THE RED DRALON THREE-PIECE SUITE by the side of the highway was an incongruous sight. It had clearly been looted from one of the farms that had been seized. From the bus leaving Marondera to go to her village, Aqui saw a white farmer in the briefest of shorts overseeing the loading of cows onto a truck, his face red-blotched with anger, watched by a war vet in a ZANU-PF T-shirt and Marlboro cowboy hat looked on. Alongside, the farmer's terrified wife and children stood in a huddle trying to guard a pile of belongings.
It was hard to feel sorry for those white farmers. They had air-conditioners and cars and refrigerators, ate food from packets, and went shopping in South Africa and on holiday in Mozambique. We had grown up living on leaves and locusts and walking an hour each way to fetch water and firewood. And some of them had treated our people very bad.
It seemed as if more than a hundred years after that season of drought and locust when Nehanda led the first Chimurenga against the whites, the bones of the Shona resistance leader were finally rising again as she had predicted. When the farm invasions started we were very happy. People were saying, ‘It's over against the whites, we're going to get our land back,’ and planning what they would do with their land. But others would say, ‘Look at this country. It's going to get destroyed.’
Mugabe had even taken to describing the land invasions as the Third Chimurenga. ‘Perhaps we made a mistake by not finishing the war in the trenches,’ he told members of his party. ‘We were modest and rushed to Lancaster House. If the settlers had been defeated by the barrel of the gun, perhaps we would not be having the same problems … Our revolution has not ended. We want it to end and the starting point is land.’
Barely a day went by without Mugabe complaining that the whites still owned 70 or 80 per cent of land. In vain the Commercial Farmers' Union kept pointing out that its 4,000 members owned 8.6m hectares, which was only 21 per cent of the land, while seven million blacks lived in communal areas covering 16.3m hectares or 41 per cent of the land, though there was no doubt that the whites had the better land.
But nobody questioned Mugabe as to why he had made so little effort to redistribute the land for the first twenty years after Independence. His government had acquired 3.5 million hectares on a willing-seller willing-buyer basis paid for by donors and created a number of Chinese-style collective farms to resettle people, but almost all had ended up wrecked and abandoned and some had never been occupied.
As Aqui's bus turned off toward Hwedza, the sky blackened with smoke. By the roadside trudged a line of people with bundles on their heads or pushing barrows full of pots, pans and bedding. The driver slowed down and spoke to them. They were farmworkers who had been rendered homeless when the white farmers they worked for were evicted by war vets. The war vets had accused them of supporting the farmers and the MDC and burnt their huts down. Now they were trying to get back to the rural areas that their families had come from originally. The bus passed an entrance to a farm, the name Greenfields scrawled out with a black pen, and posters of Mugabe plastered over the gate.
The tar road ended just past the wire fence of the last farm, then they were over the dry bed of the Sabie river and into the rocky landscape of the communal lands. The bus was crammed with people, some of whom had been waiting days as the fuel shortage had left transport very sporadic. There had been no rains that year and the bus windows were all jammed closed. The white heat of an unforgiving sun turned the airless bus into an oven, cooking the smells of sour armpit, carbolic soap and stale meat pies, until temples pounded and eyes bulged. At Aqui's feet her own bags bumped around-a precious loaf of bread, a pack of sugar and a live chicken tied in a plastic bag-all gifts from the Houghs.
She was relieved when the dark bulk of the Daramombe Mountains finally loomed into view on the right-hand side which meant they were nearly there. Aqui was going back home for her brother's funeral. The Houghs had let her have the weekend off, even given her money for the bus fare as well as food for the funeral party. Boss Hough and Madam Claire weren't like other whites. They treated me almost like part of the family.
Aqui did not know what she would have done if it had not been for getting the job with the Houghs. They were good people, paying for my asthma medicine and for my children to go to school. They were paying for her to do a cookery course. They even ran an orphanage for the growing number of AIDS orphans left by farm-workers and gave them milk from their own cows. Aqui had heard that one person was dying of the disease every 15 minutes* and most of her neighbouring families in Dombotombo had lost a mother, father or brother or had someone lying ragdoll-like on a bed as life seeped away from them. People were even forming burial clubs, macabre saving schemes modelled on Christmas clubs so their children could afford to bury them in ever more crowded cemeteries. In many families both parents had died, and aunts and uncles too, leaving children as young as seven to become heads of households. Yet she knew that many men like her late brother refused to use condoms, believing that AIDS was a myth propagated by whites to keep down the black birth rate. Some even believed the way to get rid of it was to sleep with young virgins.
