If we ever decide to give Africa an enema, this would be the place to start. "New Republic online"
HARARE DIARIST
Stranded
by Michael Grunwald
Post date: 01.16.03
Issue date: 01.27.03
My bad day in Zimbabwe, like so many bad days in Zimbabwe, began with a wait. This used to be a relatively normal country where people exchanged goods and services in relatively normal ways. Then President Robert Mugabe began trying to exert absolute power over the economy, and things got surreal. For example, Mugabe set absurdly low prices for 400-gram packages of cheddar cheese; so grocers started selling 200-gram hunks of cheddar at much higher prices. Similarly, bakers started selling "raisin bread" (with a few raisins) or "twisted bread" (with a few twists) to evade strict controls on normal bread prices. Mugabe's response has been to hire inspectors to arrest "profiteers" and enforce his because-I-said-so prices. So now there are drastic shortages and huge lines for staples. The joke here is that Zimbabweans have developed the highest IQs in the world: I queue for bread, I queue for sugar, I queue for gas.
I happened to be waiting for a Jeep. The driver finally arrived, two hours late, and charged twice the price we had agreed on the night before, but I wasn't going to complain about 40,000 Zim dollars for a day. Sure, according to Mugabe's official exchange rate, that works out to $700. But it's only about $25 in the real world. The fixed official exchange rate is as twisted as the bread; even the government-sanctioned exchange bureaus used to offer the free-falling black-market rates until Mugabe shut them all down. With insolence rarely tolerated around here, Zimbabwe's currency has continued to ignore the president's dictates and depreciate in value. The 500-Zim notes are now known as Ferraris--because they go so fast. One Brit told me she calls them "bifocals." Because they "buy fuck all."
So I handed over a small mountain of Ferraris and climbed into the Jeep with Tonderai Ndira, a laid-back young activist with the Movement for Democratic Change, the opposition party from which Mugabe stole last year's presidential election. "Tonda" was going to take me to Makonde, a few hours northwest of Harare, to show me how Mugabe's ZANU-PF party was using food as a political weapon. We were about to drive away when I noticed that our gas tank was only a quarter full. We might as well have driven away without tires. (But I'm getting ahead of my story.) With Mugabe running out of foreign currency, Zimbabwe is literally running out of gas. Drivers here routinely wait on eight-hour lines from mere rumors of fuel. Mugabe's latest solution is to confiscate the foreign currency earned by Zimbabwean manufacturers and exporters, who, unfortunately, no longer have much incentive to manufacture or export.
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It took another hour to track down a vehicle with a full tank, but finally a guy named Moses showed up in a clunker of a four-by-four to drive us to the promised land. We should've known he was bad news when he told us that he had been an election observer last year and that reports of ZANU-PF 's voter fraud and intimidation were wildly exaggerated. (Actually, we should've known Moses was bad news when he explained that September 11, 2001, was the result of "prophecy.") We drove for an hour up a paved road, past fertile farmland that used to form part of southern Africa's breadbasket. Now much of the land is lying fallow because Mugabe seized it from white farmers and then gave much of it to ZANU-PF cronies with no agricultural experience. The World Food Program is now scrambling to distribute emergency aid to more than half of the country's twelve million residents. We started to see these hungry people in their mud-hut villages after we turned up a bumpy dirt road toward Makonde--until 90 minutes later, when we heard a pop and a hiss. "Puncture," Moses explained without apology. "No spare."
Moses hitched a ride on the next passing truck to Chinhoyi, a city on the way back to Harare, to hunt for a tire. Tonda and I were left stranded in rural Zimbabwe. We found a village a half-mile up the road, so we got to see the country's misery up close. There were none of the dying babies with distended bellies that signify African famine on CNN, but most of the kids were way too small for their age, and hardly any of them went to school. Most spent their days panning for gold in a nearby river--notwithstanding Mugabe's recent ban on "unauthorized alluvial gold-mining." So did many of the adults because the drought has wiped out their crops. And, since this village was an opposition stronghold, no one was bringing in food from the outside; Mugabe maintains a strict monopoly on grain imports, which he uses to reward supporters and punish dissenters. "We have no food," said an old woman named Mayi Banda, who lives with ten relatives in a thatched hut about the size of an on-deck circle. "Please help us."
Hours passed. Moses had ditched us. The sun was setting. I envisioned a night snuggled up in Mrs. Banda's hut. Finally, we managed to flag down a raggedy pickup truck. We squeezed onto the flatbed--already occupied by a dozen of our closest friends--and it bounced us back toward Chinhoyi. Until it stopped bouncing. "Stalled," the driver explained. "Sorry." I appreciated the apology.
Luckily, by this time we were less than a mile from the paved road. By now it was dark--except for huge lightning bolts that pierced the blackness. We walked to the road, hitched a ride with another pickup, and enjoyed an uneventful seven or eight seconds before: Bam! Something big and black smashed into the windshield right in front of my face leaving an ugly dent. I hadn't thought our new driver spoke English, but he turned to me with a grin and helpfully explained: "Bat."
Bat-man left us in Chinhoyi, a ZANU-PF stronghold where Tonda has tallied two of his 14 arrests. He also has been beaten up five times by Mugabe's youth brigade, a bunch of thugs known as the Green Bombers for their janitor-style uniforms. So he whisked me through back alleys to a nondescript intersection where a crowd of people was waiting for something. The national pastime, I guess. Then an 18-wheeler pulled up, the crowd surged, I nearly broke my hand climbing into the cab, and once again I found myself sharing close and uncomfortable quarters with a dozen new friends. Including a large woman who was sitting on my feet and a young man sprawled out across the dashboard. (I have pictures.)
Our first half-hour in vehicle number 5 was uneventful enough, but then we reached a police roadblock where ZANU-PF officers armed with AK-47s--oh, never mind. The thing is, we made it back safely to Harare by midnight. I finished my reporting and left the country a few days later. And this is the inescapable point of any story about being stranded in Zimbabwe: Twelve million people are still stranded there.
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