When a Crocodile Eats the Sun Page 17

  “I can’t get anyone to accept my surrender.” He laughs, shuttling between embassies.

  I GET AS FAR AS South Africa before Mugabe bans all foreign press from covering his election. We consider trying to sneak into Zimbabwe to film clandestinely, but Channel 4 forbids it — their production insurance will not cover the loss if I am arrested and unable to complete the series. Instead, we watch the elections from South Africa and then we go up to neighboring Mozambique and make our way northwest to the border with Zimbabwe. Here in Manica Province, a group of white Zimbabwean farmers have resettled at the invitation of the Mozambican government. It’s a bizarre situation; some of them are starting again within sight of their farms on the hills across the border.

  John Coetzee (not his real name) is living with his wife and son and daughter-in-law in a canvas tent just as their forefathers, the Voortrekkers, did more than a hundred years ago when they came up to Zimbabwe in ox wagons from South Africa. They have been in Mozambique for less than a year but already the virgin bush around them is cleared and plowed and bursting with rows of sunflowers, eight feet tall.

  In fact, the bush is not quite virgin. A Portuguese farmer worked this land until FRELIMO guerrillas in their war for independence drove him off forty years ago. You can still see the ruins of his brick house. After guerrillas took it over, it was strafed and bombed by Rhodesian forces. And now it is farmland again, husbanded by Coetzee, a white Zimbabwean. When the Coetzees began to dig ditches for stream-fed irrigation, they discovered that the earth along their chosen canals was soft and giving. They were actually digging into the old irrigation furrows of the Portuguese farmer, following the unseen architecture of his contours, happening on the archaeological remains of a previous era. All else may have been turned upside down in the meantime, but the laws of gravity never change.

  Every day at a preappointed time, Coetzee gets on the two-way radio to talk to the few remaining employees on his farm across the border in Zimbabwe, which has been invaded by war vets. He has been bringing farm equipment over the border. His men back on the old farm break down tractors and pumps and mills into their component parts, and the local tribespeople load them onto donkeys and mules to carry them along the old slave trails over the Chimanimani Mountains.

  Here, in this poor region of Mozambique, the Coetzees have been welcomed by the local chief and already employ several dozen of his tribespeople. Other white Zimbabwean farmers have been similarly welcomed in Zambia and Nigeria.

  “The white people that came to Africa did a lot of things wrong,” admits Coetzee. “But history has proved that the white farmer, the Zimbabwean farmer, is a producer. There’s no way that anybody can tell me that the white farmer in Africa hasn’t benefited Africa.”

  On the second day of my visit, a local government official drives up in his air-conditioned Pajero SUV to check on the new white farmers. The official wears a well-cut dark suit and a dazzling white shirt with a starched collar. He eases down the electric windows a crack, not wanting to step out into the hot fuggy air. He has trouble talking to the local people Coetzee employs, for he speaks only Portuguese and a little Sena, while the locals speak only the chiNdau dialect of Shona. Coetzee has to interpret. It is all beginning to remind me of Roy Bennett just across the Chimanimani: local whites forming alliances with local blacks to the fury of the ruling clique in the city.

  How long will it be before there is an official Mozambican backlash against Coetzee and his ilk? How long before they become victims of their own agricultural success? The local villagers here may be materially better off because of his presence, but how long before the politics of envy kick in once again?

  On our last night with the Coetzees, Max, John’s son, adjusts the tall antenna, and we listen to news of Zimbabwe’s presidential election coming in over the shortwave radio. It is tuned to Radio Africa. Instead of broadcasting from the nineteenth floor of the Monomotapa Hotel overlooking Harare Park, it now broadcasts by satellite from an office park just north of London.

  My sister’s voice sounds metallic and distant here in the hills of western Mozambique as she tells us that Robert Mugabe has been reelected president. She tells us, too, that all Western observers have concluded that the polls have been massively rigged, that many people were not allowed to vote, that ballot boxes were stuffed with hundreds of thousands of bogus ballots, that voters were intimidated, that by any definition of the word Zimbabwe is no longer a democracy. Thanks to Mugabe’s latest citizenship changes, my father — although he again waits in line for hours to vote — is turned away at the ballot box.