The bus cranked to a halt at the Sadza growth point from where Aqui walked for the three hours across the land of the dead and the thorn bushes to the village. She was exhausted by the time the old sacred muchakata tree came into view and the line of huts, and she felt something was different but was not sure what it was. Then she realized. She could not hear the thump of the hard mukonono wood pestle against the softer mukuyu block, the sound of grinding millet that she used to listen out for as a child coming back from school to know she was almost home.
Some children appeared and ran ahead to tell her mother she was coming.
‘Mangwanani,’ Aqui called in greeting and they dropped their heads shyly, mumbling back, ‘Mangwanani!
Her mother was waiting at the door of her hut, wrapped in a luminous pink shawl that Aqui had given her. As Aqui handed over her gifts, she clapped one hand over the other then took the bags in both arms to indicate how generous it was. Inside, Aqui crouched on the ground by the fire in the middle, not on the bench around the side where the men sit, and let her eyes accustom to the smoke. She noticed the poles that framed the doorway were worn and exposed like bone. But there was a new shiny black floor and shelves. Her mother explained that one of the villagers had found a stone in the river, which if you ground it with the mud from the anthills, gave this pewter-like sheen, and now they were all using it.
She had been looking forward to her mother's sadza and perhaps some pumpkin leaves but could see there was nothing in the pot over the fire. Her mother noticed her looking and smiled wryly.
‘No food,’ she said. ‘Even the store has no mealie meal and I have killed my last goat for the funeral.’
Life seemed much harder than when I was growing up. The store was empty. There were no more mobile clinics to vaccinate children and men who were away working on the farms were coming hack with empty hands.
Soon her mother's hut was filled with aunts and others come to see Aqui back and express their condolences. Many of them had white rashes from vitamin deficiency. It took time for each person to have his or her say, and everyone seemed to think that her brother had died of TB. Then they asked after her children and her ‘top-flight administrative job’ and she smiled, knowing her mother had been exaggerating. In turn she asked about the situation in the village and they told her that the previous year during the campaign for the elections the candidate had held a meeting at the growth point and they had all been told to go and they would get food. The store was now run by a ZANU councillor and you needed to show a party card to get maize, but the villagers were all ZANU members anyway.
The biggest problem was that the rains had not come. Just that day the elders had sent young virgin girls to get the water from the well and grind the rapoko to make beer for the ancestors. This would be brewed by the oldest women who were no longer sleeping with their husbands, offloaders we call them. This beer should have no men inside. Once the beer had been made, the women would leave it under the tree about four or five in the afternoon. The elders would then come back the next morning to check the pots to see if the beer had been drunk by the spirits. Usually the pot would be only half full and everyone would start clapping their hands, beating drums, whistling and shouting, saying the ancestors have accepted the beer so we are going to have some rains. I was too suspicious about where the beer had gone. Then if the rains didn't come they would say something had been done wrong in the brewing of the beer.
Aqui walked down to the fields where the dried maize stood in sharp brown stalks like spears waiting for battle, and snapped a piece off to chew. The abundant silence seemed to hold too many memories, both good and bad. In these fields belonged the dreams she had had as a girl and the injustice that had burned inside over her brother being allowed to stay at school and being granted his own plot of land by the chief while she got nothing. None of it seemed to matter now.
The sun fell behind the Daramombe Mountains and Aqui was startled out of her thoughts by a strange flapping sound. At the other end of the field she could see a tall man from the village who had recently returned penniless after the farm he had worked on for twenty years was taken over. He was waving a long stick at the birds flying round and round in the fast-falling dark. She wasn't sure why. Nothing was growing and there were no longer any cows. She could not help thinking of Boss Nigel's farm with its green fields of tobacco and maize, water so plentiful that it filled a swimming pool and thousands of silly lolloping ostriches.
Back in the village, people were retelling the old stories of Nehanda and talking excitedly about how they would soon be getting plots of good land where they could grow wheat, tobacco and cotton like the white man. After the previous year's elections, Mugabe had announced a so-called Fast Track scheme where groups of poor blacks would be taken to a white farm and the land shared out among them. A ZANU official had come through the village and told them to put their names down, and that once land had been designated a truck would come and take them there. But they had heard no more. Villagers knew that Aqui had been a party official and thought she would know when the truck was coming.
