African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [71]
Next Time
1988
When life arises and flows along
artificial channels rather than normal ones,
and when its growth depends not so
much on natural and economic
conditions as on the theory and arbitrary
behaviour of individuals, then it is
forced to accept these circumstances as
essential and inevitable, and these
circumstances acting on an artificial life
assume the aspects of laws.
Anton Chekhov, The Island.
A Journey to Sakhalin
MEANWHILE
It was six years before I returned to Zimbabwe in 1988, and meanwhile all of Southern Africa was on a full rolling boil. This was mainly because of South Africa’s determination that all of the southern part of the continent should remain dominated by the whites. During those years The Republic’s subversion of her neighbours reached a height of unscrupulousness, of nastiness. South African armies kept Namibia and Angola at war, and it is not possible to exaggerate the cruelty of these armies. In Mozambique Renamo did its worst work. South African agents were busy in peaceful Botswana, and it was not unknown for them to murder South African citizens who had taken refuge there. Zimbabwe stood four-square, confronting South Africa, resisting ‘destabilization’.
Internally The Republic reached heights of repression. The world was told about it, but inconsequentially, intermittently: a spotlight touches a place and moves on. There was a law that prevented any journalist, from inside or from outside the country, seeing anything the government did not want to be seen. I think, when we know it all, the story will be much worse than we ever thought.
The horrors of the place were masked, as always has been the case, because what is seen by most visitors is the pleasantness of life for the whites, and because social apartheid improved–no longer were there different queues for whites and blacks in shops and banks, and the races mixed easily in restaurants and hotels. But all my life I have been hearing, ‘Never mind about the towns! It’s the countryside, it’s the farms, it’s the little dorps where no journalist has ever gone. If people knew what went on there…’
Zimbabwe was surrounded by countries where South Africa played puppet-master–surrounded by civil wars and by failure, as in Zambia to the north. Zimbabwe was suffering from a siege mentality, and its leaders were at least in some things paranoid. In Matabeleland, so they believed, and so all the world was told, guerilla armies lurked in the bush that seems made for guerilla war. There were murders in isolated white farmhouses, and some were burned down. How easy to believe that South Africa pulled the strings here too. Mugabe’s response to this threat was to send in troops that were mostly Mashona, and they terrorized villages up and down Matabeleland in a consistent and deliberate and merciless policy of intimidation. They pillaged, they murdered, they raped, they burned. In some villages half the inhabitants were killed. When they talk about this time some people start weeping or cursing or both, for these savage events wounded Zimbabwe’s idea of itself.
And then Comrade Mugabe behaved like a statesman and offered an amnesty. This was the famous Unity Accord of December 1987 when Joshua Nkomo came in out of the cold. He was minister first in the President’s office, and then became one of two senior ministers. Instead of the expected armies of guerillas, a couple of dozen men gave themselves up. They were former Freedom Fighters who had taken to the bush to express their disapproval of Mashona domination of Matabeleland, and because Joshua Nkomo was not in government, and because–probably the real reason–it is hard for men who have a talent for war to become unregarded civilians.
And something else bad happened in those decisive six years. Corruption has overtaken every newly independent country