Gallows humour in a land hung out to dry
(Filed: 20/02/2003)

As Zimbabwe's president arrives in Paris for the African summit, his countrymen are left to scramble for maize, writes Stephen Robinson in Harare

Walk into a Harare restaurant these days, and the waiter will quickly run through "the specials" - by which he will mean, in keeping with the prevailing gallows humour that soothes the senses in Robert Mugabe's devastated country, what you cannot order because it's off the menu.

A quick lunch in the Harare suburb of Newlands was typical. "Sorry, no bread, no rice. And no Coke and no fizzy drinks - the plant has run out of gas to carbonate the drinks. Oh yes, and no de-caff coffee."

Strangely, there are always beer and cigarettes, but that is of little comfort to the African women waiting patiently in the streets outside for word of where to find the bread and maize.

The problems facing diners in the smarter Harare restaurants are utterly trivial compared to the horrors that are being visited on the vast majority of Zimbabweans, an estimated seven million of whom are experiencing life-threatening food shortages.

But a curious racial solidarity has taken hold in the capital, despite Mr Mugabe's best efforts to blame the dwindling band of whites for all the country's problems.

As you walk in Harare you come upon snakes of cars backing around the suburban streets, and motorists waiting patiently in line to fill up their cars. "Not too bad today," explained one white woman, anxious to get to her tennis four. "Just about two hours, which is a lot better than last week."

A black delivery driver one space behind nodded stoically. When calculating whether to drive somewhere, Zimbabwean motorists no longer speak in terms of distance or time, but in fractions of petrol tanks.

Motorists queue patiently together with exaggerated good humour, proving that in today's chaotically repressive Zimbabwe, there is some part of Harare that will always be British Southern Rhodesia.

And no one, black or white, has a good word to say about Mugabe. The country seems to be on hold, waiting for him to die or flee into exile.

Hardship and hunger are bad enough to witness when they are caused by natural disaster or a civil war, but when they are deliberately inflicted upon a people as government policy, it is much more painful to see.

Apart from the queues and a creeping shabbiness, Harare can seem quite normal until you speak to members of the opposition and learn that the farm invasions continue. The show trial of Morgan Tsvangirai, the opposition leader, on trumped up treason charges, continues in the centre of town.

Since the beginning of the year, a further 77 white farms have been "listed" prior to confiscation and handover to Mugabe's cronies, ensuring further torment for the owners and more food shortages in the months ahead.

Scarcely a day goes by without the arrest of MPs from Mr Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic Change. They face routine intimidation, even torture. And now, having bullied the judiciary for many months with ill-concealed menace, Mugabe's men are actually arresting judges.

Zimbabwe has never been a rich country, but it was once well ordered and not without hope. After independence, most of the whites who could not face the thought of black rule left quickly for South Africa and beyond, and by the mid-1980s, the country appeared to be making slow if unspectacular progress towards racial reconciliation.

Throughout the 1990s, Mugabe enacted many reforms dictated by the IMF and the World Bank, and as the Zimbabwean dollar was allowed to float, the shops filled with Western goods, albeit at a very high price for the locals.

Whites generally thought they had reached a tacit understanding with Mugabe that would allow them to get on with running their businesses and farms unmolested by post-colonial retribution.

The problem came with Mugabe's humiliation in the 2000 constitutional referendum, and some whites are now critical of their friends who set up the MDC, which harnesses a lot of black opposition to the government but is essentially run by white farming interests.

"Mugabe would have left us alone, but he couldn't take us whites getting involved in his politics," said one white businessman, whose brother is active in the MDC and narrowly survived a recent assassination attempt.

The most troubling aspect of spending time in Harare these days is reading the comments of Olusegun Obasanjo, the Nigerian president, that land seizures have "substantially ended" and that law and order are returning to Zimbabwe.

He and Thabo Mbeki of South Africa are adamant that Zimbabwe's suspension from the Commonwealth should be lifted because conditions are improving - a baffling contention to anyone who spends even half an hour in Harare.

Zimbabweans cannot understand why those leaders should tolerate torture and repression of fellow Africans in the name of the spurious concept of "African unity".

Despite the obvious dangers, people will not be silenced. Henry Olonga, the cricketer dropped from yesterday's cricket international after wearing a black armband in protest at Mugabe's repression, knows full well that he is vulnerable.

"I am in God's hands," Olonga told me, when I asked him if he was scared about the retribution he faced for his stand against Mugabe. "To be honest, I'll be fine for now, but the problems will come when the fuss of the cricket dies down, and when you people forget about Zimbabwe."