Aqui had also put her name down on such a list. I agreed with the fact that the land should be shared, particularly as there were those whites who were greedy and had vast farms or three or four farms they weren't even using. But because I worked on a farm I knew that to be an owner you had to be very experienced and have lots of capital I didn't agree with the idea that people with nothing could come in and just take over.
She could not help remembering the words of her late mhondoro grandmother who warned: ‘It is the envying eye that will destroy us! For what she had seen back in Marondera was that it was not the poor landless blacks who were being given the land. Crowds of dispossessed people who had worked on farms had flooded into Dombotombo. Many of them originated in Malawi so they had no home to go to and were sleeping in people's yards. Twenty people in a shack again, just like in wartime. Nor were the land invasions spontaneous, as Mugabe claimed when he told the Herald, ‘They are just demonstrating their greatest disappointment that there was this No vote [in the referendum].’ Sinister men had appeared in leather coats and bush hats, party bigwigs and Hitler Hunzvi, the war vets' leader who had become an MR These were the people driving the invasions and getting the farms, not landless poor. They were even charging locals, real war vets like her, a hundred dollars to go and peg out plots of land which she thought they would probably snatch back again.
If they did, nobody would complain, for fear stalked the air. Torture, beatings and people disappearing in the night had once again become part of life just as they had been during the liberation war. The Zimbabwe Human Rights Forum had catalogued more than 3,100 murders, rapes and abductions during the campaign for the June 2000 elections and a further 10,000 huts burnt. The true figures may have been ten times more. In many constituencies, opposition candidates had been completely unable to campaign. In some places such as the lakeside resort of Kariba, they were hounded out of town and coffins erected with their names on. Posters put up by their supporters in the dead of night were torn down next morning by ZANU-PF militia. Mugabe had not unleashed so much violence against his own people since the Gukurahundi in Matabeleland, and this time the Shona too were targeted. Even before the votes were tallied, European Union observers (amongst whom no British had been allowed) denounced the elections as ‘marred by violence and intimidation’
Despite this carrot-and-stick combination of repression, rigging and promises of land, the ruling party only scraped a narrow victory. ZANU-PF won 62 seats with 48 per cent of the votes, while the new MDC, which was just nine months old, secured 57 seats on 47 per cent of the vote. But under the constitution Mugabe had the right to appoint a further 30 seats, giving him a clear majority.
For Mugabe and his cohorts, this was a drastic fall compared to almost 82 per cent of the vote in previous elections in 1995, and there was, no doubt that the people in the urban areas wanted change. The MDC had won all the seats in Harare and Bulawayo and ten of the twelve constituencies in Matabeleland. ZANU-PF had been reduced to a party dependent on rural Shona votes, retaining only one urban constituency in the whole country. Seven cabinet ministers lost their seats, including the Justice Minister Emerson Mnangagwa, who was expected to eventually succeed Mugabe. Four whites standing for MDC won their seats, despite Mugabe's vicious anti-white campaign. In Marondera, the Security Minister Sidney Sekeramayi hung on but with his majority slashed to just 61 votes even though the whole town knew that the ballot boxes had been stuffed.
The vote reflected the mood. People were not happy. By 2000 the population was 10 per cent poorer than it had been ten years earlier and the country had begun to default on its debt repayments. Zimbabwe had boasted the highest literacy rate in Africa but the number of children completing primary school had fallen from an impressive 83 per cent in 1990 to less than 63 per cent. Government spending on education had been slashed, while, without consulting parliament or cabinet, Mugabe had taken the country to a costly war 1,000 miles away in the Congo. Some 11,000 Zimbabwean troops-then still receiving British training-had been there since 1999 to prop up the tottering regime of President Laurent Kabila against Congolese rebels. Only a year later did Britain halt arm sales to Zimbabwe.
Intervening in a foreign war in which Zimbabwe had no interest, at a time when the country's finances were collapsing and the government heavily overborrowed, seemed like the sort of thing only a megalomaniac would do. Keeping the troops there was costing the country £20 million a month, and for the first time since independence Zimbabwe was in recession. But some important people were benefiting. Kabila had handed out diamond, cobalt and timber concessions to Zimbabwe's generals. The country's army chief, General Vitalis Zvinavashe, owned the haulage business that won the lucrative contract to transport supplies into Congo, and was building himself a palatial glasshouse with its own elevator on a hill in Borrowdale Brook, Harare's most prestigious private estate. Mugabe's new blue-tiled pagoda-style palace was also being built there and the local Spar supermarket stocked Johnnie Walker Blue Label, Cuban cigars and Mozambican lobsters. As if to emphasize the origins of the money, General Zvinavashe's driveway had been tiled in a diamond pattern.
