’s the one I farm on now. I commute from here. But it’s very tough, this farming business. I am finding it hard to make a living. I have to rent this house to tenants, and myself, I live in the kaya behind, the workers’ quarters.”

  We continue through the gloomy house together, and in the sitting room, we come to a wooden room-divider I recognize. “My father made this,” I say. Shumba smoothes his hand over its dusty shelves. “It is very well made,” he admits, admiring the way its mortises and tenons fit snugly. “Built to last.”

  And then he looks around at the rest of the house, as though seeing it now through our eyes. “I am sorry about this place,” he says, suddenly ashamed. “It is not in good condition.”

  As we leave, he shakes my hand again. “Next time you come and visit,” he promises, “I will try to make it more presentable.”

  He stands there barefoot, in his torn blue fatigues, on the parched, junk-strewn lawn, as the gathering darkness envelops him, chief engineer Shumba, M.Sc. Eng. (Coventry).

  sixteen

  Defense Injuries

  THE AVENUES CLINIC is where my father died, up there in that corner ward, with a view westward out over the tops of the jacaranda trees to Heroes’ Acre, while the Salvation Army brass band played “Abide with Me” in the car park below. It’s a private hospital, so it’s still functioning, while state hospitals have ground to a halt. It has framed pictures of wild animals in the stairwells, and a receptionist actually answering a phone, and even a news-agents, off the lobby.

  At 6 a.m. sharp, Nurse Georgie du Plessis from CSU starts her morning rounds, her hardback exercise book stuffed with details of the patients she needs to check. I follow behind, wearing the generic clothes of a consultant, with Georgie as my laisser passer. No journalists are allowed, on pain of arrest and worse. But it turns out, as I suspected, that many of these nurses here knew my mother; she helped train and tend them at the staff health department of Parirenyatwa Hospital. “How is she?” they ask. “How is Dr. Godwin? How is it in England? Tell her to come home. We need her here. We are so busy with all this trouble.”

  They ask after Georgina too. “We want to see her on the TV again.”

  “She was with me here,” I tell the nurses, “but she has just gone back to look after my mother.” In fact, Georgina has just called to say that the woman we hired to look after Mum, in her absence, turned out to be a proselytizing Jehovah’s Witness.

  ON HER ROUNDS, Georgie is a picture of bustling efficiency, going from patient to patient, examining X-ray charts and operating schedules.

  With the MDC leadership still out of the country, Mugabe’s brutal campaign to smash the party continues unabated, and the Avenues Clinic has been transformed into one large repository of torture victims. Every bed is full.

  White man’s flesh marks easily; it is a pale canvas on which the path of pain is easily painted. But it takes a lot more to mark a black man. Somehow, the palette of black wounds seem more violent, tearing down through dark skin, into the yellow curd of subcutaneous fat, the red gristle of muscle fibers, down to the shocking whiteness of bones.

  Here in ward 2N, bed 1, is Shepherd Geti, thirty-three, who has septic lacerations on his buttocks. They have been so badly beaten that much of the tissue there is destroyed. He was arrested by three guys claiming to be policemen but refusing to produce ID cards. They took him to the local school, Donswe (in Masawa ward), where “they sang their songs and beat their drums, and thrashed me and my friend with thick sticks, then told us if we went to hospital they would kill us.” But after his wounds became infected and he went into a high fever he came anyway. His wife is still at home and he is so afraid that Mugabe’s men will return for her this time.

  Here in bed 2N-13 is Edison Marisau, from the Mbire district of Guruve, where he is a village chairman for the MDC. He has second-degree burns. ZANU-PF members came (on 20 April) and burned his house down, with him hiding inside it. He managed to get out, though all his belongings went up in flames. When he went to the police they said, “We can do nothing as we are no longer working as the police, we only work for Mugabe’s party.” In the next-door village twelve houses were burned down and two men killed there.

  Here, in bed 2N-7, is David Mhende, a thirty-five-year-old with a terrible head injury caused by one of Mugabe’s men wielding an axe. “It just missed my eye,” he says gratefully. And here in bed 2N-9 is a twenty-nine-year-old man from Masvingo, with a broken leg and broken hands. He is asleep. Georgie consults her notes. He is a victim of political violence too, beaten by Mugabe’s post-election posses.

