Home / Contact / Stories, News & Reports / Photos
Worldwide Gay Life,
Sites and Insights Gay Zimbabwe News & Reports 2008 Also see: 1 African lesbian conference demands equal rights 2/08 2 In Zimbabwe Jail: A Reporter’s Ordeal 4/08 3 Homophobe Mugabe beaten in Zimbabwean election 5/08 4 Jailed in Zimbabwe: A Reporter’s Ordeal on His Imprisonment in Zimbabwe 5/08 5 The Position of Lesbian and Bisexual Women in Zimbabwe 6/08
27th February 2008 1 by PinkNews.co.uk staff writer Women from 14 African countries gathered in Namibia's capital Windhoek in August 2004 to develop the Coalition of African Lesbians. Lesbian organisations and a number of individual women from Sierra Leone, Ghana, Nigeria, Liberia, Rwanda, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana, South Africa, Mozambique and Namibia are members of the organisation. "Our main goal is that lesbian and homosexuality can no longer be seen as a criminal offence," the group's director and conference spokeswoman Fikile Vilakazi told Reuters. "You should not be arrested and charged for how you use your own body." The coalition lobbies for political, legal social, sexual, cultural and economic rights of African lesbians by engaging strategically with African and international structures and allies and to eradicate stigma and discrimination against lesbians. South Africa, one of the few countries on the continent where gay men and lesbians are allowed to marry and legally protected from discrimination, has been rocked by several murders of prominent lesbian activists. Sizakele Sigasa, 34, an activist for HIV/AIDS and LGBT rights, and Salome Masooa, 24, were discovered dead at field in Soweto, Johannesburg, on July 8th. They had both been shot and, it is suspected, raped. On 22nd July Thokozane Qwabe, 23, was found in a field in Ladysmith, KwaZulu-Natal with multiple head wounds. She was naked and it is thought she was also raped.
April 27, 2008 2 by Barry Bearak At one point, 21 policemen and detectives milled about my room at a small lodge in Harare, the capital. They knocked against one another as they ambled about, some kneeling, some on tiptoes, searching for clues in the cabinets and drawers. Men with rifles guarded the door. They immediately found my two United States passports, ample evidence of subterfuge. One contained work papers indicating I was a reporter; the other, the one with my visa, said I had entered the country as a tourist. “But you’re actually a journalist?” I was asked. “Yes,” I answered. “And you are not accredited in Zimbabwe?” “No, I’m not.” I had concerns well beyond myself, for certain Zimbabweans had been assisting me. Messages between us lived on in the phone. Whatever bad times lay ahead for me, I imagined things would undoubtedly be worse for these others, these friends. One of the cops gripped the phone. “You’re in terrible trouble,” he admonished. His tone was menacing but there was also an odd curl to his smile that I took to be an invitation. “Can you help me?” I whispered. His right thumb was nimbly working the keypad of the phone, but then it dropped to his side and he used it to massage his forefinger, sign language for the universal lubricant of the greased palm. In a few minutes, I negotiated safe passage to the bathroom and left him $100 in my shaving kit. Then we stood shoulder to shoulder. “What’s this?” he’d demand accusingly as we scrolled through the messages. Each time I’d nod yes, he’d hit delete. The crowded room was hot. Already, I felt jailed. I needed a breath of air, but when I moved toward the door, Detective Jasper Musademba, a well-built man in a jacket and tie, stopped me. He had been the most threatening of the police. “If you try to go outside...” he said sternly, stopping in midsentence. He made his hand into a gun and pulled the trigger. “You’ll kill me?” I asked. “Good,” he remarked wryly. “Then you’ve seen that movie.” An Electoral Limbo I’d come to Zimbabwe to cover the March 29 elections, momentous times in a contentious country. History was taking a gallant turn against long-shot odds. Robert Mugabe, the enduring political chameleon who’d led the nation since its liberation from Britain in 1980, seemed on the cliff edge of defeat. Day after day, Zimbabwe languished in a peculiar limbo. While the government refused to release the results of the presidential race, totals already had been posted at every polling station and there were solid reasons to think that Mr. Mugabe, the 84-year-old president, had suffered an unexpected comeuppance. This must have come as a shock to the “old man,” as Zimbabweans call him, not only since the election apparatus was so slanted in his favor but because he considered himself the father of his people. Knowledgeable sources told me the rebuke had at first left President Mugabe depressed and ready to concede. His power had flourished through methodical cruelty, including the murder of thousands of people in the dissident stronghold of Matabeleland. As he and cronies then acquired lavish mansions and enormous bank accounts, he thrust the nation into a calamitous economic meltdown, the main precipitator being a misbegotten takeover of productive farms from white landowners. Mr. Mugabe, who holds the genuine bona fides of a liberation hero, likes to present himself as one of freedom’s great champions. Maintaining a veneer of democracy is important to his image. Civic groups are permitted to meet so long as their messages fail to reach the masses. Courts can convene so long as Mr. Mugabe reserves the right to sweep aside inconvenient decisions. Elections can be held so long as political adversaries survive beatings and jailings and torture — and the results can be reliably rigged. On April 3, the day I was arrested, my means of observing these mechanisms oddly shifted from a vantage point outside to one within. My own freedom would depend on those remnant smidgens of civil liberty still granted the citizenry — and on the many brave people who carry on unbowed against relentless intimidation. The veneer of freedom Mr. Mugabe permits the press is applied with the thinnest of coats. Though some independent weeklies are allowed to publish, the state controls the only daily newspaper and television station. Most Western reporters are routinely denied entry. I was new to Africa. My wife, Celia Dugger, and I arrived in January as The New York Times’s co-bureau chiefs in Johannesburg. With elections coming in Zimbabwe, I soon made two trips to Harare, each time taking ritualistic precautions for safety. I left my credentials and laptop at home, entered the country as a tourist and interviewed people only behind closed doors. Each night, I destroyed my notes after e-mailing their contents to myself at an Internet cafe. I wrote my articles only upon returning to Johannesburg. But the presidential election presented new complications. Daily articles needed to be filed. I had to openly work the streets, then go back to a room with a reliable wireless link to transmit from my laptop. Over time, normally wary reporters began taking risks that mocked earlier prudence, announcing their names and affiliations