When a Crocodile Eats the Sun Read online

  Antonin just grins and pretends he can’t really understand what’s going on, which is not far from the truth, as we are speaking a combination of Shona, English, and Chilapalapa, a bastard translingual patois. He steps over to Comrade Muroyi and offers him one of his dark cheroots. Muroyi has evidently never seen a cheroot. He takes one from the packet, rolls it in his callused fingers, draws it under his nose, intrigued. Antonin flicks his Bic, and Muroyi accepts a light. He inhales deeply and suppresses a cough. He’s clearly impressed. His lungs are used to smoking marijuana seeds and stalks rolled in cheap newsprint, and he still feels a kick from the cheroot. These babies are strong.

  “Hey, man, have the pack,” invites Antonin. “I got more.”

  Muroyi snatches it, and as he is scrutinizing the raised gold motif, I risk a question. I ask him about himself.

  He is a real ex-combatant, he says, not like many of the others. “I went back to stay with my parents after the war, but I am plowing only two acres to support two wives and nine children,” he complains.

  So why has it taken him twenty years to take this drastic action?

  “The government kept promising us land, but we never got anything, so now we have come to take it for ourselves, it is our spoils of war. The government was not able to give us land before, you know, because of the laws. That’s why we have done it for ourselves.”

  He is joined by another war vet, Comrade Satan, who immediately makes it clear that he is actually the base commander by demanding custody of the cheroot pack. Muroyi scowls but hands it over.

  Before they can reprise the idea of hauling us off to the party headquarters and torture chambers, I press on with my benign questioning, this time addressing the senior Comrade Satan.

  “We will live together with the white farmers,” Satan explains. “We will take half of each farm, and we will plant our crops, just like them. And if we need tractors we will borrow them from the farmer, and if we have money we will pay for the use.”

  Just as he says that a tractor drives past, its trailer piled high with wood.

  “One of mine,” murmurs Tucker. “They’ve commandeered it.”

  At the entrance of their camp I had noticed a fresh grave, and now I ask for a closer look. There is a large cross at the head of the grave, and at its base is arranged an MDC T-shirt with a hole burned out where the wearer’s heart would be. On a piece of iron drum they have scrawled the name of the grave’s symbolic occupant, the opposition leader: “Morgan Tsvangirai, MDC.” Above his name they have painted their rallying call: “War Vets Back to War!” Underneath it is written “He will kill the people.”

  “MDC, it means Morgan Don’t Come . . . again!” yells Comrade Satan, and he and Muroyi and other men who have been filtering in pound their feet on the grave as they begin to dance around it. So far, Antonin has not revealed his camera, but now I ask if he might photograph the grave, and Satan agrees. But just as Antonin lifts his Leica, Satan suddenly shouts, “Wait! Wait!” Antonin whips down the camera, fearing some sudden irrational countermand, and Satan dashes away. Seconds later, he returns with a broad-brimmed felt hat on his head. Around its crown is a leopard skin band and a large label that reads “The mighty denim VOLO — king of all jeans — designed in Korea.”

  Satisfied now with his attire, Comrade Satan strikes a pose at the graveside looking suitably fierce, clenching his fist to the skies.

  “Now,” he says to Antonin, “I am ready. You can shoot me.”

  THE FOLLOWING SATURDAY morning, I am back at Rob Webb’s farm, without Antonin, watching from the veranda as thousands of farmworkers converge on the farm school for an enforced political rally. ZANU-PF marshals with clipboards note the size of the farm contingents. The commercial farmers from this entire district and its neighbors have been ordered to attend with all their workers. The penalty for absence no longer needs to be enunciated.

  The rally is modeled on what they used to call a pungwe in the liberation war, a public working-up of emotion. The warm-up is a series of pamberis — “forward withs” — and pasis — “down withs.” Pamberis for the ruling party, its local candidates, Robert Mugabe. Pasis for “Rhodesians,” “sellouts,” and the MDC.

  I sit, incognito, among the white farmers, all men; they have left their wives and children behind. There are about a hundred of us, dressed in desert boots and shorts and work shirts and floppy hats. We are perched on wooden schoolchildren’s benches, our knees up by our chests. The farmers work hard to keep the scowls off their faces.

