In late March of 2008, I headed home to Zimbabwe, in great excitement, to dance on Robert Mugabe's political grave. The crooked elections he had just held had spun out of his control, and after 28 years, the world's oldest leader seemed about to be toppled.
Eighty-four years old, with his dyed black hair and his blood transfusions, his Botox and vitamin-cocktail shots, he had querulously dominated his country for a generation. He had fixed elections with ease in the past, using a combination of rigging, fraud and intimidation, but now Zimbabweans had rejected him in such overwhelming numbers that it looked like he would finally be forced to accept their verdict.
They had many reasons to reject him. Once they had enjoyed the highest standard of living in Africa. Now their money was nearly worthless, halving in value every 24 hours. Only 6% of workers had jobs. Their incomes had sunk to pre-1950 levels. They were starving. Their schools were closed, their hospitals collapsed. Their life expectancy had crashed from 60 to 36. They had the world's highest number of orphans, proportional to population. They were officially the unhappiest people on earth, and they were fleeing the shattered country in their millions - an exodus of up to a third of the population.
My younger sister, Georgina, a broadcaster who lives in London, was joining me to witness the Zimbabwe endgame, though neither of us was supposed to be here. Western journalists were banned, and the police had just arrested several foreign journalists. We were in double jeopardy: I was once declared an enemy of the state, accused of spying, and Georgina worked for an anti-Mugabe radio station, in London, and she also featured on a list of undesirables, excluded from the country.
Although the election results had still not been announced, six days after the vote, the ruling party already knew that despite the gerrymandering and the intimidation, the rigging and the "ghost voters", Mugabe had lost resoundingly to his nemesis, Morgan Tsvangirai, who should now be declared the new president.
Mugabe called a meeting of his politburo to decide what to do next. From within his inner circle leaked the news that he was shocked by the nation's antipathy, and despairing. His four dozen or so politburo members, many of them comrades from the war of independence to overturn white rule, had to decide whether to concede power, drawing the long reign of the dictator to a close, or to fight on.
In the end, his resolve stiffened by his generals, Mugabe decided not to accept defeat, but instead to fiddle the figures, and trigger a second round of voting, a run-off election. But he waited before announcing this, while his henchmen planned a vicious crackdown against the opposition. Mugabe's generals were to call this attack Operation Mavhoterapapi? - "Who Did You Vote For?" - and it became their most violent since the Matabeleland massacres, 25 years earlier.
As we wait for Mugabe to massage the election results, we decide to drive south east from Harare to Chimanimani and Silverstream, where we both grew up. We cross the Silverstream river just above the rapids that tumble into plunge pools where we used to swim as kids. At the top of the village, above the factory that processes wattle bark into tannin to cure leather, is our old house, a simple colonial bungalow, with a corrugated tin roof. Outside, I recognise the landscape of my memories: the rolling green lawns of Kikuyu grass, and the malachite kingfishers, which still patronise the pond; the cork oak, flame tree, Northumberland pine, silver oak, syringa tree, jacaranda, the belhambra with its long dangling bracts of white flowers at this time of year, and the coral tree, sentinels of our childhood.
George and Tanya Webster now live here. Where my father used to have his old slip-covered armchair, next to the big brick fireplace in the sitting room, Tanya Webster, a large cheerful woman with curly black hair and glasses, now sits, knitting blankets, while kittens swat at her wool. Her husband George, genial, with short, steel-grey hair and moustache, shows us around.
Our house is the same but different. Ancestral English bric-a-brac has been replaced by African tchotchkes: a trio of plump wooden hippos, a copper wall clock in the shape of Africa, a standard lamp made from a varnished tree branch. The veranda, where I used to lie on the red-cement parapet in my flannel pyjamas, watching the thunderstorms roll down from Spitzkop, is now enclosed.
George Webster's great-grandfather came up to Gazaland with the original pioneer column, in July 1893, from Haywards Heath, via Groot Marico in South Africa. Like his father before him, Webster was in the air force. In late 1980, after independence, he resigned, along with 70 other technicians, after an ex-guerrilla who had invented his qualifications was brought in over them.
