By Christina Lamb
AMONG the many dictators who must be watching the uprisings across the Middle East and North Africa with dismay is Robert Mugabe. The Zimbabwean President has been in power 31 years and despite recently turning 87 is pushing for another five year term.
While other despots have responded to the revolutionary mood by granting economic and political concessions – whether handing out billions as done by the Saudi king or sacking the government as in Yemen and Syria, Mugabe has arrested people simply for watching video recordings of the protests.
The last few months has seen arrests and beatings of hundreds of human rights activists and anyone suspected of not supporting Mugabe. Ministers from his own power-sharing government have been incarcerated on trumped up charges of corruption and “public violence”.
To those of us who have followed Zimbabwe for years, Mugabe’s intransigence comes as no surprise. Back in 2005 he said he would only leave power in a coffin. Close aides say he followed closely what happened to Liberian leader Charles Taylor who agreed to go into exile then was arrested. Mugabe vowed he would not make the same mistake
In almost two decades of reporting on Zimbabwe, I’ve learnt not to underestimate Mugabe. I have watched him go to any lengths to stay in power, from repeated rigged and bloody elections, to bulldozing peoples’ homes and training an army of young thugs – the Greenbombers, who run rape camps of young girls.
He has literally destroyed his own country to stay in power. When I first went to Zimbabwe in 1994 it was one of Africa’s most affluent nations. It had traffic lights that worked, pothole-free roads, cappuccino bars and book cafes. Throughout the country were neat red brick schools attended by children in uniform proudly swinging their book bags.
The roads on which I 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 evenly spaced roses watered by the latest irrigation systems, and they boasted some of the highest yields in the world.
Today Zimbabwe looks as if a terrible scourge has swept through. Mugabe’s campaign of farm seizures has left fields 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. More than half of Zimbabwe’s 12-million population is on the edge of starvation and life expectancy the lowest in the world. The World Bank described its fall in living standards from 1999-2005 as “unprecedented for a country not at war”.
Saddest of all most of those neat red brick schools are now empty, the teachers having fled. “The biggest mistake we made was educating the population”, one of Mugabe’s ministers once told me.
Ripe for a revolution one might think. But Mugabe has survived because huge numbers of Zimbabweans have left the country – at least 3m, a quarter of the population. The rest are cowed down and trying to survive on what little food they can obtain.
For those at the top Mugabe has created a web of patronage bringing in army generals, judges, even bishops – the country’s brave Catholic archbishop told me he doesn’t even know which of his own bishops he can trust (he was then discredited by state run media) in a sex scandal.
I got a vivid taste of Mugabe’s attempts to divide his nation through what happened to a white family called the Houghs and their black maid Aqui, a story I tell in my book House of Stone.
I first met the Houghs in winter 2002 on their farm Kendor at the height of the farm invasions. The farm was in Wenimbi Valley in the rich tobacco-growing district of Marondera, only an hour’s drive outside Harare, and its fertile red soil had made the area one of the main targets of the government’s violent land-grab campaign. To get there had involved negotiating a series of roadblocks manned by youth militia adorned with Mugabe bandannas, their eyes bloodshot from smoking mbanje.
For the previous two years, neighboring farms all around the Houghs had been invaded and seized. 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.
Kendor farm had also been invaded. When I arrived, war veterans had been living at the bottom of the garden for months. Every night the family tossed and turned to their drumming and chanting, listening to the windows rattle and wondering when they might decide to break in. The next morning they would find carcasses of the cattle that the intruders had slaughtered.
The Houghs had thought about leaving. But the 1400-acre ostrich and tobacco farm and eight-bedroom house with its sweeping view over the balancing rocks and 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 had ended up driving mini-cabs 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 skin and they employed 300 people as well as running an orphanage for children whose parents had died in the AIDS pandemic.
We sat on the terrace talking about the situation. The setting was surreal – as we sipped our tea and ate slices of madeira cake, it was impossible to ignore the wood-smoke rising from the huts of war vets beyond the swimming pool.
To my surprise, the Houghs invited their maid Aqui to join us. She was refreshingly candid as well as stunning in her red and white polka dot uniform and green headscarf, and her great big laugh.
I wrote an article about the farm in the Sunday Telegraph. 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.
Some time afterwards Nigel came to London. We met in a coffee shop, cold rain pinging on the windows. As we warmed our icy hands on the steaming mugs, he said: “It was Aqui you know.”
I looked at him in confusion. “What do you mean?”
“It was Aqui who took my farm.”
I could not believe it. Aqui and Nigel had seemed to have such a good relationship.
“You know it’s almost the worst thing,” he continued, “worse than losing the farm. She was spitting and yelling at me: ‘Get out or we’ll kill you! Whites have no place in this country!’ I just keep seeing her face twisted with all that hatred.”
He shook his head like a cat with wet whiskers as if trying to remove the memory.
“I trusted her with my children, paid for her children’s education and medical care, gave her chickens to take to her mother in their village”, he said. What she had done seemed the ultimate betrayal.
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 percent of its export earnings.
Today, nine years on, less than 300 white farmers remain on their farms.
Any western leader who criticized Mugabe played into his hands as he would retort that the white colonial masters couldn’t stomach a successful black leader. Yet it was never really a racial issue. Those of us in the Western media played into Mugabe’s hands by focusing on white farmers like the Houghs, perhaps because they seemed people like us. But Aqui too was kicked out and now survives on money sent by a daughter working on minimum pay in a care home in England. The real victims were the hundreds of thousands of farm workers like Aqui who lost their homes and jobs. With nowhere else to go, they fled to rural villages where they now struggle to survive on baobab pods, wild fruits and fried termites.
Once a liberation hero, Mugabe has become an African Macbeth for whom staying in power has become synonymous with survival. In order to maintain his grip over different tribal factions in his party, he has named no successor. Despite much speculation about his health – he is said to have prostate cancer – he seems intent on living for ever. At his 87th birthday celebration in February he told the nation “my body may get spent but I wish my mind will always be with you”. His mother lived to nearly 100.
Christina Lamb is the author of House of Stone; A True Story of a Family divided in War Torn Zimbabwe (Chicago Review Press)
