A Premonition of Overwhelming Evil
A Premonition of Overwhelming Evil
Chapter 1
I first met him in the 1990s, in a dusty bit of veld a little to the north of the farm.
The dry heat was palpable as I turned off the tar road onto a rutted dirt track leading to a run-down butchery, hoping to buy a cold bottle of Coke. Having found one, I bumped along sipping it, asking the people I passed where the rally was to be held.
I soon found the place. An old army tent had been erected for the lesser dignitaries. A little to the right of it was a platform with Dralon-covered chairs and with some more canvas over it. The ordinary people stood or sat in a large rough semicircle beneath the burning sky.
Apart from people from the nearby villages, numbers had been swelled with bussed-in school children in their white shirts and various coloured shorts and skirts. They were chattering away, their smiles flashing in the sunlight against their black skins.
I had been told by my boss, the president of the Commercial Farmers' Union (CFU), to go to the event. It came with the job, attending political rallies. I knew what to expect by now: dusty, hot, thirsty days, mostly of waiting for enough people to turn up for it to be worthwhile for the politicians to address them. When the minister, or whoever the speaker was, finally arrived -- invariably many hours late -- it was always with a fresh flourish of authority, slogan chanting, and fist raising.
He arrived as if from nowhere. Suddenly he was right there, in the centre of a large group of security people and important dignitaries. There was a fantastic energy about him. He was walking so quickly. His face was animated and he was talking and gesticulating and moving on all at the same time. He acted like a man in his mid-fifties, not his mid-seventies. He was almost like a man possessed.
I remembered trying to fight a fire on the farm once when I was caught in the path of a dust devil. The fire had already burned through where I was standing and the ground was black and full of soot where the grass had been. As the dust devil hit, the whole world went black and I was suddenly engulfed in a blinding, swirling, dark confusion of choking debris, which settled as suddenly as it had arrived.
As Robert Mugabe moved unpredictably in different directions, the people around him moved too, just like the trees and leaves and other objects caught up in the path of a dust devil, leaning over, flying up, twirling around, and falling back down again. He was the centre. Whatever he did affected everything and everyone.
I had never seen him close up before. I was struck by how small he was and yet what tremendous energy emanated from that tiny frame. The little Hitler moustache and the elegantly tailored suit added to the aura of authority that surrounded him, to the confusion of all those around.
In the heat haze and the dust I could imagine bullets cracking as he spoke from the podium, his voice snapping and whispering, rising and falling, breaking from English to Shona and then back again. His fist always seemed to be upraised, as though anger had completely mastered him and even the veld was his enemy. I wondered whether the trees and golden swaying grasses all around recognized in what he was saying the haunting echo of his promise, years ago, at a different rally in the 1970s, when he proclaimed that bullets and the power of the gun barrel were the way forward for Zimbabwe. "We came to power through the barrel of a gun and that's how we intend to keep it."
We were a small group of whites there in the army tent. Suddenly, in the middle of it all, I was asked to make a speech about the help that the CFU was giving to black farmers. I don't know why we were asked, or, least of all, why I was asked. I was
the youngest and the least senior of the white men present. I'd never made a speech in front of thousands of people before, and never in front of a president.
I was thrust forwards to the podium, not really knowing what I was going to say. I had to think quickly.
"Your Excellency," I began. "I'm sure that in the evening you and your wife, Comrade Grace, like to sit down and listen to the piano being played by a master musician. I'm sure you love the beauty of the notes as they harmonize together into a delightful tune."
I went on speaking slowly and clearly into the microphone so that all the people could hear -- and so that I had time to think.
"Your Excellency, on the piano there are black keys and there are white ones too. The pianist can't play the harmony if he just uses the black keys and he can't play the harmony if he just uses the white ones. The harmony happens when both the black and the white keys are played skilfully together. In Zimbabwe," I said, "we have black people and white people and we each have our role to play. We can make harmony together; or we can choose not to. The choice is ours. But disharmony will not be good for our nation, just as disharmony on the piano is not good for our ears."
There was a huge round of spontaneous applause from the thousands of people present. They were all black apart from the handful of white farmers who were with me.