Webster tells me that five busloads of soldiers in civilian clothes have been deployed into nearby areas where Mugabe lost the vote. And an old Afrikaner farmer, Schalk du Plessis, had been wrenched from his truck by war vets who cuffed his hands behind his back and tied his neck to a tree with fence wire.
As Du Plessis sat there against the tree with the wire around his neck, he saw that his guard was wearing a baseball cap bearing the slogan: "Jesus loves you". "So," says Webster, "old Schalk challenged him. 'How can you do this to me and yet you profess to be Christian?' he asked." And the war vet got embarrassed and untied him.
That night I walk down the wide-planked corridor to my old corner bedroom, for the first time in 30 years. I sleep profoundly, dreaming of my childhood. And deep into the night, on wind-borne surges from the compound, I hear the throb of drums, just like I always used to hear.
Before we leave, Tanya takes us on a farewell tour of the garden. Georgina and I get down on our knees on the lawn, beneath the coral tree. It is considered a magical tree. Zulu people plant a coral tree on the grave of a chief. The bark is used to make a poultice to heal wounds. We are collecting the small, shiny scarlet seeds that the coral tree has shed. We call them "lucky beans". Tanya brings out an old jam jar and we fill it with lucky beans.
We drive back to Harare in silence. It is the anniversary of the death of our sister, Jain - killed in the Rhodesian bush war 28 years ago today, weeks before her wedding. As soon as we reach Harare, we head straight through the city to the northern suburb of Borrowdale, to Christchurch, where Jain's ashes are entombed next to Dad's.
Together we sweep the grass tailings off the two gravestones on the crematorium lawn. As we do so, a marmalade cat strolls over and then curls up, purring, on Dad's gravestone. "It belongs to the old pastor, Father Bertram," says Rodgers Sokiri, the church gardener. "The one who buried your father. He left to live in South Africa."
We phone my mother from the graveside and tell her what we're doing.
"What's it like there?" she asks. "Describe it for me, Peter."
So I tell her that there is a marmalade cat purring on Dad's gravestone, and cockerels are crowing and black-eyed bulbuls are chirping and hopping from branch to branch of the jacaranda trees. That lush banana fronds sway over the boundary wall in the late-afternoon breeze. I tell her that rather than flowers, we have brought lucky beans from the coral tree in our old garden in Silverstream, and that we are pouring them into the runnels of the letters carved into Jain's gravestone, so that they are now picked out in lines of scarlet.
"How is it in London?" I ask.
"Raining," she says, and I can hear her quietly weeping on the end of the phone, all those miles away.
In our absence, Harare's private hospitals have started to fill with victims of Mugabe's crackdown against the opposition. Denias Dombo lies broken on a hospital bed in Dandara, his dark head propped up against the bright white pillows. His left leg is in plaster from hip to heel, just the calloused khaki sole peeping out the end of the sheet. Both arms are in plaster casts too, right up to the veined ridges of his farmer's biceps.
He winces as he turns to pick up his teacup, because several of his ribs are broken. "Can you lift my leg back up?" he asks. "My blood is too heavy."
Until last week, Dombo farmed groundnuts and maize, and lived in a tidy brushed-earth kraal with three thatched houses, and his seven cattle slept in a thorn-tree-enclosed pen. Around now he should be harvesting his groundnuts, instead of lying shattered in a Harare hospital.
But earlier this year Denias Dombo made a terrible mistake. He believed it when he was told that Zimbabwe was to hold free and fair elections. "It was my job," he says, "as the district organising secretary for the MDC, to apply to the police for clearance to hold party meetings." So everyone knew his party affiliation. As it turned out, the Mudzi district did not go well for the MDC. They lost all three parliamentary constituencies to Mugabe's ruling Zanu-PF. You might think this would be a cause of celebration for the victors. But that's when the trouble started.
