‘LISTEN,’ said Shepherd, the guide. ‘Can you hear it?’
We were standing on top of the ruined Hill Complex of Great Zimbabwe looking out over the Mzilikwe valley. All around us was a maze of passages and enclosures formed from rectangular blocks of granite piled row upon row with no mortar to hold them together yet that had held fast for centuries. Some of the stones were arranged in chevron patterns, for this was said to be the King's palace. Down below on the plains I could see a mysterious series of walled circles, the remains of what had once been the greatest medieval city in sub-Saharan Africa.
Radiocarbon dating and assorted coins, china and glass beads found in the ruins have revealed that people lived here between 1200 and 1500 but no one really knows who built this place or why. It is thought that it was once the headquarters of the vast Monomatapa kingdom, whose kings ruled over all of today's Zimbabwe, northern South Africa, and large swathes of Mozambique, Malawi, Zambia and Tanzania. The name came from a Portuguese corruption of the title Mwana Mutapa which meant Lord of the Plundered Lands.
‘If you listen well and carefully,’ said Shepherd, ‘the stones will speak to you. Some say it is the clicking of the spears of Monomotapa angry at what has befallen his empire.’
I listened hard, my ear pressed against the cold stone as Shepherd had indicated, wanting to hear, but there was nothing beyond the rush of blood in my head after the steep climb. No birds, no wind. Just a stillness as if the land was in waiting. The rains were late this year and it was a strangely grey day. The paramount chiefs of the area would be coming up the hill that night to the Sacred Enclosure to hold a bira, a ceremony to ask the ancestors for rain.
Dzimba dza mabwe, houses of stone. It was this place that gave its name to the independence movements and then the country.
I followed Shepherd through a narrow passage between giant scattered boulders into the Ritual Enclosure, a walled circular chamber. On the empty pillars once stood the soapstone birds that became the symbol of the new nation, depicted on its flag and its currency. The long-necked birds with melancholy expressions were thought to represent fish eagles and be messengers of the ancestral spirits. One and a half remained behind; the rest were looted by Europeans, including Rhodes, who kept one on a plinth in his Cape Town residence, but some have now been returned and perch on stands behind glass in a strange black-painted room in the museum. Five came from South Africa, swapped for a collection of 30,000 bees and wasps. One returned recently from Berlin after many travels, for it had been looted by the Russians in 1945 during the city's fall and taken to St Petersburg.
From the Ritual Enclosure, another passage led down to the Acoustic Cave from which the King would call down to the valley to summon one of his queens. The queens dwelt behind the towering walls of the Great Enclosure, a vast elliptical compound with walls 11 metres high and 5 metres thick. Inside stands a large conical tower that featured on the wad of worthless banknotes weighing down my rucksack, its purpose a mystery. Some of the bricks in the base had been broken to form an opening, which Shepherd explained was made by German explorers who thought the tower must contain treasure and drilled into it, only to find it solid.
The ruins are set among aloe trees that look like something left from the time when dinosaurs walked the earth, and the place has the same romantic feel as Machu Picchu. I wandered amid the twisting walls and wondered what had happened to this great empire where more than 10,000 people lived until its collapse at the end of the fifteenth century. Some believe it was because of the overambitions of its King or battles over succession; others that people left in search of precious salt, or that it had depleted its own resources, forcing the population to move out to create smaller zimbabwes like those scattered across the highveld between the Limpopo and the Zambezi.
It was easy to see why, when Portuguese explorers came across Great Zimbabwe in the sixteenth century, they were stunned. The only other stone structures in Africa were the pyramids in Egypt. Black Africans had no tradition of building in stone and the explorers could not believe that the natives they were busy colonizing had possessed such skill and knowledge. They decided that they must have come across the biblical land of Ophir that supplied gold to King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba.
The first to make Great Zimbabwe known to the world, in 1871, was the German archaeologist Karl Mauch who said the walls must have been constructed by Middle Eastern people and thought he had come across the palace of the Queen of Sheba. As proof he cut wood from a door lintel, which he claimed to be cedar imported from Lebanon. It was in fact African sandalwood.
The mystery of the city's origins enabled both black and white to use Great Zimbabwe as propaganda. Right up until independence, the Rhodesian government insisted that it was built not by Africans but Phoenicians or Egyptians. They referred to the soapstone birds as ‘Phoenician hawk’ and used them on their coins and coat of arms. In 1964, the year before Ian Smith declared UDI, a book was published called Zimbabwe: Rhodesia's Ancient Greatness. The author, A.J. Bruwer, asserted that Great Zimbabwe was built by the Phoenicians between the conquests of Alexander the Great. He dedicated his work to the Prime Minister.
