Savoy
December 2003

Paradise Lost
With so much suffering across the continent, is Zimbabwe's story nothing more than the travails of a few white farmers?

BY STEPHAN FARIS | HARARE

Maybe it was the season I arrived into -- when the jacaranda trees were blooming - but Harare showed little of what I expected from a crumbling African city. On the way from the airport, I hadn’t seen a single pothole. Trash and leaves lay on the side of the street in the neat piles into which they had been swept. At the supermarket near the hotel, the shelves were full: a dozen different selections of pasta; a choice of mustards, marmalades and mayonnaises; a rack for wine; separate refrigerators for beer, milk and cheese. Yes, there were a few beggars, children trailing you, heartbreaking hand outstretched, repeating almost sub vocally: “boss, boss, boss.” But the downtown streets felt safe. The shops were open. The traffic lights worked. I could have been in an American city. Not a rich one, but nonetheless an American one. And a beautiful one. Jacarandas flowered everywhere, trumpet-shaped, electric lavender, arching over streets to sprinkle the sidewalks like rose petals at a wedding.

It took some time to sense the crisis I had come to write about. The first signs were subtle. A breakdown of trust. A sign in the supermarket forbidding shoppers from re-entering with their grocery bags. Hotels demanding money upfront. In a garden restaurant, white-suited waiters pushed the limits of civility, handing you your drink with one hand, presenting the check with the other. Hotel porters dealt in black market currency, leading you into an anteroom before pulling out thick bricks of worthless cash from their pants, covering the doorway with worried glances as you counted. When I asked the receptionist how long it would take to walk downtown, he answered only, “Ok, but you leave your valuables here.” To the eyes, the city was vibrant with flowers. But try to paint the emotional Harare, and you’d be tempted to tinge it with something sick and yellowing, the color of dying skin.

As a news story, I’d had a chip on my shoulder when it came to the country. I was living in Nigeria when the 2002 presidential elections again brought Zimbabwe to our television screens. There were reports of political violence, of beatings, of torture, of foreign journalists being banned, of local ones being attacked. BBC correspondents were refused entrance and broadcast their reports from the South African border. Viewed from Lagos, the coverage seemed obscene. Every few months, some Nigerian city was erupting into violence, leaving dozens or hundreds dead. About six months earlier, it had been government troops leading the massacres. These stories would sprinkle the inside pages of a few newspapers, and then disappear. But Zimbabwe kept making headlines. There’s a bitter joke among foreign journalists in Africa that 100 black bodies equals one white one. Zimbabwe -- where the most prominent victims were white farmers -- seemed to be bearing that out.

A year and half further into the country’s crisis, I was making my way out of Harare, and there was still no comparison with Lagos. The bus stop lay near the euphemistically named “high-density area,” the slums. It was crowded, but orderly and paved, with none of the oil-stained chaos I’d seen in other African terminuses. The road from town passed a crisply-painted school and a pharmaceutical plant paneled in high-gloss aluminum. The police at the first checkpoint drove a late-model Mercedes. There were few signs of poverty: gardens planted in vacant lots, banana trees between houses, burning garbage in an overflowing dumpster. Then came miles of yellowed grass, broken early on by sprinklers carving out a patch of green. A black and white cow grazed in front of a sign offering “Fresh Farm Milk.”

My destination was the stone ruins of Great Zimbabwe, from which the country had taken its name. I arrived just before dark, and set out early the next morning. It was surprisingly cold. The guards at the gate insisted on being paid in U.S. dollars, but gave change in the local currency at a terrible rate. I hiked up through a white mist to the oldest part of the site, a 13th-century complex of stone walls perched on a steep hill. The ruins are famous for their mortar-less masonry. Their architects used fire and water to heat and cool the local granite, which would shear off in brick-thick layers. The path I took was walled on both sides. As it neared the summit, it incorporated huge, flat boulders, and at one point became so narrow I had to turn my shoulders to pass. I would not have wanted to be a 13th-century attacker. The hilltop complex was imposing, like a medieval European fortress, and accessible only through a small, lintelled entrance. The walls followed rounded, organic lines, as if they were modeled on the weathered stone. They wrapped around lichen-covered rocks, traced the curves of the hill and flowed into doorways.

