When a Crocodile Eats the Sun Read online

  Father Fidelis suggests a meeting the following day to hammer out a modus vivendi between the white farmers and their unwelcome guests. But Comrade Mavusi bridles at this. He has not heard from his superiors about this meeting, he says.

  The army colonel signals that he wishes to speak. Now, I think. Now he will assert himself. But he only points out that a storm is approaching and we are starting to lose the light, and that the task force needs to leave now to fly back to Harare tonight.

  “If the farmers try to leave,” Mavusi instructs his followers, “chop them with your axes.” He has effectively taken us hostage. But his demands are difficult to follow, and they keep changing. Now he seems to want transport and food for two thousand supporters that he has summoned from the Zambezi Valley. If this is not done, his guys will burn the farm, beat the workers, kill Maltzer. Fidelis just agrees to everything so we can get away. But by the time we reach the helicopter landing pad, the pilots are busy tying down the aircraft in the face of the approaching storm. There will be no flight out for the task force tonight.

  Maltzer finds us half an hour later at the police station. “It’s all very well for you guys to just fly in and out,” he says. “I’ve got to bloody live here, and my farm’s going to be in flames if this isn’t resolved before you leave.”

  He is wild-eyed and desperate. The obvious solution — to deploy policemen to safeguard the farm — is, both Maltzer and the local police commander agree, out of the question. As soon as the police leave, the farmer and his workers will pay heavily for their presence.

  Antonin and I drive back through the rain to Harare with Johnny Heynes, my old schoolmate, as our passenger. I am shaken by what we’ve witnessed, astonished at the way the frothing Comrade Mavusi has the confidence of command, that neither police nor army is prepared to contradict him. Afraid too that Maltzer will not survive the night. But Heynes is phlegmatic. This is all just political grandstanding, he says, the mock charge of the elephant, when it sticks out its ears to look bigger and more dangerous, rather than a real charge when its ears are folded flat against its neck to cut wind resistance. It’s one of those pieces of bush lore that we were both raised on. It sounds convincing in theory, but things seem rather different when the beast is actually bearing down on you.

  It’ll all quiet down after the elections, he insists. When the government wins, the wovits will go away. He’s been told as much by the president in private, he confides. “And we’re telling all our members to sit tight. This madness will pass, Peter. We just have to keep our cool.”

  Six

  May 2000

  BACK IN HARARE, I phone Maltzer several times a day. For the first two days, his phone just rings and rings. Rob Webb hasn’t been able to contact him either. The comrades won’t let anyone onto Maltzer’s farm. When I call again on the third day, his line is dead.

  I put down the phone and walk to the open window of Georgina’s room on the nineteenth floor of the Monomotapa Hotel. From the park below comes the clear trilling soprano of Papagena in The Magic Flute. Before the aria is completed, it is drowned out by the sound of a police siren wailing up Robert Mugabe Avenue. In a lull, I hear the barking of police dogs nearby. Even as Zimbabwe is gripped with tension, as the farms burn and opposition supporters are attacked, the city is hosting the Harare International Festival of the Arts (HIFA).

  The festival is run by Manuel, Jeremy’s best man. Georgina and Jeremy’s company handles its publicity. In the weeks before this year’s event, they have been fielding worried calls from various acts who have been reading about mayhem in Zimbabwe. The fact that a bomb has just been thrown into the offices of the Daily News, one of the country’s few independent newspapers, just across from the HIFA site, hasn’t made it any easier to mollify visiting artists, and several have canceled. There are mixed feelings too about the appropriateness of going ahead with the festival at all.

  Downstairs, in a festival marquee, Georgina is showing off her ten-week-old baby girl to a caucus of well-wishers and fans. At a ceremony performed last week by a Buddhist Quaker in their orchid house, she was named Xanthe Naledi Jain. Xanthe means “golden” in Greek; Naledi, which means “star” in Ndebele, is after Georgina’s close friend Tsitsi Naledi Vera; and Jain is after our older sister. Georgina finishes feeding Xanthe, redoes her nursing bra, and hands the baby to Auxillia, her aptronymic nanny, who decants Xanthe into an old-fashioned Silver Cross baby carriage and wheels her away through the crowd.