at opposition news conferences. Necessity numbed my own caution. My articles required continuous updating for The Times’s Web site, so there I’d be in downtown Harare, a backpack slung over my shoulder, dictating quotes from my notebook and spelling names into the wavering connection of the mobile phone. Early on, I had asked that my byline be kept from the articles. But other reporters were less guarded about revealing themselves in print. I eventually followed suit. I was staying at York Lodge, a collection of eight cottages spread around a lovely expanse of shrubs and lawn. At age 58, after 33 years as a reporter, I’d like to think I have a nose for trouble, alert to danger like some frontier cavalry scout who tenses up at the sound of a suspicious birdcall. But the police had been at the lodge for 45 minutes before I knew a thing. I was filing another update for the Web site when I left the room for a breather about 4 p.m. Maria Phiri, a tall, wiry detective in hoop earrings and a red dress, called out, “Hey you!” I was stunned. Several men hurried my way. Their very first question had me reeling. “Who are you?” A Land of ‘No Law’ Two reporters were rounded up at York Lodge; two others were warned away before returning from the field. The other unfortunate was Stephen Bevan, 45, an able British freelancer who works for The Sunday Telegraph. We were taken in a pickup truck to the Harare Central Police Station, a large colonial-era complex colloquially known as Law and Order. The detectives’ evident glee at our capture was soon tempered by the arrival of a familiar and implacable foe, Beatrice Mtetwa, the nation’s top human rights lawyer. She is a striking woman with rectangular glasses and a neatly trimmed Afro. “There is no crime called ‘committing journalism,’ whether it is with accreditation or without,” she informed us privately in her exaggerated, lawyerly diction. This was actually news to us — and quite a relief. In fact, the law had been amended in January. It was now only illegal to falsely claim to be accredited, and neither Stephen nor I had done that. But Ms. Mtetwa also explained the sinister realities of a woebegone place: “Ultimately, there is no law in Zimbabwe. Your governments can’t apply pressure; the British and the Americans have negative influence here. The police will hold you as long as they want.” She was president of the nation’s law society. The police had beaten her with truncheons the year before. Her colleague, Alec Muchadehama, had recently spent time in the Harare Central cells that now loomed before us. “This is one of our worst places,” he told us gravely. “You’ll need to brace yourselves.” The human mind is actually good at such things. It doesn’t take much time to think of greatly admired people who have been wrongly locked up in the jails of the world. I already knew a dozen civic leaders in Zimbabwe with horrid tales of time in custody. Some were beaten, most often around their torsos and the soles of their feet. Some were simply held in the vile cells. I managed to call Celia with a borrowed phone. My wife somehow knows how to all at once be emotionally distraught and serenely levelheaded. She was already strategizing about how to free me; at the same time she was getting ready to assume the newspaper’s Zimbabwe coverage from Johannesburg. “Don’t worry, whatever the cells are like I can handle it,” I told her, attempting a tough guy’s bravado. I added a reporter’s inside joke. “Really, anything is better than having to file four stories a day for the Web site.” Not long after midnight, Detective Musademba escorted Stephen and me to the jail. Electricity no longer works in much of the decrepit complex. The hallways were entirely desolate and silent but for the squeaking of our shoes and intermittent drips from exposed pipes. At such an ominous time, my senses felt eerily deprived, except for smell. With every step, the odor of the urine-soaked lockup grew a bit stronger. The Cell Door Slams Shut The uniformed jailers wrote our names in a ledger and asked us to empty our pockets. I was flush with $4,000 cash, an amount meant to last weeks in a nation where credit cards were of little use. About $150 of that had been converted into the ludicrously inflated Zimbabwean currency; crammed in my pants were bundles of $10 million bills that piled up four inches high. The jailers patiently counted the sum before stashing it in a safe. There was never an attempt at a shakedown. Bribery was more on our minds than theirs. Stephen doled out $40 for the tenuous privilege of spending our initial hours on a wooden bench in the admittance area instead of the dreaded cells. Sleep was impossible. The bench was hard, the room cold and noisy. Near dawn, one of the bribed night crew, fearing his supervisors, rousted us from the bench and hastily herded us upstairs into an unlighted empty cage. “You can’t be found wearing your socks,” he warned urgently. “It’s not allowed. You can’t wear more than one shirt either. Hide these things.” The heavy bars then clanged shut; a padlock clicked. We couldn’t really observe the surroundings until morning, when the first sliver of sunlight pierced the one narrow window at the ceiling. The cell was about 7 feet wide and 15 feet deep. Three bare shelves of rough concrete extended a body’s length from both of the longer walls. Only the top slab left enough space for a person to sit upright, albeit with slouched shoulders. There was a circle of concrete in a corner to be used as a toilet. Behind it was a faucet. Stephen tried the knob. It did not work. The floor was filthy. The odor of human waste infected the air. More bothersome were the bugs. “Cockroaches the size of skateboards,” I quipped. This was hyperbole. The insects were mostly tiny and black, others short, white and wormy. We were soon sharing our clothes with them. About 7 a.m. the cells were emptied for “the count,” a routine taking of attendance in a large room farther upstairs. I clumsily hid my socks in my pants and buttoned one shirt to completely cover the other. There were about 150 inmates, many of them staring our way. We were older; we were the only whites. We joined them on one side of the open room. As names were called, prisoners were obliged to acknowledge their presence and shift to the opposite wall. I parroted some of the others, using the Shona word “ndiripo” when my turn came. The gesture drew some cheers and applause. It seemed an icebreaker, and before the session was over, we were being tutored in how to say “mangwanani,” or good morning. Prison movies had made me fear predation. But the inmates were instead a forlorn lot, a fair selection of Harare’s downtrodden, people who’d once had decent jobs and who’d now been reduced to scrounging and worse. Two of the more personable ones were car thieves. Only because their families were starving, they said. Two others, Donald and Lancelot, were accused of poaching after cutting the hindquarter off a deer that had been hit by a bus. We mingled easily, swapping stories and comparing bug bites. Most were in a worse fix than we were. None said they’d been beaten; they