I stopped speaking, stepped away from the microphone and walked instinctively toward Mugabe. He was sitting above me on the dais, about 1.5 metres from the ground. I approached him from his left and held my hand up to him. He looked ahead, away from me, toward the crowds who were clapping and cheering and ululating. But he was looking straight past them, toward the past. Toward the bullets. There was a pent-up storm of anger in his face, like a menacing black cloud hovering above me. I could feel hatred tearing him apart from the inside. His hand came down mechanically and I took it. The instant I touched it I knew it was unlike any hand I'd ever touched before. It was cold, despite the heat of the day, and it had a clammy softness to it. It also felt lifeless, as though the body that it came from was dead. I looked at his face and into his eyes but he couldn't look at me. It was as though I had shaken hands with a reptile and not a warm- blooded human being.
I will carry the feeling of that touch to my grave. I can't forget it. I had a premonition of overwhelming evil.
This excerpt from Ben Freeth's book Mugabe and the White African appears with the permission of Lion Hudson. Distributed in the U.S. by Trafalgar Square Publishing from IPG.
Helpless in the Dust
Helpless in the Dust
Chapter 17 (Excerpt)
Two days after the election, at around the time that Mugabe was being sworn back into power as President, his twenty-eighth year in office, the radio sprang to life. Laura and the children and I had had Sunday lunch at home with Mike and Angela, who'd just left.
"Ben! Ben! Ben! This is Bruce."
"Reading you," I replied, leaning over to push in the red button.
"I've just heard that Frank Trott has had his ribs broken and a gun put to his head by Gilbert Moyo, over on Twyford farm. Some of the workers over there heard the gang say they were coming over to 'Campbell's'. They're heavily armed. Over."
"OK, copy that. I'll go and warn Mike and Angela now, over." I knew that their radio was on the blink, so I tried their cell phone, but couldn't get through.
We knew that the looting and violence was being organized against us. A small group of nuns had come to the farm a few days earlier, under the guise of buying seed potatoes, to warn us. They had overheard a conversation that indicated that the Minister of State for Policy Implementation, Webster Shamu, was behind it. We took the information seriously and had previously written to the Commissioner of Police asking for protection.
As I drove around the corner to Mike and Angela's house, I was greeted by two gun men pointing guns straight at my head. A group of thugs had arrived. One of the men holding a gun was wearing a bright shirt with Robert Mugabe's face emblazoned on it. It was Gilbert Moyo.
I ducked down to avoid the bullets and jammed on the brakes, then thrust my truck into reverse. I managed to back around the bend, then, shoving the gear lever forward into first, wheeled around back out the way I came in. I was gaining speed when a large rock smashed through the side window, hitting me on the right-hand side of my head. It was a piece of granite and it broke in half on impact. I went down, dazed, and smashed into a tree, stalling the car.
My head was pouring with blood and I was covered in broken glass. I reached for the keys to restart the truck, but someone grabbed them away from me. Several men leaned into the truck and dragged me out. I couldn't do anything. They were viciously strong, determined, and well trained in violence. They didn't say anything or ask me anything. I was surprised by the strength of their violent attack. I felt like a rag doll in their hands.
My shoes and jersey were ripped off and my shirt was torn open. I was sad about the jersey. It was very warm and had been a gift from my grandmother. Immediately, without any questions, the blows rained down; heavy, vicious blows from the thugs' rifle butts. I tried to protect my head as best I could with my hands. Something sharp was thrust into my right arm near the elbow. Someone kept hitting my back very hard.
After being beaten for some time, I was tied up with a strong green nylon rope they took from my car. I was already very sore all over and my right eye was so swollen that I couldn't see out of it. I was dragged along the driveway, through the dust, until I could make out two shapes lying under the bauhinia trees outside the garage. Mike and Angela.
Mike's head was discoloured and misshapen from being beaten with rifle butts. Blood was soaking into the dust where he lay, coagulating into dark, crusty patches. He was groaning and barely conscious. Angela's head was visibly bruised and she had red marks on her face where she'd been beaten with sticks. Her left arm was badly broken.
None of us could do anything. We just lay there, helpless in the dust, lapsing in and out of consciousness, at the mercy of Mugabe's thugs. I heard lots of shooting and I could see them carrying loot out of Mike and Angela's house and piling it into their vehicles.