  “Not all white commercial farmers are bad,” says a ruling party official in Shona. “Only those who support the MDC.”

  From time to time I see ZANU-PF marshals pull someone from the crowd and frog-march them away for “reeducation.”

  There is a ripple of excitement through the throng of black workers when six youth-league members appear, parading a casket shoulder high. It is another symbolic coffin for the political corpse of MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai, he of many funerals. Large bundles of MDC T-shirts are lugged in, and the marshals spread them on the dust and spit on them. They load the coffin onto the roof of an old car, which the driver attempts to start. For several minutes, the engine sputters and dies, sputters and dies, while the farmers try not to laugh. Then a phalanx of youth militia pushes the car over the carpet of T-shirts, and a mock mourning cohort ululates and cheers the death of Morgan and his party. The scene is filmed by the cameras of the state-controlled ZTV, the only media allowed here today.

  The leader of the local farmers’ union, George Stam, is called to the podium.

  “With war, there is no progress, no development,” he says. “We are now reeducated,” he assures Mugabe’s men. “And I’d like to thank all those who have made this possible — the farmers, the workers, the war veterans.”

  It is craven, but the white farmers know he is hamming for their survival, placating, playing for time. And he manages to insert a coded note of protest.

  “It is not in our culture to make public statements about whom we support,” he says. “But I have asked all my farmers to get their ZANU-PF party cards so there can be no mistake about our intention.”

  Stam ends with a public plea to the ruling party for protection from the unreasonable wiles of the war vets.

  “There is a need to reestablish authority in some places,” he says, and the farmers around me almost choke on the understatement.

  In the following pamberis, a teenage marshal approaches me to inquire why my fist is not reaching high enough, why my cheers seem halfhearted.

  “What is your problem?” he demands. “Most other people are doing it. You must too.” I shrug. He hisses. “I am not kidding you!” I remain silent, and he points his whip handle at me. “I am watching you.”

  The local governor, Border Gezi, the party’s rising star, takes the mike. A former accounts clerk for the power utility, Gezi has recently converted to the Vapostori faith, now one of Zimbabwe’s fastest-growing religions, in order to attract Vapostori support. As is their custom, he now shaves his head and wears a long beard.

  This is the man who sent a letter of thanks to Rob Webb for his donations.

  “Be warned,” Gezi tells the farmers now, “your business is farming and not politics.”

  But he lies. What he really means is that, to have any hope of surviving, the members of this community must not exercise their democratic rights, unless it is to vote and campaign for the ruling party, and that is mandatory.

  “There will be many more meetings on your farms,” he tells them. “You will be sure to facilitate those.”

  Most of Gezi’s remarks are in Shona, and these sentiments are much more militant than his comments in English, as is the case with Mugabe’s speeches too. In Shona he talks frequently of a hondo — “a war” — if his aims are frustrated. It’s a schizophrenic performance.

  At the end of his speech, Gezi starts to dance a traditional jig called the kongonya. He stoops forward and then hobbles in
little baby steps with one hand on his waist and the other holding the back of his head. And though he is short and very fat, he is oddly nimble.

  The smoke from huge cooking fires hangs over the meeting. Cows and cornmeal and chickens and sheep “donated” by the farmers are being prepared for the crowd.

  “At least they didn’t cook and eat us,” says the farmer next to me when it is finally all over, and he laughs nervously.

  Back at Rob Webb’s house, some sixty of Mugabe’s men, led by Border Gezi, have arrived for a buffet lunch, serving themselves huge portions of roast chicken, potatoes, asparagus, and gravy, piling it high on Jenny Webb’s second-best crockery.

  I DRIVE OUT past the rough straw shelters of the vets who occupy the Webb farm. They sit there listlessly, excluded from the festivities up at the big house. Soon I am stuck behind a long column of tractors and trailers packed with farmworkers returning to their farms from the rally. Eventually they draw to one side to let me pass. As I overtake them, I give a wave of thanks, and, mistaking my gesture, they all return the open-palmed sign of the opposition.

