The Fear: Robert Mugabe and the Martyrdom of Zimbabwe by Peter Godwin

Rating: 3 & 1/2 Stars

In 1980, Robert Gabriel Karigamombe Mugabe (B. 1924) won Zimbabwe’s first democratic elections by a land-slide. His victory dismayed his mother who felt that her son “was not the kind of person to look after other people”.

The mother’s premonition proved true. The 1980 elections held in Zimbabwe were not just its first. Effectively, they were its last as well. Since then, Mugabe has established a single-party government and has attempted to crush all challenges to his authority through systematized state-sponsored terrorism and genocide.

Peter Godwin’s brilliant and unsettling account of Zimbabwe’s human-rights crisis starts with the author and his sister flying to Zimbabwe in 2008 to celebrate what they optimistically hope is the end of Mugabe’s reign of terror. Too late, they realize their confidence was misplaced. The opposition, led by Morgan Tsvangirai may have won the elections, but Mugabe still refuses to make his exit, and has unleashed a red tide of violence and retribution against the people of Zimbabwe. The book covers the two trips made by Godwin in 2008 and 2009 to his home country, and is a bleak report of a nation sinking into cataclysm, while the rest of the world watches helplessly by the side-lines. 

The son of post-W.W. II British immigrants, Godwin was born in Zimbabwe. He and his family were forced to flee after Mugabe painted the white race as the scapegoat for all the problems endured by the country. Godwin and his sister, Georgina, faced no small danger in returning. They had both been declared enemies of the state for their criticism of Mugabe’s regime. As they traverse the land, the Godwins catch up with old friends and acquaintances who keep them abreast of the current situation in Zimbabwe.

We see many portraits of courage in this book – from high-level opposition members, from grass-roots workers, from professionals, and from the average Zimbabwean. Inevitably, they all endure the dictator’s wrath for daring to ask for a people’s mandate. Make no mistake about it; their bravery comes at a very high price. Yet, most of the people Godwin speaks with not only ask to be identified by name, they name those who oppress and torture them as well. Words like ‘resilience’ seem woefully inadequate to describe the character of the Zimbabweans. 

Despite Godwin’s occasional essays at humor, this book is a harrowing read. It can't be otherwise. Any attempt to soften the conditions to make it more ‘reader-friendly’ would be a betrayal of the truth - the harsh reality of ground zero.

Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen

Rating: 3 & ½ Stars

I’ve always found it interesting to read colonial experiences of Europeans, and have wondered whether they can legitimately be categorized under the literature of the nation in question. In Isak Dinesen’s case, the doubt resolves itself. Out of Africa is very much about the land and the people, albeit as seen by an outsider. Dinesen’s writes with the eye of a painter, and the voice of a poet. The book is a hymn to the allure of Africa. She seems to have the awareness of living on borrowed beauty; in the paradoxical situation of one who may have come to conquer, but stays to be captivated.

Isak Dinesen was one of the pen names adopted by Baroness Karen von Blixen-Finecke (1885-1962). Born into an aristocratic family in Denmark, the young Dinesen received her education in art in Copenhagen, Paris, and Rome. Having married her second cousin, she moved with him to Africa in 1914 to start and manage a coffee plantation in Kenya. The marriage ended in divorce in 1925, but the Baron left Dinesen a couple of things to remember him by – the coffee farm in the Ngong Hills that she managed to keep going till 1931, and the dreaded syphilis that stayed with her for the rest of her life. This book is a memoir of the years between 1914 and 1931. There is very little mention of her personal woes. Rather, it is a collection of slightly dreamy reminiscences of her life in Kenya.

The author comes across as a woman who was both courageous and cultured, and a gracious, hospitable hostess who threw her home open to her friends, most but not all of them, fellow colonials. While recounting the management of the farm, she speaks in no particular chronological order of the animals, people and events that she encountered. She is a clear-eyed observer of characters and customs, but there is in her writing the ambivalence that is probably innate to the colonialist. On the one hand, she is deeply appreciative of everything around her, and ironically refers to the “prejudiced civilized person”. This is however, in marked contrast to the undercurrent of condescension that pervades the book.

Inadvertently or not, she lays bare the ugliness of colonialism, and the willful and malicious harm inflicted by the European race on the people and wildlife of Africa. Her descriptions of big game hunting and the clinical, cold assessment of Africans often seem lacking in human empathy. This in understandable because to those who ventured to ‘shoulder the white man’s burden’, the land and the inhabitants of Africa and Asia were resources to be exploited, and lesser races to be subjugated. Only under such a delusion could colonization be perpetuated. 

Still, we cannot be over-critical of Africa’s past, especially when there’s enough to regret in its present. In the final analysis, colonial literature is itself the best testament to the times to which it bore witness.

Strength in What Remains by Tracy Kidder

Rating: 3 & 1/2 Stars

It seems like there’s not a lot of good news coming out of Africa recently. It’s normal to get fatigued when then there’s nothing but a spate of misery gushing from the second largest continent in the world;  normal to shrug hopelessly about conditions that we cannot change; normal to turn our attention to more pressing concerns where we can make a difference. Is it ever normal to stop caring? That’s neither normal nor possible when we read Tracy Kidder’s, ‘Strength in What Remains’.

This is both a book about a man, Deogratias, and his country, Burundi.  Burundi is a tiny country just south of the equator, lying adjacent to Rwanda. Of course, most of us have heard of Rwanda, but the recent history of the two countries has been inextricably connected. Both countries have a mixed population of Hutu and Tutsi people, whose ethnic identities are so convoluted and obscure that they defy simple explanation. In Burundi, the minority Tutsi held the reins of power; in Rwanda it was the Hutu. In 1993, after Burundi’s newly elected Hutu President, Ndadaye, was assassinated, the country erupted into Civil War. Six months later, Rwanda started a government- sponsored genocide.

In 1994, Deogratias, who is identified here only by his first name, landed in New York, from Bujumbura in Burundi. Till very recently, he had been a top-ranking medical student, who dreamed of one day building a clinic for the people of his rural settlement – Butanza. That was before the Civil War sent him into a spiral of terror, when he spent months on the run, avoiding all human contact. To see other people meant probable death, or images of impossible, inhuman cruelty.

Deogratias spoke no English, only French and his native Kirundi; and had a meager amount of dollars when he landed in New York. This intelligent and idealistic young man was soon reduced to minimum wage, and virtual homelessness. Yet about twelve years later, not only was he again enrolled in medical school, he was an ardent volunteer for Partners in Health, an international organization committed to better health in the developing world, and in the process of continuing his interrupted dream for his people. His short term goal was to build a medical clinic in Kigutu, and for the long term - improved public health for the whole country.

“health in his country was dreadful…an average life expectancy of thirty-nine years; one in five deaths caused by waterborne diseases or lack of sanitation; severe malnutrition for 54 percent of children under five; for women, one-in-nine lifetime risk of dying during childbirth; and fewer than three hundred doctors to serve a population of about seven million. And most of these doctors practiced in the capital…”

Deo survived the holocaust that overtook his country; he survived under the grimmest conditions in Harlem, which appears no less a Third World than much of Africa; he resumed his dream of medical school. Yet none of this is extraordinary in itself. Survival and success are both mysterious gifts of an inscrutable Providence. What is remarkable is what he is doing with those gifts.