From Dark Star Safari (Paul Theroux, 2002) pp356-8
The Robert Mugabe rumors, which I solemnly collected, depicted the poor thing as demented as a result of having been tortured in a white-run prison: long periods in solitary, lots of abuse, cattle prods electrifying his privates, and the ultimate insult — his goolies had been crimped. Another rumor had him in an advanced stage of syphilis; his brain was on fire. “He was trained by the Chinese, you know,’ many people said. And: “We knew something was up when he started calling himself “comrade”’’. He had reverted, too — did not make any decision without consulting his witch-doctors. His disgust with gays was well known: “They are dogs and should be treated like dogs.’ He personally banned the standard school exams in Zimbabwe ‘to break with the colonial past.” Some rumors were fairly simple: He had a life-long hatred of whites and it was his ambition to drive them out of the country. Of the British prime minister he said, ‘I don’t want him sticking his pink nose in our affairs.’ But noting all this I kept thinking of what Gertrude Rubadiri had told me, “We called him “Bookworm.”’ Really there was no deadlier combination than bookworm and megalomaniac. It was, for example, the crazed condition of many novelists and travelers.
The long lines I saw at gas stations told part of the story: there was a serious gasoline shortage. The new $500 million Harare International Airport had run out of aviation fuel. No hard currency meant a severe reduction in imported goods. ‘There had been food riots in Harare. The opposition parties had been persecuted by the ruling party’s goon squads. The unemployment figure had risen to 75 percent, ‘visitor numbers had dropped by 70 percent, the irrationality of the president was so well known his accusations had ceased to be quoted in the pages of the world’s press, except for his maddest utterances, such as ‘I have a degree in violence.’ But also foreign journalists had been attacked and some seriously injured, others had been deported for trying to cover stories of intimidation and disruption. Fearing the same fate, under ‘Occupation’ on my entry visa application I wrote ‘Geography teacher.’
Zimbabwe had been for years one of the great African destinations, for it had the Zambezi, river rafting, bungee-jumping off Victoria Falls Bridge, and so many wild animals that big-game hunting was freely available. Gun-toting hunters banged away at the Big Five — elephants, rhinos, leopards, lions and giraffes. A Zimbabwean guide told me that some foreign hunters were very fussy and would decline to shoot certain elephants if the creatures’ tusks were four feet instead of five feet long. Zimbabwe was perhaps the only country in Africa where you could legally buy those elephant’s foot wastebaskets that gave environmentalists the horrors. Huge newly chopped-off ivory tusks were also available in Harare shops, and so were the skins of lions and leopards, crocodile belts, elephant or hippo hide wallets, and such curiosities as a yard-long giraffe femur with an African landscape scratched on its shank in scrimshaw.
But tourists and curio collectors and travelers were staying away. The problem was land invasions. The president had actively encouraged veterans of the guerrilla war ~‘landless peasants’ – to invade, occupy and squat in the fields of white farmers and to take their land by force. Many black Zimbabweans had done so to white Zimbabweans, some of them violently. Eight white farmers had been murdered by these intruders, none of whom had been prosecuted – indeed, they were congratulated for achieving their objective, having seized the whites’ land and become landowners and gentry themselves. When a High Court judge questioned the legality of the farm invasions he was attacked by the government and he eventually resigned. As for the stolen farms, in some cases the government had failed to supply the invaders with free maize seed, fertilizer and tractors, and so they had left the land and returned to city life. Almost 2000 properties had been invaded and occupied; more were promised, so the threat was real.
Whenever a local paper wrote critically of the land invasions the journalist on the story was arrested or harassed. Foreign journalists were thrown out of the country or their work permits revoked. The editor of the independent Daily News and two of his reporters were charged with ‘criminal defamation’ after reporting a well-sourced story about kickbacks connected with the new airport. The briber, a Saudi Arabian, had whined publicly that he had not received a fair return for his bribe of $3 million.
The editor in chief of the Daily News had been the target of an assassination attempt. Zimbabweans said that the proof that it had been government-inspired was its cack-handedness. That it had been botched was certain evidence of government connivance, since the government could not do anything right. Another paper, The Independent, was being sued for ‘contempt of parliament’ for its verbatim reporting of an incriminating parliamentary debate. Another bill had been passed stipulating that music, drama, news, and current affairs programming on Zimbabwean radio and TV had to be purely Zimbabwean ‘in order to foster a sense of Zimbabwean national identity and values.’ Since Zimbabweans had already established themselves as some of the greatest innovators in African music, and its musicians played to large crowds in the US and Europe, the intention of this bill was to make white Zimbabweans nervous.
‘Everything Mugabe says and does is intended to drive the whites away,’ a white Zimbabwean told me. I replied that it seemed to me that black Zimbabweans were enduring an equally bad time, with such high unemployment, high inflation, unstable currency and an economy in ruins. Blacks were being driven away too — many had fled to South Africa.
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