The Last Resort Read online

  But it was when my father heard him say of white farmers, ‘To them we say, they have become our enemies. Go back to Britain, go back to Blair,’ that Dad exploded. One minute he was sitting in his leather recliner, shaking his head, muttering to himself. The next he was on his feet bellowing at the television.

  ‘Fuck me! Listen to this. Just listen. Go back to Britain? I am not British! My people have been on this continent for three hundred and fifty years! I never set foot out of Africa until I was fifty years old. My own mother never left it once. My father only left twice – to fight fascists in Europe. Go back to Britain? My grandfather fought against the British in the fucking Boer War, for Christ’s sake. Who the fuck does he think he is? I am not British. I am not British.’

  I sat there, stunned. Not by the fact that my father was in a rage – I had seen this before – but by the words three hundred and fifty years. Three hundred and fifty years in Africa? It was true, and yet it sounded absurd. His ancestors – my ancestors – had arrived here in the time of Cromwell and William of Orange. They were here a century before America’s War of Independence, longer than most Americans, including Grace’s ancestors, had been in the United States. Were they ever told they weren’t American? And yet here was my father having to defend his right to be Zimbabwean – to be an African.

  Mom went over to him and tried to calm him down. She seemed strangely relaxed now, more relaxed than I had seen her since I arrived. It was odd how quickly their roles had reversed. She didn’t say it to my father, but she had known: Mugabe was never going to give up power in this election, or any other one, come to that. She had been prepared for this disappointment and seen it coming; he had to deal with the fact that he didn’t understand the country he was living in.

  ‘It’s only Saturday, darling, there’s another day to go,’ Mom tried to encourage him, as if his cricket team had to come from an innings behind, but I think he knew then. We all knew.

  When the results were announced three days later I watched them from the safety of a London pub. One hundred MDC activists had been murdered in the buildup to the 2002 election; fourteen hundred polling agents were arrested over the election weekend, held without charges and only released days after the results. With no one from the opposition at those stations, government agents were free to do with the ballots as they wished. The ruling party won in a tight contest, and every one of the invited observer teams, the South African delegation leading the way, lauded the process and announced it free and fair.

  But all I could think of when I listened to the results was my parents on a range of hills overlooking a ravaged valley. My father was sixty-six years old. My mother was sixty-one.

  It was time they started thinking about their future.

  FOUR

  Frogs and Spiders

  IN JANUARY 2003 Grace moved to New York, and I followed her in the spring. She had taken a good look at my living conditions – the tumbledown dump next to the scrapyard – and decided it wasn’t for her.

  I came in on a media visa sponsored by my travel editor at the Daily Telegraph in London, a fellow Zimbabwean named Graham Boynton, who had spent years working on glossy magazines in Manhattan.

  ‘New York?’ he said. ‘Watch out – it’s much bigger than Mutare.’

  Grace found us an apartment in Harlem, the only place we could afford two rooms. I wanted to replicate the large space I’d had in London, where I’d had a study overlooking a park.

  From 141st and Broadway, above the bodegas and pineapple stands of Little Dominica, I now communicated with my parents via intermittent e-mails. My father had installed a secondhand computer in his office off the back patio. The e-mail worked when Zimbabwe’s phone lines worked, which wasn’t very often or for very long, but at least I could keep in touch.

  My mother, although bewildered by ‘this Internet thingy,’ wrote occasionally, too. I learned that Tello, the dog, had died after being caught in a poacher’s trap set on their land, the wire for the trap made from my parents’ game fence by the settlers across the road.

  So much for coming in peace.

  ‘We’re now finding zebra and antelope carcasses in the hills,’ she wrote. ‘It’s awful. The fence we erected to keep the animals in is now being used to throttle them.’ They would not be getting another dog, she wrote, ‘because dog food has become too expensive.’

