Love in the Driest Season (23 page)

Monday morning, I was back in Soko’s office. I handed him the file, told him of the bribery allegations, of my father’s accident, and that I now had to return to the United States. I omitted my fears that foreign journalists were probably going to be deported within a year or two anyway.

He was very polite but firm.

“This is the second time you’ve been in my office, Mr. Tucker, and I must tell you I find this extraordinary. It is improper for parents to come to my office. This is the regional headquarters. Your concerns should be addressed to your caseworker, and they will take it to the head of the department. If there is a need, they should come here, not you.”

“I know that, Mr. Soko, and I’m very sorry to disturb you. I hope you will forgive me if I seem to be a pushy American. It is not my intention. But I came to see you because the problem
is
your lower staff members. They seem to believe anything anybody tells them and to delight in believing it. The facts seem of no consequence to anyone; our work at Chinyaradzo seems forgotten; it seems every manner in which we try to get involved is twisted to have some evil purpose. Now with my father’s injuries, I have obligations to two generations of my family on either side of the Atlantic, to my daughter here and my father there. I cannot fulfill one without the other, and I cannot do either without your help. I came to respectfully explain these things to you. I mean no disrespect by having done so.”

There was a pause. I held my breath.

“You have spoken well, Mr. Tucker,” he said finally. “I will see what I can do.”

T
HE FOLLOWING DAYS
were miserable. It was the end of the dry season; the ground was parched, tempers were edgy. My father seemed to stabilize, but I kept an open plane ticket booked to Mississippi. I had to get back to work, filing short dispatches, but delayed any travel because I could not budge from the bribery allegation. The work didn’t add up to much, and what was left of my career seemed to be in freefall.

Then, late one afternoon, the phone rang.

It was a secretary from the Department of Social Welfare. She asked me to hold. There were a couple of clicks, and then a woman’s voice came on the line.

“Is that Mr. Tucker?”

“It is.”

“This is Margaret Tsiga,” she said with a laugh. “You wouldn’t believe what people are saying about you and me.”

18

F
RIENDS AND
F
OES

M
ARGARET
T
SIGA
worked just across the hall from Aaron Munautsi, but it seemed like another world to me. When I walked in, she smiled, she laughed. Her voice had a warm, confident tone. She didn’t seem bothered by the bribery allegations. If anything, she was amused.

“So this is the mysterious Mr. Tucker,” she said, shaking my hand lightly. “Such things I have heard about you! My goodness. The director told me that Steve was saying you had given me money. ‘How much did I get?’ I asked. ‘And who is this man who gives me money for nothing? Ah, this is the man all women are looking for.’ ”

“If only that were me,” I said, trying to get adjusted to her pleasant demeanor. It was throwing me off. “I’m very sorry your name got dragged into this. I just don’t know what to tell you about Steve.”

“This is a rather unpleasant man,” she said. “I believe he thinks Africans cannot hear so well. He seems to shout everything he says.”

“Even hello?”

“He is not the type to say ‘Hello, how are you?’ Maybe he does to somebody. Not around here.”

She rustled around some papers and folders on her desk, and I recognized the familiar edges of Chipo’s file in her hands. She flipped it open and began to sort through the documents. She started to ask the standard questions and took notes. I heard my voice going over the saga one more time. I looked around her office as I spoke. It was a small rectangle, with a concrete floor, a small window, and tired white paint on the walls. The space was cramped, filled with her desk, a couple of low-slung bookcases and filing cabinets, and the chair I was sitting in, pulled up tight to the desk. The surface of her desk was neatly kept, but the shelves and the space around it were filled with stacks of notes and files. The bookcases, along the wall next to the door, were filled to overflowing. I was overcome, once again, with what a tiny slot our case filled, at how many other children were in some need of assistance, and how poorly equipped the department’s workers were to try to keep up. After a while she said she had what she needed for today and she told me I could go.

“The next time you come in,” she said as I stood to go, “could you bring Miss Chipo? I would like to meet this young lady. And also your wife. I hear she is lovely.”

I said yes, of course, and took a step toward the door. Then I thought for a moment and turned around.

“Does this mean you are actually considering our case?”

“Of course,” she said with her slight laugh, as if I were a student a little slow on the uptake.

“So our file is now in the adoption section?”

“That’s right.”

“Which means it’s not in the foster section?”

She laughed again. “Exactly so.”

I opened my mouth again, to ask what had happened to the bribery mess and if it was all finished. And then I remembered my brother once telling me that my problem in life was that I just didn’t know when to shut up. So I did, nodded goodbye, walked down the corridor to the exit, and then sprinted for the truck, grabbing the cell phone and calling Vita on a dead run.

“We’re out of fostering! We got past Munautsi!” I shouted. A whoop on the other end was her response.

