The Fear Read online

  Opposite the university, which is on strike, ragged men are repairing jagged potholes so big they look like shell holes. The men have propped a cardboard sign in the middle of the road, which reads: “Voluntary work. Pliz help.”

  “Isn’t it impressive,” murmurs Pocock, almost to himself, as we lurch through the graceful avenues of overhanging boughs that still line the dilapidated streets, “how the original arboreal architecture of the city’s planners has confounded even the urban decay.”

  FOR MUCH OF FRIDAY 4 APRIL Mugabe is locked in a meeting with his politburo. We know he’s up there, on the top floor of the party headquarters, “Shake-Shake” House, because the gold-bereted soldiers of the Presidential Guard, garlanded with bandoliers, machine guns, and grenades, are lolling outside. And several hundred “war veterans,” bussed in from the provinces, are assembled in the car park. They are mostly young peasant boys (unborn in the independence war) in coarse woollen sweaters, the bedrolls on their backs snagged with grass seeds from sleeping outside.

  Mugabe’s party HQ is really called Jongwe House, “cockerel” in Shona, which is his party’s motif. But the pitched pediment at the top of the building (complete with a crowing cockerel) reminds us of the wax cartons of thick millet beer, Chibuku, which you must shake before drinking, to mix the sediment. Repeated urgently in red on each eave of the carton’s pediment is the instruction that gave the beer and now Mugabe’s party HQ their names. Shake-Shake. In a dictatorship that diminishes us all, a subversive nickname is meant to mollify. When we mention Mugabe’s draconian spying agency, the Central Intelligence Organization (CIO), we often call it Charlie Ten. And instead of referring to Robert Mugabe by any of his many official titles—His Excellency, Supreme Leader of ZANU-PF, Commander in Chief, Comrade—most Zimbabweans call him, simply, Bob. After all, how can you be scared of a dictator called Bob?

  Later, after waiting in vain for the President to address them, the war vets march through town, chanting his praises. Political demonstrations are illegal here, but only if they are attempted by the opposition.

  The meeting goes on for more than five hours. The fate of the country hangs on its outcome. Although the election results have still not been announced, six days after the vote, the party now knows what they are. And despite the gerrymandering and the intimidation, the rigging and the “ghost voters,” Mugabe has lost resoundingly to his nemesis, Morgan Tsvangirai, who, according to the constitution, should now be declared the new President.

  But it is here, in this meeting chaired by Mugabe himself, that his own tenure will actually be decided. And his four dozen or so politburo members, many of them comrades from the war of independence to overturn white rule (fought from 1972 to 1980), now divided between hawks and doves, between hardliners and conciliators, between rivals for the succession, must decide whether to concede power, drawing the twenty-eight-year reign of the dictator to a close, or to fight on.

  The state-controlled broadcaster, ZTV, shows the scene inside. Mugabe, in a well-cut dark suit and polka-dotted tie, moves slowly around the large flower-topped horseshoe table, shaking hands with each person. What’s noticeable is the way, even now, in his hour of humiliation, they all seem to revere him, bowing their heads as he approaches and, in the case of the few women, curtseying, as though to a king.

  My ears in the room come via James Mushore. I have known him since we were thirteen, boarding in the same granite-walled dormitory at the local Jesuit College, St. George’s. He is a prominent investment banker, straight-backed and tall, with gold-rimmed glasses, a connoisseur of single malts and Cuban cigars.

  James is also the nephew of retired General Solomon Mujuru—now trying to position himself as a “moderate” within Mugabe’s party, though he was not ever thus. Years ago, not long after the end of the independence war, when he still used his guerrilla name, Rex Nhongo (his wife, Joice, who today serves as Mugabe’s deputy, called herself Teurai Ropa—“Spill Blood”), the general had put the barrel of his pistol to my heart and threatened to shoot me. It was a Russian-made Tokarev, with an iridescent mother-of-pearl handle. Odd, how you remember such details. He had worked his way through most of a liter bottle of Johnny Walker Red Label at the time, but his grip remained remarkably steady.