One Thursday, Denias Dombo heard a vehicle growling to a halt outside his home, and went to investigate. As he approached he saw "bright flames - my house already on fire" and the two men who had set it alight scampering back to their pick-up truck.
He recognised both men. One was the newly elected Zanu-PF MP for the area, and the other was a prominent Zanu-PF member and neighbour. The vehicle in which they sped off had Zanu-PF signs on its doors, and in the back sat a group of youths in party T-shirts, with pictures of Robert Mugabe's face across their chests.
Dombo yelled after them: "I see you, I know who you are and you are the ones who have burned down my house."
Everything inside was destroyed. So Dombo collected the MDC vice-district chairman and his own brother and together they walked all night, 15 miles, to the nearest police station, at Kotwa, to report the crime, and then walked home.
Later that afternoon the police arrived, took a cursory look at his burnt house, and departed. Twenty minutes later, about 30 youths in Zanu-PF T-shirts swarmed into the kraal, armed with sticks and iron bars. They were yelling and throwing rocks. Dombo and his family tried to barricade themselves in the kitchen. But their attackers broke down the flimsy door and began stoning the family huddled inside.
That's when Denias Dombo came to a decision.
"I decided, better for me to come out, or they will kill my family."
So he told his wife, Patricia, who was carrying their four-month-old son, Israel, his 14-year-old daughter, Martha and her nine-year-old sister, Dorcas: "I'm going to go out and when they run after me, you must all run away as fast as you can, and hide." Then Dombo took a deep breath and ran out towards his attackers, and, just as he had anticipated, they converged upon him, with their rocks and iron bars and their heavy sticks, until, he says, "my blood was rushing out everywhere". He tried to protect his head with his arms while they beat him. "I heard the bones in my arms crack and I cried out: 'Oh, Jesus, I'm dying here - what have I done wrong?'" And as they beat him, on and on, his assailants made him shout, "Pamberi ne [up with] Robert Mugabe", "Pamberi ne Zanu-PF", "Pasi ne [down with] Tsvangirai".
The beating continued until the ringleader, one Jeavus Chiutsa, finally looked at his watch and said: "Let's leave him here, we'll come back and finish him off tonight."
Denias Dombo tried to stand up, teetered and fell down, tried to stand up once more and fell again. And then he looked down and realised his leg was broken; he could see the jagged shard of his left shin bone "waving out", as he puts it. And one arm hung limp and shattered too. "And they saw I was going nowhere," he says. "So they blew their whistles, and toyi-toyi-ed [war-danced] away down the road."
Unable to escape, Dombo lay down by the embers of his burnt house. "The pain was so great," he says. "There was blood everywhere. I was in such terrible pain and I thought I was dying, and I decided, better to kill myself than just wait for them to return and finish me off."
So Dombo picked up a length of thick wire, and wiping the blood from his eyes, twisted one end into a tight noose around his neck and summoned his remaining strength to reach up and attach the other end to a hook in the brick wall of his charred house. He took a deep breath and threw himself down. He felt the wire tighten around his throat, felt the sunlight dim, felt himself grow faint and the life inside him ebbing away. Then he fell heavily to the ground. The wire had broken.
Dombo can't go on, a great jagged sob wells up from his chest, it is the first time he has really recounted the detail of what happened, and faced the enormity of it all. At his bedside Georgina is crying too, and she reaches over to grasp his hand. Slowly his sobs subside and he takes up his story once more. After the wire broke and he fell to the ground, Dombo lay there trembling with pain, the wire noose still twisted around his neck, until he heard a piping voice calling to him.
"Baba, Baba, simukai, ndaporta," which in the local Shona language means, "Father, please wake up." It was Dorcas, his daughter, kneeling at his side. When she saw him lying there, covered in blood, his bones broken and wire twisted around his neck, she began to weep.
"It's OK, it's OK, I'm not yet dead," he told her softly, patting her arm. "But you must go and get help quickly or I might still die."