weren’t political types. But few had lawyers — and many were jailed without their families knowing. This had dismal implications. The jail provided prisoners no food. If no one knew you were there, no one knew to bring you something to eat. At breakfast, Stephen and I were allowed downstairs and pointed toward a well-stuffed wicker bag. The empathetic wife of the British ambassador had personally overseen preparation of our first meal. Sandwiches of bacon and eggs were triple-wrapped to hold their warmth. Tea, coffee, cocoa and sugar were packed in little bags to use with a thermos of hot water. There were juice boxes, soda cans, chocolate bars, hard candies and breath mints. Neither of us had much appetite, but we were enormously grateful. Thwarted as journalists, we now had renewed purpose. We could feed the hungry. A Deadline Looms It was a Friday, and Fridays held a fateful deadline. If we didn’t get bail, we’d be locked away all weekend. We were relieved to be sent back to Law and Order, where we again found Beatrice Mtetwa, our lawyer. The night before, I had wanly told her that the case against me seemed hopelessly open-and-shut. I had written articles, and anyone who Googled my name with “Zimbabwe” would have all the proof that was needed. She harrumphed at that, insisting that even a simple database search was beyond the technical expertise of the Harare police. I now realized she might be right. The Criminal Investigations Department had only a few computers, a shortage of chairs and no functioning toilet. Detectives who earlier had seemed so competently fearsome now reminded me of the beleaguered gumshoes on “Barney Miller.” Detective Musademba hunt-and-pecked on an antique typewriter, making triplicates with carbon paper. He’d sometimes shake away his boredom by breaking into song and pounding out the beat with the palms of his hands. Detective Inspector Rangwani, in charge of the investigation, was lamenting his need for a copy of the updated statutes. “May I use yours?” he asked our lawyer, who took the opportunity to hector and berate him. “This is a police state,” Ms. Mtetwa said brassily. “The law is only applied when it serves the perpetuation of the state. How does it feel, Inspector Rangwani, to be used this way by the state?” The browbeaten cop looked bedraggled, his head sagging from his neck like a wilted house plant. He replied meekly, “Madame, I agree with you and I have made a recommendation just as you have stated to drop the charges.” Suddenly, the nightmare seemed to be ending with a yielding snap of the finger. The inspector forwarded the matter to the attorney general’s office, and the appropriate official there advised the police to set us free. But there was then an odd delay, then an abrupt reversal, the pretense of a working justice system lost in a maddening flicker. “The law only applies when it serves the perpetuation of the state,” Ms. Mtetwa repeated. Two South African television technicians had been arrested the week before on similar charges. That morning, a magistrate found them not guilty. Yet instead of being released, they were rearrested. Someone in the government thought this a useful time to suppress the zeal of interfering foreign media. Clemens Madzingo, the police’s chief superintendent, himself gave us the news. He is a huge, pit bull of a man. He stood in the doorway with a triumphant grin. New charges were forthcoming, he said. Proof of our misdeeds would soon be excavated from files in our confiscated laptops. “Until then, you’ll be back in the cells.” The Hard-Liners Prevail Things had turned badly for us; more important, things were more hapless for Zimbabwe. The government now bizarrely announced a recount of its unannounced election results. The hard-liners had apparently steeled Mr. Mugabe to fight on. In a fine Orwellian touch, they had accused the opposition of cheating. They now appeared set to finagle an election victory. Did our incarceration somehow suit such purposes? That possibility set us into anxiety overdrive. Our wives, our editors, our embassies: they were all working hard to get us out. And while these welcome efforts supplied hope, they also left us vaguely embarrassed. If pressure could be applied on Mr. Mugabe, it ought to be for Zimbabwe’s sake, not ours. Jail, once so forbidding, now seemed merely dreary and depressing. How would we keep warm? Was there a way to get clean? When will this end? I was fortunate to have Stephen as a comrade. I once observed that while we were amply accompanied by every sort of insect, the jail lacked rodents. “Why would rats stay here?” he responded with his wonderful dry wit. “There’s no food. They’ve left the country the same as everyone else.” More than a quarter of Zimbabwe’s 13 million people have fled. The nation’s primary income is the cash sent home by this diaspora. Soon to follow are many inmates and guards from the jail. They wanted our phone numbers in Johannesburg — and pleaded with us not to forget them. We had befriended a few jailers, but those who allowed us favors would end their shift, followed by jailers more stern, some wielding lengths of rubber hose. Our socks went on, our socks came off. Sometimes we were left alone; sometimes we were stuffed in with many others. I delivered a parental lecture to a young cellmate who’d cut a man with a beer bottle in a bar fight. We continued to share our food. But even this enjoyable gesture of charity could trigger regret. During the two daily “counts,” we’d try to note who seemed hungriest: The acrobat? The peddler? The guy in the “69” T-shirt? At meals, we were permitted to select only a few inmates to join us downstairs. A short, emaciated man in a red jersey had meekly asked to be included. “Stay close to me when they come for us,” I told him. But then I forgot. “I was near you,” he later muttered disconsolately, “right near you.” A Blanket, Then a Fall Sleep escaped me. The concrete was too hard, my body too bony. I had never so craved a pad and blanket. The insects were most annoying at night. In my wakefulness, I’d pull my sleeves over my hands but then the stretched fabric exposed my midriff. One time, when able to wander the bleak corridors, I found what once had been a bathroom, with the remnants of sinks and showers. In one corner was a heap of blankets, stiff and moldy and fetid. I was tempted to take one but they were simply too disgusting. I wasn’t yet that cold or tired. Still, I had a fixation. Surely, a blanket was obtainable. We hadn’t paid any bribes since that first night but we decided to raise the subject of contraband blankets with a favorite jailer. “Yes, this can be organized,” he agreed. The next day was Sunday; stores would be closed. He’d bring them from home. That night, we awaited his footsteps. The jail possessed no flashlights. The guard used the tentative glow from a cellphone to find the right key. “I’m sorry but one blanket is very thin,” he quietly apologized. Stephen and I vied in self-sacrifice for the lesser covering, and I won with quicker hands. The top shelf in the cell was seven feet off the ground. I climbed up and smoothed the