Loe raamatut: «House of Stone: The True Story of a Family Divided in War-Torn Zimbabwe»

Prologue

THE WAR VETERANS had been living at the bottom of the garden for months. Every afternoon the family would take tea on the terrace and stare beyond the swimming pool and children's tree house to the plumes of smoke rising from the round thatched huts that the squatters had built. Every night the family tossed and turned to their drumming and chanting. The next morning the farmer would find the carcasses of the cattle that the intruders had slaughtered.

Kendor Farm was in Wenimbi Valley in the rich tobacco-growing district of Marondera. Tobacco was Zimbabwe's main export, and for the previous two and a half years neighbouring farms all around them had endured similar invasions. The first murder of a white farmer had happened only a few miles away on 15 April 2000. Since then many farmers had been badly beaten; some had been hacked to death. Most had been either kicked off or fled. By August 2002 the morning roll call over the radio, started to check on the safety of local farmers, had stopped because Kendor was the only white farm left in the valley.

The Hough family had thought about leaving. But the 1,400-acre ostrich and tobacco farm and eight-bedroom house with its sweeping view over the balancing rocks and floaty canopy of msasa trees was their dream. They had worked hard for the farm and sunk all their money into it. They wanted their children to grow up as they had and could not imagine starting all over again. Other white farmers who had moved abroad to England or Australia had ended up driving minicabs and living in poky council flats. Besides, it was not only them. On the land they had a factory producing bags and shoes from ostrich leather and they employed 300 people as well as running an orphanage for children whose parents had died in the AIDS pandemic.

One morning, Claire Hough had gone to take the children to school and her husband Nigel had left for a meeting in town when their manager called in a panic. A crowd of people had arrived at the gate waving a letter demanding the farm. Nigel grabbed a friend and rushed back in his pick-up. By the time they got there, the mob had started a fire in his driveway, taunting him and barring their way with sticks and shamboks. ‘Hondo, hondo’ they chanted, Shona for ‘war’. He could see that some of his furniture had been taken out of the house and piled up in front of the terrace.

Nigel telephoned the police but they refused to come, saying they did not involve themselves in ‘domestic matters’. By now the crowd had surrounded him, dragging him off, nostrils flaring as they scented blood. ‘This is not Rhodesia any more!’ shouted one man. ‘Go back to your own people.’ As they pulled him towards an outhouse, Nigel noticed that some of the women had draped themselves in his wife's scarves and dresses and were tossing around his children's stuffed animals. Then he noticed something else.

In the front was Aqui Shamvi, the woman who had worked as their maid and much-loved nanny to their children since their first baby had been born six years earlier. To the Houghs she was almost part of the family. Now she was transformed. ‘Get out or we'll kill you!’ she spat at him, eyes rolling with hatred. ‘There is no place for whites in this country!’

* * *

I first met the Houghs (pronounced Huff) and their maid Aqui (Ack-we) in August 2002 when they were all still living on Kendor Farm. Their relationship seemed different to me from any other I had seen between white farmers and black servants in Zimbabwe, and rather uplifting at a time when Robert Mugabe's government was promoting racist hate-speak in the state media.

The Houghs encouraged me to talk to Aqui and she was refreshingly candid as well as stunning in her red and white polka-dot uniform and green headscarf, and with her great big laugh. The setting was both sinister and surreal-we all sat on the terrace chatting and taking tea and Madeira cake trying to ignore the wood-smoke rising from the huts of war vets at the end of the lawn. To get to the farm had involved negotiating a series of roadblocks manned by youth militia adorned with Mugabe bandannas, their eyes bloodshot from smoking weed. Marondera was only an hour's drive outside Harare and its rich red soil had made the area one of the main targets of the government's land grab.

I wrote an article about the farm in the Sunday Telegraphy for which I was then diplomatic correspondent. In it, I described Nigel Hough as ‘a model white farmer’ for all his involvement with the local community and pointed out that to take his farm would expose the fact that the government was clearly not interested in helping its people.

A week later, to my horror, the farm was seized.

At that time, like many, I could not believe that Mugabe was really serious about seizing all the white-owned farms. The land distribution was undoubtedly unfair, with most of the productive land still in white hands. But the 5,000 commercial farms produced most of the food for the nation, were the country's biggest employer and responsible for 40 per cent of its export earnings.

Three years on, fewer than 300 white farmers remain on their farms. Yet it was never really a racial issue. Those of us in the Western media played into Mugabe's hands by initially portraying it as such, focusing on white farmers like the Houghs, perhaps because they seemed people like us. But the real victims were the hundreds of thousands of farm workers like Aqui who lost their homes and jobs. Many of them were beaten by marauding youth brigades who accused them of supporting the opposition and raped their wives or daughters while forcing them to sing pro-Mugabe songs. With nowhere else to go, they fled to the rural areas where they struggle to survive on wild fruits and fried termites.