He asked her to fetch a neighbour, a fellow opposition supporter, Wellington Mafiyoni.
Soon Mafiyoni arrived and gingerly loaded Dombo's shattered body into a wheelbarrow. He trundled Dombo 500 yards out into the bush and laid him down on the ground, pulling some branches over him as camouflage.
"Be brave," he urged, "and try not to cry, so they won't hear where I hid you."
Then he set off to walk the 15 miles to the police station to get help. And as Dombo lay there that evening on the cold, hard ground, with the jagged end of his broken shin bone sticking out of his flesh, the mob returned. Dombo listened as they searched for him and he heard them decide that he must already be dead. And he heard them setting about his prize possessions, his seven cattle, with axes.
"They cut the tendons on their back legs," he sobs now. "I could hear my cows crying to me. But I could do nothing."
Sometime the next afternoon the ambulance arrived with a police escort, as the driver was too afraid to come alone.
"I still need another operation to set my bones properly," he says, "but my doctor told me that I am still too weak, my blood pressure is still too low for that."
His broken ribs still hurt, and they stop him from sleeping, and he can't move his leg. And as he lies here, sleepless, he dreams of his children.
"I don't think I'll ever see them again," he says.
Then he holds up his broken arms.
"For me, this is a death sentence - I can't provide for my children any longer."
He starts to lose it again, and through his tears, he rails. "I have lost everything. All I had accumulated has turned to ashes."
He doesn't know where his family is, his wife and daughters and his baby son, or how they will survive. Dombo reaches painfully into his bedside table to retrieve the phone number of someone he hopes might know where they are. He presses it into my hand and asks me to try to locate his family.
"Please, sir, I am begging you."
And then, apologising as he does so, he turns his face to the wall and begins to weep again.
Ayear later. At Harare city hall the walls of the corridors are lined with gilt-rimmed oils presented by old white mayors, mostly of bucolic English scenes. I am asked to wait in room 103. The sign on the door says it is the "Mayoress's Parlour and Lady Councillors' Retiring Room", and it's furnished with floral armchairs, a divan, and a dressing table.
Much Musunda will see me now. He's a prominent commercial lawyer, and an old friend. He tells of his efforts to restore the city's water supply, fend off cholera and fill in the pox of potholes - all with no budget. Musunda has agreed to stand in as acting mayor (without salary) while the man voted to the job in 2008, Emmanuel Chiroto, serves as his deputy.
"The idea," says Much, "is that I guide and mentor Emmanuel. My aim is that within my five-year term, by year three, I hope, he will take over as mayor himself."
Emmanuel Chiroto sits in an office next door, under - as the law requires in every office - a scowling portrait of "His Excellency, the President of the Republic of Zimbabwe, Comrade Robert Gabriel Mugabe". A small, intense man, in a purple shirt and dark suit, he has an open, troubled face.
Chiroto used to live with his wife, Abigail, 27, and their four-year-old son, Ashley, in Hatcliffe, a working-class township from which he ran a little textile business - screen-printing logos on T-shirts, mostly. Abigail sold eggs and freeze-its (frozen drinks), and was training to be a tailor.
In the elections, he stood as a city councillor. "There were warnings about my security," he says, "but I didn't take them seriously. I was such a small fish - why would they want to kill me?"
In Zimbabwean cities, the mayor is voted in by the other city councillors. The MDC had won 45 out of 46 seats in Harare. That's how hated Mugabe is here. Three days before the mayoral election, some of the councillors suggested Emmanuel put his name forward.
"I asked my wife, and she said, 'Why don't you go for it?' So, I agreed, though I didn't actively campaign." He even missed the caucus meeting, because he was in Epworth, a slum east of the city, collecting some MDC women who had been badly beaten. "When I came back from Epworth, they told me, 'Congratulations, you have been elected mayor!'
"I was happy, honestly. I phoned my wife and said, 'I'm now the mayor of Harare!' She said: 'I won't congratulate you on the phone, I'm coming to do it in person.'"
