Love in the Driest Season (16 page)

“Whoops,” the doctor said when I returned to his office.

He lanced it again, then put me in a private clinic, which turned out to be a former psychiatric hospital that still drew some of its old clientele. For five days, I lay on a narrow bed with my left arm in a sling above my head, next to a flatulent Rhodesian farmer in his nineties and across the hall from a disturbed young man who roamed the corridors at night. The arm was so badly infected that if I pressed my left wrist with my right thumb, a brown and yellow gunk oozed out of the incision above my bicep. The nurse on the night shift could not bandage this properly, nor could she set the IV drip in my right arm. When it would rush eight hours of antibiotics into my system in forty-five minutes, she would scream that I was trying to kill myself.

At night, the crazy man walked the rooms. He’d stand at the end of my bed and stare.

“Give me your water,” he’d say.

“Okay,” I’d say, handing over the bottle.

“Bobby Charlton [the English soccer star] was a great man,” he’d say, taking a swig.

“You know it,” I replied.

Our friend Dionne Ferguson stopped by one day.

“How is it in here?” she asked.

“You see
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
?”

“Yeah?”

“Leave out the funny parts.”

I staggered home to find that Vita was driving from store to store trying to find cornmeal for our workers and security guards. Known as mealie meal, or
sudza,
it was a starchy paste that looked like mashed potatoes but was much heavier. You rolled it in your hand, mixed it with meat or stew, and ate. It was the national dish.

It was sold in huge plastic bags, five pounds or ten pounds or twenty or more. Now the shelves were bare in store after store. It was unthinkable. Harare without
sudza
was like Beijing without rice. There had been no drought and harvests were fine. The Grain Marketing Board reported that the silos were full. Somehow, the country’s networks of farmers, millers, grain merchants, and railroads couldn’t coordinate services to keep the supply flowing.

Even the
Herald,
the government mouthpiece, seemed taken aback. “We fail to understand how Harare can go for three weeks without maize-meal while maize is available just around the corner and no one lifts a finger to do anything except to harangue over who is responsible for the shortage,” noted an editorial.

The paper voiced suspicions that the millers were holding up production—which wouldn’t have been surprising, since the government was ordering them to operate at a suicidal loss in order to keep prices artificially low—but whoever had been the problem, it took weeks before the shortage eased.

None of this slowed the government’s attack on journalists, now the scapegoats for almost all of the country’s ills. While I lay dazed in the hospital, the government had stepped up the campaign. Chen Chimutengwende, the information minister, was promising to overhaul the national law on how journalists operated. His ministry was rewriting the codes for defamation and libel and restructuring accreditation.

“We are not living in normal times,” he told the
Herald
in a story reported in a heavy black box on the front page. “We have allowed the operation of independent media whose agenda is not to run a newspaper business but to destroy the country. We know that the owners of these papers are being funded by right-wing Rhodesians and other fascists internationally, so we cannot sit and watch while they destroy us.” As for foreign correspondents, he said that international “neocolonial” media campaigns were so virulent that the government was dispatching attachés to its foreign missions to help “lead the nation’s defense against blackmail and intimidation.”

He left no doubt where these right-wing forces were based. “Anti-Zimbabwe stories are allowed to pass unchallenged, especially in the United Kingdom, the United States, South Africa and Australia,” he said.

I dismissed it as Chimutengwende venting his spleen. Mugabe was scheduled to make a national address on Saturday night. That would settle everything. He had remained above the fray since the journalists’ arrest. Diplomats and policy experts assumed that he would now appear presidential: unflappable, unfazed, the veteran statesman of southern Africa.

Woozy from the antibiotics and painkillers, I slumped onto the couch to watch the Saturday night address. Mugabe did not aspire to the presidential look. He took the air of the schoolteacher he once had been, faced with a bunch of obstreperous sixth-graders. He told the nation that their national security was being undermined by judges, journalists, and white people (who were less than 1 percent of the population). He said the military’s abduction of Mark and Ray was justified because the army had been insulted by a “blatantly untrue” newspaper story.

“[The story’s] heinous objective was to plant the idea of a coup, thereby causing disaffection in the army and to instill alarm and despondency in the peace-loving people of Zimbabwe,” Mugabe said. “Propelled by their unquestionable loyalty and commitment to the defense and security of the state, they went to the source of the falsehood and arrested those who had manufactured it.”