flimsy material over the concrete, but when I stepped down I lost my balance and grabbed a swatch of fabric instead of the sturdy ledge. I tumbled sideways, my hand grasping at empty air. I bounced off one concrete slab on the opposite side and then fell flat on my back. That was how I spent my fourth — and final — night in the Harare cells, in pain, slapping at bugs, still unable to sleep. The Bail Hearing Detective Musademba collected us in the morning for a bail hearing. The transport was an old pickup whose engine required a rolling start. He recruited Stephen to help push. I was excused because of my backache. The courthouse is called Rotten Row, after a nearby street. It’s a circular five-story structure built around four elaborate saucers that once fed into one another as a fountain. With the nation insolvent, there’s no money to maintain either ornamentations or courtrooms. Floors are filthy. Microphone stands have no mikes. The building’s clocks are each stymied at 7:10. Our hearing was pro forma; the magistrate released us each on bail of 300 million Zimbabwean dollars, about $7, and the police were ordered to surrender our seized passports into the custody of the bailiffs. The real showdown only came later, a hearing when Beatrice Mtetwa would argue we never should have been arrested at all. I sat fretfully in the “dock,” the enclosed rectangle reserved for the accused. Across the room in the witness box stood Superintendent Madzingo, the brawny police chief who’d pledged to scavenge through our incriminating laptops. What did he have? Nothing, it turned out. He testified that “critical new evidence” had caused the attorney general’s office to reverse its initial decision to let us go, a hasty fiction that was not even loitering in the rough vicinity of the truth. When asked to provide documentation, he tendered the printout of an article scooped off my desk at York Lodge, something I’d brought to Harare as background for a possible feature article about a political candidate. Ms. Mtetwa proceeded to hang up Mr. Madzingo like a side of beef. “Who is the author of that article?” she asked. The article wasn’t mine. It had been written by one of the all-time-greats of The New York Times, Anthony Lewis. “Can you tell us the date of that article?” It was published in 1989. Magistrate Gloria Takundwa first covered her giggles with fingers, then with the loose sleeve of her black robe. Freedom, and Uncertainty Beatrice Mtetwa said it was fortunate the case was before a magistrate. Most were independent, many were courageous. They were leftover gloss in Mr. Mugabe’s veneer of freedom. Justice was seldom found in higher courts. The magistrate announced her decision on April 16. While we had expected it to go our way, our minds were infused with our lawyer’s admonition: the law only matters when it serves the interest of the state. We suspected that the government intended to rearrest us, which turns out to be true. But whatever the intentions, we were better prepared. We fled quickly from Rotten Row, our car pirouetting through the streets until we were sure we weren’t followed. We waited in the parking lot of a pork production plant until word came that our passports had been recovered. Then, by prearrangement, we rendezvoused with a driver in a fully gassed car, avoiding the country’s airports and heading northwest through the winding roads of the Matuzviadonha Mountains, toward the Zambezi River and a small border crossing into Zambia. I had left the cells with a case of scabies, an infestation of microscopic mites that swelled my hands and wrists to nearly twice their size. But I am better now, back in Johannesburg, with Celia, with our sons, Max, 17, and Sam, 12. In the meantime, Zimbabwe is beset with paroxysms of violence. Thuggery, torture and murder are familiar implements in Robert Mugabe’s tool kit. Political opponents are being brutalized, as are everyday people whose voting defied him. The presidential election results are still unannounced.
May 2, 2008 3 by Tony Grew Robert Mugabe, now 84, has terrorised many groups in his country, not least gays and lesbians. As his country crumbled around him, gay people became an even more victimised group, and he claimed homosexuality was "un-African" and a "white man's disease." He told a cheering crowd of supporters in 2006 that gay marriages are a threat to civilisation and condemned churches that chose to bless same-sex relationships. That same year, as inflation rocketed and the standard of living of a nation once one of the richest in Africa fell to poverty levels, the government made it illegal for two people of the same sex to hug, hold hands or kiss. Campaigner Peter Tatchell of the gay rights group OutRage! attempted to perform a citizens arrest on Mr Mugabe in Brussels in 2001. In 2004, Mr Tatchell requested at Bow Streets Magistrates Court for an arrest warrant for the Zimbabwean president over allegations of brutality, homophobia, and repression of civil rights. Mr Tatchell documented accounts of political opponents being rounded up and imprisoned. However, the magistrate, Timothy Workman, ruled that Mr Mugabe was entitled to immunity as a head of state. For two people of the same sex to hold hands is against the law. He has previously described gay people as worse than "dogs and pigs", has warned against the dangers of homosexuality and threatened pro-gay clergy with prison sentences. Zimbabwe (non-gay background story) April 27, 2008 4 by Barry Bearak, New York Times And I’d been caught at it red-handed, my notes spread across my desk, my text messages readable on my cellphone, my stories preserved by Microsoft Word in an open laptop. At one point, 21 policemen and detectives milled about my room at a small lodge in Harare, the capital. They knocked against one another as they ambled about, some kneeling, some on tiptoes, searching for clues in the cabinets and drawers. Men with rifles guarded the door. They immediately found my two United States passports, ample evidence of subterfuge. One contained work papers indicating I was a reporter; the other, the one with my visa, said I had entered the country as a tourist. “But you’re actually a journalist?” I was asked. “Yes,” I answered. “And you are not accredited in Zimbabwe?” “No, I’m not.” I had concerns well beyond myself, for certain Zimbabweans had been assisting me. Messages between us lived on in the phone. Whatever bad times lay ahead for me, I imagined things would undoubtedly be worse for these others, these friends. One of the cops gripped the cellphone. “You’re in terrible trouble,” he admonished. His tone was menacing but there was also an odd curl to his smile that I took to be an invitation. “Can you help me?” I whispered. His right thumb was nimbly working the keypad of the phone, but then it dropped to his side and he used it to massage his forefinger, sign language for the universal lubricant of the greased palm. In a few minutes, I negotiated safe passage to the bathroom and left him $100 in my shaving kit. Then we stood shoulder to shoulder. “What’s this?” he’d demand accusingly as we scrolled through the