They met in town and drove out to Hatcliffe together, where he dropped her at home and went to park his pick-up truck. As he walked back, he got a call. "One of our guys, Jairos Karasa, our ward chairman, had been attacked by Mugabe's militia at their torture base in Hatcliffe - they had three there - and he was being carried in with a wheelbarrow. So I turned back, got my car, and went to collect him. I phoned my wife and told her I was taking Jairos to hospital, so I'd be late.
"When I found Jairos, he was in agony, he couldn't stand or sit, he had been beaten so badly. I took him to Avenues clinic. While I was there, I got a call from an MDC guy out in Hatcliffe saying my house was on fire. The first thing I said was: 'Where is my family? Are they safe?' But no one knew what had become of my wife and my little boy."
Emmanuel took refuge at the Namibian embassy. Then he alerted the African observer mission, and returned with them to his house.
"The fire was out by then, and a large crowd had gathered outside. No one knew where my family was. I went straight into our bedroom, but there were no burnt bodies in there. And then I knew they had been taken. We heard the approaching chanting of a big column of Mugabe's youth militia, so we left the area."
One of the youths who had been trying to guard his house told him what had happened. At 7pm three twin-cabs without licence plates arrived. A group of men ran out, some of them in army fatigues, armed with AK-47s; there were party youth too, brandishing machetes.
"No one knows exactly how many, my maid counted at least nine. They asked her where I was, and before she could even answer they smashed down the front and back doors. She heard three loud bangs and looked back to see the whole house on fire. Then she heard the doors of the twin-cabs slamming shut and heard them drive away, very fast.
"An MDC guard said they carried both my wife and young son out of the house, that my wife was struggling and screaming. It's one of those things I don't want to know about in any more detail."
Emmanuel got the election observers to drop him off in town, at his nephew's flat. But the Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO), Mugabe's secret police, were waiting for him there, "so we had to run for our lives and jump over wall after wall, until we lost them".
In the meantime, his brother had gone to the police station at Borrowdale, a northern suburb of Harare. "As soon as he arrived there, a twin-cab pulled over at the gate and dropped off my kid. My sister went over to the black twin-cab - there were two huge guys in the front with sunglasses, and in the back a policewoman. My sister said: 'Tell me, where is his mother?' But they drove off. Ashley said: 'Let's go and get Mummy, she's in the bush. The soldiers left her there.'"
"Later I asked my brother to go to Parirenyatwa Hospital, to see if there were any unidentified bodies there. And he found my wife in the morgue there, her body was swollen and battered."
Emmanuel went neither to her funeral nor to the burial. "Everyone said I had to stay in hiding as it was too dangerous for me to come out. I really wanted to see my wife before she was buried. But they all said no. The burial itself was very tense, because there were CIO agents mingling in with the mourners, looking for me.
"Later, Morgan, our president, phoned to see if I wanted to continue as mayor, if I felt I could manage, after what had happened. I said: 'My wife has died while we were fighting this election, so I must continue.'"
On Sunday morning, I meet Emmanuel out at Hatcliffe. He surveys the ruin of his house and inventories all he has lost. "My home is totally destroyed, and my business, everything I worked for all my life. My wife is dead. Now I live in a loaned council house, and I have no assistance from anyone to rebuild."
There in the small, wild garden that Emmanuel admits he hasn't set foot in since the attack, I find the burnt hulk of their sofa, and in the overgrown weeds of their front lawn, a charred Zimbabwe passport. I flip it open to see that it is Abigail's, her burnt photo smiles back at me, charred at the edges. Nearby are Ashley's tiny sneakers, and Abigail's flip-flops, both charred too. Emmanuel walks around the burnt walls. "I don't think I can ever live here again," he says.
His Nokia rings, and the screen lights up to show a photo of Abigail on their wedding day. Emmanuel holds the phone up to show me. "This is my lovely wife," he says simply. "And they killed her."