I knew that one of the vehicles that Moyo was using had belonged to Kobus Joubert. The DISPOL (police officer commanding the district) had been out to his farm, about ten kilometres away, while Moyo was looting and killing some of his animals. Although she had stopped him from looting further, she had allowed him to take Kobus's vehicle. More recently Kobus, who was still on his farm, was shot dead in his bed one night.
I learned later what had happened to Mike and Angela. After having Sunday lunch with us, they'd gone to find a calf that had been separated from its mother. They'd managed to catch it and had got it on the back of the Land Cruiser. Mike wasn't happy with the look of its mother's teats, so Angela was just driving off with some milk in a bottle to feed the calf when Moyo and his gang had torn up the driveway in a lightning attack.
Jonah Zindoga, the squatter from the neighbouring farm who had been poaching our game and had beaten up Mike six months earlier, breaking several of his ribs, had been bicycling up and down the road. He was obviously keeping a look-out. His brother, Simberashe, was one of the leaders of Moyo's gang.
The gang arrived just as Mike was trying to call Bruce on his cell. When he heard the vehicles, Mike came out to see who it was. He was attacked immediately. They grabbed him and started beating him brutally with sticks and rifle butts.
Angela, who was in the Land Cruiser, saw what was happening and leaped out, running straight toward the thugs, shouting, "Stop!" They had about fourteen guns between them at that stage but Angela charged them single-handedly, with no weapon herself.
They grabbed her violently, breaking her left arm in several places and beating her with sticks. They tore big chunks of her hair out and beat the bare patches on her scalp. One of the thugs urinated on her head. Then they tied her to Mike with a thick blue nylon rope, which they took from the workshop.
Just after I'd left the house, Kelly, one of Mike and Angela's dogs, had arrived, panting and in distress. Kelly had never come to our house of her own accord before and Laura immediately realized that she'd come to ask for help. So she called Bruce. Bruce arrived on the main road while we were all lying tied up and injured on the driveway. He realized that something was dramatically wrong when he saw my vehicle skewed across the driveway with all its wheels shot out.
Bruce didn't know what to do -- he was all by himself. He parked on the driveway and came into the garden on foot to try to assess whether or not we were still alive. He kept the phone line to Laura open. "Shall I shoot into the air?" he asked her.
"Yes!" she said. He fired some shots into the garden and this panicked the thugs, who fired volleys of shots back. I believe they thought that he had several people with him. Bruce retreated to his car to try to make some phone calls and get the police to do something.
The gang finished taking all the weapons and valuables from Mike's safe, then picked up Mike and me and dumped us on the floor of Mike's station wagon. Angela was put on the back seat, flanked by two men with rifles sticking out of the windows. They drove out, straight past Bruce's vehicle, as though they didn't see it. Bruce was lying concealed in the grass a few metres away. They eventually saw him and started running towards him. He fired some shots in the air and with that all hell broke loose. He got into his car while they fired several volleys of shots at him but he managed to drive past Mike and Angela's house. He looped round back to our house where Laura and the children were. Grace, who was soon to become Bruce's fiancée, had arrived there too with Megan, Bruce's daughter. Bruce advised them not to go onto the main road where the shooting was still going on. They must get out through the northern boundary.
Meanwhile Mike, Angela, and I were taken to the Bronkhorsts' farm just down the road. All I could see from where I was lying were telegraph poles and the tops of trees. I desperately tried to see where they were taking us but it was impossible to really know.
It was painful bumping along the rough roads. My head was bouncing on the floor and I couldn't do anything about it because I was tied up. Mike and I were like two bags of maize bouncing around as the truck careered along at high speed. I didn't know it then, but I had a twelve-centimetre skull fracture as well as broken ribs. Mike's injuries were worse, though, and all I could hear from him was constant groaning.
Bruce had come back out onto the main road to try to tail us. Our captors started chasing him, travelling at speeds up to 150 kilometres an hour, Bruce said later. The thugs had more than twenty guns between them, and they kept firing them out of the windows as they screamed along, peppering Bruce's vehicle with bullet holes. They even shot at passing traffic.
At one point they set off down the old strip road near Stockdale farm. Bruce stopped to try to make some phone calls. He was on the phone to Bruce Rogers, who was telling him to watch out for an ambush, when a bullet whistled through his open side window, missing his head by inches. A second bullet was deflected off the perspex. The gang had stopped around the corner and had come back on foot with their rifles. Bruce drove off.
