When Judith Todd was 10, her father Garfield Todd became prime minister of
Southern Rhodesia. “We then had a few short years in which we weren’t
ostracised,” she says. “When I first went to school and I was asked what my
father did, I would say, ‘He’s a New Zealander’, so as not to mention his
being a missionary, because missionaries were generally despised by whites
for being ‘kaffir-lovers’.”
As prime minister Todd planned to extend the franchise to blacks, which soon
made him hugely unpopular with white voters so Judith told classmates her
father was a missionary, not letting on that he was prime minister.
In 1958 Todd was ejected from power and ostracism began in earnest,
culminating with his being restricted to his farm by his successor, Ian
Smith, once Smith had decided to declare independence from Britain in 1965.
In 1972 both Todd and Judith were arrested for their continuing opposition
to white minority rule. Judith went on hunger strike, which was forcibly
broken, and was then allowed to leave for exile.
When Rhodesia became Zimbabwe and gained its independence in 1980 both Judith
and her father were feted as heroes of the liberation struggle. Gradually,
however, they both fell foul of Robert Mugabe and in 2002 Sir Garfield (he
had been knighted in 1986) was deprived of his citizenship and his right to
vote. Judith, though she had been born in Zimbabwe, was also deprived of her
citizenship and would have been stateless but for the generous grant of New
Zealand citizenship by that country’s prime minister, Helen Clark.
Judith’s new book, Through the Darkness: A Life in Zimbabwe, is a surprise to
many who expected it to be all about the traumas of the past few years in
Zimbabwe. Mercifully – for the story of the land invasions and subsequent
economic collapse has been told and retold elsewhere – she says little about
that. Instead the book deals largely with her life in the 1980s and 1990s as
she threw herself body and soul into the work of rebuilding the country
after its long civil war.
The effect is powerful because she knew the whole top political elite,
frequently interacted with them and is able to be detailed and accurate
about her dealings because she kept an extensive file of the memos and
letters. “The lucky thing was I had no computer, just an old manual
typewriter and I kept carbons of everything. In a way the book existed long
before I wrote it,” she says.
The book blows sky-high the usual picture of Zimbabwe as having been run more
or less reasonably by Mugabe, until his defeat in the constitutional
referendum of 2000 caused him to pull down the pillars of the temple. As
becomes all too clear, the worm was in the apple from the start, with the
new regime adopting a totali-tarian and often violent attitude towards
opposition.
Torture, corruption and disregard for the rule of law were the norm right away
– indeed, the real question is how on earth Lord Soames, Britain’s proconsul
in charge of the transition to majority rule, could have permitted the 1980
election.
Mugabe broke all the rules – his guerrillas roamed the villages when they
should have been at assembly camps, there was widespread intimidation and
open violence against many opposition candidates: one such candidate was
last seen pinned to the ground having red hot coals rammed down his throat.
What fooled many people was that once Mugabe had forcibly incorporated Joshua
Nkomo’s Zapu into his ruling Zanu-PF the country was so close to a one-party
state that Mugabe simply didn’t need to show the iron fist, but it was
always there. “As I try to show, there were a few people, like the guerrilla
veteran, Aaron Mutiti, who understood Mugabe from the start. Aaron said in
1980, ‘Family life, religious life and economic life as we know it will
progressively disappear if Mugabe gets to power’.
“But most people thought this was way over the top. That was the problem. The
opposition was naive about what Mugabe might do if challenged. They threw
themselves into elections, really believing that Mugabe would allow himself
to be voted out of office. Everyone underestimated the depth of his
ruthlessness.”
There are several oddities in this. So many of the politicians Judith helped
free from Smith’s clutches or, later, from Mugabe’s jails, soon joined the
government and became little Mugabes themselves.
How could Judith stay friendly with such people – and how to explain that the
patient, long-suffering Shona people have produced such a brutal and
ruthless regime? “None of those people are still friends of mine. I’ve lost
them all. It is a conundrum about the Shona producing such a regime – one
friend once asked me in horror, ‘How did all these monsters find one
another?’
