Free When a Crocodile Eats the Sun by Peter Godwin Page A

gave a speech after the referendum result saying that he was a democrat and would respect the will of the people. But his face was tight with anger as he said it, and his smile was not a real smile; it was a rictus, a barely suppressed snarl. And he looked over the camera, not into it, over our heads, not into our eyes. And you could see that this was a man fueled by thoughts of revenge, that he was boiling with the public humiliation. How could he, who had liberated his people, now be rejected? How could they be so ungrateful? It couldn’t be his own people who had done this (even though 99 percent of the electorate was black); it must have been other people, white people, leading them astray. He would show us. He would show these white people not to meddle in politics. In things that did not concern us. We had broken the unspoken ethnic contract. We had tried to act like citizens, instead of expatriates, here on sufferance.
    During the referendum campaign, Mugabe’s ruling ZANU-PF party had already taken out race-baiting ads in the
Herald.
Among the local press clippings my father sent me was a full page ad featuring a large photo of an elderly white couple wearing “Vote No” T-shirts. “They are going to vote no,” read the caption, “Vote yes.” In the news reports, white Zimbabweans were now referred to as the “nonindigenous,” “Britain’s children,” and even simply “the enemy.”
    “What do you think?” I ask my father.
    “Oh, no one takes any notice of it,” he says cheerfully. “For God’s sake, the war ended twenty years ago. There’s no racial animosity these days. I’ve never felt any. Mugabe’s trying to divert attention from his terrible economic mismanagement, but it isn’t working.”
    And indeed in the forthcoming parliamentary election, four months later, Mugabe’s ZANU-PF party candidates faced a real opposition — the MDC — which had coalesced around the referendum campaign. And so Mugabe was doing what old generals always do, girding up to fight the last war. Just like Fidel Castro, Mugabe pulled on his old olive green army fatigues, the vestments of a battlefield he had never personally fought on, to emphasize the victories of the past and to distract from the failures of the present. At rallies around the country, he punched the air and ranted anew against an antique and increasingly irrelevant colonialism, now a generation past.
    And then he choreographed a crisis. Days after his referendum defeat, people calling themselves “war vets,” ex-combatants from the independence war, began arriving on white-owned farms and refusing to leave. The way they pronounced “war vets” was elided so that it sounded like “wovits,” which is what my sister and others started to call them. Very few were actual war veterans at all; they were just a ragtag collection of Mugabe supporters and unemployed youths, many of whom were being paid a daily stipend by the ruling party to participate. Hitler Hunzvi was clearly the architect of the campaign — and the wovits arrived in government buses and trucks. When the white farmers complained to the police, the police said it was a “political” matter beyond their jurisdiction.
    Still, when the farm killings began, it took my parents by surprise. Suddenly my father wasn’t quite so sanguine.
    Martin Olds — who I am reading about on the plane — was murdered on April 18. He had farmed in a place called Nyamandlovu. It means “Meat of the Elephant” in Ndebele, the tongue of our southern tribe, the offshoot of Prince Biyela’s Zulus. Many down there, Olds among them, had joined the MDC. He was alone when his homestead was attacked. He had sent his teenage daughters and his wife into Bulawayo. The attack came just after first light. It was a hit squad, the locals said, Shona-speaking, from up north. The CFU tried to reconstruct what happened. A hundred men, armed with AK-47s and pangas (machetes), arrive in a fourteen-vehicle convoy.