When a Crocodile Eats the Sun Read online

  Later, after my mother does eventually retire, Dr. Mhazo dies very suddenly, under mysterious circumstances. He is perfectly healthy on a Friday, and over the weekend he dies in the hospital of massive organ failure. My mother is deeply suspicious. But she can do nothing.

  Five

  April 2000

  FOR THE FIRST YEAR of his life, our new baby, Thomas, seems to absorb all our time. We are exhausted by him, intellectually numbed. When he is nine months old, Joanna and I bring him out to Africa, briefly, to meet my parents. They seem nonplussed at first, Dad in particular. On being presented with his grandson, he lowers his newspaper and makes some baby sounds. When I look again, the paper is back up. Only later when I examine photographs of their encounters do I see that I have somehow missed the glowing smile that my father is bestowing on Thomas as the baby confidently grips his grandfather’s russet forearm. It is a smile I have never seen before.

  Now I am coming back to Africa on my own, on assignment for the New York Times Magazine, after a six-month absence.

  The heavyset Congolese businessman sitting next to me on the flight into Harare wears a houndstooth sport coat, a Chanel necktie, a sheen of sweat, and two Rolexes, one on each wrist.

  “This one for local time; this one for Washington time,” he explains, following my glance. His children are safely in the United States at college, he says. The profits from the cell-phone network deals he’s cobbling together are parked securely out of Africa too. He palms some peanuts and chugs some Cape sauvignon blanc and turns to look out the window.

  “Africans can’t do governments,” he suddenly announces. “We are useless at it, disorganized.”

  I close my newsmagazine and nod noncommittally.

  “And our institutions never work because we never pay our dues.” He reaches up and presses his bell for more wine.

  Recent events in Zimbabwe have strengthened his thesis. As he turns away I look back at my magazine, at a photograph of a white Zimbabwean farmer, a big bear of a man, sporting a bushy beard. His name is Martin Olds, and his body lies as he fell, on his back, beneath a shattered window, arms outstretched. He is barefoot, dressed in dark green shorts and a khaki shirt, his injured right leg bound between two makeshift wooden splints. I examine them closely. Are they baseball bats? No. They’re wooden curtain rods, and he has tied them around his broken leg with torn strips of curtain, now bloodied. The bald dome of his head is crisscrossed with red gashes. His position looks oddly like a supine crucifixion, one foot over the other against the pinewood of the curtain rod, arms flung open along a worn wooden broom handle, the horizontal beam of his cross.

  Today I am flying into a firestorm. After ten years of one-party rule, President Robert Mugabe has suddenly encountered real opposition. It began as a minor obstacle on the political skyline, an irritating clause in the constitution that limited his term in office. So he has rewritten the constitution to increase his already considerable presidential powers, and reset the presidential clock, another twelve years in office. But his change needed to be ratified by a referendum, and he needed something to sweeten the deal, something to entice the continued loyalty of a threadbare people. So he inserted into the new constitution a law allowing the seizure of commercial farmland and its redistribution to black peasants.

  Land is something of a paradox in Africa. It was not always precious. There is, for most societies, a litmus test that shows if there’s a scarcity of land or of people, the wedding test: does the bride come with a dowry, or must the groom pay a price to the bride’s father? Europe has mostly dowry cultures. In Africa, bride price is the rule. Fertility is prized above all, because, hard as it is to believe today, the continent’s historic curse was underpopulation, which hinders centralized rule and state building.

  To early white visitors, much of Africa seemed almost empty. For the most part, “an unpeopled country,” said the bellicose explorer and correspondent Henry Morton Stanley as he strolled through East Africa.

  This impression of emptiness was accentuated by the African system of shifting agriculture. Bush was cleared, land prepared mostly by hand, crops planted, and rain relied on to water them. No fertilizer was used other than the ash from the initial burning, and when the soil became exhausted after two or three seasons, the farmer simply moved on to a new patch of bush. The idea of land “ownership” as such was an alien one. A white farmer once told me of his grandfather going to see a local chief about buying some land. “Buy land?” said the chief. “You must be crazy. You don’t buy the wind or the water or the trees.”