Similarly the black nationalists seized on Great Zimbabwe as evidence of a glorious African past to reinforce their right to the land, and named the independence movement after it. Even among themselves, it was useful to boast some connection. In the early days the movement was dominated by members of the Karanga clan such as Leopold Takawira, Josiah Tongogara and Simon Muzenda. Mugabe, who was a Zezuru, gained kudos by encouraging the belief that he was from the influential Mugabe dynasty of chiefs who guard the ruins.
Today in the museum, Mugabe's photograph has been added to the list of great kings of Monomotapa and the chiefs of the Mugabe clan, even though he is no relation.
‘His excellency was here in April,’ said Shepherd, seeing me looking at the picture. He added that the 81-year-old President had ‘bounded like a goat’ up the hill which had had me huffing and puffing.
Great Zimbabwe was one of the most beautiful places I have ever visited, yet there were no tourists. In the lodge where I stayed the night, I self-consciously took a place at one of the massive tables in a cavernous banqueting hall hewn from a giant rock. My steps echoed across the room. The only other guests were a bemused-looking black couple from Harare who had won a weekend there as a prize. We all giggled as most things we tried to order were ‘not available’, including toast at breakfast.
In ancient times Great Zimbabwe was one of the wonders of Africa. Modern Zimbabwe is one of its nightmares.
To get to Great Zimbabwe, I had driven through a country that had become a land of wreckage. Victoria Falls, once a bustling resort offering everything from ballooning to bungee jumping over cataracts, was a ghost town. The falls were at their most spectacular and I was showered by the spray, forgetting that my passport was in my belt-purse until I arrived back in London and the immigration official at Heathrow initially refused to accept the waterlogged document. Yet on the walk around the rim of the gorge, I did not see another soul. Outside used to be a row of curio stalls where one had to dodge insistent salesmen holding out carved animals and urging, ‘Madam, yes you like hippo?’ Now there was just debris: the stalls had been destroyed as part of Operation Murambatswina, Mugabe's ‘clean-up’ programme. Later, I met the Mayor, a lumbering bear of a man, from the opposition MDC. ‘I felt so helpless,’ he said, wiping away tears, as he told me of the bulldozing of homes and businesses in his town.
Down the road was Hwange National Park. On my first visit back in 1994, I had seen so many animals-zebra, buffalo, lion, eland-that I stopped counting. This time you could drive for miles without seeing any. Not live, at least. There were corpses of elephants and buffalo whose legs had swollen and burst and they had fallen down dead. This was partly because of the worst drought to hit southern Africa for years. But the real problem was that the park had run out of diesel fuel and pumps to keep the watering holes full.
Bulawayo, the capital of the Ndebele, is still an opposition stronghold. The art gallery was even showing what were clearly protest paintings of Operation Murambatswina, made from pieces of wreckage and with titles like Inferno. The city's famous Fifth Street market was a tangle of twisted metal. ‘Psst… want some tomatoes?’ whispered a voice. Traders now sell vegetables as clandestinely as if they were peddling drugs.
While I was there, word came of a dairy farm that had just been invaded out on the Matopos road. In the early days of the land grab dairy farms were protected to safeguard milk production, but not any more. I found a family taut-faced and on edge, serving me tea and freshly made chocolate rice-crispie cakes, and vowing to cling on to the farm started by their Scottish grandmother back in the 1950s. These were the bitter-enders, determined to hang on, knowing their worthless Zim dollars would get them nothing elsewhere. After haranguing the family all day, the truck of invaders from town had gone, but we all knew they would be back. The teenage daughter was in tears and hysterical. Is it worth it, I wondered?
The road to Harare used to pass through prime farmland. Today the fields are blackened and overgrown, the long greenhouses ripped of their roofs and farmsteads stripped of roof tiles and windows. Former white farmers tell me they play ‘Spot the cow’ on the five-hour drive. I count two and no tractors. Someone explains that the government has set up Provincial Farm Material and Equipment Acquisition Committees, otherwise known as loot committees.
In Harare, the wreckage of Operation Murambatswina was still visible. Most of the estimated 700,000 people who lost their homes in the Pol Pot-style campaign drifted back to rural areas where villagers were already starving. Others had no place to go and ended up living like animals on the dusty ground in shelters fashioned from cardboard. They were surviving on pieces of the rotten potatoes that their children salvaged from the bins. Every so often thugs from the ruling party would come and chase them out, forcing them to find some more rubble to squat on.
Far away in my garden in south-west London stands a scrap-metal giraffe called Elvis that I had bought in March 2005 from one of the curio stalls on Harare's Enterprise Road. The young sculptor sitting among his fantastic scrap-metal zoo of ostriches, elephants and other creatures asked me to give the giraffe his name ‘so as not to forget us’ It is a moment I will not forget because just then we heard the wail of sirens and Elvis froze in terror. Moments later the presidential convoy appeared with its motorcycle outriders, ambulances, and trucks full of men in khaki pointing AK-47s, ready to shoot any passer-by that moved.