  This evening’s great attraction is Oliver Mtukudzi, the gravel-voiced singer who holds Zimbabwe in his thrall. He opens his set with one of his current numbers, “Wasakara” (“You Are Worn Out”). The song is a pointed message to the president that it’s time for him to move on and let younger men take over. “Wasakara” has just been banned from all ZBC stations. As the band falls silent, the multiracial crowd cheers wildly and ululates. Mtukudzi introduces his band, and when he comes to his two daughters, who are performing as his backup singers, they are greeted by a welter of catcalls and wolf whistles from admiring males in the audience.

  “Give me your farms for them, then,” Mtukudzi calls out, a reference to lobola, “bride price,” still practiced here.

  The crowd roars with laughter. And I sit there thinking of Louis Maltzer and wondering what has happened to him.

  AFTER THE CONCERT we repair to “Coca-Cola Green,” the refreshment area, and I begin drinking Zambezi lagers with Keith Goddard, a friend of Georgina’s. He is a small, birdlike white man with long hair, metal-rimmed glasses, and laughing eyes. My sister secretly admits to finding him rather attractive. Not that she would be of romantic interest to him — he is openly gay and heads up a group called Gay and Lesbians of Zimbabwe (GALZ), which the infamously homophobic government keeps trying to shut down. The government’s fury has been stoked recently on the streets of London when Peter Tatchell, head of the UK gay rights group OutRage!, tried to perform a citizen’s arrest on Robert Mugabe as he arrived to shop at Harrods, but was rebuffed by his bodyguards.

  Goddard is regaling me with the tale of his farcical court case, still on appeal, in which he is charged with multiple rapes. Because of his diminutive stature, he has to stand on a box to give evidence. The alleged victim, Vuma, claims that he was raped twice, forced to sleep overnight, and ordered to drink cold coffee and eat burned toast the next morning before being allowed to leave. Given that Vuma is a huge man, and Goddard tiny, the judge expresses some skepticism. Ah, says the prosecutor, but the acts were done at gunpoint. And he presents exhibit A, a pair of plastic water pistols, neon pink and green, in camp retro-futuristic style. They are still sealed in the original plastic wrapping.

  Shortly afterward, a reporter from a government paper, the Sunday Mail, tries to infiltrate GALZ. He is discovered almost immediately, one of the first cases in history of a straight man being outed. Police harassment of GALZ continues, but its members (at last count there were some four thousand of them, overwhelmingly black) are fearless. Mutual antipathy to Mugabe’s policies has made strange bedfellows of GALZ members and the raw-boned white farmers.

  Goddard points across the crowd to a young black man. It is his tail from the CIO. The agent acknowledges Goddard with a half wave and turns his attention back to the stage where a black dancer is somehow twitching the hemispheres of her posterior individually to appreciative whistles from the crowd.

  The talk that night is full of the rising tempo of the conflict around us. Local real estate agents are reporting a tripling of properties for sale in suburban Harare as the farm invasions cause a ripple of anxiety through the small white community. And feverish rumors are breeding — of internal coups, of a raid by ex-Rhodesian Special Forces to “take Mugabe out,” of international rescue contingency plans.

  THE NEXT MORNING I phone Rob Webb to ask again about Maltzer.

  “He’s bolted,” says Webb, and he gives me a contact number in Harare. “By the way, we’ve been ordered to host a ZANU-PF rally this weekend. You
might be able to sneak in. But you’d better dress like one of us. Oh, and leave Antonin behind or he’ll be dead meat.”

  I call Maltzer’s Harare number, and his wife, Maryanne, answers. Half an hour later, they open the door to me at a tiny borrowed apartment in the Avenues district of central Harare.

  “Man, after you left it got really crazy.” He sighs. “Mavusi and his gang demanded to move into my father-in-law’s cottage and gave us only two hours to move all our things out. And as my son and I tried to drag our belongings out of the house, they kept on dancing around us, brandishing carving knives at us and cracking whips and making death threats. ‘We haven’t killed any farmers in this area yet,’ they said, ‘and we think it’s time we started.’?”