messages. Each time I’d nod yes, he’d hit delete. The crowded room was hot. Already, I felt jailed. I needed a breath of air, but when I moved toward the door, Detective Jasper Musademba, a well-built man in a jacket and tie, stopped me. He had been the most threatening of the police. “If you try to go outside...” he said sternly, stopping in midsentence. He made his hand into a gun and pulled the trigger. “You’ll kill me?” I asked. “Good,” he remarked wryly. “Then you’ve seen that movie.” An Electoral Limbo I’d come to Zimbabwe to cover the March 29 elections, momentous times in a contentious country. History was taking a gallant turn against long-shot odds. Robert Mugabe, the enduring political chameleon who’d led the nation since its liberation from Britain in 1980, seemed on the cliff edge of defeat. Day after day, Zimbabwe languished in a peculiar limbo. While the government refused to release the results of the presidential race, totals already had been posted at every polling station and there were solid reasons to think that Mr. Mugabe, the 84-year-old president, had suffered an unexpected comeuppance. This must have come as a shock to the “old man,” as Zimbabweans call him, not only since the election apparatus was so slanted in his favor but because he considered himself the father of his people. Knowledgeable sources told me the rebuke had at first left President Mugabe depressed and ready to concede. His power had flourished through methodical cruelty, including the murder of thousands of people in the dissident stronghold of Matabeleland. As he and cronies then acquired lavish mansions and enormous bank accounts, he thrust the nation into a calamitous economic meltdown, the main precipitator being a misbegotten takeover of productive farms from white landowners. Mr. Mugabe, who holds the genuine bona fides of a liberation hero, likes to present himself as one of freedom’s great champions. Maintaining a veneer of democracy is important to his image. Civic groups are permitted to meet so long as their messages fail to reach the masses. Courts can convene so long as Mr. Mugabe reserves the right to sweep aside inconvenient decisions. Elections can be held so long as political adversaries survive beatings and jailings and torture — and the results can be reliably rigged. On April 3, the day I was arrested, my means of observing these mechanisms oddly shifted from a vantage point outside to one within. My own freedom would depend on those remnant smidgens of civil liberty still granted the citizenry — and on the many brave people who carry on unbowed against relentless intimidation. The veneer of freedom Mr. Mugabe permits the press is applied with the thinnest of coats. Though some independent weeklies are allowed to publish, the state controls the only daily newspaper and television station. Most Western reporters are routinely denied entry. I was new to Africa. My wife, Celia Dugger, and I arrived in January as The New York Times’s co-bureau chiefs in Johannesburg. With elections coming in Zimbabwe, I soon made two trips to Harare, each time taking ritualistic precautions for safety. I left my credentials and laptop at home, entered the country as a tourist and interviewed people only behind closed doors. Each night, I destroyed my notes after e-mailing their contents to myself at an Internet cafe. I wrote my articles only upon returning to Johannesburg. But the presidential election presented new complications. Daily articles needed to be filed. I had to openly work the streets, then go back to a room with a reliable wireless link to transmit from my laptop. Over time, normally wary reporters began taking risks that mocked earlier prudence, announcing their names and affiliations at opposition news conferences. Necessity numbed my own caution. My articles required continuous updating for The Times’s Web site, so there I’d be in downtown Harare, a backpack slung over my shoulder, dictating quotes from my notebook and spelling names into the wavering connection of the mobile phone. Early on, I had asked that my byline be kept from the articles. But other reporters were less guarded about revealing themselves in print. I eventually followed suit. I was staying at York Lodge, a collection of eight cottages spread around a lovely expanse of shrubs and lawn. At age 58, after 33 years as a reporter, I’d like to think I have a nose for trouble, alert to danger like some frontier cavalry scout who tenses up at the sound of a suspicious birdcall. But the police had been at the lodge for 45 minutes before I knew a thing. I was filing another update for the Web site when I left the room for a breather at about 4 p.m. Maria Phiri, a tall, wiry detective in hoop earrings and a red dress, called out, “Hey you!” Several men hurried my way. Their very first question had me reeling. “Who are you?” A Land of ‘No Law’ Two reporters were rounded up at York Lodge; two others were warned away before returning from the field. The other unfortunate was Stephen Bevan, 45, an able British freelancer who works for The Sunday Telegraph. We were taken in a pickup truck to the Harare Central Police Station, a large colonial-era complex colloquially known as Law and Order. The detectives’ “There is no crime called ‘committing journalism,’ whether it is with accreditation or without,” she informed us privately in her exaggerated, lawyerly diction. This was actually news to us — and quite a relief. In fact, the law had been amended in January. Her colleague, Alec Muchadehama, had recently spent time in the Harare Central cells that now loomed before us. “This is one of our worst places,” he told us gravely. “You’ll need to brace yourselves.” The human mind is actually good at such things. It doesn’t take much time to think of greatly admired people who have been wrongly locked up in the jails of the world. I already knew a dozen civic leaders in Zimbabwe with horrid tales of time in custody. Some were beaten, most often around their torsos and the soles of their feet. Some were simply held in the vile cells. I managed to call Celia with a borrowed phone. My wife somehow knows how to all at once be emotionally distraught and serenely levelheaded. She was already strategizing about how to free me; at the same time she was getting ready to assume the newspaper’s Zimbabwe coverage from Johannesburg. “Don’t worry, whatever the cells are like I can handle it,” I told her, attempting a tough guy’s bravado. I added a reporter’s inside joke. “Really, anything is better than having to file four stories a day for the Web site.” Not long after midnight, Detective Musademba escorted Stephen and me to the jail. Electricity no longer works in much of the decrepit complex. The hallways were entirely desolate and silent but for the squeaking of our shoes and intermittent drips from exposed pipes. At such an ominous time, my senses felt eerily deprived, except for smell. With every step, the odor of the urine-soaked lockup grew a bit stronger. The Cell Door Slams Shut The uniformed jailers wrote our names in a ledger and asked us to empty our pockets. I was flush with $4,000 cash, an