  That was back in 1983, during the Matabeleland massacres, when Mugabe unleashed his fearsome North-Korean-trained Fifth Brigade on the southern province to crush the “dissidents” there from the Joshua Nkomo’s Ndebele opposition party, ZAPU (Zimbabwe African People’s Union). It was a particularly brutal campaign of pacification. I had written about the massacres for the Sunday Times, which is what prompted the general to draw his gun when our paths crossed. He was in charge of the media junket intended to show that I had imagined it all. “You drive in front,” I was told. “There may be land mines.” I was subsequently accused of being a spy and forced to flee the country, threatened with death. It’s a threat, I hope, that’s now sufficiently antique to have lapsed.

  I RECEIVE James’s text on Friday evening—Georgina and I are having supper with husband and wife architects Richard and Penny Beattie. Georgina has brought a bottle of Moët from Heathrow duty-free. It stands expectantly in an ice bucket, waiting for the politburo’s endorsement of Mugabe’s decision to concede defeat.

  Supper is an improvised affair. The power is out, and so is the water. The Beatties are cooking on gas canisters in candlelight. “It’s like camping, only for longer,” says Penny. They have surfed Dipleague, a sort of Craig’s List for diplomats, on which only forex is accepted, to buy what was intriguingly billed as “neatly killed chicken.”

  Even for well-off upper-middle-class families like this, life is a struggle. Chicken is the only meat they’ve been able to eat for months now. “I could write a recipe book on how to cook chicken a hundred different ways,” Richard mutters wearily, and thwacks his neatly killed chicken with a cleaver. Tonight he’s settled on a coq au jus. Jongwe au jus—cooked in its own blood.

  I read James’s text aloud. The politburo has decided the presidential election results: 43.2 percent for Mugabe, and 47.9 percent for his challenger, Tsvangirai—below the crucial 50 percent threshold. This means that a second, run-off, election will now be necessary.

  Mugabe has not conceded defeat after all. There is no political grave upon which to dance.

  “I’m not sure how much more of this I can take,” says Penny, and she slumps, deflated, onto a bar stool in the flame-flickering gloom. The Moët stands redundant in its chilled silo. The jongwe boils over. Nobody notices.

  Of course he won’t give up power—I realize that now. What were we thinking? The old man isn’t going anywhere; he’ll die in office. We’ll have to carry him out in his boots, or rather in his Jermyn Street Oxfords.

  two

  A Nation of Gentlemen

  LIKE MOST DICTATORS, Mugabe is both ubiquitous and remote; the landmarks of his life already read like an obituary, at once fixed and mythical. The boy who grew up to be our dictator, Robert Gabriel Karigamombe Mugabe, was born in 1924, at Kutama, a Jesuit mission station, sixty miles west of the capital, Harare. When he was ten, his father, Gabriel Matibili, a carpenter from Malawi, deserted the family, leaving Mugabe’s mother, Bona, to raise her remaining children alone.

  The young Robert, by his own admission, was awkward, unathletic, and bookish. Instead of playing with other boys when tending cattle together, he would strike out on his own to read. He hero-worshipped the Irish Jesuit principal at Kutama, Father Jerome O’Hea, and contemplated joining the priesthood himself. Instead, he trained as a teacher. He was initiated into the cause of black nationalism at Fort Hare University in South Africa, a decade after Mandela had graduated there. On his graduation, Mugabe returned to Rhodesia to teach.

  Petiri was one of his pupils at Mambo School in the 1950s. (He is too afraid of his old schoolmaster to use his real name.) Georgina and I arrive at his house bearing medication from his children, who are in the diaspora. He shows us his report c
ard filled out in Mugabe’s careful cursive. He recalls him as unsmiling, rigid, aloof from the other teachers. “He was a very harsh man. We nicknamed him Hammurabi, after the Mesopotamian law-giver.”

  Mugabe went on to teach in Ghana, where he arrived just as it became independent, Britain’s first sub-Saharan colony to be unleashed. “Ghanaians were just like the rest of us, but free!” he marveled. There he met his first wife, a Ghanaian, Sally Hayfron.

  Back in Rhodesia two years later, Mugabe was drawn into the leadership of black nationalist politics. He was eventually arrested on charges of subversion, and spent eleven years in jail. While he was there, his three-year-old son, Michael Nhamodzenyika (“Suffering Country,” in Shona), died of cerebral malaria in Ghana. Despite a strong recommendation by his white jailer, who vouched that Mugabe would duly return from Ghana to detention in Zimbabwe, he was not allowed to attend the funeral.