He also turned his attention to the four judges who had asked him to affirm the rule of law.

“The judiciary has no constitutional right whatsoever to give instructions to the president on any matter as the four judges purported to do,” he said. “Their having done so can clearly be interpreted as an action of utter indiscretion or as one of imprudence, or as I regard it, an outrageous and deliberate act of impudence.”

After another broadside at the nation’s comparatively wealthy white minority (who he said had “evil machinations” to overthrow the government), he went on to journalists.

“They think they have the freedom to disparage, deride, malign, libel, and viciously attack others with impunity,” he said. “They mischievously interpret freedom of expression by extension to mean even the right to investigate and incite such arms of government as the army to mutiny or to turn against a properly elected government.”

The president finished with a threat: “Any media organization which willfully suspends truth necessarily forfeits its right to inform and must not cry foul when extraordinary means visit them,” he said.

The events of the past month left little doubt what “extraordinary means” entailed, and they left equally little doubt that the truth was whatever Robert Mugabe said it was.

After the speech, I called John Makumbe, an outspoken professor of political science at the University of Zimbabwe, for his reaction. He was a thickset, heavy man, an albino who had little fear of social ostracism, and his wit could be scathing.

“Well, in case you missed it, the president has just declared open season on the media,” he said. “What we have now is a situation where the government and the military are on one side, and the people and the judiciary on the other. Things can drop rapidly into anarchy from here.”

I liked Makumbe, as did most journalists who sought out his analysis. After a few minutes more, I ended our conversation as I always did, with thanks and a word to be careful.

He gave his slight, raspy laugh.

“I would think, Mr. Tucker, that you might need that advice more than I do.”

The next week, four more local journalists were arrested.

The
Zimbabwe Mirror,
another independent paper, reported that a soldier’s corpse had been returned from the battle in Congo. More to the point, only his head had been returned, the story said.

Reporter Grace Kwinjeh and editor Fernando Gonçalves were arrested and charged with filing a report intended to cause alarm or despondency—the same offense with which Mark and Ray were charged. During the course of making calls on this incident, I noticed that when I hung up the phone, it would ring back. When I picked up, there was no one there. It had been doing that sporadically for months. Now it was doing it on almost every call. Most journalists in Zimbabwe assumed their lines might be tapped, but this was getting ridiculous.

After another interview, I got the same ring back. But this time I didn’t hang up. I just pressed a finger down over the button on the receiver. As soon as it rang, I lifted my finger and demanded, “Who’s on the line?”

There was a pause. “Eh, is that two Rayl Road?”

“It is.”

“Eh-eh. Do you still have those two big dogs, Mr. Tucker?”

We had two Rottweilers.

“Yes,” I said. “But I can’t afford to feed them so much anymore. They’ve taken to eating anybody who comes over the walls.”

The man laughed, and the line went dead.

13

C
HOOSING
C
HIPO

Z
IMBABWE WAS NOT,
at this stage, a country that struck fear into any foreign correspondent’s heart. The incident with Mark and Ray and the journalists from the
Mirror
had been terrifying for them. But foreign reporters, at least at the moment, seemed to be regarded as a different kettle of fish. Most diplomats and analysts interpreted Mugabe’s threats as local huff and puff, fodder to show the local faithful that he had powerful enemies and thus was an important man in world affairs. (This was surprisingly effective. With the government paper trumpeting stories about U.S. and U.K. “meddling” on a steady basis, many Zimbabweans thought that Americans were receiving the same diet of news. My friends were often incredulous when I would show them the international sections of the
New York Times
and the
Washington Post,
in which Zimbabwe was rarely mentioned, much less on the front page.)

Further, Zimbabwe was debating the rule of law. That put it on the upper fringes of most places I reported about. In the context of Rwanda, Burundi, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Congo, and southern Nigeria, Mugabe’s tub thumping and a tapped phone line did not seem greatly alarming.

But these were not ordinary times, as Chimutengwende said, and I was not in any ordinary position. Mugabe’s government was more than a little paranoid in its search for scapegoats. If I filed hard-nosed stories on the country’s turbulence, as was my professional mandate, then those stories might anger the government. And if the general policy was to “actively discourage” foreign adoptions on principle, there was no need to wonder what the policy would be toward newfound “enemies of the state.” If I angered the government for any reason at all, then Chipo would go back to the orphanage, an event she would likely not survive.

