In the market, looking for a long-distance bus to Harare, I wandered into a parking lot of battered taxis. A man leaning against an old car said he would drive me the 160 miles to the Mozambique-Zimbabwe border at Machipanda for a reasonable price. He would show me the sights along the way. I said that was fine with me if we could leave soon. We left an hour later. About halfway into the trip he pulled off the road at a junction. An arrow indicated Nova Vanduzi. I said, ‘I don’t see anything.’ Putting on his surliest face he replied that if I did not pay him more money he would not take me to Machipanda. I argued for a while, then agreed, but still he whined at me for more money all the way to Machipanda, while I complained to him that I was often the victim of my own trusting nature.
17. Invading Drummond’s Farm
Zimbabwe had a fearsome reputation for political mayhem at the time I walked across the eastern border from Mozambique into Mashonaland and caught a bus to the capital. Everything was wrong in the country, so I heard, and it was growing worse: dangerous, disrupted, dispirited, bankrupt. But I couldn’t wait to see such extreme strife for myself — the journalistic exaggeration, the possible drama of it, ‘these are the lucky ones.’ The way strife makes people talkative was a gift to anyone who wanted to write about it. The admonishment Stay away from farms, in a US Embassy advisory on Zimbabwe, made me want to stay on a farm. I had no names, no contacts, yet I had the idle wanderer’s distinct confidence that having arrived here I was available for some sort of enlightenment; that I would meet the right people; that I would be fine. I had no idea at that early stage how any of this was going to happen, for I didn’t have a friend in the whole country.
Don’t go, some people said. But they had warned me about going to the Sudan and I had loved that big dusty place. Sitting on the Harare bus, traveling the road through Zimbabwe’s Eastern Highlands, the farming country from Mutare to Marondera, an intimation of distress was visible to me. I made a note at the back of the book I was reading, Not many cars. It was a beautiful land of tilled fields and browsing cattle and farmhouses; yet it seemed rather empty, as though a plague had struck. Much of what I saw could have been the set of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers for here and there were perambulating Africans, and I got glimpses of Spam-colored settlers, yet apart from these few individuals the place seemed curiously unpeopled and inert.
The book in my lap, which I’d bought in Mutare, helped me understand a little of what was happening. It was African Tears; The Zimbabwe Land Invasions, written by Catherine Buckle, a woman who had been robbed in installments. Her Marondera farm had been snatched from her in piecemeal and violent intrusions over a six-month period.
‘It’s a one-man problem,’ many white Zimbabweans explained to me. Depending on who I talked to they said variously, ‘The president is out of his mind’ or ‘He’s lost it’ or ‘He’s off his chump.’ Even the kindly winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, Archbishop Tutu, said, ‘The man is bonkers.’
The Robert Mugabe rumors, which I solemnly collected, depicted the poor thing as demented as a result of having been tortured in a white-run prison: long periods in solitary, lots of abuse, cattle prods electrifying his privates, and the ultimate insult — his goolies had been crimped. Another rumor had him in an advanced stage of syphilis; his brain was on fire. ‘He was trained by the Chinese, you know,’ many people said. And: ‘We knew something was up when he started calling himself “comrade” ’. He had reverted, too — did not make any decision without consulting his witch-doctors. His disgust with gays was well known: ‘They are dogs and should be treated like dogs.’ He personally banned the standard school exams in Zimbabwe ‘to break with the colonial past.’ Some rumors were fairly simple: He had a life-long hatred of whites and it was his ambition to drive them out of the country Of the British prime minister he said, ‘I don’t want him sticking his pink nose in our affairs.’ But noting all this I kept thinking of what Gertrude Rubadiri had told me, ‘We called him “Bookworm.” ’ Really there was no deadlier combination than bookworm and megalomaniac. It was, for example, the crazed condition of many novelists and travelers.
The long lines I saw at gas stations told part of the story: there was a serious gasoline shortage. The new $500 million Harare International Airport had run out of aviation fuel. No hard currency meant a severe reduction in imported goods. There had been food riots in Harare. The opposition parties had been persecuted by the ruling party’s goon squads. The unemployment figure had risen to 75 percent, visitor numbers had dropped by 70 percent, the irrationality of the president was so well known his accusations had ceased to be quoted in the pages of the world’s press, except for his maddest utterances, such as ‘I have a degree in violence.’ But also foreign journalists had been attacked and some seriously injured, others had been deported for trying to cover stories of intimidation and disruption. Fearing the same fate, under ‘Occupation’ on my entry visa application I wrote ‘Geography teacher.’
Zimbabwe had been for years one of the great African destinations, for it had the Zambezi, river rafting, bungee-jumping off Victoria Falls Bridge, and so many wild animals that big-game hunting was freely available. Gun-toting hunters banged away at the Big Five — elephants, rhinos, leopards, lions and giraffes. A Zimbabwean guide told me that some foreign hunters were very fussy and would decline to shoot certain elephants if the creatures’ tusks were four feet instead of five feet long. Zimbabwe was perhaps the only country in Africa where you could legally buy those elephant’s foot wastebaskets that gave environmentalists the horrors. Huge newly chopped-off ivory tusks were also available in Harare shops, and so were the skins of lions and leopards, crocodile belts, elephant or hippo hide wallets, and such curiosities as a yard-long giraffe femur with an African landscape scratched on its shank in scrimshaw.
But tourists and curio collectors and travelers were staying away. The problem was land invasions. The president had actively encouraged veterans of the guerrilla war — ‘landless peasants’ — to invade, occupy and squat in the fields of white farmers and to take their land by force. Many black Zimbabweans had done so to white Zimbabweans, some of them violently. Eight white farmers had been murdered by these intruders, none of whom had been prosecuted — indeed, they were congratulated for achieving their objective, having seized the whites’ land and become landowners and gentry themselves. When a High Court judge questioned the legality of the farm invasions he was attacked by the government and he eventually resigned. As for the stolen farms, in some cases the government had failed to supply the invaders with free maize seed, fertilizer and tractors, and so they had left the land and returned to city life. Almost 2000 properties had been invaded and occupied; more were promised, so the threat was real.
Whenever a local paper wrote critically of the land invasions the journalist on the story was arrested or harassed. Foreign journalists were thrown out of the country or their work permits revoked. The editor of the independent Daily News and two of his reporters were charged with ‘criminal defamation’ after reporting a well-sourced story about kickbacks connected with the new airport. The briber, a Saudi Arabian, had whined publicly that he had not received a fair return for his bribe of $3 million.