Love in the Driest Season (21 page)

But as our first anniversary of bringing Chipo home came and went, there was no hope of leaving the country at all. Weeks passed with no word from Munautsi. When I finally tracked him down to check on our file, I got the familiar heave-ho out of his office.

With nothing else to do, I turned back to reporting. I tried to throw myself into it, and in most ways it was fascinating. Harare that winter was an odd mixture of political intrigue, rising prices, and, of all things, witchcraft trials and accusations. One self-proclaimed prophet was arrested in the town of Seke after exhuming the corpse of a two-year-old girl and chopping off her arms and legs. He was going to burn them to ashes, which would then be mixed in elixirs for evil powers, for there is no item more potent in the dark arts than human flesh, blood, or organs. There was such a spate of similar incidents that the
Herald
ran an editorial with this headline: “Let’s Stop These Witchcraft Murders.” Meanwhile, parliament was debating the possibility of lifting the Witchcraft Suppression Act of the colonial era, thus making it legal to call someone a witch, a charge that could result in the accused being stoned or killed on the spot. The use of
tokoloshis,
a near-invisible, ankle-high gremlin created by traditional healers, was believed to be rampant. Gordon Chavunduka, director of the fifty-thousand-strong National Traditional Healers Association, pointed out in an interview that most of the spirit world was a benign or comforting place, and almost all traditional healers used their work for solace, consolation, communicating with ancestral spirits for guidance, or medical healing. The increased use of menacing forces, he said, indicated an increase in social fear and desperation.

This manifested itself in many ways, and I could see none more tragic than the fear, and resulting waves of almost hysterical denial, triggered by AIDS deaths. The official number of deaths was a rough-hewn guess because so few people would have themselves tested. And while a number of prominent people in Harare worked hard on the issue, there was a larger body of society that often seemed eager to believe almost anything and everything about the disease except what the overwhelming body of medical evidence showed—that it was a disease carried in bodily fluids.

This skepticism drew on a good measure of historical fact, though few Westerners seemed to realize it. In fact, it made a certain amount of sense.

Colonial regimes in South Africa and Rhodesia apparently did try to develop some form of biological warfare against blacks. Zimbabwe’s minister of health, Timothy Stamps (who is white), said in a 1998 BBC interview that there was “no doubt in my mind” that South African apartheid agents had “inoculated our population” with diseases such as anthrax, Ebola, and even bubonic plague during the 1970s liberation war. In South Africa, cardiologist Wouter Basson faced charges that he headed an apartheid-era biological warfare unit, before being eventually acquitted. Bioengineer Jan Lourens testified before government committees that the apartheid-era experiments included tests to inoculate blacks with poisons to reduce the birth rate. And the CIA had been up to all sorts of tricks in the Congo, once trying to poison nationalist leader Patrice Lumumba with tainted toothpaste.

Just as blacks in America remember the Tuskegee experiment, so too do Africans remember these events and regard the AIDS epidemic with skepticism. Political leaders, noting that the disease started flourishing in southern Africa during or shortly after the last stages of anticolonial struggles, thought that it was suspicious that blacks were harder hit than whites. This resulted in the beliefs that were voiced by Zimbabwe’s vice president, Joshua Nkomo, who had said that AIDS was a disease white scientists had created to kill black people.

As interesting as these theories were, they did not address the raw facts that were not in dispute. Mary Bassett, a black American who was a senior lecturer in public health at the University of Zimbabwe, moved to Zimbabwe in 1986. The prevalence of HIV-positive blood donors in her surveys at the time was 2 percent. By 1999, it was 15 percent. She also assigned her students to keep track of the mortality rate in Harare, pulling figures from the city morgue each year. They paid closest attention to corpses between the ages of twenty-five to forty-four.

The death rate for that group was up 700 percent in a decade.

The government did try to combat the problem, at least on some level. There were AIDS awareness campaigns, and the government linked with Western nongovernmental organizations to provide condoms at subsidized price. The government also became the only one in the world to tax the populace to pay for AIDS health care costs. Finance Minister Herbert Murerwa announced that a 3 percent levy would be added to everyone’s tax bill, and the Health and Child Welfare Ministry would create a fund for the revenue, expected to total some 26.6 million Zimbabwe dollars (about U.S. $760,000). That was more than double what the country had spent on AIDS the previous year.

“I know that this isn’t as much as some people wanted, but I hope it shows we’re trying,” foreign minister Stan Mudenge said at Harare’s African Diplomats Ball, an AIDS fund-raiser, to a hearty round of applause.

