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
IT WAS ONLY WHEN Aquinata crossed the second of the three rivers where her two brothers lay buried that she felt safe. Her way back from the Catholic mission school went up and down through yellow elephant grass and over rocky kopjes or hills dotted with spiky acacia trees where green mambas lurked. If she walked quickly she could just do it in an hour.
The teachers would always keep back two or three of the girls after school to cook their supper. Aqui hated that. She had never fainted in lessons like some of her friends but most days she had been up since four or five, collecting water and firewood before school, and had eaten nothing since tea in the morning. I would be so hungry in my belly that it hurt just to look into that pot of fine white sadza. Sometimes it would even be fortified with lumps of meat. Yet they wouldn't even give me a scrap.
It also meant she would be walking home as the shadows turned crimson and the sun swelled like an elephant's bottom then suddenly slunk from the sky. That was the hour when trees turned to dark murmuring shapes where spirits or tokoloshis might hide and bad men and animals came out. On what Aqui thought of as the Wrong Side of the rivers, warthogs and vicious dogs might dart from the bush, and once she even saw a cobra lying like a stick across the path, its skin shiny as if coated with dew. In the rivers were crocodiles that occasionally ate people from the village, though that did not stop Aqui and the other children from swimming.
But once she had navigated the log over the middle river, a crossing she could now do in five steps, she would finally be relieved of the fist