A number of people from the community went to the police station to try to get help, informing them that we'd been beaten and abducted and that Mike and Angela's house had been looted. Even though the election was now over, the police didn't respond. We even drove past a police vehicle, which was crawling along the road in the opposite direction. The guns were bristling out of the windows of our vehicle but the police did nothing. It's a quiet stretch of road with no more than five or ten cars an hour. It was obvious that the police were monitoring and directing the whole show.
Laura and the children heard the shooting and after Bruce told them to get out of our house, she loaded the dogs and a few possessions into the Ford Laser while Grace drove her car with the children in it. The Laser, at over twenty years old, is low to the ground. It was never designed for dirt tracks in the bush, but it was evident from all the shooting that Laura had to go out through the bush on the northern boundary rather than risk being shot at on the main road.
Megan started crying.
"You mustn't cry, you must pray," Grace told her. The children prayed and Megs stopped crying.
When they got to the northern fence, neither Grace nor Laura had wire cutters. It's a tall game fence that Bruce had put up to try to protect the wildlife before it was all poached away. Laura said a prayer, and out of the bush walked a man with a dog. "The man had a lovely face," she told me later, "and the dog looked healthy and well fed." This was very unusual in a land where even the people are hungry. Laura had never seen the man before, and has never seen him or his dog since.
Laura briefly explained the situation to him. Without a word he pulled some wire cutters out of his back pocket and walked over to the fence. He cut through it and opened it out. As she and Grace drove through he told them which tracks to take. They got to the police station without further incident.
At the police station she explained the situation. "My brother is being shot at. My parents and husband have been badly beaten and they've been abducted." One of the policewomen started laughing at her. Laura made to go around the counter and give the women a slap but she was restrained by some of the other people in the community who were there on our behalf.
This excerpt from Ben Freeth's book Mugabe and the White African appears with the permission of Lion Hudson. Distributed in the U.S. by Trafalgar Square Publishing from IPG.
I'm Here for My Land
I'm Here for My Land
Chapter 15 (Excerpt)
Shortly after the SADC Tribunal's interim relief order of 13 December 2007 granting us protection from eviction, Peter Chamada and some of his thugs drove into our garden in a Toyota Prado in the middle of the night. He made a fire on the lawn not far from our bedroom. Early in the morning I managed to get out and drove to Mike's house to get Andy's camera from his safe. It was just after dawn when I returned home, with the sun rising behind me. I walked toward Chamada with the camera in full view on my shoulder. We had the same conversation that had happened a thousand times before on a thousand farms, but this one was recorded and was later included in the 2009 documentary film Mugabe and the White African.
"Good morning. How are you, Mr Chamada?" I enquired.
"How are you?" he replied.
"What are you doing here?" I asked.
"I'm here for my land," he said.
"Your land?"
"Yes, that you've taken. It was given to me four years ago by the government."
"No, that's not correct. We've been to the SADC Tribunal, as you know."
"Who is SADC? I am SADC," Chamada asserted.
"SADC has given us full relief," I informed him, "until the main case."
"I am SADC," he repeated, "and SADC has the same feelings that I have."
"SADC has said that you can't interfere until after the main case is heard," I told him.
"Is that why you refuse to get out of this farm? Tell me."
"This is my home," I said, with feeling.
"It is your home? Well, you're in the wrong home. Who did you
pay? The African or another white fellow?"
"We paid transfer duties to the Zimbabwe government. We
bought it on a willing-seller, willing-buyer basis. We didn't steal it."
"Now that's unfortunate, because we realized without land we
have nothing," Chamada continued.
I put him right: "You have got land. I've been to your house
in Harare."
"So you've been raiding my home also!"
"No, I've just driven past it."
"What were you coming for?"
"I was coming to see where you live," I said simply.
"And do what?"
"Well, if you want to steal my house, maybe you can give me your house?" I said with a smile.
"The land belongs to the black peasants. It belongs to the black poor majority," he insisted.
"And Ministers are the black poor majority?" I asked with irony. "Every time you come, you come in a brand new car. This is a brand new Toyota Prado worth about 50,000 US dollars. Last time it was a brand new white twin cab. Before that it was a Jeep Cherokee."