  John Coetzee switches off the radio and slumps back down on his camp chair outside his tent in the middle of the Mozambique bush, and he just shakes his head. “Fucking Africa,” he says, and takes another slug of his Dos Equis cerveza.

  Fourteen

  September 2002

  BACK IN NEW YORK, Joanna and I have decided to buy an apartment because we are hemorrhaging rent. I sell my flat in Notting Hill and we start to look at property in Manhattan. We first look downtown, as post-9/11 bottom-feeders, but the market has frozen. Everyone is waiting. So we look in the Upper West Side, where we rent now.

  One day we are shown into a ruinously dilapidated apartment on Riverside Drive, overlooking Joan of Arc Island, a small grassy tussock dominated by a statue of the French martyr on horseback, brandishing her sword at the Hudson River and the New Jersey shore beyond. The owner is an eccentric rabbi who first moved in as a student at Columbia University forty-five years ago and hasn’t touched it since. He doesn’t seem to notice the great chunks of plaster missing from the peeling walls, or the huge water-leak stains on the ceilings, or the grimy black wooden floors. The living room is headquarters of his radical green Jewish environmental group, and along one wall rests a thicket of vintage Israeli protest placards all proclaiming: BIBI — STOP THE TRANS NEGEV HIGHWAY. The master bedroom is a jewelry workshop where we find Rikki, an Ethiopian Jewish refugee, a Falasha, in a leopard-print leotard and safety goggles, armed with a soldering gun, bent over a trestle table making exquisite pendants and earrings of silver and nickel and amber. The rabbi is unable to shoulder his way into the dining room at all; the door opens only a chink to reveal floor-to-ceiling stacks of banana boxes, overflowing with musty documents. In another bedroom, Joanna gives a squawk of alarm as the door of the walk-in closet springs open and out steps a small, elderly man impeccably dressed in a white linen suit and spats. He doffs his panama hat and introduces himself as Mr. Goradevski. He is a recently arrived Polish Jew, he explains. A duo of Polish Jewish girls also lives here, accessing their bedroom from the fire escape, through the window.

  “I’m a Jew too,” I find myself saying to the rabbi, trying to boost our chances as prospective buyers. It is the first time I have said it in public.

  “Observant?” he asks, looking me up and down.

  “No,” I confess. “I only recently found out.”

  In the end, he sells it to us anyway. And we mortgage ourselves to the hilt to buy this Jewish halfway house.

  “It has a great karma,” declares Joanna as we survey the wreck we have purchased. Thomas, now four, takes one look at it and bursts into tears. “It’s broken,” he wails. “And dirty. I want to go home.”

  As we begin the arduous task of making the apartment livable, I teach part-time at Princeton, where I have been appointed for a semester as a visiting professor of journalism. Though my green card hasn’t come through yet, I now have a temporary work permit. With two little boys, a new, ruined apartment, and a temporary job, it is starting to feel like I am finally nesting. But I still miss Africa and follow events there compulsively. And when National Geographic magazine suddenly shows an interest in the Zimbabwe land conflict, I head back to Africa again as soon as I can.

  TRAVELING WITHOUT a TV crew this time, and without an impending election, I risk crossing into Zimbabwe, although of course I can’t tell the immigration officers that I plan to write a story
— that would require a special visa that I would never get. For “purpose of stay,” I write “tourism.”

  On the drive from the airport I notice new graffiti, “Exodus 20:17,” scrawled on various walls along the way. At a red traffic light a group of ragged, feral children swarm around the car with cupped palms. One small boy comes up to my closed window. When I don’t open it, he wipes his hand across his runny nose and writes on the glass in yellow snot: “help me.”

  I sit with my parents under the jasmine pergola drinking tea, looking out at the swimming pool. It has now completed its transformation into a fishpond and is alive with water lilies, cream and mauve. Papyrus reeds pierce its surface, rising to large green moplike flower heads, and the shafts of bulrushes too, with brown tips like Zulu spears. A great clump of orange crane flowers grows on what used to be the love seat. Around the edges grow yellow daylilies, white alyssum, and orange nasturtiums.