  Ian Smith, the Rhodesian Prime Minister, finally freed Mugabe in 1974, as part of a détente brokered by South Africa. Aided by Sister Aquina, a Catholic nun, he soon fled over the border into Mozambique. There he joined the guerrilla war against white Rhodesian settler rule—although he was never himself a soldier.

  Mugabe was a reluctant participant in the 1979 Lancaster House peace treaty that ended the Rhodesian conflict. Lord Carrington, the British Foreign Secretary, who hosted the talks, said of him, “The quietly spoken Mugabe worried me: he was secretive, seemed not to need friends, mistrusted everyone. Devious and clever, he was an archetypal cold fish.”

  Petiri and his friends were with Mugabe’s mother, Bona, in April 1980, as the results of Zimbabwe’s first democratic elections were announced. She reacted strangely, he says. “Bona was not happy he had won. We were at her house and she said, ‘He is not capable of doing it. He is not the kind of person who will look after other people.’ ”

  White Rhodesians also reacted badly to Mugabe’s landslide victory. Many fled to South Africa, then still in the grip of apartheid. They feared that Mugabe was an avowed communist, committed to wide-scale nationalization and a racial vendetta.

  Even my parents, “white liberals,” who had opposed Ian Smith, cast around for an escape. The bizarre ark they came closest to boarding was the island nation of Nauru. My father was offered the post of chief engineer there and my mother, Nauru’s sole doctor.

  I had never heard of Nauru, but I’d already left home for university in England by then, so it wasn’t about to become my new domicile. Georgina, though, was going to have to make the trek, and asked me for help in finding out more about it. In those pre-Google days, this wasn’t so simple. Nauru was hard enough to find on a map: we scanned up and down the vast blue expanse of the south Pacific until we finally chanced upon a tiny dot in the middle of the ocean. It was one of the most isolated places in the world, an eight-square-mile pile of sea-bird droppings, rich in phosphates. A muggy equatorial island, I discovered, whose residents (there were fewer than ten thousand of them) made a living by strip-mining said phosphates, and selling it to make fertilizer and explosives, to those not fortunate enough to inhabit their own pile of bird shit.

  At the time we were considering it as an alternative to the prospect of a Mugabe-led Zimbabwe, this self-excavation still paid off handsomely—and Nauruans enjoyed the world’s highest per-capita income. It wasn’t to last. As they dug themselves into the sea, in pursuit of dwindling bird-shit supplies, their income dwindled too, and the investments made by the Nauru Phosphates Royalties Trust were spectacularly unwise. Leonardo, the Musical, one of the biggest disasters in the history of the West End, was just one of their money losers.

  The island wallowed in another unfortunate superlative: its people were the world’s most obese. About 90 percent of the residents were overweight, and nearly half of them had type-two diabetes. As their doctor, my mother would be busy, busy, busy.

  For ten-year-old Georgina, there were two other strikes against Nauru. Her new horse, Top Ace, would not be allowed on the island, as there was an equine ban, and she would have to be sent to boarding school in Australia, nearly two thousand miles away. She took to running round the house, howling, “I don’t want to go to Naurooo!”

  On some level, I don’t think my parents were ever serious about leaving Zimbabwe. That’s why they chose such a preposterous place as Nauru. And their initial horror at Mugabe’s ascent soon faded when he moderated his militancy. He quickly dropped his plans for nationalization, promising instead a free-market economy.

  And in his first speech as Prime Minister, Mugabe appealed to the country’s whites not to flee. “Stay with us, please remain in this country and constitute a nation based on national unity,” he pleaded.

  My parents gratefully accepted his offer. As did other whites, especially the farmers.

  As Mugabe emerged from the carapace of Rhodesian propaganda, there was much to surprise us: his obvious Anglophilia; his Savile Row suits; his fastidious English; his penchant for Graham Greene novels; his admiration of the Queen, especially once she had knighted him in 1994, for services to Anglo-Zimbabwe relations; his love of tea and cricket, a game, he said, that “civilizes people and creates good gentlemen. I want everyone to play cricket in Zimbabwe. I want ours to be a nation of gentlemen.”