  I sit with my parents that night, dazed from the driving and the rally, and we watch it on the eight o’clock ZTV news. Not even the lens of the state can disguise the stony faces of the farmers as they are hectored, nor the desultory party chants of the farmworkers press-ganged to attend, nor what looks like a reeducation session from the Cultural Revolution. In the Sunday Mail the next day, the front-page headline reads: “Farmers Pledge Their Support for ZANU-PF.”

  There has been another white farmer murdered too, Alan Dunn. His crime was to defeat a ruling-party candidate for a seat on his local council. He answered his door to five men who knocked him to the ground and pounded him with heavy chains, rocks, and tire irons. His three terrified daughters hid under their beds as he was being killed.

  I sit now, on Sunday, at his memorial in Harare. Most of the mourners are elderly, their gray hair and glasses glinting in the afternoon sun. As we wait for the service to begin, two farmers behind me discuss another casualty, John Weekes, a farmer shot in the stomach, who now lies dying in the hospital. “At least he nailed one of the gooks,” says one with satisfaction. “They found blood spoor.”

  A friend and neighbor recalls Dunn’s words at a dinner just before his death. “I’m going for it,” he had said. “I’m putting in a full set of seedbeds and going for it. This thing will sort itself out.”

  “Lord, in the midst of our tears and aching hearts,” prays the priest, “give us the love and strength to face whatever comes.”

  He reads from the Gospel of John: “Together we sow and reap a rich harvest . . .” But many of the farmers standing here today, uncomfortable in their mothballed suits, have been prevented by the wovits from planting their winter wheat. Already the alarm is being sounded about the future food shortages this will cause.

  “Alan came to Africa with nothing in his pockets,” recalls another eulogizer, “and built an empire. We are going to run Alan’s farms like they were run before. We will not let these farms go down. We will run them until the girls are old enough to take them over.”

  Dunn’s three tow-haired daughters file up to the altar. Each bears a single sunflower. The youngest girl also clutches a frayed brown teddy bear.

  “Death is nothing at all,” they declaim together, from Canon Henry Scott Holland’s famous sermon, “The King of Terrors,” their piping voices wobbling with suppressed sobs. “It does not count. I have only slipped away into the next room. Nothing has happened. Everything remains exactly as it was. I am I, and you are you, and the old life that we lived so fondly together is untouched, unchanged.”

  But they are wrong. Nothing is as it was. Everything has changed.

  Seven

  June 2000

  SOON AFTER DUNN’S MEMORIAL, a new election banner is erected over Enterprise Road. VOTE FOR COMRADE STALIN MAU MAU! it shouts. It is echoed by posters on streetlights and walls throughout the northern suburbs. The elections are only a few weeks away.

  “Who the hell is Stalin Mau Mau?” I ask Dad. I’m helping him take our empty bottles back to the bottle return at Bon Marché, the local supermarket.

  “Oh, him,” he says dismissively. “His real name is Keen Marshall Charumbira and he’s an impresario and boxing promoter — a sort of Zimbabwean Don King. He’s the ZANU-PF parliamentary candidate for our constituency.”

  “And the name?”

  “Stalin Mau Mau? His Chimurenga name, I think.”

  If I hadn’t just spent weeks out on the beleaguered farms, I would laugh. Stalin Mau Mau. How crude could you get in concocting a cocktail of fear by association? A hybrid that mixes a communist dictator who killed millions in his purges, and the Kikuyu tribal rebellion against British rule in Kenya, where black domestic workers slit the throats of their white employers. This was a particularly frightening chimera for white Zimbabweans.

  “I shan’t be voting for Mr. Mau Mau,” says Dad unnecessarily. Instead he will be voting for Tendai Biti, the MDC candidate, a young black law lecturer at the local university. The MDC is entering candidates for all 120 contested seats in Parliament. They are a mixed slate of academics, trade unionists, businessmen, lawyers. Four are white. One of these, a farmer, Roy Bennett, is running in our old home district of Chimanimani.

  “I think I’ll go down and take a look,” I tell Dad. “See how he’s doing.”