Ashley emerges from the pick-up parked outside. There is a sombre, unsmiling quality about him, as though his childishness has been extinguished early. "In the early days," says his dad, "Ashley used to say: 'We were taken by soldiers. We left Mummy there in the bush.' Over and over, he begged me, 'Let's go back and get her.' He would get a belt and tie it around his eyes, to blindfold himself, and he would say, 'This is what Mummy was like.' He thinks if he blindfolds himself, that maybe he can see her again."
We stay for a few days with husband-and-wife architects Richard and Penny Beattie in Borrowdale. Their friend Henry Chimbiri, a former high-school teacher, drops by, looking thinner than ever. Henry is the Zelig of Zimbabwean opposition politics, with elements of Forrest Gump and the Scarlet Pimpernel. He was active in the union movement, held various posts in the MDC, then stood as parliamentary candidate in Mount Darwin South. While trying to campaign, he was beaten and imprisoned. On polling day, as the candidates were waiting for the ballot count to begin, they heard the results being announced on the radio. Unsurprisingly Henry had lost.
As a freelance photographer and cameraman he has covered almost every significant MDC event and meeting. He has been arrested so many times he's lost count - more than 60. Put it this way, Alec Muchadehama, the human-rights lawyer who represents Henry, is on Penny's speed dial.
To drive around Harare with Henry is to get a conducted tour of the violent reality of Mugabe's rule. As we drive past State House, Henry points to the house opposite, another official government residence. A few years ago he was on the way to a rally for Tendai Biti, one of the MDC's leaders, when his truck was passed by Mugabe's cavalcade, and the people chanted and jeered. Shortly afterwards they were pulled over at gunpoint by soldiers and ordered in here. "They beat us so badly, using planks and sticks they had cut off from the pine trees, one man had to have his arm amputated afterwards," says Henry.
"I am one of the lucky ones," Henry admits. "I am still alive. But there are other people not so lucky, who don't have Penny to call a lawyer. If no one talks about you, then no one will come to your rescue. Many of these cases haven't been followed up, cases of people being tortured, people being killed. The little people have disappeared and no one follows up."
Driving home later, we are talking about revenge and justice for torture victims, as we have done before, when Henry says: "It happened to me too."
"What did?"
"Torture." He is speaking so softly I can barely hear him.
"How?" I ask, hesitantly.
He rubs his eyes with the backs of his hands, and lets out a decisive sigh.
"The time I was arrested together with Raymond Majongwe, the head of the teachers' union - they said that I was involved in mobilising teachers against the government.
"They handcuffed me and blindfolded me, and threw me into the back of a vehicle." They drove fast out of the city, he says and when they stopped he could smell pigs, so he knew this was some kind of farm. Then they threw him into an empty room and locked the door. After an hour, they removed his blindfold, and the interrogation began.
"I could hear Majongwe crying in the next room - I know his voice - and they were beating him there. They brought in a small blue enamel plate with a silver crochet hook on it, with a cotton reel with white thread. And they said: 'Tell us the truth. Or else we will work on you the whole night, and you will not be a man when we are finished.'
"So I tried to tell them what I knew about the strike, and that there were fliers floating round the school calling for the strike. They asked who distributed them - I didn't know. Then they blindfolded me again and removed my trousers down to my ankles. I started shivering, knowing that something terrible was going to happen. They called to someone. 'Skipper,' they called, 'get ready, we are waiting for you.'
"A person came in, this Skipper, and he got hold of my penis, and said: 'You tell us, there is a tape recorder, tell us.' I told him about Majongwe, and whatever I could think of. Then he said to me, 'You are a fuck-up!' - he said it in English - 'And we are going to teach you a lesson.' He held my penis very firmly, and he pushed the crochet hook inside, and then he twisted it. I screamed with the pain - he had hooked it inside my penis - I could feel the blood spurting down onto my thighs. I fell off the bench and he punched my mouth repeatedly, telling me to shut up. I tried to pretend I was having an epileptic fit. He called his colleagues to bring some water. They came in running, and poured water on me, and then they removed the blindfold and said: 'Now tell us.'