  When the first white pioneers trekked up from South Africa to cross the Limpopo River, it wasn’t the land they were interested in but what lay beneath it. They had come to prospect for gold. The deal they struck with Lobengula, the paramount chief of the Matabele, and his subject Shona tribes, dwelled exclusively on mineral rights. Under the Rudd Concession of 1888, emissaries for Cecil Rhodes’s British South Africa Company agreed to pay him one hundred pounds every lunar month, and give him one thousand Martini-Henry breech-loading rifles, one hundred thousand rounds of ammunition, and a gunboat on the Zambezi (or, in lieu, another five hundred pounds, which is what he eventually got), in return for which he would cede all mineral rights to his territory, though not the rights to the land itself.

  But this proved to be no Eldorado, and following the defeat of Lobengula and the subjugation of the indigenous people, Rhodes granted his pioneers parcels of land to farm, as a sort of consolation prize. Subsequent farmers purchased their land from the British South Africa Company, which was the colonizing authority under a royal charter, but tribal authorities were never compensated. Rhodes created tribal reserves for “natives,” of whom there were then estimated to be fewer than six hundred thousand in a country the size of Spain.

  Racially based land tenure was later codified under various laws, and population pressure in the so-called Tribal Trust Lands began to grow as the black population increased with their access to Western medicine, with people like my mother carrying out wide-scale vaccinations against killer diseases. By mid-1945, blacks already numbered over four million, and white immigrants were being recruited from a war-ravaged Europe, under the so-called Empire Settlement Scheme, to buy farms in Rhodesia with low-interest loans.

  For much of the twentieth century, whites possessed more than half of Rhodesia/Zimbabwe’s agricultural land, even though they made up barely 1 percent of the population, and this land disparity was seen as one of the main causes of the country’s civil war. But at independence in 1980, when white-dominated Rhodesia became black-ruled Zimbabwe, the new president, Robert Mugabe, at the urging of his ally, President Samora Machel of Mozambique, made racial reconciliation the centerpiece of his policy. Machel rued the economic chaos wrought at his own country’s independence when his policy of wholesale nationalization triggered a swift exodus of a quarter of a million Portuguese, after five hundred years of settlement. People like my parents, who had feared that Mugabe, an avowed Marxist, would bustle all whites out of the country, were hugely relieved to find instead that he welcomed them to remain in a tolerant, multiracial Zimbabwe. He appointed a white minister of agriculture and toured the country with him, appealing to white farmers to stay on and contribute to the new country.

  And they did. Their produce, in particular tobacco, brought in 40 percent of the country’s export earnings; their food crops fed the cities; they employed a quarter of the country’s workforce. Zimbabwe became the fastest-growing economy in Africa, and it was the continent’s breadbasket, frequently exporting food to neighbors in need.

  Robert Mugabe did begin a program of voluntary land redistribution, funded mostly by the British government, and nearly 40 percent of the land held by whites at independence was purchased — at market prices — and transferred into black hands by 2000. But Mugabe’s interest in land resettlement waned, and in the past decade his government had allocated an average of only 0.16 percent of his annual budget to land acquisi
tion; the military got over thirty times that amount. And when the British realized that many of the newly acquired farms were being given not to landless peasants, as had been agreed, but as bonbons to Mugabe’s political cronies, they froze the remains of the fund. Even then, some 740,000 acres of land acquired for resettlement remained empty and idle.

  But Mugabe’s neglect of the land question failed to raise any spontaneous clamor from his people, by now the best educated in Africa. Most of them, especially the young, had aspirations to salaried jobs in towns rather than to a life of toiling in the fields. A poll conducted by the Helen Suzman Foundation in early 2000 found that only 9 percent of Zimbabweans saw land redistribution as a priority. By then, according to the Commercial Farmers Union (CFU), 78 percent of white farmers were on property they had purchased after independence, only when that land had first been offered to — and turned down by — the government, as was required by law.