The problem was that the government didn’t consult the population about to be taxed. Neither did they announce how the money would be used. Prevention? Treatment? More nurses and doctors? It was anybody’s guess. There were no bold statements at press conferences and no returned calls from government officials.

I called any number of AIDS clinics, orphanages, and physicians to see what they’d heard. They hadn’t been consulted either. Things were particularly difficult for Ernestine Wasterfall, the matron at Emerald Hills, the orphanage that had so many children with AIDS. The government was supposed to send her a monthly allocation for her charges, now down to an inflation-ravaged twelve cents per day per child. They hadn’t sent her a penny for five months. “We pray some of this tax money comes to us, but we don’t know if it will,” she said. “The government never contacted us about it. Even the money they are already supposed to send us, they don’t. I don’t see how this is going to be any different.”

Her skepticism, which was widely shared, was based on historical precedent. In the early 1990s, a similar tax was imposed to compensate for a devastating drought. The drought came and went, but the tax went on for years. The government never explained how all the money had been spent.

Zimbabweans were no fools, and they now looked at their dilapidated hospitals and poorly paid physicians and were doubtful that the same government that allowed the health care system to atrophy was suddenly going to double AIDS spending. I asked Wasterfall if I might send a photographer, freelance shooter Rob Cooper, to illustrate the story. She said they didn’t allow pictures of AIDS patients. But, she said, do you think Americans might send donations if they saw pictures?

I told her I had no idea, but if someone should send along donations, I would certainly relay them. But, I cautioned, this was a remote possibility.

“Send Mr. Cooper over anyway,” she said, ever hopeful. “I don’t see how it can hurt, and it might help.”

Rob went over and took pictures, including shots of two terribly ill little boys. A decent man, he made prints of some of the nicer shots and took them back as small gifts for the boys, along with a donation to help. Wasterfall accepted the donation but not the pictures.

The little boys were already dead.

17

B
ETRAYED

L
ATE IN THE DRY SEASON
of 1999, the beginning of the end made itself apparent to me in two ways, large and small. The latter was a travel article a freelance reporter had written from Zimbabwe and sold to the
Chicago Tribune.
In it, she told of a bizarre flight on Air Zimbabwe, in which the pilot first told passengers over the intercom that the copilot had not shown up, but not to worry, he could handle the jet for the short flight. Once airborne, he told them he was going to the bathroom, but not to worry because the autopilot was on, and so forth.

The only problem with this little bit of airborne legend is that it was just that. The story wasn’t true. The government was unhappy, especially since tourism had been declining for more than a year, and the
Tribune
ran a correction. The government was not mollified, as an editorial in the
Herald
made clear: “American and South African newspapers, driven by a pathological hatred of the present Zimbabwean Government, fell for this chicanery and ran the story . . . such mischievous reports must be taken seriously and remedial action taken.”

Pathological hatred? Remedial action? That had my attention, all right. The way this was going, one word from Kaseke and I could be charged as a malicious hack who was abducting a helpless Zimbabwean infant. “Wouldn’t that make for a cheery headline,” I muttered.

The second item was far more serious.

Many Zimbabweans had tired of Mugabe’s administration. Of course they admired his heroic past. But that was twenty years ago. The Poles had tired of Lech Walesa, the Nobel laureate who led them to freedom, in a single term. Now, in vast numbers, Zimbabweans were turning to an opposition political party that was taking shape. Morgan Tsvangirai and Gibson Sibanda, the leaders of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions, had resigned their labor posts to form the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), a coalition that would draw on its leaders’ high profile among the working class. It also drew immediate support from several international agencies who were alarmed by the nation’s collapsing infrastructure under ZANU-PF. Tsvangirai, who had already been severely beaten by unknown assailants after he organized national strikes and stay-aways, announced that his nascent party would field candidates for all parliamentary seats when elections were held in eight months.

The government, accustomed to a badly fractured and tiny opposition, recognized the threat immediately. They lambasted and insulted the new party at almost every turn. Chimutengwende, the information minister, ridiculed the MDC as “fake . . . political upstarts . . . It is boys’ work to think that just because they have succeeded in organizing a stay-away, then you can run the country.”

Initially, I didn’t give such statements much credence. But the more I thought about it, the more the government’s reaction took on troubling overtones. The new party was going to be far more powerful than any electoral challenge Mugabe had ever faced. The elections would be sharply contested; Tsvangirai was clearly hoping to use success there as a platform to run for president in 2002. He had good reason to be optimistic. The power of labor movements to shake off unwanted regimes in developing nations had been demonstrated by Walesa in faraway Poland and by Frederick Chiluba in next-door Zambia. People in Harare and in towns across the country were bursting with optimism that Tsvangirai was well poised for a similar turn to elected office.