"I looked down at my penis and saw the crochet hook was still inside it. Blood was everywhere. I looked at them, and I was weeping. And Skipper said: 'Kusina amai akuendwe. Your mother is not here to listen. There is no one to help you.' Then he wrenched the hook out. Blood flowed even more. I screamed and screamed. They all left the room, and I was on my own, just looking at my groin. I tried to hold my penis, to stop the blood, but it just kept on flowing.
"They came back a few minutes later, blindfolded me again, pulled up my trousers, took me outside and threw me in a vehicle. I was covered in sweat and blood. They drove me for a few minutes and then removed my blindfold, removed the handcuffs, but tied my hands again with the blindfold, threw me out on the ground, and drove away." Henry is staring straight ahead, still speaking in a quiet monotone.
"My penis is still painful. Even now, it hurts when I try to have sex with my wife. There is a lump inside, I can feel it there. I am now disabled."
I have pulled over to the side of the road while he has been talking. And now we sit there in silence for a moment while I struggle to respond. This is beyond all the cliches of empathy. There seems something ghoulishly intimate and premeditated about this particular torture - the pseudo-surgical instrument: the silver hook, gleaming malevolent in its dish.
"Jesus, Henry. I'm so, so sorry. I had no idea." I pat his shoulder inadequately.
On my last day in Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe, Henry drives me to the airport in his battered pick-up truck. On the way, we stop off at the wild grounds of a Catholic convent on the south-western edge of the city. Among the boulders and trees, Gift Konjana sits in the "agreement circle", with eight other torture survivors, working out the rules of engagement by which they will share their stories. After this, they will each retreat to their own tree to reflect on their personal journeys, and pick out a totem for the exercise - it could be a pod, a seed, a twig, a handful of earth - that they will use to represent themselves. Then they will join the "trauma circle", where they will share their horror stories with one another. And finally, they will try to help one another wrestle to rebuild their shattered minds, their self-worth.
Konjana, 39, a handsome, muscular, former physical education teacher, is a facilitator for Tree of Life, a self-help organisation trying to assist Zimbabwe's legion of tortured to heal themselves, as no one else seems interested in helping them. He has been tortured himself. All the facilitators have - it's a job requirement.
"I was suicidal when I came to Tree of Life," he says. Then at the workshop, "I began to see that, like a tree that has been through droughts, fires, limb-cutting, I too could survive. Like a tree, which still gives fruit and shelter to birds and insects and man. I can also do that, I can fend for my family. I am still someone. A human being. There is still a reason for me to live. I can still be something in my society.
"And at the end," says Gift, "we have a ritual - we discard our totems - burn them or bury them or throw them over our shoulder without looking back. It's about starting anew."
The group is singing now, in harmony, a song with the chorus "You are just like God", and each time, they add the name of a circle member. Their voices rise, soft among the balancing boulders, as they sit in their circle of hard-back chairs, struggling to heal themselves, because no one else will.
Last Wednesday was the second anniversary of the signing of the treaty that brought about Zimbabwe's so-called "unity government" in which Robert Mugabe was supposed to share power with his opposition, while the country transitioned to democracy. But in that time, few of the agreement's required benchmarks for political reform have been achieved. The military remain highly partisan, as do the courts, and the police. The independent media remain hobbled. The feared intelligence service, the CIO, is still completely unregulated. And around the country, Mugabe's men frequently break up and intimidate the public consultations that are supposed to lead to a referendum on a new constitution, and internationally supervised elections.
And in those two years, not a single person has been brought to justice for any of the thousands and thousands of atrocities - the assaults and rapes, the abductions and torture and house burnings - committed by Mugabe's men during that terrible time in 2008, the time that the survivors called The Fear.
Extracted from The Fear: the Last Days of Robert Mugabe by Peter Godwin to be published by Picador 1 October