  I couldn’t imagine my parents without a dog. We’d always had dogs on the other farms: Flossy, a beautiful springer spaniel who would dig out cricket balls I hit into hedges; Sally, a gun-shy pointer with the spots of a Dalmatian. But most of all there was Ruff, a huge German shepherd with the mane and temperament of a lion. Ruff was almost handsome, but his right ear had flopped down after a vaccination one year, and it never went up again. It gave him a slightly docile look, but he was thoroughly vicious. Ruff snarled at everyone except my father. When my dad was away on compulsory Rhodesian Army call-ups during the war and we were home alone with Mom, the first thing he would ask when he called was, ‘How’s Ruff?’ We had the grenade shields on the windows and Mom had the Uzi automatic by the big bed in case of an attack, but my father was convinced it was Ruff who really protected us.

  I remembered when Ruff had died. It was at the grape farm, and Dad found his lifeless body by the back door, still facing the gate he’d always guarded. Ruff had snarled at most of the black workers on that farm, but when he died they went into mourning. Neighbouring farmworkers who had always navigated the stretch past our house in terror in case Ruff charged out, now came to offer my father condolences, as if one of us had died. The workers who insisted on burying him laid him to rest like a chief beside the gate, piling a high mound of rocks on top of his grave ‘to protect his spirit’. My mother said she had only ever seen my father cry once in his life, when his uncle Norman Melville died, but he had tears in his eyes that morning: grieving the loss of his dog, yet humbled by the respect black farmworkers had shown for him. He had assumed they hated Ruff.

  I wondered who would guard the house now that Tello was gone.

  Far worse than losing their last dog, though, was that they were also losing many of their friends (including their doctor), who were emigrating to the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Australia. And so it was happening again. You could mark the political convulsions in the country by its exoduses. In the early 1970s the white population of Rhodesia numbered 270 000 – five per cent of the total – but when the guerrilla war intensified, 50 000 left for South Africa. Then came 1980, when Mugabe won power in a shocking election landslide, ushering in majority rule. One hundred and fifty thousand whites would leave that decade – two thirds of the white population. I recall, as a twelve-year-old, the many drunken arguments and late-night fallings-out my parents had with friends who were going, unable to live under a black government, or what they assumed would be a Marxist one.

  In truth, my parents briefly considered leaving themselves when Mugabe won that election, but a speech he made on national television – Dad had finally rented us a black-and-white set from Look and Listen – eased their nerves. They sat down to watch it, terrified of what he was going to say about us whites; they listened with a growing sense of astonishment.

  ‘If yesterday I fought you as an enemy, today you have become a friend and an ally,’ Mugabe said at one point. ‘If yesterday you hated me, today you cannot avoid the love that binds you to me and me to you. Is it not folly, therefore, that in these circumstances anybody should seek to revive the wounds and grievances of the past? The wrongs of the past must now stand forgiven and forgotten.’

  My parents looked at each other.

  ‘He speaks rather well,’ said Mom.

  ‘Yes, he does, better than Smith,’ said Dad.

  Smith was Ian Smith, whose Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) from Britain on 11 November 1965 – rather than accede to black majority rule – had ushered in the start of the violent, fifteen-year-long liberation war. My parents, part of a small coterie o
f liberal white Rhodesians, had always despised the man they called Smithy.

  Weeks passed, then months. We waited for the backlash. Nothing happened. My parents shrugged and decided to stay.

  ‘We’re Zimbabweans now, better get used to it,’ they finally told my sisters and me, and they meant it. Of the whites who remained in the country, many began to send their children to exclusive, predominantly white private schools. My parents kept us in state schools – ’I refuse to isolate you from reality in elite institutions,’ my mother said – and in 1983 sent me to Prince Edward, a government boys’ boarding school in Harare, which, by the time I graduated in 1986, was eighty per cent black. One day we were fighting a race war; the next we were sitting in classes sharing notes on Jane Austen with the sons of black men our fathers had fought against. ‘You’re no better or worse than any black person,’ Mom told me when she packed me off to Prince Edward. Still, I suspected my father had really sent me there because they were good at cricket.