We were by no means home free; if the adoption process took as long as fostering, we would never make it out of the country before the elections. We went on a charm offensive the next day. Vita, Chipo, and I went back to see Mrs. Tsiga, Chipo in a little denim dress, her braids pulled back in an upsweep. She walked in, holding Vita’s finger for balance. Tsiga, looking up from her desk, burst into a laugh. She pushed back her chair, leaned down, and opened her arms.

“Come, little sister,” she said.

Chipo walked into her arms as though she were a favorite auntie. She sat on her lap the entire time we talked.

“Boy, is
she
cool,” Vita said when we were getting back in the truck. “She’s more like Stella, or one of the women who work in the orphanage, than the social workers. Can you see Munautsi getting Chipo to sit in his lap?”

I came back in the building a couple of days later, bringing another sheaf of personal reference letters for adoption—the last batch had followed department regulations and just mentioned fostering—and I stopped as soon as I turned the corner into the hallway that led to her office. In the gloom of the unlit corridor, there was a line of seven or eight people outside her office. Some sat, some stood. One mother nursed an infant. A couple of other children scampered in and out. The door was halfway open, and I could hear Tsiga talking with a client already inside. I glanced at my watch. It was 3:30. I took my place at the end of the line, leaning against the wall and saying a quiet hello, getting nods in return. Clearly, these were not all adoption cases. Too many set faces, clenched jaws. Divorce and custody, deaths of parents, child support, allegations of abuse, charges of neglect, abject poverty—the somber laundry list of reasons people would be sitting in the Department of Social Welfare for hours on end. Tsiga was clearly involved in many areas of social work, not just adoption. I looked down the hallway, then walked back to the other corridor, where other social workers had their offices. No lines. No one else was in. I walked back to my spot at the end of the line and slumped onto the floor, back against the wall. I was already regretting not bringing a book. The line inched forward as the clock moved toward the 5
P.M.
closing time. Nobody in the line budged. Half an hour passed, and then another. The rest of the department shut down. Cars pulled out of the dusty parking lot outside. At a few minutes before 6
P.M.
, it was finally my turn. And then a man came walking down the hall, two children in tow. He started to go in the office in front of me. I was about to protest when he winked at me and said, “I’m the husband. I’ll just be a minute.”

She stood up, smiling to greet him and calling out a friendly hello to me.

“This is my husband,” she said. “He always comes to wonder when I’ll be home.” They laughed, talked briefly in Shona, and then he was gone, giving me a handshake and walking to the door, children swirling around him.

“Don’t let me hold you up,” I started, and she waved me into the seat, dismissing the notion with another wave of her hand. “I just have so much to do. Yours is a small part. My husband, he was stopping to see if I was going to cook dinner or if he should make other arrangements.”

“He doesn’t mind you working late? You’re the last one here.”

“He’s used to it,” she said, with that soft laugh I liked so much.

“You have lovely children,” I said. “You have those two?”

“We have several, actually. Sometimes I seem to lose count.”

“You’ve got four, five kids? And you’re working late? And I’m thinking I’ve got a lot to do with one? You’re shaming me, Mrs. Tsiga.”

“You get used to it.” She shrugged. “I think you have some papers for me?”

I had almost forgotten the reference letters. I handed them to her, continuing the conversation about families for a few minutes. Over the next couple of weeks, as Vita or I brought her one document or another, the pattern was the same. She often had a line outside her door—her office was never empty—and to get to see her by 5
P.M.,
it was best to show up at least an hour earlier. I sat in the dim hallway next to the other clients and read one book after another. As always, there was no such thing as an appointment. She was in court, in interviews, or there was someone already in her office. In contrast to the workers I had experience with, she was there right on time each morning, or just a few minutes early, and she often worked past the close of the business day. She was so tired she often had bags under her eyes, and yet she was clearly committed to working with some of the city’s most disadvantaged children. It was just plain inspiring, and our conversations often wound up drifting onto any number of subjects, not just Chipo’s adoption.

In the midst of this, as we began to feel some small ray of optimism, the phone rang one night after dinner. Vita handed the receiver to me, mouthing that it sounded like an American woman on an international call. I said hello, and Jo-Ann Armao, the assistant managing editor for metropolitan news at the
Washington Post,
said hello back. Jo-Ann was not one to spend much time on small talk, and she asked if I still wanted to work at the
Post.

“Sure,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady. Vita looked up. “The
Post,
” I mouthed silently, giving a thumbs-up.

Jo-Ann was talking about covering the city, about salary now, and I was waving to Vita in big country-cousin bye-byes, holding out my arms like I was an airplane, flying around the room, and she was shaking her head and laughing.