  And at that, Maltzer said, something snapped inside him. It felt almost physical. He got his emergency bag and his son and just drove away. Even as they followed, screaming and shouting and warning him not to leave or they would burn everything, kill everyone, never let him back on his farm, he kept going, abandoning everything, everyone.

  “I feel terribly worried about the farmworkers,” he says now. “I feel a lot of responsibility for them, but I don’t know what to do. I don’t want to go back. Not after what we’ve been through.

  “We’ve applied to go to Australia. I’ve only ever been a farmer, you know. That farm is my life’s work. Everything we’ve got has gone into that farm. I’ll be walking away from a three-quarters of a million US dollar investment. But I’ll do whatever I have to — sweep streets if necessary — as long as I don’t have to put up with this nonsense anymore.”

  THAT NIGHT, BACK at my parents’ home in our converted garage guest room, I draw the batik curtains made by my dead sister and lie on the candlewick bedspread surrounded by the books and LPs of my childhood. I pull the top book off the dusty stack, an il-lustrated collection of Greek myths. The first story features the Chimera, the fire-breathing monster, part lion, part goat, part serpent — a word that has now taken on the meaning of an impossible, foolish fancy. Maybe this whole country is a chimera: part developed, democratic; part ancient, atavistic, authoritarian, and, in its very conception, a foolish, unworkable contraption destined to split asunder along its very evident seams, a Frankenstein country where the crude sutures are visible to all.

  And as I lie there, I hear the convoys going by, straining up Enterprise Road, the trucks full of war vets beating their fists and their knobkerries and their pangas on the metal sides in time with their songs and their slogans. Our Dalmatians stir, creaking their wicker baskets, and they begin to whine and howl at the rhythmic sound of the war vets’ beating on their trucks, just as Prince Biyela’s Zulus once beat their spears on their cowhide shields in unison to frighten their enemies. Sometimes, when the wind picks up across the silent city, I can even hear snatches of their words: “Pasi ne maBhunu! Pasi ne maBhunu!” they chant as they beat the metal sides. “Down with the Boers,” they chant as they are carried out to the farms in government trucks.

  And I think of Louis Maltzer cornered in his borrowed apartment, broken by intimidation and threats, ready to do anything, to sweep the streets of distant, unknown towns, rather than remain in this mad and dangerous place.

  Is this how it ends? Will we be picked off one by one until those who remain just run?

  I finally drift off to sleep in the early morning.

  WHEN I AWAKE, sunlight is streaming through the windows, and birds are warbling. The smell of coffee and bacon wafts over from the kitchen, and Mavis is singing a hymn as she hangs up the laundry in the courtyard. The war vets of the night before banging on their trucks seem like nothing more than an unsettling dream.

  But then Dad meets me in the main house with a sheaf of phone messages. The war vets have occupied the Rydings, a private elementary school, out in a farming district called Karoi. The students there are mostly farmers’ kids, and feelings are running very high. The situation is confused. I need to get there fast. My parents stand at the top of the drive and wave. Antonin is waiting for me at Meikles Hotel, standing on the lion paw-print carpet again, trying to look like a tourist with his battered panama hat, a cheroot in the side of his mouth. Soon we are on the open road once more, driving due west.

  THE RYDINGS SCHOOL is housed on an old farm on the outskirts of Karoi. Tobacco barns have been converted into classrooms and dormitories. Their brick walls are covered in ivy and surrounded by lush lawns of broad-bladed kikuyu grass. Today is the first day of the new term, and the school should be teeming with small children, but it is not. The school has asked them to stay away. Instead, the barn of an assembly hall is filled with their parents, some four hundred in all, their faces clenched with tension.

  The “war veterans” are demanding half of the small farm on which the school stands. Their behavior, says the chairman of the school board, has been erratic and belligerent. The staff, he announces to the gathered parents, can no longer guarantee the children’s safety. It is an emotional meeting, with all the fear and frustration of the past few months boiling over. Many parents, besieged on their own farms, say their children are already at risk. They have been counting on the school as a safe haven for their kids.

  “Can you imagine if news gets out that our children are in danger, and two hundred parents come down the road and meet two hundred war vets armed with knobkerries and pangas — there’s going to be blood on your hands,” says one farmer.

  “If our kids are all here, we’ll do anything to get them back, and the vets know that,” says another.