  Opposition to Mugabe’s new constitution came from an eclectic congregation drawn from all points of the political, racial, tribal, and social compass, and it was especially strong in the urban areas, among the black middle class and the trade unions and people like my parents, who had been part of the old white liberal establishment. It also came from white farmers who realized that their land was to be seized. Many joined a new political party, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). Its leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, was a former trade union head. The MDC didn’t disagree with the idea of land reform — no one did really, not even the white farmers themselves — but Tsvangirai said it had to be done in a planned and orderly way, so that the golden goose of commercial agriculture would not be cooked. Campaigning for the February 2000 constitutional referendum was lively, but the opposition was denied access to the government-controlled radio and TV, and no one thought Mugabe would actually lose. He had never lost at the polls before. So when he did, we were all shocked. I found myself taking a deep breath and thinking, Now there’s really going to be trouble.

  President Mugabe gave a speech after the referendum result saying that he was a democrat and would respect the will of the people. But his face was tight with anger as he said it, and his smile was not a real smile; it was a rictus, a barely suppressed snarl. And he looked over the camera, not into it, over our heads, not into our eyes. And you could see that this was a man fueled by thoughts of revenge, that he was boiling with the public humiliation. How could he, who had liberated his people, now be rejected? How could they be so ungrateful? It couldn’t be his own people who had done this (even though 99 percent of the electorate was black); it must have been other people, white people, leading them astray. He would show us. He would show these white people not to meddle in politics. In things that did not concern us. We had broken the unspoken ethnic contract. We had tried to act like citizens, instead of expatriates, here on sufferance.

  During the referendum campaign, Mugabe’s ruling ZANU-PF party had already taken out race-baiting ads in the Herald. Among the local press clippings my father sent me was a full page ad featuring a large photo of an elderly white couple wearing “Vote No” T-shirts. “They are going to vote no,” read the caption, “Vote yes.” In the news reports, white Zimbabweans were now referred to as the “nonindigenous,” “Britain’s children,” and even simply “the enemy.”

  “What do you think?” I ask my father.

  “Oh, no one takes any notice of it,” he says cheerfully. “For God’s sake, the war ended twenty years ago. There’s no racial animosity these days. I’ve never felt any. Mugabe’s trying to divert attention from his terrible economic mismanagement, but it isn’t working.”

  And indeed in the forthcoming parliamentary election, four months later, Mugabe’s ZANU-PF party candidates faced a real opposition — the MDC — which had coalesced around the referendum campaign. And so Mugabe was doing what old generals always do, girding up to fight the last war. Just like Fidel Castro, Mugabe pulled on his old olive green army fatigues, the vestments of a battlefield he had never personally fought on, to emphasize the victories of the past and to distract from the failures of the present. At rallies around the country, he punched the air and ranted anew against an antique and increasingly irrelevant colonialism, now a generation past.

  And then he choreographed a crisis. Days after his referendum defeat, people calling themselves “war vets,” ex-combatants from the independence war, began arriving on white-owned farms and refusing to leave. The way they pronounced “war vets” was elided so that it sounded like “wovits,” which is what my sister and others started to call them. Very few were actual war veterans at all; they were just a ragtag collection of Mugabe supporters and unemployed youths, many of whom were being paid a daily stipend by the ruling party to participate. Hitler Hunzvi was clearly the architect of the campaign — and the wovits arrived in government buses and trucks. When the white farmers complained to the police, the police said it was a “political” matter beyond their jurisdiction.

  Still, when the farm killings began, it took my parents by surprise. Suddenly my father wasn’t quite so sanguine.