But to any interested observer, Mugabe had demonstrated that he was not going to campaign and lose. He had identified his pressure valves in the past twelve months—white farmers, journalists, the American and British governments. It seemed equally clear that he would intensify his punching of those buttons as the election approached. How? When? Who knew? Professionally, in another country, I would have regarded this as a compelling story to cover. But here, it spelled personal disaster. The anti-Western, antimedia climate would be certain to escalate. Anyone could see that foreign reporters were going to be one of the first targets. It was imperative, I realized, that we get out of the country before the elections.

That left us seven months.

I swore under my breath. We had planned to stay here at least five years, to buy a house. I had planned to write at least one book on African affairs, possibly even staying after my posting was finished.

All of that was in shambles now, as was a good chunk of my career—I was no longer ignoring a story in my own backyard, I was running from it. I had come to travel as little as possible, just forty days in 1999, about one-fifth of my usual work pace. This left us in something of a quandary. My paper’s parent corporation, Knight Ridder, had taken over the Africa bureau after the
Detroit Free Press
had sent me here. They had no obligation to provide me with a job after my posting expired—and since I had been consumed with Chipo’s adoption, they were less than impressed by my performance. In theory, I was to go back to the
Free Press,
but I had not worked in the city for seven years and had had little contact with anyone there since the corporate takeover of my foreign posting. The paper had been decimated by a strike in my absence, and I was now such a nonentity that the last time I’d gone into the building, the security guard at the front desk had no idea who I was—my name was no longer on the employee list—and would not let me pass. The editors upstairs made no mention of a job waiting for me.

The
Washington Post
had called about a job nine months earlier, offering a ticket from Harare to Washington to discuss the position. But we had not been approved as foster parents at that stage. Our prospects had seemed so bleak that I told them it would be misleading for me to even make the trip, as that might imply some possibility of us getting out of Zimbabwe. “I hope you won’t think that the
Post
just calls once,” the recruiting director said, in a tone that implied that my phone wouldn’t be ringing anytime in the next decade.

Looking for something, anything, I had put together a book proposal while on leave. It fell flat. I wrote a couple of short stories while stuck in one airport or another and shipped them to three small magazines. Nice, the editors said, but not for us.

In short, as I boarded a plane for my trip back to the United States, my once bright career had deteriorated into a dead-end job in a Third World country with no prospect of another. Worse, I had been to the United States once in the past four years—and I now had twenty-one days to convince someone there to hire me within twenty-eight weeks.

It was not a happy flight across the Atlantic, and I was feeling pretty low by the time I made two connecting flights and was finally aboard a small prop plane descending into rural Mississippi. As the plane came in over the pastures, I could see my parents’ car in the parking lot. Chipo and Vita came running down the corridor as soon as I walked into the tiny airport, and I dropped to my knees and let Chipo knock me over backward. I had not seen them in more than two months. Vita looked fabulous, rested and in great shape. Chipo had her hair in beautiful long braids. I swept her up into the air and spun her around, and she collapsed against my shoulder in a gigantic hug. “Dadn!” she kept saying, over and over. My father rounded us all into the car, and my mother had a table full of home-cooked food waiting at the house for what amounted to a family reunion.

After dinner, my father and I retired to the back porch rocking chairs to sip whiskey and talk about the prospects for Mississippi State’s football season—an issue of paramount importance in that part of the world—while my mother and Vita chatted as though they had been best friends for years. Chipo went from group to group. She would crawl up into my father’s lap and sit there while he rocked back and forth, her head against his chest. Then she would run into the house, banging on my mother’s piano, just as I had done when little, and then scamper around the same yard I had grown up playing in. Later, I settled her into the swing my father had built, and pushed her back and forth, back and forth. It was that in-between time of year, late summer or early fall, and Vita and I listened to the soft evening breeze pass through the trees above, sharing a drink, content to soak up each other’s presence and conversation. My home state had changed a great deal in my long absence, I was discovering, and while it wasn’t perfect, no one hassled us either, even when we went into the local Wal-Mart, hand in hand, to buy ice cream for dessert.