  Excited to get home, I bought an old Bedford truck at the British army auctions near Nottingham, and with a bunch of friends from university drove the length of the African continent. On the bumper, I proudly displayed stickers of the new Zimbabwean flag. Back in Harare, I joined thousands of compatriots, black and white, from all over the world. There was a charged atmosphere of possibility. We would show the world just what could be achieved in Africa’s newest independent nation.

  And initially Zimbabwe prospered, the economy grew, health care and education expanded dramatically as Western aid poured in to rebuild this nation, emancipated after eight years of war.

  So what went wrong?

  When I look back over the trajectory of Mugabe’s life, I find it hard to identify a moment when the “liberation hero” transforms into the “tyrannical villain.” I think that’s because there was no “good leader turns bad” metamorphosis. Robert Mugabe has been surprisingly consistent in his modus operandi. His reaction to opposition has invariably been a violent one, inherent in his political DNA.

  If you rewind to the early days of his tussles for his leadership of ZANU, the Zimbabwe African National Union, you will see ample evidence already of the bloody internal feuding by which he seized the helm of the party, and fought off challengers.

  The guerrilla war itself may have been a justified struggle for democracy, but as a teenaged conscript in the Rhodesian police, I witnessed first-hand the gruesome punishment of black civilians by Mugabe’s guerrillas, in order to win the “balance of fear.” Mugabe learned then that the barrel of Kalashnikov underwrote success at the ballot box.

  He made it clear again during the 1980 elections when—in breach of the Lancaster House peace agreement—he kept many of his guerrillas out in the field to warn the voters that the war would continue if his party didn’t win. Although the scale of his victory was such that he didn’t need to intimidate voters, he wasn’t taking any chances.

  Barely three years after independence, Mugabe ordered his troops into the southern province of Matabeleland to launch Operation Gukurahundi, “The Rains That Clear Out the Chaff.” They killed around twenty thousand Ndebele civilians, most of them supporters of Joshua Nkomo’s ZAPU party. No one has ever been held accountable for this political genocide. It remains the single worst moral stain on Robert Mugabe’s record—although at the time international reaction was shamefully muted.

  After these massacres, Mugabe coerced a shattered Joshua Nkomo, the father of black Zimbabwean nationalism, into a “Unity Accord,” which effectively created a one-party state. Without real opposition, Mugabe’s administration grew increasingly authoritarian, inefficient and corrupt.

  Mugabe appeared irked when, in 1990, Nelson Mandela
was released from prison and soon swept to power in South Africa’s first democratic elections, eclipsing Mugabe’s role as the colossus on the African stage. Mandela joked that Mugabe had grown accustomed to being the star, “and then the sun came out.”

  By 2000, after thirteen years of political monopoly, Mugabe was shocked and enraged to find that a new opposition to his rule had emerged among the younger generation, and he set out to crush them, as was his default—violently.

  He also ordered his party militia onto white-owned farms to forcibly evict the owners and their workers. In Shona, it was called jambanja, a violent overthrow. Most of the farms were doled out as bribes to his own elite; Mugabe kept six for himself. Few of the new owners had any agricultural know-how, and commercial agriculture, the economy’s foundation, quickly collapsed, bringing the rest down with it.

  Mugabe’s old pupil, Petiri, sees a psychological tendency, on a social level, among African leadership. He traveled widely through Africa in the 1960s. “I knew Kaunda and Banda and Kenyatta before independence, when they were still on bicycles, when we were learning. I know the leadership of Africa: a father is a figurehead. It’s about masculinity. All radical fathers want to dominate their wives and kids, so in a political party, that domination is carried out too—you don’t want people to answer back—you select ‘yes’ men. This has been a problem in our leadership. People have to listen and obey, or else. Mugabe is like that. Anyone who criticizes him is eliminated. One by one, got rid of.”

  three

  People Smell Power and Run to Where It Is

  MY OLD FRIEND Godfrey Chanetsa arrives punctually for tea. His closely shaved head gleams, and he is dressed in an immaculately pressed striped shirt, dark trousers, and tasseled loafers. Educated at Queensland University in Brisbane, Australia, Godfrey, now fifty-seven, is articulate, cosmopolitan, passionate, just the kind of person that made so many enthusiastic about this country.