  In 2002, my mother wasn’t faulting anyone for leaving anymore. She put a brave face on it, though, playing up her stoic colonial image.

  ‘The loss of Dr Walker I can handle,’ she wrote, in that blasé, offhand manner she had. ‘But some of my ladies are going now, too, and soon I won’t have a bridge four. Whatever is this country coming to?’

  It was in June 2003 that I got the news I had been dreading. My father told me in an e-mail that they had just received their Section Five. He made it sound as if a Section Five was a special commendation, a prestigious award. It was in fact a government notice that arrived in an ominous brown envelope and read like something out of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four: You are hereby notified that it is intended to compulsorily acquire the land described above … for the purpose of resettlement.

  My parents had somehow survived the initial invasions, but here was confirmation that the government really did intend to take their farm.

  I called them in a panic and got my father.

  ‘Ag, well, ja,’ he said, ‘we got our letter.’

  ‘And what now?’

  He paused.

  ‘Well, it looks like we’re in the shit.’

  I knew that this was the end of the line. You could appeal a Section Five (a Section Eight was the final marching order), but the state had now marked them out. It would be pointless to hold on much longer. For what? To be violently evicted? And so I decided to fly home to tell my parents it was time to leave. I even had a plan.

  My younger sister, Helen, worked in London as a marketing manager for a property company, and she had recently bought a plot of land in Pemba, on the north coast of Mozambique, over the Internet. After years of civil war and Marxist misrule, Mozambique was now becoming an unlikely tourist destination, just as Zimbabwe was going in the opposite direction. My parents refused to leave their farm, but Helen and I reckoned that perhaps they would consider temporarily relocating across the border. They could help build a house on her beachfront plot, run it as a guesthouse, just as they had Drifters, and wait to see if things turned around back home.

  I thought the plan would have a pleasing symmetry to it.

  My parents had honeymooned in Mozambique in its 1960s tourist heyday; Stephanie, my eldest sister, was convinced she had been conceived on Paradise Island in the Bazaruto Archipelago, nine hundred kilometres south of Pemba. But my mother also had roots in Mozambique, blood in its soil. Her maternal grandfather, Edgar Eggleston, the son of a railway clerk from Derbyshire, had moved to Mozambique in the early 1900s and became a stationmaster in Gondola, a no-horse town on the just-completed Beira Corridor railway that still links landlocked Zimbabwe to the Indian Ocean via Mozambique. My mother’s mother, Evelyn Eggleston, likely would have been born in Mozambique had it not been for the fact that one Eggleston daughter had already died of malaria there, and another almost succumbed to blackwater fever contracted on its tsetse-fly-infested plains. Instead, Edgar sent his wife, Sarah, back to England to give birth to my maternal grandmother.

  On second thought, perhaps there wasn’t such a pleasing symmetry.

  In September 2003 I flew back to Zimbabwe to tell my parents it was time to go. I had a mission this time, unlike my previous visit, when I’d felt out of my depth. The Daily Telegraph had assigned me to write about my parents, these bittereinders, the last of a dying breed. There were now fewer than a thousand white farmers left on their lands, and twelve had been murdered. The invasions had only intensified since the 2002 election.

  I rented a car this time, and when I drove through their front gate at sunset and saw them standing there, waiting expectantly, as if for rescue, I knew instantly that they had aged a decade. My dad had lost so much weight that he wore his trousers halfway up his belly, tied tightly with an old leather belt. He seemed to have lost a few inches of height, too, as if it was not only his game fence that was being chopped away by the settlers but also his very stature.

