No one comes to the airport to bid me farewell. I check my backpack and a battered brown leather suitcase with the silver letters db on it. Someone at the Goodwill, where I bought it, must have reversed my initials. My business cards show that I’m Ben Dabney, PhD researcher at Wisconsin State University. That brown suitcase holds my collection of 3×5 cards. I’ve wrapped them in bundles of a hundred and stuffed each bundle inside a sock.
I carry my most prized possession on board: a Hermes Rocket portable typewriter in its grey metal case. Peterson says typewriters are expensive in Zimbabwe. My jacket pocket contains a list of 73 people to interview.
According to my ticket, my destination is Salisbury, Rhodesia. I know I’m going to Harare, the liberated name of the capital of the liberated nation of Zimbabwe. Rhodesia is dead.
My journey is about more than history. Mugabe’s gospel of reconciliation will help me reconcile the ruined relationships of my life.
Chapter 2
‘Which hotel, sir?’ the taxi driver asks as he closes the trunk of his gleaming yellow Datsun. The latch catches on the third try.
‘King George the Sixth,’ I reply.
‘The King George, sir,’ he answers as if he hasn’t heard correctly.
I sit in the back with the Hermes on my lap. Although a plastic piece is missing from the window crank, the silver handle shines like a place setting at a Christmas dinner. The driver picks up a piece of towelling and wipes it across the dashboard, chasing away imaginary dust. The steering wheel on the right has me disoriented. I look out the window for murals of heroic guerrilla fighters or billboards with Mugabe’s face. The yellowing facade of Harare International Airport bears no odes to the Chimurenga, as the Zimbabweans call their 13-year liberation war.
The driver pulls a lever and the meter ticks like an angry metronome.
‘Your car smells new,’ I tell him.
‘We are trying our level best, sir,’ he answers. ‘These days things are so tough.’
‘Why?’
‘We don’t know if the Europeans will keep coming,’ he responds. As we pull out of the parking lot, he puts on black-framed sunglasses. A strip of masking tape holds one of the sidepieces together.
‘Is this your first time in Zimbabwe, sir?’ he asks.
‘My first time outside the United States.’
‘You are from America, sir?’
‘Yes, Wisconsin. A very cold place in the Midwest.’
‘I think at school we once learned that they produce cheese in Wisconsin, sir.’
‘That’s right. Wisconsin is famous for cheese and the Green Bay Packers.’
Despite his politeness, I’m starting to worry about the driver. I don’t see many people or houses. I’ve asked no one about taxis or crime. I am at his mercy in this land of reconciliation.
‘Sir, what’s a Packer?’ he asks.
‘It’s a football team,’ I reply. ‘It’s a little hard to explain.’ A stadium full of freezing people with their faces painted yellow and green is hard to explain.
A station wagon passes us on the left. The back wheels kick up gravel as the vehicle leaves the tarred surface. A dozen people press against each other inside. A baby strapped to its mother’s back peers out the window.
‘These et’s,’ the driver says, ‘they are causing all the accidents these days. Always overtaking on the left. Where do they buy their driving licences?’
‘What’s an et?’ I ask.
‘An emergency taxi, sir. Those Peugeot 404s that keep running people off the road. They’re so dangerous.’ He speaks softly and the accent is new to me. Taxi drivers don’t have the elocution of prime ministers.
After passing many fields of thriving weeds, there are pedestrians and houses. Black people are walking everywhere – on dirt paths, along the side of the road, in front of shops. Most of the women wear black canvas tennis shoes or flip flops. Though I’m sweating from the January heat, many of the walkers wear knitted beanies. A white woman who looks like she’s in a hurry passes us in a blue Morris Minor. A German Shepherd barks from out her back window.
Farther along, two men ride black, balloon-tyre bicycles, like the one I got for my eighth birthday. Ahead of them, a man pushes a similar bike with a table and four wooden chairs tied to a rack over the back wheel. Smoke from a loosely rolled cigarette drifts from his mouth as he escorts his load.
‘Sir, this is where the Europeans live,’ the driver tells me. ‘It’s called Hatfield.’
‘The houses are huge,’ I reply. High walls and concrete fences surround the yards, leaving only the red rooftiles easily visible.
‘Not so big, sir. In Borrowdale or Chisipite they are far much bigger. Some are double storey.’
‘Doesn’t this city have smog?’ I ask. Harare’s blue sky evokes camping in northern Minnesota and not the overhang of a capital.
‘Iwe!’ the driver shouts as a car speeds across the road in front of him. The offender ran a stop sign. ‘Hauzive kudraiva! You don’t know how to drive, you!’ The driver parks in front of the hotel and the meter stops. He hands me a scrap of brown paper.
‘Here are my details, sir,’ he says. ‘Whenever you need a taxi, ask for Cosmas.’
The black metal letters on the building in front of me read ‘King George v Hotel’. One generation, apparently, has fallen away.
Before I can get my arms into the straps of the backpack, a tall man in a white Nehru jacket is standing in front of me. ‘Good morning, sir,’ he says, trying to ease the backpack out of my grip. ‘Let me help you.’ He smells like freshly laundered hospital linen.
I carry my typewriter as I follow him up some stairs and through a double wooden door. The lobby has well-vacuumed, ageing brown carpeting and dark veneer panelling. The brass light fixtures are missing most of their bulbs.
‘Good morning, sir,’ says a tall blonde woman at the desk.‘Do you have a booking?’
Mugabe’s picture hangs on the wall behind her. They’ve washed away his wrinkles. He’s wearing those dark-framed glasses from the days of the liberation war. He’s not smiling, but I like having him there.
I unzip seven pockets in my backpack before I find the well-folded piece of paper that confirms my booking and hand it to her.
‘Aaron,’ she says in a voice now half an octave higher, ‘take the gentleman’s bags to Room 124.’
‘Yes, madam,’ he replies, picking up the luggage he has just set down. I follow the slow-treading Aaron down a corridor of more brown carpet to my room.
The mattress sags and the nightstand drawer smells of mothballs. I’m coated with lack-of-sleep slime and ready for my first shower on the African continent. Instead, I collapse on the bed. I fidget to find a comfortable position. After a few minutes the springs relax and I’m asleep in Zimbabwe, exactly where I want to be.
Chapter 3
The King George lies on a busy road, opposite a small set of shops. As I come out the double doors, three young men wait for me at the bottom of the stairs.
‘Chess set, master?’ says one of them. ‘Very good price for you, my friend.’
‘Nice hippo, baas. Cheap, cheap.’
They’re hawking stone carvings, animals, knights, rooks and bishops. I keep moving. They follow with marketing ploys and titles of honour. I want to tell them I’m no one’s master, that there are no slaves in a free Zimbabwe. I keep quiet and they turn to other prey.