My first visit to Zimbabwe was in 1994 when I was living in neighbouring South Africa. I was so taken with its beautiful scenery and friendly people that a few months later I went back on holiday with my husband-to-be. In those days, it was one of the most prosperous countries in Africa. We got giggling-drenched in the spray from Victoria Falls, drank gin-and-tonics as the sun set over the Zambezi and laughed at road signs warning ‘Elephants Crossing’ We sat awed by the silent grandeur of the Matopos Hills, burial place of Cecil Rhodes, empire builder after whom the country was originally named and a man who said, ‘I would annex the planets if I could.’

We also marvelled at an African nation with traffic lights that worked (even if they did call them robots), the pothole-free roads, neat brick schools everywhere, cappuccino bars and book cafés. It seemed a true Garden of Eden and the roads on which we travelled passed through a patchwork of lush green fields of tobacco, cotton and maize. They looked like model farms with combine harvesters gathering up neat bundles, long greenhouses full of neatly spaced roses, and rainbows playing through the water sprinkling from sophisticated irrigation systems.

Today Zimbabwe looks as if a terrible scourge has swept through. Some of the most advanced farms in the world have been reduced to slash and burn. The fields are charred and spiked with dead maize stalks or overgrown with weeds; the equipment has been plundered and stripped; and what little ploughing still goes on is by oxen or donkey. The country, which used to export large amounts of food, cannot even feed its own people. The destruction of the farms has left more than half of Zimbabwe's 12 million population on the edge of starvation and life expectancy has plummeted to around 30. The money is so worthless, with a loaf of bread costing 90,000 Zim dollars, that the country is returning to a barter economy.

In 2005, Mugabe switched his attention to the cities, targeting the urban population who had dared vote against him in successive elections. In the last week of May, I watched in shock as police bulldozers demolished thousands of homes, market stalls and small businesses. Operation Murambatswina or ‘Clean Up the Filth’ turned the country into an apocalyptic landscape wreathed with plumes of smoke and scattered with fleeing refugees clutching the scant belongings they had managed to salvage in bundles or on their heads. The few lucky ones had wardrobes or iron beds strapped onto wheelbarrows.

I have seen many dreadful things in my nineteen years of foreign reporting but nothing has affected me so profoundly as wandering through the smoking ruins of Mbare, the southern suburb of Harare that sprawls around Zimbabwe's oldest and largest market. My Lonely Planet guidebook recommends it as one of its five highlights of Harare and the place to see ‘colourful crowded scenes typical of Africa’. Instead, it looked as if a tsunami had passed through, reducing the famous market into drift-piles of smashed wood, twisted metal and broken bricks. The ground was awash with fruit and tomatoes trampled by the boots of Mugabe's henchmen, the ultimate indignity in a country where so many were starving.

Sirens wailed and newly acquired Chinese warplanes roared overhead to add to the fear. I walked around, careless of the fact that I was illegally in the country and that my white skin and fair hair were acting like a beacon to my presence, so stunned was I that a country's leader could do this to his own people.

A few figures were picking among the debris like vultures while others crouched in small dazed groups by the roadside. It was winter and the ground was hard and cold. The ubiquitous face of Robert Mugabe stared impassively up through the broken glass of a smashed picture. Ten or so women, two of them breastfeeding babies, squatted amid the rubble of what they told me had been the country's oldest chicken cooperative, founded in 1945. Further on, next to a pile of pink concrete and some torn magazine photos of celebrities, sat a large woman with elaborately beaded hair and a face that was crumpling inward. She tonelessly explained that the scattered debris was all that remained of her beauty salon, Glory's Hair Palace, which she had built up over many years. Glory was an extremely ample woman, jokingly known in the neighbourhood as Miss Universe. Her reputation for nimble weaving of hair, all the time dispensing sound advice about the male species (with frequent references to her own long-departed husband ‘the useless Blessing’), had enabled her to feed and educate her children.

A little further was a small fire around which huddled a terrified family with a daughter in a wheelchair. The mother, Memory, had the white flaking skin common among those who are HIV positive. ‘When they came with the bulldozers we told the police we have a disabled child, so please don't knock down our house’ she said. ‘They just said we don't care about the disabled and bulldozed our house and my husband's carpentry workshop and all his tools.’ Since then they had been sleeping in the open, and she showed me a seeping wound on her daughter's leg where she had been bitten by a rat.

None of these people were beggars or criminals. They had all been working for years to provide their families a decent life, only to find their homes and workplaces crushed to rubble in the name of ‘urban beautification’.

