I’ve made a decision. I’m going to Zimbabwe to chase my dream. I will write the definitive history of Zimbabwe’s struggle for liberation and reconciliation. Robert Mugabe will be the hero of my story. John Peterson, my African History professor, will supervise.
I’m reading Green Eggs and Ham to my daughter Hilary. She’s five and giggles like I’m tickling her tummy every time I recite the refrain. Dr Seuss is perfect for diverting her attention from my departure.
Dr Seuss is my line of communication to her, the only tool, short of candy and ice-cream, with which I can reach her. The chasm between us is of my creation. I’m running away from it. If I have been only an occasional visitor in her life to date, I will now be an even more distant, less frequent, presence. My dream has no meaning for my daughter Hilary or Janet, her mother. I’ve abandoned Janet before. When she became pregnant I tried to deny responsibility, then just fled. I saw Hilary for the first time when she was three months old. To my shame, I never changed her diaper or fed mashed carrots into her toothless mouth. I wasn’t there when she took her first steps or waited for the fairy after losing that first tooth. I’ll miss many more milestones as I attempt to make sense of my world of ideas.
As I leave, I promise birthday greetings and postcards of elephants, plus the occasional phone call. Janet, small and tight-lipped, knows better than to expect anything. Hilary has no concept of 8000 miles or two years. She probably won’t recognise me the next time we meet or may not want to if she does. I will live with all that somehow, like so many men who find things they think are more important in life than fatherhood.
Less conflicted is my cursory farewell dinner at my parents’ house in South Milwaukee. They respond to what they see as my ‘bad decisions’ with resolution and faith. They pray for me as I set off for what to them is a godforsaken and dark continent. ‘There are pagans there,’ my mother says.
I don’t try to argue and don’t promise any postcards. Since their conversion this is how it’s been.
No one comes to the airport to bid me farewell. I check my backpack and a battered brown leather suitcase with the silver letters db on it. Someone at the Goodwill, where I bought it, must have reversed my initials. My business cards show that I’m Ben Dabney, PhD researcher at Wisconsin State University. That brown suitcase holds my collection of 3×5 cards. I’ve wrapped them in bundles of a hundred and stuffed each bundle inside a sock.
I carry my most prized possession on board: a Hermes Rocket portable typewriter in its grey metal case. Peterson says typewriters are expensive in Zimbabwe. My jacket pocket contains a list of 73 people to interview.
According to my ticket, my destination is Salisbury, Rhodesia. I know I’m going to Harare, the liberated name of the capital of the liberated nation of Zimbabwe. Rhodesia is dead.
My journey is about more than history. Mugabe’s gospel of reconciliation will help me reconcile the ruined relationships of my life.
Chapter 2
‘Which hotel, sir?’ the taxi driver asks as he closes the trunk of his gleaming yellow Datsun. The latch catches on the third try.
‘King George the Sixth,’ I reply.
‘The King George, sir,’ he answers as if he hasn’t heard correctly.
I sit in the back with the Hermes on my lap. Although a plastic piece is missing from the window crank, the silver handle shines like a place setting at a Christmas dinner. The driver picks up a piece of towelling and wipes it across the dashboard, chasing away imaginary dust. The steering wheel on the right has me disoriented. I look out the window for murals of heroic guerrilla fighters or billboards with Mugabe’s face. The yellowing facade of Harare International Airport bears no odes to the Chimurenga, as the Zimbabweans call their 13-year liberation war.
The driver pulls a lever and the meter ticks like an angry metronome.
‘Your car smells new,’ I tell him.
‘We are trying our level best, sir,’ he answers. ‘These days things are so tough.’
‘Why?’
‘We don’t know if the Europeans will keep coming,’ he responds. As we pull out of the parking lot, he puts on black-framed sunglasses. A strip of masking tape holds one of the sidepieces together.
‘Is this your first time in Zimbabwe, sir?’ he asks.
‘My first time outside the United States.’
‘You are from America, sir?’
‘Yes, Wisconsin. A very cold place in the Midwest.’
‘I think at school we once learned that they produce cheese in Wisconsin, sir.’
‘That’s right. Wisconsin is famous for cheese and the Green Bay Packers.’
Despite his politeness, I’m starting to worry about the driver. I don’t see many people or houses. I’ve asked no one about taxis or crime. I am at his mercy in this land of reconciliation.
‘Sir, what’s a Packer?’ he asks.
‘It’s a football team,’ I reply. ‘It’s a little hard to explain.’ A stadium full of freezing people with their faces painted yellow and green is hard to explain.
A station wagon passes us on the left. The back wheels kick up gravel as the vehicle leaves the tarred surface. A dozen people press against each other inside. A baby strapped to its mother’s back peers out the window.
‘These et’s,’ the driver says, ‘they are causing all the accidents these days. Always overtaking on the left. Where do they buy their driving licences?’
‘What’s an et?’ I ask.
‘An emergency taxi, sir. Those Peugeot 404s that keep running people off the road. They’re so dangerous.’ He speaks softly and the accent is new to me. Taxi drivers don’t have the elocution of prime ministers.
After passing many fields of thriving weeds, there are pedestrians and houses. Black people are walking everywhere – on dirt paths, along the side of the road, in front of shops. Most of the women wear black canvas tennis shoes or flip flops. Though I’m sweating from the January heat, many of the walkers wear knitted beanies. A white woman who looks like she’s in a hurry passes us in a blue Morris Minor. A German Shepherd barks from out her back window.
Farther along, two men ride black, balloon-tyre bicycles, like the one I got for my eighth birthday. Ahead of them, a man pushes a similar bike with a table and four wooden chairs tied to a rack over the back wheel. Smoke from a loosely rolled cigarette drifts from his mouth as he escorts his load.
‘Sir, this is where the Europeans live,’ the driver tells me. ‘It’s called Hatfield.’
‘The houses are huge,’ I reply. High walls and concrete fences surround the yards, leaving only the red rooftiles easily visible.
‘Not so big, sir. In Borrowdale or Chisipite they are far much bigger. Some are double storey.’
‘Doesn’t this city have smog?’ I ask. Harare’s blue sky evokes camping in northern Minnesota and not the overhang of a capital.
‘Iwe!’