“I spend a lot of time Googling Pol Pot, trying to understand. The opposition
leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, recently said that ‘Mugabe wants to push us all
into a hunter-gatherer subsistence mode of life and to scatter whole
communities in the countryside in search of food’. I think that’s about
right. Mugabe was friendly with Pol Pot, Ceausescu and Kim Il-sung while
Mengistu, the former Ethiopian dictator, is one of his advisers.
“All these men seem to have had the same mindset. But there’s something else
too. When Mugabe was ruthlessly imposing himself on his party in the
guerrilla camps in Mozam-bique, the worst punishment was to be put ‘in the
pits’. No one who’s suffered that is willing to describe it; it just stands
for unimaginable horror and cruelty. It’s something to do with water. But
quite a few of his lieutenants are men who suffered that and that experience
has made them so frightened of him that they obey him implicitly.”
Judith willingly agrees that her own 10-year marriage to banker Richard (now
Lord) Acton, heir to one of Britain’s most famous Roman Catholic peers,
pales beside the way she has been married to Zimbabwe. “I was always wanting
to live up to my parents. My father was so brave and principled. My mother
designed the whole national school system. And they were such fun. Zimbabwe
has been my full-time commitment ever since 1965.”
But hasn’t what happened fully justified Ian Smith and the white racists who
predicted that black rule would mean dictatorship, corruption and chaos?
“You have to say they called it right. But if I had my time all over again I
would oppose racism just as strongly as I did then.
“The funny thing is that some of those old Smithites are friendly to me now.
They’ve changed too – they don’t want to be racists any more. Smith and
Mugabe are symbiotic, though. The fear of something like Mugabe created
Smith and Smith’s ruthlessness called forth a Mugabe, who has in turn now
validated Smith. It goes round and round. But Smith did love the country
which was why he gave way rather than see it destroyed. Mugabe is destroying
it rather than give way.”
Now is the hardest time. “I remember the Queen saying to me how during all the
time Smith’s Rhodesia was out of the Commonwealth ‘we kept a candle in the
window for Rhodesia’ – and how, while apart-heid South Africa was also
estranged, she kept a candle in the window for South Africa too.
“But all those years we could always look forward to the ultimate triumph of
majority rule. Now there’s no such inevitable light at the end of the
tunnel. And at that time Zimbabwe seemed to have so many friends – the
Commonwealth, at the UN, other African countries and so on. Now the
Zimbabwean people seem to have no friends.”
As if in confirmation, Gordon Brown threw the preparations for the forthcoming
EU-African summit in Portugal into turmoil last week by announcing that he
would boycott the meeting if Mugabe was welcomed. In response, African
leaders closed ranks, saying they would not attend if Mugabe was barred.
This sort of standoff just seems to justify Todd’s pessimism about Zimbabwe’s
isolation. “The EU invites Mugabe to Portugal, the UN says nothing, no
country in Africa is willing to stand up to Mugabe and Zimbabwe isn’t even
on the agenda for the coming Commonwealth heads of government meeting in
Kampala.”
But surely the Mugabe nightmare will be over one day? “Yes, of course. But
right now it’s a genocide. What else can you call it when you pull down
people’s houses, deprive them of the means to look after themselves and make
it impossible for them to find food? What are you trying to do then except
commit mass murder?
“I had a dreadful dream last night. I was in Bulawayo with my parents and
great big garbage lorries were being filled up with the bodies of dead
children. Actually that is pretty much what is happening.”
Will she go back? “Yes, of course. As soon as I can” – though her book may
well have made it very unsafe for her to do that: her forthright criticism
of the regime is unlikely to go down well.
In the early 1980s, when she had done far less to provoke its wrath, she was
raped as a punishment.
Doesn’t she look forward, when the nightmare is over, to helping reconstruct
Zimbabwe from the ruins? “At times I don’t think I can do that again. I came
back in 1980 to help rebuild the country after a civil war. When Mugabe goes
the rebuilding will have to start from a much lower level. It’s so
discouraging. But I know that in the end I will.
“It is my country and the minute I see people I know I can help – and
Zimbabweans are such lovely people – there’ll really only be one answer,”
she says.