Along the railway line, past the National Foods factory, I came to Kambu Zuma suburb where police and militia had just arrived on their trucks and bulldozers. I stared aghast as people sat and did nothing while police took axes to their homes. Some of the houses were not shacks but two-storey concrete houses that took the bulldozers an hour to demolish.

Impatient with their slow progress, the police started ordering residents to destroy their own homes. Large fires were lit and people told to throw on their possessions. I watched hundreds of Zimbabweans, one of Africa's most educated populations, obediently smash and burn all they had ever worked for, leaving them with nowhere to live, no means to feed their children or pay their school fees.

I had made repeated trips to report on Zimbabwe since 1999 when the first farm invasion took place. Throughout the subsequent intimidation of the population and rigging of three elections, I had never understood why Zimbabweans did not rise up against their leader as people had in Yugoslavia or Ukraine. It irritated me that they kept asking why the outside world did nothing, when it seemed they were unwilling to help themselves. But at that moment in Kambu Zuma, watching people meekly burn their own belongings, I realized for the first time just how much twenty-five years of Mugabe's rule had oppressed the population. The next morning I had coffee with Nelson Chamisa, the youth leader of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change. Usually something of a firebrand, he stared into his cup, looking utterly defeated. ‘The people will never rise up now,’ he said, ‘Mugabe can do anything he likes to them.’

Afterwards when I returned home to London, I found myself waking in the middle of the night seeing those blank faces watching the bulldozers. I went to see Macbeth at the magical Wilton Music Hall in the East End and found Shakespeare's tragic hero portrayed as an African dictator as if to haunt me further.

‘Where will it stop?’ had been the plaintive cry of a friend from one of the United Nations agencies in Harare. ‘It's just so unnecessary.’ His organization, like all foreign aid agencies, had been banned by Mugabe from assisting the hundreds of thousands made homeless because the President insisted there was ‘no humanitarian crisis’. Later, Mugabe refused to let the UN supply tents to those still sleeping in the open, saying ‘there is no tradition of tents’ in Zimbabwe, and his bulldozers destroyed a model settlement built by the UN in Headlands. I wasn't surprised to read the latest World Bank statistics revealing that 70 per cent of Zimbabweans are living below the poverty line and describing its fall in living standards from 1999 to 2005 as ‘unprecedented for a country not at war’.

The tragedy of Zimbabwe, as my friend from the UN said, is that it is just so unnecessary. But to this African Macbeth it is very necessary indeed. For Mugabe is a man who, in a quarter of a century, has gone from liberation hero and darling of the left to tyrant with much blood on his hands. Staying in power has become synonymous with survival.

This is a story then about two people who have lived through all this, from a brutal civil war to the elation of becoming the last British colony in Africa to win independence; the early optimism and international acclaim, with Mugabe even receiving an honorary knighthood; and then the descent into madness. It is a story of two people, from completely different backgrounds, one rich, one poor, one white, one black, yet it is not about race. Rather it is about power and one violent man trying to save his skin even if he destroys the whole country in the process.

Ethnic cleansing is a loaded term and not quite accurate for what Mugabe has done, though the Ndebeles have been targeted most and he has increasingly surrounded himself with members of his own Zezuru clan whom he has known since the days of the liberation war. Perhaps it should be called political cleansing or class cleansing, for Mugabe's Marxist ideology and loathing of the bourgeoisie underpin many of his actions. Anyone with a different point of view is forced to conform or flee. In the last five years, at least a quarter of the population have left the country-more than 3 million people, including many of Zimbabwe's brightest, such as doctors, nurses, journalists and teachers. Those who remain are enfeebled by fear and hunger, and many are sick. Around a third of the adult population are infected with the HIV virus, and few of those are able to access drugs. Mugabe has even banned church feeding programmes. By 2006 Zimbabwe had the world's lowest life expectancy-just 37 for men and 34 for women. People were so desperate in Zimbabwe's brutalised society that the United Nations Children's Fund reported one child abused every hour partly because of a myth that AIDS could be cured by having sex with a virgin.

Back in 2001, on one of the last times I was actually allowed into the country as a journalist, I went with a group of colleagues to attend a press conference of Didymus Mutasa, hardline Mugabe loyalist and Politburo member. ‘We would be better off with only six million people, with our own people who support the liberation struggle,’ he told us in his soft voice. ‘We don't want these extra people.’ He spoke extremely politely and at the time I thought this was just crazed talk. But Mutasa then became State Security Minister in charge of secret police and it was he who headed Operation Murambatswina. For in the violence-filled years since his threat was made, Zimbabweans have learnt to their cost that Mugabe and his henchmen mean exactly what they say.

London, November 2006