The ancient city probably took about 100 years to build, and spread from the hill into the valley below. At its peak, its inhabitants numbered as high as 20,000, dominated a huge sweep of land, and thrived on a gold trade that stretched to the coast and beyond. Archaeologists have dug up Chinese porcelain and Indian jewelry. This is the site of Zimbabwe’s Great Enclosure, Africa’s largest pre-colonial structure south of Egypt’s pyramids. Most likely used as a royal compound, the mammoth walls enclose an area the size of a football field. Because of its grandeur, the site has suffered considerable politicization. The Rhodesian government bent over backwards to deny that the site had been built by Africans, conjuring up evidence of Greek, Egyptian, Jewish or Arabic origins. Zimbabwe’s current rulers continue to mix history and politics. A sign in the museum denies the popular theory that the city’s 15th century decline resulted from overpopulation and overgrazing. It claims instead that the area was abandoned when its king set out to expel “foreign” Swahili traders.

This battle, between Africans and outsiders, is the central myth of Mugabe’s government, the 79-year-old former freedom fighter’s justification for all that goes wrong. The country is in the throes of twin political and economic crises so interlocked that a deterioration in one fuels a slide in the other. Both had been simmering for so long that it’s hard to say which came first. The political crisis fired up in February 2000, when Zimbabwe’s voters, fed up with their country’s slow economic slide, handed Mugabe his first electoral defeat, rejecting a constitutional amendment that offered him sweeping powers. The proposal would also have allowed the government to appropriate farmland without compensating its owners: the 4,500 mainly white farmers who controlled half of the arable land while millions of poor blacks were making do in rugged “communal lands.” Mugabe quickly seized on the popular issue of land redistribution and accused those who disagreed with him, including the newly formed opposition party the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), of allying themselves with the former colonial power, the “gay gangsters” as Mugabe dubbed Prime Minister Tony Blair and his cabinet. Parliament overrode the voters’ decision, and Mugabe opened the gates for often-violent farm invasions.

It wasn’t enough. In parliamentary polls later year, the MDC took nearly half the elected seats, despite an intimidation campaign that included murder, rape, torture, kidnapping and arson. Thirty one people had died, including five white farmers. Mugabe’s grip tightened. Supreme Court justices hostile to his land policies were forced out. Foreign journalists were expelled. The offices of the Daily News, a local independent daily, were firebombed. MDC supporters were assaulted.

Meanwhile, the economy sputtered. Agriculture and its related industries had formed the pillars of Zimbabwe’s economy, generating 66 percent of the domestic economy and 50 percent of the country's foreign-exchange earnings. Donors -- who had been willing to fund land redistribution provided it was done legally and compensated the farmers -- pulled out. Foreign investors and tourists stopped looking to Zimbabwe. The following three years saw things change only for the worse. Farm invasions continued, and the economy carried on with its freefall. In 2002, Mugabe won a presidential election that was widely seen as neither free nor fair. The MDC gained popularity, and the government stepped up its crackdown, referring to its opposition as Britain’s "running dogs." Opposition supporters were tortured, beaten and chased from their homes. The number of murdered white farmers, grist for the international press, rose to 13.

Like all good myths, Mugabe’s has its basis in truth. Zimbabwe has the dubious distinction of having been colonized not by a country, but by a company, the British South Africa Company of Cecil John Rhodes. The Englishman had made his fortune in South Africa’s diamond fields before leading an army of white settlers in 1890 into what is now northeastern Zimbabwe. The men were looking for gold, but settled for land, and eventually spread west as well. By 1896, the settlers had seized most of the fertile land in the region, pushing its original inhabitants out or - at best - employing them as indentured workers. The new country was named Rhodesia, after its founder, who dreamed of bringing Africa under British rule from “Cape to Cairo.” It was only after a 1896-1897 uprising killed roughly 10 percent of the whites that the new government allocated land for blacks, “communal lands” similar to Indian reservations in the United States. By the time of Rhodes’ death in 1902, British settlers were pouring into the country.

When I made a trip to Rhode’s grave outside of Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second largest city, I was offered a rare glimpse of how tourism had been. Local sightseeing companies were serving a tourist or two a week. But about one day a month, a South African “train safari” would pull in, and business would buzz at pre-crisis levels. Early one morning, I joined a convoy of open-topped trucks ferrying the train’s passengers to a hill Rhodes had called View of the World and declared would hold his bones. The weather was cold and drizzly, and the mostly gray-haired tourists huddled under blankets and pulled their rain coats tight. “It might be difficult to view the world because of the weather,” quipped the driver of one truck, a man I’ll call Samuel. “Otherwise, like yesterday, we could see from Cape to Cairo.” Granite hills rose and tumbled like ocean swells in a strong wind. Some areas had been hit be a recent fire, and blades of grass shone visceral green against the sooty soil. Whatever else can be said about Rhodes, he had an eye for design. His grave was a simple, bronze slab set in a natural witches’ circle of lichen-flecked boulders. Only a later, gaudy memorial for 33 fallen British soldiers spoiled t

On the return, I sat next to Samuel and tried to draw him out on Rhodes’ legacy. “The politicians talk like he did everything bad, but he also did some good,” he told me. “Like for instance, the railways. He also brought development.”