But the next morning, our talk turned to our diminishing array of options, and things grew somber. I packed an overnight bag with two suits and a pair of white shirts. I kissed Vita and Chipo. And then I was gone again, bouncing from city to city, airport to airport. I talked with editors at major newspapers and book agents, looking for any kind of opening. Two weeks later, after tap-dancing for anyone who would have me, I was so worn out that I was nauseous most every morning. At a pay phone in Manhattan, just across from Central Park, I called the
Washington Post
on a lark, asking if they’d like for me to stop in when I came down to D.C., even though I had refused to come in to talk to them eight months earlier. To my surprise, they said sure. I was on a train the next morning. Vita and Chipo flew into Washington to meet me, as we would leave from there to go back to Harare. I went through the interview process at the
Post
the next day, but I wasn’t optimistic, and kept my suit coat on because I was so nervous that I was sweating through my shirt.

Then I went back to my hotel room and waited two days for a phone call, from anyone, anywhere. None came. With nothing else to do, we began the long trek home. We loaded up the baggage, drove out to Dulles International Airport, and boarded an overnight flight to London. I was downright morose by the time we made the connection for the next leg of the flight, another overnighter to Harare. When we finally walked in the house, some thirty-six hours after we’d left Washington, the answering machine was beeping. It was my mother, and she was terribly upset.

The day we left, my father had been burning a pile of cut trees and branches, called “brush” in country parlance, in the small pasture behind the house. He was using a chain saw to cut up the larger limbs so that they could be tossed on the fire. He didn’t notice the machine was dripping gas over his shirt, pants, and shoes.

After a while, he set the chainsaw down and dragged a few limbs over to the fire. He stood beside the blaze to throw them in. The gas on his clothes drew in the flame, then ignited with a whoosh. His skin went with it. He was sixty-six years old, he was alone in the pasture, and he was turning into a torch. He looked at himself aflame. He didn’t panic. He didn’t even say anything. He took off his glasses and set them down on a stump. Then he pulled off his burning clothes. He lay down on the ground and rolled over. The flesh on his legs was still burning. He scooped up loose dirt and packed it on the flames until they died. Then he stood up, still smoking, and walked to the back door.

“Betty,” he called inside, “could you bring me a towel? I think we may need to go to the hospital for a minute.”

He had second- and third-degree burns from his ankles to his hips. He had patches of equally severe burns on his arms. At the hospital, he never cried out. The emergency room staff was in awe. I learned of this over the phone, shaking my head at the old man’s grit, but I wasn’t at all sure that he would live. We had barely slept on the consecutive overnight flights, and I sat up again this night, making plane reservations in case I should have to turn around and go back. Somewhere around 3
A.M.,
I typed up a letter for the Department of Social Welfare.

We were in Kaseke’s office six hours later. My temper was ragged and my patience finished. In our family, Vita is the one quickest to anger. She can turn on a rude store clerk in a heartbeat. When I finally go off, though, it’s one for the ages. I got arrested in Warsaw for shoving a cop (who had insulted Vita), I had to be pulled away from a twenty-something white Zimbabwean kid in the bowling alley (same reason) and, when Vita once needed surgery, I read the riot act to a doctor in Detroit (um, see above) in such fashion that the hospital put Vita in a private post-op room that looked like a hotel suite. They sent her flowers every day.

I was now at a similar pitch. In fact, I was just damn through with the lot of them. Our application to adopt had not budged in nine months (so much for my source’s advice to sit back and rest assured the department would process the application). It still sat in a brown folder, one of hundreds, if not thousands, of files stacked on desks around the department, mired in the foster section paperwork. I was so livid that morning that my foot was tapping the floor, my fingers were drumming on Kaseke’s desk, and I was pretty sure I had lost the ability to blink.

Skipping the formalities, I told Kaseke of my father’s accident, that his life was in danger—and then an idea came spinning down from the void. Keeping in mind Beth’s winning example, I said this meant we would have to quit my posting and return to the United States as soon as possible. Family ties. Son needed. Surely she understood.

She expressed sympathy for my father. Then she sighed deeply and told me there was nothing she could do.

“There have been charges of bribery against you while you were gone,” she said. “The matter is very serious. There was this matter last year, and now it has arisen again. It is very, ah, unseemly. If you have paid no one, as you say, it is curious that people keep telling us you have.”

I bit the tip of my tongue, sharp enough to hurt.

“Mrs. Kaseke, I’m as tired of these allegations as you must be. As I told Mr. Munautsi, whom am I supposed to be bribing, and what am I supposed to be getting for it? You have seen Vita and me in the hallway here for hours on end, because your staff won’t make appointments, won’t return our calls, and won’t keep regular office hours. It has been fifteen months since Chipo came to our house. Fifteen. We have had home studies by two different social workers. You yourself investigated this matter, and yet our case has not budged. This is not what happens when people are bribed. Things tend to happen then. Obviously, these charges are being made by someone who doesn’t know us, or this case, at all.”