My heart was sinking as I drove up Enterprise Road again in November, wondering what had happened to Elvis. All that remained of the curio market was some crushed metal that might have once been Elvis's marvellous animals. I asked someone at a nearby shop what had happened and she looked at me in terror, then busied herself in the back.
In the city centre, I was surprised to see flash new BMWs and Volkswagen Beetle convertibles. Their owners were presumably those close to power and thus able to obtain foreign currency at the official rate of 26,000 to the US$, which was a fifth of the market rate of 120,000. So worthless was the currency that brand new signs had sprung up warning of 1 million dollar parking fines rising to 5 million if the car was towed away.
Hiring a car had not been difficult, even if the lady at the Hertz agency at Harare airport (who later admitted that it was no longer really Hertz) did warn, ‘This is not a 100 per cent car.’ But petrol was so scarce that when it came in people were queuing for three or four days and a full tank was the main prize in the lottery.
I used my US dollars to buy black-market petrol but paid the true cost of this when just outside Masvingo, not far from Great Zimbabwe, my car slowed to a halt, then lost power altogether. Somewhat fortuitously this occurred just in front of Byword Motors where the receptionist was a grandmotherly white lady called Florence who made me a cup of tea and apologized for lack of biscuits. The mechanic soon emerged to tell me that my fuel pump had seized up because of dirty petrol. There were neither pumps nor filters to be had, so he and his men laboriously cleaned out my blocked ones and sieved the sand from my petrol while Florence told me about losing her farm with its garden that had been her pride and joy. ‘I suppose it was a fool's paradise,’ she said. She was delighted when I produced a copy of Homes and Gardens in which I had been hiding my notes and told me that her favourite magazine Readers Digest had been banned in the country ever since running an unflattering piece about Mugabe.
One of her friends dropped by to return the copy of Pride and Prejudice that she had borrowed and gossip about the drama competition she was organizing. It seemed odd that amateur dramatics were still going on as we talked of how the country was being reduced to pre-modern times, returning to ploughs and recommissioning steam trains. According to Florence, you could smell Masuingo hospital for miles off because no one had petrol to collect bodies from the mortuary. She, like many I met, was surviving on money sent from her children abroad.
By summer 2006, inflation was above 1200 per cent and according to the government's own Central Statistical Office, a family of five needed 22 million Zimbabwean dollars per month for basic goods and services. Life expectancy for women had fallen to just 34 and cemeteries were running out of space. In November a third of the army was sent home because the government could no longer feed them. The UN described the country as ‘going into meltdown’. The first deaths from cholera were reported in Harare and municipality cleaners began finding dead newborn babies people had thrown away because they couldn't afford to feed them.
Yet Mugabe seemed more powerful than ever. His party was re-elected in March 2005 with an increased majority. They had fought on an anti-Blair platform with full-page advertisements in the state media denouncing the British Prime Minister as the source of all Zimbabwe's problems. The election was declared ‘seriously flawed’ by Britain's Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, and ‘free and fair’ by observers from Libya, China, North Korea and Iran. The European Union had not been allowed to send observers while a group from the Carter Center of former US President Jimmy Carter, one of the world's most respected monitoring organizations, were turned back at the airport, accused of being ‘terrorists’.
Mwana Mutapa, Lord of the Plundered Lands, Mugabe stays in power largely through his web of patronage, particularly to senior military officers. He has surrounded himself more and more with people from his own Zezuru clan and ex-colleagues from the Chimurenga, even those who had once been critics such as Edgar Tekere who had stood against him in 1990 Presidential election and Dzikamai Mavhaire, the man who back in 2000 had dared suggest he retire after the defeat in the referendum. ‘You can't be on the outside if you want to survive,’ explained one such returnee. To provide jobs for these people, he created a new Senate to which elections were held in November.
With this Senate, Mugabe had even managed to destroy the opposition, which split over whether or not to participate in yet another fraudulent election. Since then the MDC have been tearing themselves apart with accusations that senior members were actually in the pay of the ruling party and given stolen farms by Mugabe. His tentacles are everywhere.
I don't sleep easy in my bed while I am in Zimbabwe. I am there illegally and if I am caught the sentence is two years' imprisonment. I am one of just three foreign journalists to have been named by Mugabe's spokesman George Charamba as an enemy of the state. I have a six-year-old son back home and have heard all about Zimbabwe's overcrowded jails, rife with TB and lice. I do not want to end up in one.
The country might look surprisingly innocuous for somewhere lumped with North Korea and Iran as one of the ‘outposts of tyranny’ by US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. But I have met too many victims and seen too many scars to be under any illusions. This is an extremely repressive regime where people disappear in the night. The state controls the internet and one of the two mobile phone networks and has obtained Chinese technology to intercept the calls on the other. On the few occasions I speak on the phone, we use strange codes such as ‘rose gardens’ for farms and ‘the Yorkshireman’ for Mugabe (written backwards, it spells Ebagum).
