MSN on the spot: my brush with 'Screaming Bob'
The Zimbabwe elections, despite President Mugabe's considerable efforts to the contrary, will be the subject of intense international scrutiny. Fifteen years ago, however, the world was largely unaware of the looming crisis - as one accidental eye-witness can testify.
Having a semi-automatic weapon levelled at you by an Angry Man can have a profoundly focusing effect.
One minute you’re scuffing down a dusty street, cursing your hangover and contemplating breakfast; then, just as you’ve decided how many espressos you can down without risking cardiac arrest, there’s an unexpected click a few inches from your ear.
This was not a familiar noise. And the face at the other end of the primitive but nonetheless ominous-looking machine gun which had made it wasn’t familiar, either. Nor was it friendly.
I grinned. Angry Man did not. What he did do was silently gesture, with surprising efficacy, that if I did not cross over to the other side of the road immediately, I would be shot.
Mindful of the disruption this would cause to my breakfast plans, I acquiesced – and beat a hasty retreat in a sort of half sprint, half backward-glancing shuffle.
Law of the land
I had unwittingly broken one of the fundamental rules of Zimbabwe: thou shalt not walk along the perimeter of President Robert Mugabe’s Harare compound. Or Else.
It was 1995 and I was in Africa doing research for my geography dissertation, working alongside the UN and Oxfam on a number of grassroots development projects in rural Zimbabwe – impoverished, even then.
“You walked WHERE?” shrieked one friend, an aspiring human rights lawyer, later that day. Mugabe’s military bunker-style home, ringed by impossibly high razor wire-topped fences and shrouded from view by densely planted trees, was clearly off limits.
“We call him Screaming Bob,” said our Zimbabwean safari guide. “He never goes anywhere without his full police escort, lights and sirens on full blast.”
Crumbling economy
I remember the exchange rate being around 14 Zimbabwean dollars to one British pound at the time. Today, the official rate is 59,500 dollars to the pound – and climbing hourly. On the thriving black market, £1 would probably net you more than 69 million dollars. Sounds like a lot, until you realise that only buys you six loaves of bread.
Fifteen years ago, food was already running out. Unemployment was spiralling out of control; the infrastructure was disintegrating; HIV and Aids were ravaging rural villages (one of the friends we made during our stay died a few months after we left) and most of the Zimbabweans I talked to had nothing positive to say about their president.
Five years ago, while the world largely continued to look away, I took a phone call on the news desk of a British newspaper from a young woman who had fled her native Zimbabwe. Land belonging to white farmers, many originally from Devon and Cornwall, was being seized and given to landless blacks as part of Mugabe’s anti-imperial policy.
In the process, many of those farmers were murdered. One image in particular came to embody Mugabe’s aggressive land seizure programme: the body of Terry Ford, who had been tied up and shot dead on his farm. In the picture, Ford’s pet dog lies patiently curled up on the blue blanket covering his master’s lifeless chest.
A dark decade
Kath, the Zimbabwean refugee who had phoned the newspaper to ask if we could help, called us with daily updates. A priest had been kidnapped. Friends had disappeared. Elderly farmers had been thrown in jail on trumped-up charges and were being badly beaten while their land was seized by settlers, often illegally.
It is hard to reconcile these and other stories that have leaked out of Zimbabwe during the past decade with Mugabe’s enduring political presence. More than a third of the nation’s population is believed to have fled.
The BBC, banned from covering the elections from within Zimbabwe, today showed footage of a man trying to shield his five-month-old niece as he leopard-crawled through razor wire to cross the border into relative safety. “How do you feel about president Mugabe when you find yourself in this situation?” asked the correspondent. “I think it is time for him to go,” the man answered quietly, “because we are tired.”
by Laura Snook, Editor, MSN UK News
March 28, 2008