  “Where’s the security guard?” I ask as darkness falls and he fails to appear.

  “We dropped the service after a few months,” says Dad.

  “It didn’t make sense,” says Mum. “Having a guard just signals to tsotsis [criminals] that you have something worth stealing. And the guards themselves are often in cahoots with the robbers, providing them with inside information about household precautions and routines.”

  “Anyway,” says Dad, “our guard seemed to sleep most of the time.”

  I don’t bother to argue and change the subject.

  “What’s Exodus 20:17?” I ask. “I keep seeing it written on walls.”

  “Oh, Peter. I’m ashamed of you,” says my mother, in mock rebuke. “A chaplain’s grandson, and you don’t know that? Exodus 20 is where God lays out the Ten Commandments for Moses. Verse 17, I think, is number ten: ‘Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house, nor his wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is thy neighbor’s.’?”

  “It must have been daubed by evicted farmers, come into town,” says my father.

  THE NEXT AFTERNOON I head out to Woodleigh Farm, east of Harare, to visit the Drapers, an elderly couple who have just been attacked by those trying to evict them. Still sprightly at eighty, Dubble Draper meets me at the ivy-layered arch leading to her low-slung, utilitarian farmhouse, with an offer of tea.

  “But not cake. I’m too depressed to bake,” she says, limping over the red-cement floor of the kitchen.

  She has a bandage on one leg; bruises and gashes cover her thin, tanned arms.

  In the living room, leaning against the mantelpiece, is her chain-smoking daughter, Lee, whose face is puffy and bruised, one eye swollen shut. Lee gingerly eases up the back of her blouse to show a large mulberry bruise in the shape of a boot tread. Her hair is matted with blood from a deep cut on her crown. Yesterday, at about this time, just after the sun dipped behind the jacaranda tree in their garden, Dubble heard a commotion and came in to see “this child of mine with eight monsters on her, her face already a pool of blood.” One of the attackers stood over Lee with an ax held aloft, ready to swing. Dubble hurled herself at him.

  When Bob, Dubble’s infirm husband, staggered onto the scene with his flashlight, muttering, “Who are these? Who are these?” they turned on him too, but the ringleader cried, “Leave him, he’s half dead already,” and snatched his flashlight, then disappeared down the corridor into the gathering darkness. As he left, he lashed out with a bottle at the photos that line the wall, a gallery of Dubble’s triumphs as one of the country’s premier horse trainers.

  “Pack your things and leave, white bitch! Take your pictures and get out! This is all ours now!” he screamed, and then was gone.

  Dusty outlines on the wall mark the missing frames, but some survive. Here is Dubble as a glamorous young matron in a slim-cut white cotton dress she made herself, court shoes, a fox fur cape, black velvet headband, black lace veil, and pearls strung around her slender neck. She holds the reins of the sleek mare that has just triumphed at the Mashonaland Turf Club. “Mrs. A M Draper (trainer) leads in Snow Princess, 1959,” reads the caption.

  In the middle of the lawn, there is a large patch of burned grass from the wovits’ huge bonfire. All night they pranced with a high-kneed march and beat a metal pipe on a large empty drum and chanted, “Kill the Drapers! Kill the Drapers!” The family huddled inside, behind closed curtains, while their security guard, a diminutive man called Decent, told the crowd that he would set his dog on them if they tried to come inside. For hours they taunted and abused him, calling him a white man’s lackey. But Decent remained there, standing at attention, with his Labrador sitting beside him, refusing to let them in.

  Dubble tells me that, for weeks now, the cottage at the bottom of the lawn has been occupied by “the pastor,” who claims he is the new owner of Woodleigh Farm, and indeed of their house, which they should vacate immediately. He has begun plowing up their horse paddocks, which are on nonarable land, and he has cut down their avenue of fifty-year-old fir trees and sold them for firewood. The “pastor” is in fact a librarian at the Herald, the government newspaper. He commutes out to his new farm from Harare every weekend, and during the week he leaves his nephew, Liberty, there to watch over his interests. He has brought farming activity almost to a standstill, turning the Drapers’ head groom — whom they adopted as a nine-year-old orphan thirty-two years ago — against them. The pastor has persuaded the grooms to go on strike for millions of dollars of “retrenchment money,” compensation he says they will be paid by the Drapers when they leave.