  CHIMANIMANI IS STILL recovering from Cyclone Eline, which has swept away all its bridges, leaving it cut off by road for more than a month. My small rental car labors up the hill from the Biriwiri Valley, now the sole access road, which is reduced to one lane hugging the cliff face; the other has been washed down into the steep valley far below.

  It’s the first time I’ve been back in a couple of years, since Georgina’s wedding. Today Heaven is empty, and the Frog and Fern is closed. The local wovits are on the warpath here too, and Chimanimani Village is desolate. I wander over to the Msasa café. I find the owner, John Barlow, a young white man who is a master carpenter, in the back carving an African drum from a log of blue mahogany. His newly renovated café is empty, and we sit by the fire sipping fresh local coffee and discussing evacuation routes. It is the hot topic around many Zimbabwean dinner tables this week.

  Most white Zimbabweans, and many middle-class black people, have what they call gap bags packed and ready, in case the election results trigger a spasm of violence. Gap bags because that’s all you have when you “take the gap,” that is, flee from the country through a pass — a gap — in the mountains, the reverse of the trek made by the pioneers in their covered wagons. Georgina and her friends have a complicated plan that involves various rendezvous along the route from Harare, with prearranged fuel sources, then crossing the Zambezi into Zambia. They have organized food supplies and visas and vehicle carnets. Some have acted preemptively, going “on vacation” for the next couple of weeks, deaf to the entreaties of the MDC to stay and vote.

  The evacuation plans now seem prudent, given the white-hot racial rhetoric pouring out of the state media, and Hitler Hunzvi reinforcing Mugabe’s mantra of malice by saying that if ZANU-PF loses the election he and his men will go back to war. Add to that conveniently color-coded culprits, and it’s beginning to look distinctly scary for white communities, especially isolated ones like this.

  The whites here in Chimanimani have already evacuated once, last month, when several truckloads of vets became incensed at a rumor that Hunzvi’s private clinic in Harare (where opposition members claim to have been held and tortured) had been torched — it was just another in a spate of rumors — and decided to take out their ire on the local whites. There aren’t very many of them left, about twenty families. Warned first by their domestic workers and black colleagues, and then by the local police chief (who was demoted and transferred for his trouble), the whites formed a convoy and drove up to Skyline Junction and out of the valley to lie low until tempers cooled.

  Evacuating no
w from Chimanimani is particularly tricky, with its back to the soaring mountains, and one of its two access roads washed away by Cyclone Eline. If the other one is controlled by war vets, how to get out?

  John Barlow was loath to leave last time, but now even he’s taking evacuation seriously. “You know, if it comes down to it, the only way out may be to grab the kids and do a Sound of Music — climb up over the mountains and into Mozambique.”

  The very idea of going to Mozambique for sanctuary strikes me as absurd: it is officially one of the poorest countries in the world after being ravaged by thirty years of civil war. But that’s what we’ve come to.

  The war vets here in Chimani have been conducting a sporadic reign of terror. They have stripped and beaten black schoolteachers in front of their pupils, threatened the black managers at some of the sawmills, forced locals to attend ZANU-PF rallies. But now their venom is directed overwhelmingly at one man, a white man — Roy Bennett, the local MDC candidate. Charleswood, his seven-thousand-acre farm, is arguably the prettiest in the country, tucked up against the national park. It is latticed with irrigation canals, which feed neat rows of coffee bushes. The local Ndau people call Bennett Pachedu, which means “One of Us.”

  A pitch-perfect Shona speaker, who often walks around without shoes, Bennett arrived in the area about a decade ago. He did what very few farmers bother to do; he went first to pay his respects to the local chiefs, to get their approval of his presence on Charleswood — a matter way outside their modern jurisdiction, and just good neighborliness on his part. He divvied up his need for seasonal labor among the chieftaincies, and only then did he get on with farming. But he continued to be a good neighbor. When Cyclone Eline struck, for instance, and his workers were cut off from their homes in the tribal areas, he got tired of waiting for the government roads department to come. So he took all his farm equipment and his own workers and fixed the roads himself. And so he was approached by a delegation of local ZANU-PF councilors and kraal (village) heads to stand as their candidate for Parliament.