When Jo-Ann finished, I said of course I’d take the job. Then, using up my allotment for chutzpah, I asked for more money than she offered and asked how long they could wait before I actually showed up. We agreed on mid-February at the latest, nearly five months in the future and a month or so in front of the parliamentary elections. If the adoption didn’t come through in time, Vita and I had already decided that she and Chipo would stay behind with friends while I moved to start the new job. It was an unpleasant prospect, but there was no way I could go on reporting in the country. If I had to go, Vita and Chipo would move across town, settling into a spare room in the home of our friends Bill and Dumisille. Bill was a senior officer for the U.S. Agency for International Development. Dumi was from Swaziland in next-door neighbor South Africa and knew the regional ropes. They lived in housing that was property of the U.S. embassy. The residence would give Vita and Chipo some measure of diplomatic protection if things got unpleasant, and Bill and Dumi were uniquely placed to help us out if it came to that.

It was in the midst of this planning, on a quiet Sunday morning in early November, as we all waited for the rainy season to descend upon us, that most expatriates and a good number of Zimbabweans woke up to wonder if the head of state had gone slightly out of his mind.

“Blair Using Gay-Gangster Tactics: Mugabe,” screamed the headline stripped across the front page in the
Sunday Mail,
the government paper’s Sunday edition. The proudly homophobic president was accusing the British prime minister of hiring homosexual thugs to force him to change his stance on Zimbabwean land reform. Britain’s intelligence wing, MI-5, was said to be lending a secret, guiding hand.

This remarkable claim arose from an incident on the street outside the St. James Court Hotel in London, where Mugabe was staying. It hit on a popular refrain for him, as he had been saying for years that homosexuals were “lower than dogs and pigs,” that they were not deserving of human rights, and so on. This vitriol had alarmed gay-rights activists the world over. So when he began to step into his limousine outside the St. James, four activists from a group called Outrage ran at him. Led by Peter Tatchell, they said they were going to “arrest” Mugabe for human rights violations. His bodyguards were inattentive or not present; Tatchell’s crew got a hand on Mugabe before he was hustled into the limo.

Mugabe translated this publicity stunt to be a coordinated attack from the top echelons of Britain’s new Labor government, orchestrated by Tony Blair himself.

Mugabe had scheduled a constitutional referendum for February. If passed, the new constitution would allow Mugabe to “take back” the land from white Zimbabwean farmers—most of them British descendants—at will, without paying anyone for it. Britain, like most everyone else, said this was unconstitutional and outside the rule of law. Mugabe said Blair was dispatching homosexuals to harass him into backing off the policy. He repeated the “gay gangster” allegations to reporters during the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in Durban, which grouped fifty-two national delegations from what had once been part of the British Empire.

The whole episode was so daft, so bizarre, that most diplomats and journalists in Zimbabwe—and a good number of citizens—simply threw back their heads and howled with laughter. It was the joke of every dinner party, every afternoon
braai
. The state-run paper printed an editorial telling citizens it wasn’t patriotic to laugh at the president, but nobody cared. Tony Blair and his Gangster Gays! It sounded like a garage band in drag.

Edgar Langeveldt, Zimbabwe’s first stand-up comic, picked up on the mood in his one-man show at Harare’s Seven Arts Theatre later that month. He was colored, the regional term for mixed-race, and his often raunchy act encompassed song and dance, female impersonations, skits in which a bumbling black detective investigates the murder of an obnoxious Rhodesian housewife (she wore lime green bell-bottoms, made jokes about blacks, and danced around the kitchen to Abba; you felt she had it coming). In a taped monologue that played on a huge screen while he changed clothes during one skit, he appeared as Grace Mugabe—but all that could be seen on the screen was one of her trademark huge hats. It obliterated everything else. The audience gasped, then laughed so hard you couldn’t hear the rest of the act. No one had done such in-your-face comedy in Zimbabwe, and certainly not about the president. I did a feature story about Langeveldt, interviewing him over a late lunch before the last show.

Not everyone was laughing.

Langeveldt went to a popular bar a few weeks later. Several men approached. They didn’t say anything. They just beat him senseless. His jaw was grotesquely fractured. He could barely speak, much less perform, for weeks.

Needless to say, at this point in the story there were no arrests.

That wasn’t all. On November 25, three local journalists received death threats. Ray Choto, one of the authors of the alleged coup story who was still awaiting trial, got a small package at his house. It contained a toy, two bullets, and a note: “See you in heaven before Y2K.” Basildon Peta, news editor at the
Financial Gazette
and head of the Zimbabwe Union of Journalists, opened his mailbox to find three bullets and a note: “Watch out or you are dead.” Ibbo Mandaza of the
Zimbabwe Mirror,
that had published the story about the soldier’s head being returned from the Congo, got the threat by phone.