amount meant to last weeks in a nation where credit cards were of little use. About $150 of that had been converted into the ludicrously inflated Zimbabwean currency; crammed in my pants were bundles of $10 million bills that piled up four inches high. The jailers patiently counted the sum before stashing it in a safe. There was never an attempt at a shakedown. Bribery was more on our minds than theirs. Stephen doled out $40 for the tenuous privilege of spending our initial hours on a wooden bench in the admittance area instead of the dreaded cells. Sleep was impossible. The bench was hard, the room cold and noisy. Near dawn, one of the bribed night crew, fearing his supervisors, rousted us from the bench and hastily herded us upstairs into an unlighted empty cage. “You can’t be found wearing your socks,” he warned urgently. “It’s not allowed. You can’t wear more than one shirt either. Hide these things.” The heavy bars then clanged shut; a padlock clicked. We couldn’t really observe the surroundings until morning, when the first sliver of sunlight pierced the one narrow window at the ceiling. The cell was about 7 feet wide and 15 feet deep. Three bare shelves of rough concrete extended a body’s length from both of the longer walls. Only the top slab left enough space for a person to sit upright, albeit with slouched shoulders. There was a circle of concrete in a corner to be used as a toilet. Behind it was a faucet. Stephen tried the knob. It did not work. The floor was filthy. The odor of human waste infected the air. More bothersome were the bugs. “Cockroaches the size of skateboards,” I quipped. This was hyperbole. The insects were mostly tiny and black, others short, white and wormy. We were soon sharing our clothes with them. At about 7 a.m. the cells were emptied for “the count,” a routine taking of attendance in a large room farther upstairs. I clumsily hid my socks in my pants and buttoned one shirt to completely cover the other. There were about 150 inmates, many of them staring our way. We were older; we were the only whites. We joined them on one side of the open room. As names were called, prisoners were obliged to acknowledge their presence and shift to the opposite wall. I parroted some of the others, using the Shona word “ndiripo” when my turn came. The gesture drew some cheers and applause. It seemed an icebreaker, and before the session was over, we were being tutored in how to say “mangwanani,” or good morning. Prison movies had made me fear predation. But the inmates were instead a forlorn lot, a fair selection of Harare’s downtrodden, people who’d once had decent jobs and who’d now been reduced to scrounging and worse. Two of the more personable ones were car thieves. Only because their families were starving, they said. Two others, Donald and Lancelot, were accused of poaching after cutting the hindquarter off a deer that had been hit by a bus. We mingled easily, swapping stories and comparing bug bites. Most were in a worse fix than we were. None said they’d been beaten; they weren’t political types. But few had lawyers — and many were jailed without their families knowing. This had dismal implications. A Deadline Looms It was a Friday, and Fridays held a fateful deadline. If we didn’t get bail, we’d be locked away all weekend. We were relieved to be sent back to Law and Order, where we again found Beatrice Mtetwa, our lawyer. The night before, I had wanly told her that the case against me seemed hopelessly open-and-shut. I had written articles, and anyone who Googled my name with “Zimbabwe” would have all the proof that was needed. She harrumphed at that, insisting that even a simple database search was beyond the technical expertise of the Harare police. I now realized she might be right. The Criminal Investigations Department had only a few computers, a shortage of chairs and no functioning toilet. Detectives who earlier had seemed so competently fearsome now reminded me of the beleaguered gumshoes on “Barney Miller.” Detective Musademba hunt-and-pecked on an antique typewriter, making triplicates with carbon paper. He’d sometimes shake away his boredom by breaking into song and pounding out the beat with the palms of his hands. Detective Inspector Rangwani, in charge of the investigation, was lamenting his need for a copy of the updated statutes. “May I use yours?” he asked our lawyer, who took the opportunity to hector and berate him. “This is a police state,” Ms. Mtetwa said brassily. “The law is only applied when it serves the perpetuation of the state. How does it feel, Inspector Rangwani, to be used this way by the state?” The browbeaten cop looked bedraggled, his head sagging from his neck like a wilted house plant. He replied meekly, “Madame, I agree with you and I have made a recommendation just as you have stated to drop the charges.” Suddenly, the nightmare seemed to be ending with a yielding snap of the finger. The inspector forwarded the matter to the attorney general’s office, and the appropriate official there advised the police to set us free. But there was then an odd delay, then an abrupt reversal, the pretense of a working justice system lost in a maddening flicker. “The law only applies when it serves the perpetuation of the state,” Ms. Mtetwa repeated. Two South African television technicians had been arrested the week before on similar charges. That morning, a magistrate found them not guilty. Yet instead of being released, they were rearrested. Someone in the government thought this a useful time to suppress the zeal of interfering foreign media. Clemens Madzingo, the police’s chief superintendent, himself gave us the news. He is a huge, pit bull of a man. He stood in the doorway with a triumphant grin. New charges were forthcoming, he said. Proof of our misdeeds would soon be excavated from files in our confiscated laptops. “Until then, you’ll be back in the cells.” The Hard-Liners Prevail Things had turned badly for us; more important, things were more hapless for Zimbabwe. The government now bizarrely announced a recount of its unannounced election results. The hard-liners had apparently steeled Mr. Mugabe to fight on. In a fine Orwellian touch, they had accused the opposition of cheating. They now appeared set to finagle an election victory. Did our incarceration somehow suit such purposes? That possibility set us into anxiety overdrive. Our wives, our editors, our embassies: they were all working hard to get us out. And while these welcome efforts supplied hope, they also left us vaguely embarrassed. If someone could apply pressure on Mr. Mugabe, it ought to be for Zimbabwe’s sake, not ours. Jail, once so forbidding, now seemed merely dreary and depressing. How would we keep warm? Was there a way to get clean? When will this end? I was fortunate to have Stephen as a comrade. I once observed that while we were amply accompanied by every sort of insect, the jail lacked rodents. “Why would rats stay here?” he responded with his wonderful dry wit. “There’s no food. They’ve left the country the same as everyone else.” More than a quarter of Zimbabwe’s 13 million people have fled. The nation’s