I have to be careful who I talk to, for I neither want to implicate them, nor be caught. This is getting harder because there are far fewer white faces now than there used to be and spies from the CIO are everywhere. Twice after going into townships, I am told that everyone I spoke to was then visited by secret police.
Nigel books me into a small local lodge just outside Marondera, and only after check-in do I realize that this too has been taken over by war vets. Rather than printing a new menu, they have just written in sadza between the steak and kidney pudding and apple pie. At lunch, perhaps to impress me, Nigel orders the sadza and it comes in thick wads. He tells me that when he was at school this would have been ‘kaffir food’ that no white would dream of eating.
That night, I walk nervously up the long unlit path to my hut. Inside, the pink-fringed silk lampshades have seen better days, the door does not lock and there is a fat brown centipede in the dirty cracked bath. I hear a car outside and wake with a start imagining it is the CIO. But it turns out to be guests returning from the noisy bar.
My nerves have already been wrecked in Harare, when the electronic gates of the house where I was staying opened for me to drive out one evening, to reveal a road filled with blue flashing lights. That's it, I thought, and froze. Then my amused companion pointed out that they were fire engines.
One day Nigel picks me up to go and see the farm where he grew up. We pass the cracked ‘Riversdale’ sign and bump along an overgrown track to the old farm buildings.
The squatters think we have come to reclaim it and seem disappointed that we have not. ‘We heard the whites were coming back,’ says one. An old man pulls out a sheaf of withered-looking tobacco leaves. ‘We don't know what to do,’ he says. ‘We are hungry and no one comes to help us.’ The farmhouse has been stripped of all furniture and fittings, and families are squatting among dried faeces, cooking from fires on the floor.
On the way back we pass Nigel's own farm and he slows down. The ostrich sign is still there though there are no ostriches to be seen. ‘Netsai is growing tomatoes now then,’ he says. He tells me he keeps finding himself humming the old war song ‘Rhodesians Never Die’
‘Do you think you'll ever get the farm back?’ I ask.
He thinks for a moment. ‘No,’ he replies. ‘You just have to move on.’
Not everyone has moved on. Later at Nigel's house, Aqui is upset when one of his friends drops by to pick up his child who has been over to play and speaks over her head to me as if she were not there. ‘You see things haven't changed at all,’ she says. ‘They still think they are the masters.’ Then, ever ready to give the benefit of the doubt, she adds, ‘Maybe he is one of those who lost his farm. And of course there are also blacks like that who won't go near whites, they just hate them.’
When I accompany Aqui back to Dombotombo she takes me to the shack across the road, where 24 people are now living. One large family is sleeping outside around the chicken coop with a few pieces of salvaged furniture-an iron bed and a kitchen cupboard-more victims of Mugabe's demolition. They show me the hole where their house used to be. ‘It's like wartime,’ says one.
The next morning we leave for her village. It is so poor and the earth is cracking with dryness. ‘I have never seen it so bad,’ says Aqui, clearly shocked. ‘Whose fault is this?’ I ask her aunts, ‘Do you blame Mugabe?’ There is an audible intake of breath. ‘You are asking the Unquestionable,’ says one woman.
People might not talk about him but there are plenty of rumours. Mugabe is said to be so paranoid that he refuses to open any post. His wife Grace, they say, is under house arrest after she tried to flee dressed as an Arab. Mugabe spends hours each day with a Serbian psychiatrist because he is haunted by the ghosts of General Tongogara and others he has killed.
On several occasions I am chatting with opposition members when they get telephone calls which they react to with excitement. ‘Mugabe is in a heart clinic in South Africa and won't last the night,’ they whisper. I know they are clutching at straws for I remember Shepherd telling of Mugabe running up the steep hill of Great Zimbabwe.
Just as the collapse of Great Zimbabwe remains an enigma, so it is a mystery how one man could so wilfully destroy his own country. How could Mugabe, the man who seems at war with the world, be the same man who stunned everyone with his forgiveness and conciliatory speeches after independence? Did he learn too much from Smith's assassins and become an African Macbeth ‘in blood/Stepp'd in so far, that, should I wade no more,/Returning were as tedious as go o'er’?
But I remember reading how he had warned on taking office: ‘The change is not in me … the transformation really is taking place in the minds of those who once upon a time regarded me as an extremist, a murderer, a psychopath killer. I have remained my true self. What I was I still am.’
I am sad to leave Great Zimbabwe and its houses of stone but I have tarried too long in the country and am fearful of being caught. Shepherd has resisted my attempts to draw him on the country's future. But before I go, he tells me to write something in my notebook. ‘We have a saying in Shona-gomo radonha-when the King has died the mountain falls,’ he says, as if in warning.