  “We’ll be looking at a hostage situation here — that’s the threat, the vets would have us by the nuts.”

  “It’s time to make a stand,” says one farmer. “This is where the line is drawn.”

  “They will use you,” warns the farmers’ security coordinator. “It’s a political thing, and it will never end.”

  “We’re actually not in charge of our own destiny here,” admits the chairman. “We know how these people operate. We know how they lie. Let’s wait until the government people who deal with these idiots tell us it’s safe.”

  At the gazebo pub on the edge of the school grounds the parents gather after the meeting to drink Lion and Zambezi beers and ponder their future. The sky darkens, and a pulsing spray of stars emerges, under a bright crescent moon.

  “Godwin?” inquires a young white man in a khaki blouson.

  “Yes . . .” I do not recognize him.

  “It’s me, Simon Tucker. You used to be my prefect at St. George’s.”

  “I hope I didn’t beat you,” I say, for Tucker has grown into a tough-looking young man.

  “No,” he laughs. “You were actually OK.”

  Tucker farms nearby and has had many dealings with the group of men — mostly real war veterans, not just rent-a-mob — now threatening the Rydings School.

  “There are about sixty of them,” he says. “And they have rival leaders. The first one was a Comrade Peugeot. I rode out to meet them on my motorbike when he first arrived, and we shook hands. He said, ‘Fine, we want half the farm,’ and he got out a hoe and began marking his half, which included my tobacco crop, still in the field. He agreed to let me grow wheat on ‘his land’ and wrote a letter to that effect.

  “Ten days later, another group came and demanded, ‘Why are you plowing in our fields?’ I showed them the letter from Comrade Peugeot giving me permission, and they took it away. So I went ahead and fertilized the field and was about to seed it when the vets turned up at the house again. This time the leader was a guy wearing a tree-bark headdress and a black leather jacket, holding a machete. He was shaking with rage. He started poking me in the chest and shouting: ‘Tucker, we are going to kill you!’ I just said, ‘I’ll do whatever you want.’

  “The vets have been intimidating my labor too. The tractor drivers were told that if they continued to plow they would be tied to their tractors with wire and set afire. Then the vets ransacked the house of one of my guys, a builder, who
was quite high up in the local MDC. I took him to the police station to file a complaint, and the police just turned him over to the vets at the ZANU-PF offices, who burned him with cigarettes and beat the soles of his feet.

  “They told him they were going to give him forty lashes, ‘twenty for you and twenty for your boss’ — me — ‘because he isn’t here.’ Then the vets had a meeting in the compound and ordered everyone to bring all MDC cards, literature, and T-shirts in, and they publicly burned it. They said, ‘If we find any MDC stuff on you after this, we will kill you.’?”

  I ask Tucker if he thinks it would be possible to meet his vets.

  “I dunno. They’re very volatile,” he says. “The best time to try is first thing in the morning before they’re high or stoned, before their blood’s up. But you just never know with these guys.”

  His wife thinks it’s a terrible idea.

  Antonin and I spend the night at the Twin River Inn, and at dawn the next morning we drive back out to Tucker’s farm. On the way we pass a war vets’ sign.

  “No Go for Whites,” Antonin reads in his Czech accent. “Hmm. You sure about this, Peter?” And he grins, game for anything.

  By 7:00, we are waiting with Tucker outside the trading store that has become the vets’ base camp. A man emerges, red eyed and sleep fugged, and hawks fruitily on the ground. He is Comrade Muroyi (Shona for “wizard”), the base commander, he says, and he is pretty annoyed to see us here.

  “Who are these ones?” he asks Tucker roughly.

  Tucker answers as we have rehearsed. He says we are from overseas and we have come to look at the land question. He does not actually say we are journalists.

  “They should report immediately to ZANU-PF HQ in Karoi,” says Muroyi. This quickly mutates from a suggestion into an order, a trip on which we will be escorted by armed vets. Given what happened to Tucker’s builder there, it’s not really a trip we want to make. But Muroyi clangs on a simbi, an iron pipe hanging from a tree branch, which is their call to arms, and he shouts for his comrades to get up. Tucker and I exchange glances, and he rolls his eyes. His wife had been dead right. This was a terrible idea.