primary income is the cash sent home by this diaspora. Soon to follow are many inmates and guards from the jail. They wanted our phone numbers in Johannesburg — and pleaded with us not to forget them. We had befriended a few jailers, but those who allowed us favors would end their shift, followed by jailers more stern, some wielding lengths of rubber hose. Our socks went on, our socks came off. Sometimes we were left alone; sometimes we were stuffed in with many others. I delivered a parental lecture to a young cellmate who’d cut a man with a beer bottle in a bar fight. We continued to share our food. But even this enjoyable gesture of charity could trigger regret. During the two daily “counts,” we’d try to note who seemed hungriest: The acrobat? The peddler? The guy in the “69” T-shirt? At meals, we were permitted to select only a few inmates to join us downstairs. A short, emaciated man in a red jersey had meekly asked to be included. “Stay close to me when they come for us,” I told him. But then I forgot. “I was near you,” he later muttered disconsolately, “right near you.” A Blanket, Then a Fall Sleep escaped me. The concrete was too hard, my body too bony. I had never so craved a pad and blanket. The insects were most annoying at night. In my wakefulness, I’d pull my sleeves over my hands but then the stretched fabric exposed my midriff. One time, when able to wander the bleak corridors, I found what once had been a bathroom, with the remnants of sinks and showers. In one corner was a heap of blankets, stiff and moldy and fetid. I was tempted to take one but they were simply too disgusting. I wasn’t yet that cold or tired. Still, I had a fixation. Surely, a blanket was obtainable. We hadn’t paid any bribes since that first night but we decided to raise the subject of contraband blankets with a favorite jailer. “Yes, this can be organized,” he agreed. The next day was Sunday; stores would be closed. He’d bring them from home. That night, we awaited his footsteps. The jail possessed no flashlights. The guard used the tentative glow from a cellphone to find the right key. “I’m sorry but one blanket is very thin,” he quietly apologized. Stephen and I vied in self-sacrifice for the lesser covering, and I won with quicker hands. The top shelf in the cell was seven feet off the ground. I climbed up and smoothed the flimsy material over the concrete, but when I stepped down I lost my balance and grabbed a swatch of fabric instead of the sturdy ledge. I tumbled sideways, my hand grasping at empty air. I bounced off one concrete slab on the opposite side and then fell flat on my back. That was how I spent my fourth — and final — night in the Harare cells, in pain, slapping at bugs, still unable to sleep. The Bail Hearing Detective Musademba collected us in the morning for a bail hearing. The transport was an old pickup whose engine required a rolling start. He recruited Stephen to help push. I was excused because of my backache. The courthouse is called Rotten Row, after a nearby street. It’s a circular five-story structure built around four elaborate saucers that once fed into one another as a fountain. With the nation insolvent, there’s no money to maintain either ornamentations or courtrooms. Floors are filthy. Microphone stands have no mikes. The building’s clocks are each stymied at 7:10. Our hearing was pro forma; the magistrate released us each on bail of 300 million Zimbabwean dollars, about $7, and the police were ordered to surrender our seized passports into the custody of the bailiffs. The real showdown only came later, a hearing when Beatrice Mtetwa would argue we never should have been arrested at all. I sat fretfully in the “dock,” the enclosed rectangle reserved for the accused. Across the room in the witness box stood Superintendent Madzingo, the brawny police chief who’d pledged to scavenge through our incriminating laptops. What did he have? Nothing, it turned out. He testified that “critical new evidence” had caused the attorney general’s office to reverse its initial decision to let us go, a hasty fiction that was not even loitering in the rough vicinity of the truth. When asked to provide documentation, he tendered the printout of an article scooped off my desk at York Lodge, something I’d brought to Harare as background for a possible feature article about a political candidate. Ms. Mtetwa proceeded to hang up Mr. Madzingo like a side of beef. “Who is the author of that article?” she asked. The article wasn’t mine. It had been written by one of the all-time-greats of The New York Times, Anthony Lewis. “Can you tell us the date of that article?” It was published in 1989. Magistrate Gloria Takundwa first covered her giggles with fingers, then with the loose sleeve of her black robe. Freedom, and Uncertainty Beatrice Mtetwa said it was fortunate the case was before a magistrate. Most were independent, many were courageous. They were leftover gloss in Mr. Mugabe’s veneer of freedom. Justice was seldom found in higher courts. The magistrate announced her decision on April 16. While we had expected it to go our way, our minds were infused with our lawyer’s admonition: the law only matters when it serves the interest of the state. We suspected that the government intended to rearrest us, which turns out to be true. But whatever the intentions, we were better prepared. We fled quickly from Rotten Row, our car pirouetting through the streets until we were sure we weren’t followed. We waited in the parking lot of a pork production plant until word came that our passports had been recovered. Then, by prearrangement, we rendezvoused with a driver in a fully gassed car, avoiding the country’s airports and heading northwest through the winding roads of the Matuzviadonha Mountains, toward the Zambezi River and a small border crossing into Zambia. I had left the cells with a case of scabies, an infestation of microscopic mites that swelled my hands and wrists to nearly twice their size. But I am better now, back in Johannesburg, with Celia, with our sons, Max, 17, and Sam, 12. In the meantime, Zimbabwe is beset with paroxysms of violence. Thuggery, torture and murder are familiar implements in Robert Mugabe’s tool kit. Political opponents are being brutalized, as are everyday people whose voting defied him.
