Inthenews.co.uk
By Alex Stevenson
22 July 2008
Lauren St John has first-hand experience of politically inspired violence in Zimbabwe. But she still loved living in the country, where awe at its natural beauty sat side by side with an all-pervasive fear of violence and retribution. Oppression still lingers today, as Ms St John knows only too well.
I found her in reflective mood. Ms St John has just finished a memoir of her experience growing up as the daughter of a white farmer during Rhodesia’s tumultuous years of independence. Her fond memories at the farm which became the title of her book began with a tragedy, however, when her 11-year-old classmate was shot dead by guerrillas. Bruce Campbell and his family were killed by a volley of machinegun fire bursting through the walls of the Rainbow’s End farmhouse which Ms St John’s family subsequently moved into. When she moved into the house where he had lived, red blood stains were still evident on the cupboard in her bedroom.
The Campbells were victims of racist violence against the perceived colonial oppressors, but Ms St John remembers never sensing any bad feeling in the house afterwards. “My mum asked Camilla [Campbell, the surviving mother] why there’d been no bad feeling… she said it’s because there’d been so much love in the house,” she explained.
That love transferred itself to her own experiences growing up at Rainbow’s End, a thousand-acre farm which was also part game reserve. From the age of 11 to 17 she enjoyed the stunning wildlife, Jenny the giraffe and herds of wildebeest and impala. But over this experience lay the constant threat of a repeat attack. Ms St John is hugely sympathetic to opposition supporters in Zimbabwe today as a result.
“It has been so gut-wrenching to see what has happened,” she says of the recent sham runoff vote held by Zanu-PF leader Robert Mugabe.
“It’s a heartbreaking thing and what’s disturbing is that the same people that were fighting for freedom and for justice and for equality are now the same people that are destroying, have no truck for quality and seem intent in reducing the country to famine.
“It’s hard to credit what would make people who once held those kind of idealistic views now resort to such depravity.”
Violence has been an everyday occurrence in Zimbabwe, even after the June 27th second round election. Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) supporters found themselves systematically targeted in an attempt, Ms St John alleges, at obliterating all opposition. “Operation Red Dye, it’s called,” she explained. Those who did not vote in the runoff have been targeted, many of them finished off for good.
Youth militia and Zanu-PF party officials have been confronting all those who abstained. Ms St John’s father, Errol, still works in agriculture in Zimbabwe and was himself approached by a war veteran. “He told them, legitimately thank God, that his authorised polling station was more than an hour’s journey away and he didn’t have the petrol to get to the polling station.” A lucky escape. The wife of one MDC supporter had her limbs removed before being roasted alive, she says.
MDC senator David Coltart told inthenews before the runoff vote that the persecution seen against MDC matched the horrors of the Gukuruhundi, the campaign of violence seen in 1983. The name comes from a Shona term with several definitions, along the lines of ‘the storm that sweeps away the chaff before the spring rains’ – an apt comparison, as Ms St John’s adolescence mixed wonder at the beauties of African natural life with the horrors of war. Her father returned to Zimbabwe to participate in the struggle. “Fear and elation” were her feelings on first arriving at Rainbow’s End. That dichotomy is just as valid for today’s Zimbabwe.
Ms St John says the country’s mood has changed rapidly since the aftermath of the original first-round vote. “People are so beaten and cowed,” she said. “People simply do not have the spirit or the strength to do anything.”
Agreement on talks between Mr Mugabe and MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai is a positive step forward, but Ms St John remains deeply concerned about the current situation in the country.
“The tragedy of Zimbabwe is not just the horror of what’s happening – we’re in completely uncharted economic territory,” she explained.
Hyperinflation is the problem. Last year prices rose by a ridiculous 100,000 per cent. Could things possibly get any worse? Apparently, yes. Ms St John says eight billion per cent is expected to be this year’s figure. A week ago a single egg cost Z$6 billion. Six potatoes cost Z£80 billion. “Somebody standing there with nothing – how do they begin to find that kind of money, even supposing with the empty supermarket shelves that they could find those items in the first place?”
“People are incredibly desperate, I can’t tell you. Given that a minimum of 80 per cent of people are out of a job, anyone that can get work by helping Zanu-PF probably will.”
Ms St John’s worries about the concerns of ordinary people are piercing. It is the ordinary people, with ordinary problems, who she believes often get left out beyond the headlines. What about diabetics? People with cancer? Even the dead are problematic as Zimbabwe’s mortuaries continue to fill.
“Where do they get the money to help themselves? To have a single filling costs Z$3 trillion. The country must be filled with people with just ordinary conditions.”
International condemnation is hardly helpful, she believes: “The rhetoric of the outside world is not going to be any help to somebody who has no idea where to get tonight’s food.”
The parallels continue. Optimists are hoping the MDC’s deal with Mr Mugabe over further talks could be the beginning of the end for the regime. Will those current supporters of Zanu-PF be forced to acknowledge their failed mindframe, in the same way Ms St John was forced to do over the white cause in the war of independence? Having thought she was a liberal, she was forced to confront a new truth where by definition she was a racist.
“How could I never have questioned the fact that blacks went to separate schools?” she asks. “My father loved the war and because of him I loved the war too. To me we were fighting communism.”
It is more probable, however, that the repression brought about by the “criminal cabal” running the country, as Gordon Brown puts it, will remain. Certainly there is no immediate solution to the economic crisis it faces. But even today it is that climate of fear that lingers.
“As long as I remember people have been so petrified to speak out. Even your trusted friend, you’re petrified to speak to. The walls literally have ears – it’s so terrifying.”
Lauren St John was speaking to Alex Stevenson. Rainbow’s End: An African Memoir, published by Penguin, is out now in paperback priced £8.99.