  He had grown a thick grey beard and was starting to resemble some of the rugged armed men in the sepia-tinted photograph of his Afrikaner grandfather’s commando unit in the Second Boer War that he had hung in his study. Taken in 1902, two months before the end of that bloody conflict, the photograph shows my great-grandfather, the dashing Gerrit Gauche, in his veld hat and khaki uniform, rifle at his side and a bandolier of bullets across his chest, standing directly behind the white-bearded leader of the commandos, Jan Smuts, the legendary Boer general who later would become prime minister of South Africa.

  I wondered aloud: Was the beard his own last stand, a sign of atavistic Boer resistance?

  He looked at me like I was an idiot.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘There’s a shortage of razor blades.’

  My mother was so thin that I imagined a strong wind could blow her over. Her hair had greyed rapidly in the past eighteen months, and the lines on her face were now deep grooves.

  Still, my parents seemed in good spirits. They had just returned from a boozy farewell party for another friend.

  ‘Soon we’ll be the only ones left,’ Mom smiled, hugging me tightly, her eyes welling with tears, as they always did whenever I arrived or left home.

  The shock of their appearance helped soften the blow when I saw the house. I had spent the night in Harare with my eldest sister, Stephanie, the only one of my siblings to still live in Zimbabwe, and she had warned me what to expect. ‘Jeez, Doz, I swear, you could shoot a National Geographic documentary in there. They let in all the animals, hey. It’s like an ark.’

  The house had been nudging into genteel shabbiness eighteen months before, but now it was in full decline. Cobwebs had gathered in the corner of my room, and the ants still roamed the ceiling. Hornets had somehow made a nest of packed sand on the side of my mattress. The rest of the house was no better.

  I dumped my bags and joined my parents in the living room for tea just in time to see an albino frog – pale white, with bulging eyes – hop directly into the middle of the living room floor from the veranda. I leapt out of my chair in fright.

  ‘My God. Look at that thing. How can we get rid of it?’

  ‘Oh, don’t mind him,’ Mom smiled. ‘He’s just passing through.’

  The frog stared at me, unblinking, its translucence utterly out of place on the dark tan of the carpet. Then, sure enough, it hopped steadily on through to the back porch.

  It was a good time to bring up the cobwebs.

  ‘Ma, um, listen, shouldn’t we remove the spiders in my room?’

  She shrugged. ‘Remove them yourself, my boy. And besides, why should we keep this place tidy when these bastards could take it away from us any day now?’

  In the clear light of the following morning I could see why so many creatures had colonised the place. The land below the front lawn that ran down to the main road used to be cut clear. Now it had grown wild, a breeding ground for insects. You couldn’t see Frank’s house through the trees anymore.

  ‘Dad, why don’t you clear all the bush out by the
road?’ I said as we sat on the lawn chairs sipping coffee. ‘That’s why you’re getting all these bugs and things flying around.’

  I thought it helped make my case that a swarm of gnats, black as a cloud, hovered over my head as I spoke. The gnats didn’t seem to go near my parents; they always targeted me.

  ‘No,’ he snapped. ‘I want to grow it like this.’

  ‘Why on earth would you want to be closed in by bush?’

  ‘So that people can’t see the house.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Douglas, do you have any idea of what’s happening here? These people drive down a road, spot a house they like, and just take it. That’s how they do it. I don’t want them to see us up here.’

  It was clear by now that the war veterans and settlers had been used by the Mugabe regime. They were the shock troops, sent in to do the dirty work. They were never given title deeds to the land they occupied, and they never qualified for bank loans to get funding to farm; although the government gave them free seeds, fertiliser and even fuel, they would often sell this to pay for the bus fare to town, where they would buy food. It somewhat defeated the supposed point of the exercise.

  Instead, the best farms were being picked off by the chefs: ministers, generals, brigadiers, senior party officials. Few chefs – the term comes from the Portuguese Chefe, ‘chief ’ – actually farmed. They lived in the cities, but they used farmhouses as weekend retreats, like Soviet dachas, and often chose the best ones by simply driving around and picking whichever they liked the most. They became known as ‘telephone farmers’: they would phone in farm instructions from their houses in town.