“Anyway, it’s just history,” he added after a pause. “You can’t be worr

It’s people who worry about the living that posed the biggest threat to Mugabe. To those too young to remember the liberation struggle, Mugabe’s defining accomplishment had been to destroy the economy. The country had lost a third of its GDP since Mugabe kicked off his land reform. Unemployment had passed 75 percent. Inflation was running at over 455 percent. Prices could double, literally overnight. In response to crippling cash shortages, the government had printed something it called “bearers’ checks,” money that expired. Price controls meant that staples were hard to find, and a fixed exchange rate put imported goods far out of reach of the middle class. Zimbabwe may have looked better off than other African countries, but that was only because it had been so recently well off. “Our infrastructure has been good, but all of sudden there’s nothing to put in that infrastructure,” a 40-year-old fruit and vegetable dealer told me. “If you have a fridge at home, but you can’t put a drink in that fridge, what’s the use of it.”

In Bulawayo, I went to visit Pius Ncube, the catholic archbishop and an outspoken opponent of Mugabe’s. He wore clerical robes, a silver cross hanging down to his belly and old, plastic glasses that magnified his eyes. On one wall hung pictures of Nelson Mandela, Ghandi and Oscar Romero. “There’s another one I wanted there, but I don’t have the picture,” he told me. “The one of the black human rights leader, Martin Luther King, Jr.” I had caught him on a tough day. He had recently met with Mugabe and had concluded that the president wasn’t going anywhere. “The middle class almost can’t live,” he told me. “The poor man is dying. People are living under bridges.” His hands had been in constant motion as he spoke, fidgeting with his glasses, his cross, his unopened mail. But they stilled as he turned his head to stare at his files. “Sometimes in the middle of the night I wake up and wonder, ‘Am I laying down while people are dying of starvation?’” he said. “But what’s the point?” he continued quietly. “Even if I wake up, people are still dying.”

Not all the opposition was ready to give in. From Bulowayo, I made a side trip on the road towards Victoria Falls, stopping at the coal town of Hwange to interview MDC supporters who had been beaten, tortured, denied food, fired from their jobs and chased from their houses. Prisca Sibanda, 28, had been abducted by recruits from a government youth camp as she campaigned for the MDC. The boys spent the day hitting her with sticks, stone and boots, and burned her with a red-hot wire and the drippings of a burning plastic bag. She was three months pregnant, but when she began bleeding from between her legs, her assailants dumped cold water on her and continued. Sibanda hadn’t recovered from the attack. Her body had an adolescent’s scrawniness, but she moved like an old woman. Her baby had survived, but needed a doctor’s help to learn to sit, and - even after her first birthday - still couldn’t crawl. I asked Sibanda if she would campaign again, and she said she would. “I want to believe that if we have a change of government, maybe we can have a better life in the near future,” she said.

For the moment, that future is looking bleak. I had planned to ride the old colonial train back to Harare, but the line had run out of diesel, so I flew instead. Back in the capital, I set off for the countryside with a Zimbabwean friend. This was the land Rhodes had snatched. Even before we left the suburbs, I could see its fertility. We crossed through hilly country where jacarandas glowed against the green foliage of the slopes, and moved into the plains. Industrial sprinklers sprayed white arcs over fields of maize, and peas grew in boxes of rich green. Newly tilled earth sat in clumps the color of chocolate, and in the distance I could see golden expanses of winter wheat sliced into neat sections by the paths of tractors. As we pushed on, the landscape turned to scrub and bush. The soil changed, became redder and drier, split by an occasional cottage with cracked walls and peeling paint. Giant granite domes bulged from the ground like knuckles. We had passed into the communal lands.

This was the disparity that Mugabe had tried to bridge. On paper, his land reform would rescue subsistence farmers from their scrabbled plots and replant them in the fruitful fields of the white landowners. But the implementers had made two mistakes. To begin with, the best land went not to the powerless, but to civil servants, teachers, policemen, and members of the army, the secret service and the ministries, most of whom kept their day jobs. Secondly, nobody seems to have worried about feeding the nation. A well-run commercial farm will produce at least 6 tons of maize per hectare. Communal farms, with their small lots, produce one tenth of that. Suddenly, there was a lot less food around. The program also had the bad luck of kicking off into a minor dry spell, one which the commercial farmers with their irrigation and experience could have handled. In past droughts, the government had imported grain and sold it at subsidized prices. But the crippling of the country’s major export industries meant there was no cash to spend. Most of the seed farms had been split up, given to farmers who wanted to grow food. When planting season came, there wasn’t enough seed to sow.