  In ward 1S, we catch up with Mr. Coric, a Yugoslav orthopaedic surgeon who has never been so busy. What he is seeing mostly now is what he calls “defense injuries.” It’s a chilling phrase—one the doctors use to describe the shattering damage caused to your arms when you hold them up over your head, in an effort to protect yourself from the blows. The blows of the boot, the blows of the log, the blows of the whip, the blows of the rock, the machete, the axe.

  Now Mr. Coric has run out of the metal plates and pins he uses to set shattered arms and legs, so he can no longer operate, other than to clean up the shards of bone. He doesn’t know what else to do. “I can’t just discharge someone with fractured tibias,” he says, head in hands.

  In ward 1S-2 are C. Mutekele and Happiness Mutata. Georgie goes to their bed ends and takes a quick look at their charts, comparing them against her book. Happiness has a fractured right leg and fractured right arm, and no plates or pins, so neither bone is set yet. If they start to mend then Coric will have to break them again and re-set them. They are PEV victims too. The pace of the terror is so fast now, we are distilling it down to acronyms. PEV. Post-Election Violence.

  In 1S-10A, beneath a “nil by mouth” sign, lies Reason Kapfuya, an MDC member from Mrewa-UMP (Uzumba Maramba Pfungwe). He is a big man with his head partly shaved to expose a violet-tinctured wound tacked together by black nylon sutures. Both his arms are broken too, and one leg.

  “Who did this to you?” I ask.

  He looks at me as though I am an imbecile. “ZANU-PF,” he says. “Mugabe’s people.”

  Next to him is Hilary Cheinuru, an MDC polling agent from Gutu West. He was ordered to go to a ZANU-PF meeting, but begged off, saying he was unwell with malaria. He was badly beaten with logs and knobkerries. “But I’m not finished,” he says. “I’m going to be very serious and work harder than before. By giving us this threat, they are giving us power. We’ve faced the danger, so now we are used to it.”

  Also in ward 1S is Reason Mashambanaka from Mrewa, with part of his hair also shaved, to reveal a gashed skull. His whole family was attacked while they were asleep. He is fifty-three. “They beat my seventy-two-year-old mother, all over her body with sticks, and even my children though the littlest one is only three years of age.”

  Jonathan Malikita, thirty-nine, in Bed 15D of ward 1S, is the chief election agent and campaign manager for Maramba in Mashonaland East. It used to be a ZANU-PF stronghold, which the MDC was trying to infiltrate for the first time. He was a schoolteacher but in 2002 he began working for the MDC full time. “After the elections,” he says, “they began terrorizing us. At midnight there was a shower of rocks, which broke the roof of my house. There was glass everywhere from broken windows, then they set the house alight. I ran naked from it and fled to the house of Florence Machinga, the MP for Wuzumba, seeking shelter. But they followed me there and burned her house down too. They attacked me there, there were more than a
hundred of them.” He insists that I write down their leaders: Modesta Mushambi, a ZANU councillor; Kenneth Dzema; Cephas Chikomo, the ZANU District Chairman; Itai Kandemire, a war vet. “They were trying to chop my head off with their axes and I put up my arms to protect myself. My arm was chopped in three places.”

  “It was a truly terrible fracture,” agrees Georgie, shaking her head as she reviews his chart, “with bones sticking out at right angles.”

  “And then they left me there because they thought I was dead,” continues Jonathan. “I heard them say it, ‘He’s dead now, we’ve finished him, MDC has gone.’ If they hear I am still alive…” He trails off.

  And what about a run-off?

  “If I go back there, they will finish me off for sure. It will be terrible. There will be a massacre.”

  His wife, Esther, and their youngest child, Denzel, eighteen months old, are over in the pediatric ward.

  In Bed 1S-1 is Grace Gambeza from Mudzi. She is twenty-nine. She has septic hematoma on her back and buttocks and fractured arms. DW, says the chart—defense wounds. She also has a tiny baby that is still breast-feeding. The nurse brings her in, a bundle wrapped in a white hospital sheet, and tries to hold her to Grace’s breast to feed. With two broken arms, Grace cannot hold her baby to her own breast. It is one of the saddest things I’ve ever seen. Grace weeping silently, her broken, un-set arms lying uselessly at her sides, as the nurse holds the crying baby to her breast and tries to get it to feed. Georgie looks up from her patient log, shakes her head, blinks rapidly and takes off her glasses, pretending to clean them. Then, not trusting herself to talk, she turns on her heel and marches off to the next patient.