Neither was the adoption process formally started, despite our new foster parent status. The Department of Social Welfare had yet to allow us to file a formal adoption request, and it was becoming apparent that foster custody was no indicator that such an application would be approved. Worse, Florence Sibanda resigned from the agency. Now we would have to start all over with a new social worker, still in the foster section, and obtain all of Chipo’s personal identity papers. Only when those were in hand could her file be turned over to an adoption officer. That person would have to conduct
another
home study and fill out and process yet another set of paperwork. Then the director of the department had to approve it. Then the provincial director had to approve it. Then it went to the national ministry for an application for an exemption that would allow foreigners to adopt. The minister, Florence Chitauro, had to personally sign the exemption. Then we would go back to a judge.

This could take years. Of course, that was presuming that each officer approved of the adoption. A “no” could come at any time.

It was about this time that my source in the Department of Social Welfare counseled me to back off for six or seven months. “Slow down,” the source said. “They really don’t like you guys. They think you’re pushy Americans. Just let everything settle down for several months, and then come back and tell them you’d like to adopt.”

But the longer I stayed in the country as a foreign correspondent—which my work permit, renewed annually, clearly identified me to be—the more risk I ran of running afoul of the government, particularly with such a tiny foreign press corps. After the fall of apartheid in neighboring South Africa, the full-time correspondents dispatched by Western media outlets to the region had moved from Harare to Johannesburg. Mine was the only American organization to still base a full-time staffer in Zimbabwe. Even the major wire agencies, Reuters and the Associated Press, staffed their Harare offices with talented local journalists instead of sending in career professionals from headquarters; Zimbabwe was just too small, too far off the beaten path. There was the BBC correspondent, a dedicated young reporter named Joseph Winter, and Andy Meldrum, an American national writing for the British paper
The Guardian,
but the other foreign journalists in town were stringers to one degree or another. If Mugabe’s administration decided to go looking for an American correspondent to make an example out of, I counted noses and figured I was no lower than number two or three on a very short list.

I sent my editors a one-page memo, giving formal notice of Mugabe’s speech and its possible implications for the company’s assets in Zimbabwe. I recounted the series of arrests of journalists and told them that our phone was tapped. “Ordinarily, this would not cause much concern,” the note read. “I would send Vita to Johannesburg in a difficult time, and follow only in the event of extraordinary violence directed at Western journalists. . . . But foster custody does not permit us to take Chipo out of the country. She has no birth certificate and no passport. If I get expelled or arrested, or if my work permit is canceled, she will be returned to the orphanage. I do not consider that an option.”

I then told them I was invoking my contractual right to take three months of unpaid parental leave as soon as possible. I needed to lower my profile in the Information Ministry, while pushing as hard as possible on the adoption in the Social Welfare office, and hope the two didn’t talk to one another.

I called editor Joyce Davis on the satellite telephone, the untapped line, a few minutes later. “What is this going to do to our coverage of Zimbabwe?” she asked.

“Pretty much kill it,” I replied. “I don’t see any other way. I get hauled in for one story and poof, that’s it for Chipo. Then there’s the conflict of interest—I’m going to be reporting on a failing administration in which I need a cabinet member to sign my adoption papers. It’s just too dodgy. I’ve got forty-seven nations in my region. I’ll be happy to file stories from anyplace else on the continent—Angola, Nigeria, Sudan, Somalia, Rwanda, Congo, you name it—but I will file stories on Zimbabwe only at my discretion. If that’s unacceptable, I understand, and we’ll figure something out.”

The desk was professionally dismayed, to put it mildly. A correspondent refusing to cover the country he is based in is extraordinary, if not unheard of. The editors were personally supportive—Joyce was an adoptive mother herself—and we agreed that I would finish my current round of assignments, about a month’s worth of work, and then take my leave. Our understanding was that I would get the adoption completed and move the bureau to Nairobi as soon as possible.

I hung up feeling as though I was letting the pressure get to me, that I had lost my nerve. There was a lingering sense that I was allowing the emotional weight of reporting in more deadly countries to affect my judgment here, as if there were an overlay making it difficult to distinguish between Bosnia and Zimbabwe, or Rwanda and Zimbabwe, or Congo and Zimbabwe. I would shake my head to try to focus on what was happening just in this country, stamping my foot on the ground to emphasize that I was
here.
The problem was that the picture didn’t look any better when I did that. I felt a hitch in my gut every time I looked at Chipo.