"How about you?" he butted in, pointing at our utility pickup. I should've panned the camera round to our ancient Ford Laser, which was over twenty years old, and the beaten-up Mazda pickup, which was twelve years old.
"This has nothing to do with our land!" Chamada insisted.
"If you've got all this money, why can't you buy somewhere?" I asked.
"The land belongs to the black peasants," he continued. "Look at you! You are so greedy!"
"I'm so greedy?" I was incredulous.
"You're so greedy!"
"You come to steal my house and my farm and yet you say I'm
greedy? I paid for everything, Mr Chamada."
"You paid for it? Where? I can't buy land in the UK," he said,
untruthfully. "Everything my father has in London and America is frozen. You've taken it. My father isn't even allowed to go to your country. But you're still here."
"But you can own land in the UK, Mr Chamada. It's only government ministers who are subject to targeted sanctions because of what they've done to this country."
"No, my friend. You take all the land from us, you starve us, you bring sanctions and you want to cripple us so that you can take us over. This country will never be a colony again," he said forcefully. "I will sleep here until you are out. I mean it. I want you out. We are so tired of you guys. You come here. You grab every nice thing away from us -- everything nice."
"Mr Chamada, we only own about 2 percent of the land in Zimbabwe," I said, rather overestimating the amount of land that white people were still living on. "Can't a white person be a Zimbabwean any more?"
"Not any more."
"Why not?"
"Our president told you, crystal clear. He indicated to you that we don't want anything to do with you people. We have nothing to do with you!"
"So a white person can't own a house?" I asked.
"No. We're not happy with you!"
"We can't own any land? Can't do any farming?" I persisted.
"We're not happy with you white fellows, because we've realized your attitude. It's cantankerous. We want to deal with friendlier people -- men from China, men from India. Not you. We don't want you any more -- get it?"
"But we're Zimbabweans," I said, desperately.
"We don't want you in particular. Just go!"
"Just because we're white, hey?" I asked, sadly.
"I'm not talking to you any more. I am happy and I am telling you the land belongs to us. End of story."
We ignored him after that. He positioned himself on the lawn
with his fire, not looking very happy at all. One of his men carved "F*** you Ben" into a tree in the garden. They left after a few hours, but we knew they'd be back.
Sure enough, just over a month later on Sunday 21 January 2008, Chamada was back again, drinking beer and demanding to know why we still hadn't moved out. I told him again that we had relief from SADC. He just laughed at us, then drove off.
The following day our Supreme Court judgment was handed down in Harare. "The application is dismissed," said Justice Mlaba simply. The judgment itself was sixty-one pages long, but we couldn't get a copy immediately afterwards because it wasn't finished. The judges had nailed their colours to the mast: the judiciary and the executive
were one and the same. It was the final confirmation that there was no longer any independent justice in Zimbabwe. The Supreme Court clearly believed that they couldn't alter or overturn any decisions made by the president. When the rule of law is overturned, it becomes rule by law and dictatorship is complete.
About two weeks later, Chamada drove back into our garden and demanded that we leave. He kept shouting and sounding the car horn, keeping the children awake until the early hours. We informed the police but they were unclear about how to deal with our SADC Tribunal relief. An election was coming up, which made things more complicated. If the police didn't uphold the Tribunal ruling, we made it clear they would eventually become accountable. Chamada and his men headed off.
Meanwhile, the local magistrates handed down a judgment stopping Mike's trial until the High Court appeal had taken place. It was a huge relief. I asked for a written copy of the judgment to show to the police and to the invaders when they came to the farm, but there was nobody to type it up. "I'll do it," I offered. "The magistrate can sign and stamp it when he has read it and agrees that I've typed it up correctly."
I felt it was important that I didn't strike up any conversation with the magistrate while I was typing. When he'd signed and stamped the typed judgment and given it back to me, I paused at the door on my way out and said, "God bless you."
"This law goes against our conscience," he replied. I knew that apart from a small minority, most people felt the same.
This excerpt from Ben Freeth's book Mugabe and the White African appears with the permission of Lion Hudson. Distributed in the U.S. by Trafalgar Square Publishing from IPG.