Mugabe was still said to lead an ascetic life, up at 5 a.m. as he had been since prison days to use his exercise bicycle and practise his own form of yoga, and despising smoking and drinking or any form of excess. But like a spider sucking in flies, as his public support waned, Mugabe seemed to encourage those around him to indulge in corruption and looting to retain their support. ZANU-PF had acquired numerous businesses and increasingly the country was being run by a mafia, many of whom had joined in the farm snatching with great enthusiasm. Through his ever-expanding secret police, Mugabe kept files on them all and would pull them out the moment anyone showed signs of disloyalty.
Aqui's favourite singer, Thomas Mapfumo, had been forced to flee the country after criticizing this corruption in his new album Chimurenga Explosion. With lyrics like ‘the beautiful country that Mugabe has turned to hell’, he also questioned why the government was spending so much on someone else's war when its own people were perishing in hospital through lack of drugs. One of the country's top musicians, Mapfumo had been a great supporter of Mugabe’ during the liberation struggle and was even jailed by Smith in 1979. Yet now his songs were banned on the radio using the very same Censorship and Entertainment Control Act that Smith had introduced in 1967, and he had fled to America.
Most ordinary people kept their words to themselves. But no one could hush the news of what happened in Yugoslavia in October 2000 where people had come out into the streets of Belgrade to occupy parliament and overthrow Slobodan Milosevic, and it gradually percolated though the cities. Mugabe was said to have kicked his television in anger when he saw the news and ordered a steel ring of roadblocks round the main cities of Harare and Bulawayo, which were well designed by the colonial regime to be easily sealed off. But unlike Yugoslavia, most Zimbabweans had no access to independent media. The opposition was scared of which way the army and police would go, and anyone who spoke out soon regretted it. The government had its eyes and ears everywhere and people had even been arrested for criticizing Mugabe on a bus. The Daily News, the only daily independent newspaper, which had been launched in 1999, had been bombed in January 2001, destroying its printing press.
In the increasingly ludicrous state Herald, Mugabe blamed the economic crisis on Britain, from the fuel shortage, which he said was caused by Royal Navy submarines intercepting oil tankers bound for Zimbabwe, to poisoning fish in Lake Kariba. The revelation that Whitehall had a contingency plan to evacuate all 20,000 British citizens was interpreted by ZBC as a massive military operation to be launched from Botswana for the ‘reconquest’ of Zimbabwe.
Aqui did not really believe this. The radio was pumping out so much Rwanda-style hate-speak against the whites, yet those she had come into contact with had treated her well. You could no longer be sure of getting facts from the radio. If something was green the radio reported it as yellow. If it was brown they called it white.
She thought about the Houghs, the way Boss Nigel asked her about her life and what she thought about things, even discussing her doubts about the Old Testament. She knew he was involved in the MDC, that he went out at night with some of the farmworkers putting up Chinja stickers. She knew Madam Claire was scared about this and saw the way she hugged her children close each time more news came that another farm nearby had been invaded by men with pangas and names like Comrade Slit-eyes or Comrade Double-trouble. She felt bad for them that they might lose their farm.
But then she thought about her people in Zhakata's Kraal with their bare shelves and standing under the sacred tree calling to the spirits for rains. She thought about the ageing President, his skin like a turtle's, haunted they said by the ghost of General Tongogara, the murdered commander of the bush war. She imagined Mugabe alone in his big palace with his shopaholic wife, rumoured to be kept under house arrest after being caught in the embrace of another, poring over the latest catalogues from Harrods, while he sent troops off to far-away lands. She thought about her born-free children, growing up now with no signs of the jobs as accountants, nurses or top-flight secretaries that she had imagined. It was clear that nothing was going to change unless you did it for yourself. Of course I wished I had a house like the Houghs instead of this small shack, all squashed up like a nest. Then she checked herself. Jealousy doesn't work. It makes you destroy people.
*By 2005, according to Unicef, the country had 1.3 million AIDS orphans and 318,000 child-headed households.