  Martin Olds — who I am reading about on the plane — was murdered on April 18. He had farmed in a place called Nyamandlovu. It means “Meat of the Elephant” in Ndebele, the tongue of our southern tribe, the offshoot of Prince Biyela’s Zulus. Many down there, Olds among them, had joined the MDC. He was alone when his homestead was attacked. He had sent his teenage daughters and his wife into Bulawayo. The attack came just after first light. It was a hit squad, the locals said, Shona-speaking, from up north. The CFU tried to reconstruct what happened. A hundred men, armed with AK-47s and pangas (machetes), arrive in a fourteen-vehicle convoy. When Olds goes out to speak to them, they shoot at him, so he retreats inside. The men take up six ambush positions around his homestead and open fire. Olds calls the police, pleading for help, but no one comes. He calls his neighbors, who try to help but are forced back with gunfire, as is an ambulance they have requested.

  For three desperate hours, the gun battle rages. Olds was once a soldier; he knows how to defend himself. But he is one against a hundred. He is shot in the leg; he ties it with a makeshift splint and fights on. The attackers lob burning Molotov cocktails through the windows. A neighbor flies over the homestead in a little Cessna and sees the house in flames below, sees the gunmen converging on it, but can do nothing to help. And as the house burns, Olds retreats from room to room, finally to the bathroom, where he fills the tub with water, wets his clothes, and prepares to make his final stand. He returns fire until he runs out of bullets, until he is overcome by the smoke and the heat, and then he climbs out the window, hands raised.

  He is barely outside before the gunmen converge on him, beat him with shovels and rifle butts, stones and machetes. Then they get into their trucks and drive back north. Those injured in the attack are escorted by police to a nearby hospital where they are treated and released. Police confirm that no arrests have been made.

  Surreptitiously the Congolese businessman leans across the empty seat between us to see what I am studying so intently. He sees the picture and raises his eyes to look at me with an expression I cannot quite recognize at first. Then I realize it is pity. He feels sorry for Olds and for me and for our little tribe of white Africans. I feel embarrassed, humiliated, mortified. I am not used to being the one pitied. I am the one who pities others. I casually close the magazine and pretend to look out at the roiling black clouds we are about to penetrate on our way down to land.

  It is raining heavily when we disembark at Harare Airport, which is gently atrophying as plans for a new one are pondered. We jog across the tarmac to line up in the immigration shed. The rain drums down on the corrugated-tin roof, making it hard to hear. Strategically positioned pails catch the gushing leaks. Above us an electronic ticker flashes a message from the Zimbabwe Investment Center: “Welcome to the most favorable investment destination on the continent.” But when it comes to the telephone number for potential investors to c
all, the ticker lettering breaks up into a jumble of x’s and y’s and z’s.

  When I reach the head of the line, I hand my passport to the black official and greet him in Shona, Zimbabwe’s main vernacular. He ripens in smile and demands, “Why don’t you stay here? We need people like you.”

  By “people like you,” he means white Zimbabweans. I shrug and feel half pleased, half ashamed. It always has this sweet-and-sour effect on me, this place. Even as it gets poorer, more ramshackle, more dangerous, its slide accentuated for me by my periodic overviews, snapshots separated by absence, I am tempted each time to tear up my return ticket and stay. For whether I like it or not, I am home.

  Dad is noticeably more frail; he now has early-stage emphysema. Mum’s back hurts constantly, and she thinks she may need it operated on. Mavis, the housekeeper, is aging with them, stooped and slow now, and being kept alive by expensive hypertension drugs that Mum gets her.

  The swimming pool lies green and still and opaque, its pump quiet, with a slimy watermark around its rim. Dad has given up. The chemicals, he says, have increased tenfold in price and are often unavailable. Georgina warned me about this, and I e-mailed them to say that I would arrange to have the chemicals delivered monthly to them, via a Web site I have discovered. It is important to keep exercising, I argue.

  “Please let me help?” I say to my father, but he gets angry.

  “It is absolute robbery,” he says, “what they’re trying to charge. I will have nothing to do with it. We can do quite well without the pool.”

  “Anyway,” says my mother brightly, “we saw a program on ZTV about converting your pool into a fish facility, and we’re going to drive into town, to the Ministry of Agriculture, to pick up a pamphlet on how it’s done. It’s getting increasingly difficult to find fish in the shops, so we’ll breed bream for the pot.”