We pulled off the main road and reached an elementary school in the Kowo district where the aid group WorldVision was distributing food. This was a community that had been able to feed itself, even produce a little extra to sell. But the drought had destroyed their previous harvest, and the seed shortage had smothered the following year’s. Of its 5,000 inhabitants, 3,000 relied on aid groups to eat. And again, with the rains starting and no seed to be found, the next year threatened further privation. This was the new face of Zimbabwe, a scene repeated all over a country where the World Food Program was estimating it would have to feed nearly half the population. The recipients sat quietly in the tree shade, waiting their turn to queue up by a small concrete church to be given bags of grain and beans and bottles of vegetable oil. I had been to other food distributions in other countries and marveled at the orderliness. “Are we docile?” asked my friend. On the way up, I had asked why so few were agitating against Mugabe. “Yes. Maybe we are peaceful. If you want, we will let you rule us until you die.”

Zimbabwe is young country. It wasn’t born into the age of Benjamin Franklin and George III nor even that of John Kennedy and Malcolm X. The big names at the time of its independence in 1980 are still alive: Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Robert Mugabe. On my last full day in the country, I visited Harare’s Heroes’ Acre, where the man who created Zimbabwe plans to be buried. The guide assigned to me at the entrance described how North Korean designers carved a huge wedge into a hill and created a monument meant to suggest back-to-back Kalashnikovs. A giant bronze of three guerillas, two men and a woman, stands where the triggers would be. From there, the graves curve away to form the distinctive banana-shaped clips. The hold Mugabe’s canonized: founders of the nationalist movement, prisoners, journalists, economists, politicians, soldiers, and his first wife, Sally, next to whom Mugabe has reserved a plot of his own. Steep black-granite stairs start the guns’ barrels, which stretch into a 130-foot tower topped by a flickering electric lamp. The official guidebook says the light symbolizes the eternal flame of independence, but my guide assured me it represented muzzle flash. “Every night there is a battle,” he said.

Mugabe has played his freedom fighter heritage like a dream, and the result has been a curious double vision about his country. As Western countries decried what they called a seriously flawed elections, African heads of state hurried to Mugabe’s defense. The South African observer mission reported that the campaign had been characterized by “incidents of violence and intimidation,” but concluded that the relative absence of problems on voting day meant that the results should be considered legitimate. South African President Thabo Mbeki’s had refused to condemn his neighbor even as his country’s “quiet diplomacy” did nothing to slow Mugabe’s crackdown, earning him the enmity of Zimbabwe’s opposition. “The man is funny,” said Pius Ncube, the Bulawayo archbishop. “About AIDS, he’s never made a clear statement. And now he’s backing Mugabe when he knows clearly that Mugabe is oppressing the people.”

After my visit to Heroes’ Acre, I met with Morgan Tsvangirai, the leader of the MDC, who was due in court the following week for his trial for treason, a charge that carries the death penalty. Mugabe had been notching up the pressure. He had closed the country’s only independent daily newspaper and violently crushed union demonstrations. I argued that under these conditions the opposition couldn’t survive too much longer, and Tsvangirai countered that Mugabe’s days were also numbered, that the old man’s regime would crumble under pressure from the economy. “You know when you’ve carried a load for far too long and you’re just a few hundred yards from home, you can feel the weight,” he said. “But you can also feel the determination to get there.” He told me his party had been trying to bring African countries around. “Mugabe tells them that this a land crisis, that this is a colonial crisis,” he said. “Those we have talked to now realize that this is not a land crisis, this is not a British crisis, this is a crisis in governance.” With the white farmers gone, Mugabe’s opponents hope that support from African states will become untenable. The war he has characterized as between Africans and their oppressors remains between Africans and their oppressors. But it’s becoming increasingly clear that the new oppressors lie in the Zimbabwean government.

The rains had come to Harare, and in the clouds’ gray light, the jacaranda blossoms had lost their luster, clumping together under nearly barren trees like drifts of wet confetti. On the way to meet Tsvangirai, my taxi driver had made a quick turn to avoid a police checkpoint. Since the crisis began, he told me, they had started demanding bribes. In Lagos, this was a practice so entrenched that Nigerians had developed specialized verbs. You “dash” a policeman. He “chops” your money. In Zimbabwe, it was a new phenomenon. For years, Zimbabwe had been a model of development. It had showed struggling African countries a way forward. Now it was sinking in their wake. The story here wasn’t important because the country was worse off than Nigeria -- or Liberia, or Sudan, or the Congo, or even Kenya. It was important because it didn’t have to become like them.

Contact Information

Email: stephanfaris@yahoo.com