January 2008 5 By Fadzai Muparutsa of Gays and Lesbians of Zimbabwe (GALZ) With freedom of movement, gay men are at an advantage when it comes to identifying and establishing relationships with other gay men and seeking support without the knowledge of or interference from their families and heterosexual friends. They have better access to conducive environments where their sexuality is affirmed and where they can take control over the processes of coming to terms with their sexuality and coming out. Women, on the other hand, are generally protected behind the chastity belt of the home and most are not at liberty to mix with whom they please and establish unsupervised relationships. This makes it more difficult for lesbian and bisexual women to meet with others like themselves whilst keeping their sexuality hidden from their families. Those who do come out are either extremely brave and highly determined or economically independent and belonging to those few families that are more tolerant of sexual difference. Gay men enjoy greater opportunities to work and be economically independent: a large number of women rely exclusively on their families to survive. Women who do generate income often have their money controlled by men. This impacts more seriously on a married lesbian or bisexual woman than on a married gay or bisexual man. With control of the purse strings, a gay man is in a better position to survive the ordeal of being outed to his family; should a lesbian woman's sexuality be discovered, she may lose her family, including her children, and be returned to her rural home. Understandably, lesbian and bisexual women are more visible in urban areas where they stand a better chance of enjoying greater economic independence and access to public space. In the rural areas lesbian and bisexual women remain firmly silenced. With no support network and no information, these women are far more likely to internalise their oppression and believe that they should conform to cultural norms of heterosexual marriage and the bearing of children. Although these women may outwardly concur with their position, they are still forced to accept a lifestyle, which runs entirely contrary to their emotional and psychological needs. Although spaces for lesbians and gay men remain limited, men are once again at an advantage. Whilst gay men are generally more accepting of lesbian and bisexual women as social equals and do not view women as sex objects, many still carry with them unconscious prejudices of heterosexual socialisation. For example, gay men can often hide their sexual relations with women, lesbian women may fall pregnant which has led to accusations of some women being 'false lesbians', traitors to the cause or women trying to cash in. Even in cases where gay men are known to have children, this is considered a lesser crime simply because children are seen as appendages to women and not to men. Bisexual men who self-identify as gay are accepted and tolerated; bisexual women who identify as lesbians are viewed with suspicion. Lesbian women with children are often turned into apologists for choices that they make concerning their rights to bear children. Discussions around sexual rights relating to the right to bodily integrity, the right to choose one's sexual identity, the right to all safe and consensual sexual activity with other adults (even if this seemingly conflicts with one's sexual identity) and the right to bear children are still very much in their infancy within the African lesbian and gay discourse. Another potential source of sanctuary for lesbian and bisexual women is the women's movement but, in Zimbabwe, this is deeply divided by conflicting ideologies. Many organisations are linked to government and have entrenched themselves in nationalist thinking around feudalism, patriarchy and hierarchy which are viewed by them as authenticating and reclaiming African culture. There exists no room within this framework for tolerating difference and it promotes the exclusion of those who are viewed as such. This invented African culture is highly oppressive to women and prevents them from discussing issues of paramount importance to them because, from a cultural perspective, such discussions are considered taboo. The lesbian or bisexual woman cannot hope to find solace here. For women in general, there are few acceptable places in society for them to fill. One space sanctioned by men is the church where men feel that women will be protected in loco parentis. The conservative wing of the women's movement is, therefore, also heavily influenced by fundamentalist Christian thinking which finds no room for the inclusion of lesbians. As a major strategy for the recognition of women's rights, the women's movement has adopted the majoritarian argument that women form over 50% of the population. In a heavily heterosexualised culture, lesbians are too small a minority to consider important and, in fact, sexual difference may even be perceived as a threat since many organisations fear to associate with those unpopular both with government and the Christian church. This is very different from the HIV and AIDS movement where homosexual men have gained greater acceptance through the acknowledgement that men have sex with men. It is generally agreed that lesbians are at least risk of contracting HIV if they remain within exclusively lesbian relationships. However, because of gross generalisations within the HIV and AIDS movement relating to lesbian sexual behaviours, African lesbians are placed on the lowest rung when it comes to risks associated with acquiring or transmitting the HIV virus. For lesbian women who are exclusively WSW, this is undoubtedly true, but most women in Africa do not enjoy that luxury of choice and certainly most who do want children do not have access to expensive technologies for artificial insemination. In Zimbabwe, where women do not enjoy control over their bodies or their sexuality and are forced into marriages and into having children, lesbians are put at the same high risk of contracting HIV as their heterosexual counterparts. Not only is this threat to their health entirely unnecessary, every sexual act performed upon them can be interpreted as rape. So, although great strides have been made by international HIV/AIDS service organizations through the adoption of the apolitical term MSM that includes non-gay-identified men and avoids politicised labels, lesbian women remain excluded in both heterosexual and homosexual interventions. Sex between men is criminalized in Zimbabwe, no law exists here which prohibits sexual relations between women: but, by the same token, protection of the rights of women to bodily integrity and ownership of their own sexuality is minimal. This means that, although richer lesbian women may be in a better position to buy their freedoms and independence, those who are poorer are still required to subjugate themselves to the control of men and poorer lesbian women, who tend to be less aware of their rights and whose position depends on the sanction of men, have fewer choices still. A woman is not thought of as owning a sexuality independent of the needs of men and the idea of sexual expression not involving penetration is entirely alien to the machismo mentality. For these reasons and others related to the general invisibility of lesbian and bisexual women in public spaces, the majority of Zimbabweans believe that it is illogical for lesbians to exist in African cultures. Those who profess to be lesbian are simply not believed. Women who claim to be independent of men, even for sex, arouse intense anger in those men with deep-seated insecurities about sexual rejection and the need to control. In more traditionally conservative circles, homosexuality may be thought of in terms of illness brought on by demon possession. The cure for a man is exorcism but often the cure for a woman is to subject her to enforced sexual relations with a man. |