  This is not how Bob Draper expected to end his life. At eighteen he ran away from school to join the Royal Navy and fight the Nazis. His destroyer was sunk in the eastern Mediterranean and he floated for days in the oily sea.

  “For years after,” interjects Dubble, “he used to get these terrible boils that would eventually burst and oil would come out.”

  Bob was captured in German-occupied Greece and thrown into a POW camp, escaped, found his way to the British headquarters in Alexandria, where he was dispatched to the Far East. When the war ended, he returned to Rhodesia and Woodleigh Farm.

  He is a talented rider himself, captaining the Rhodesian polo team for several years. “We even had a practice ground right here on the farm,” he says, with nostalgic reverie.

  “Great life, great life,” says Dubble.

  “Yes, lots of good fun,” agrees Bob, and you can see that the memory of those days is more real to him now than yesterday’s beating in his own house by frenzied squatters intent on taking over the farm.

  “Are you bitter?” I ask him.

  “What?”

  “Bitter?” I repeat. Bob is pretty deaf now.

  He blinks at the word. Then an anguished look spreads across his deeply scored face. “Yes,” he says slowly, trying it out. “I suppose I am. There’s cause for bitterness, let’s face it. I was born here. I served my country through World War II, worked here all my life, paid my taxes, and you wonder what it was all for. Bitter? Yes, I do believe I am.”

  “I never dreamed it would get to this stage,” says Dubble. “I mean this is just plain, unadulterated anarchy. It’s the mob running the country. There is no help from anywhere.”

  Dubble is too traumatized for me to contradict her, but of course it’s not really anarchy at all, though many are calling it that. Anarchy? Just look at the word’s origin, from Greek anarkhos: an, “without,” arkhos, “chief or ruler.” Without ruler? Not in Zimbabwe, we aren’t. Our problem is the opposite. We have an oppressive, overbearing ruler. We have a dictator.

  I can think of other words that far better describe what we are enduring. Fascism, for one. Anarchy here is nothing more than a fig leaf to hide the heavy hand of the state. In fact it is all pretty well organized. The original wovits I met more than two years ago on the first occupied farms are fast disappearing, turfed off by the real players, the elite: the ministers and the generals and the judges and the ambassadors. Other farms,
like Woodleigh, are being divided into smaller plots for lesser-ranking functionaries.

  AT HOME FINALLY, I tell my parents about the Drapers, and they nod sagely and exchange glances.

  “Uh, we had a little labor trouble of our own,” says my father.

  “Mavis,” says Mum.

  “But I thought she’d retired,” I say.

  “Yes,” says Dad, “but she came back.”

  And slowly the full story comes out. Mavis turned up one day with goons from Joseph Chinotimba’s pseudounion, who accuse my father of having underpaid Mavis, of not having given her a proper pension, of owing her a “retrenchment package” even though she retired and was not laid off.

  “What’s this all about, Mavis?” my father asks.

  She sits in the back of the goons’ car, her eyes downcast, frowning.

  “Why don’t you tell them these allegations are untrue? We have always paid you well and looked after you.”

  But Mavis says nothing.

  So my father goes to his filing cabinets and returns with his double-entry ledgers and contracts and receipts for her wages and interest-free loans and pension records and private health insurance, going back more than twenty-five years: all is meticulously recorded there. But the two large men will not even look at his proffered evidence. Instead, they demand he go with them to the police station. So over my mother’s objections, he puts on his outside shoes and his jacket and accompanies them to Highlands Police Station.

  They sit there in the charge office for hours, the four of them, Dad and the union enforcers and Mavis, waiting their turn. And eventually they are ushered in to see a junior policeman. The union men speak to him first, and then Dad.

  “It is not our jurisdiction,” says the young officer quickly, clearly nervous to contradict Chinotimba’s men, and he suggests the matter is one for the Ministry of Labor.