‘We have spent so long being careful ... is this really change?’
Peta Thornycroft finds her fellow Zimbabweans caught between joy, hope and fear after the coup against Mugabe
Harare is blooming after the first summer rains ended a punishing heatwave, and the farmers say they are expecting a huge harvest of maize and tobacco. But it was a more urgent sense of relief and renewal that brought dozens of young men out to drink as the sun set over the Zimbabwean capital last night.
“It is excellent. We are celebrating. It was time for him to step down,” said Dick, a farmer, as he swilled beer at a street bar.
He did not need to name the man to whom he was referring.
Hours earlier, Robert Mugabe had been detained by the army in a military coup designed to prevent his wife, Grace, from succeeding him as president and to install Emmerson Mnangagwa, a long-time ally and former vice-president, in her stead.
But as I stepped out of Harare international airport, renamed after Mr Mugabe just last week, there was little sign that the man who defined the country for nearly four decades had finally fallen from power.
Minutes before we landed it was good to see splashes of green below – patches of maize and tobacco, with young green shoots in neat fields among the trees and the old farmhouses dotted around in the bright sunlight of early summer.
A familiar sight, in strange, unfamiliar times.
The immigration officials were thin, smart and welcoming, especially to people like me, returning residents on a Zimbabwean passport.
And outside the airport building, the lean, middle-aged taxi drivers bargained hard for our US dollars – the preferred currency in Zimbabwe and worth at least 70 per cent more than telephone cash, or swipe cards – phantom money that Zimbabweans use so efficiently.
The banks have no cash, at least for ordinary people.
“Don’t you know what happened? We are happy. We were waiting for this. I knew about two days ahead as my family is connected,” bragged one dreadlocked young man, one of the more sober of the crowd in the bar.
Dick the farmer and his friends, in a jubilant mood, first heard their world had changed and the military had taken over early in the morning.
Some switched on the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation, a backward propaganda machine for Zanu-pf for 37 years, to watch Gen Constantino Chiwenga, the head of the armed forces, announcing that Mr Mugabe’s rule was effectively at an end.
What is remarkable is that these young men are part of the elite who have benefited from the Mugabe era, and would once have supported him.
Dick is growing 20 hectares of tobacco and 80 hectares of maize on land taken from a white farmer in the controversial and often brutal land seizures over which Mr Mugabe presided in 2003. “We got the farm through the land reform and yes, we are making money,” he said.
His dreadlocked companion admitted that his grandfather was part of the military which is hated in some circles for its role in the murderous repression of the opposition after
independence in 1980. But not all of Mr Mugabe’s supporters have deserted him. Behind the young farmers, near the pub, some older men rattled off a range of insults against “foreign press”.
One paunchy man, who declined to be named, mumbled familiar abuse from the vocabulary of Mr Mugabe when he speaks about the British. However, even in this upmarket suburb, you do not have to look far to find the deep economic dysfunction that has brought the country nearly to its knees. Nearby, all the restaurants are closed, the last one going bust four months ago.
A 32-year-old security guard, who has four children, lives about 12 miles north of this suburb, Newlands, in one of the more depressing squatter areas, where water is hard to come by and where most people have no power. “I didn’t see any army. I don’t know anything. Nothing is different,” he said.
Others at the sharp end of Zimbabwe’s economic catastrophe were less restrained.
About eight miles south of Harare, in a poor and shabby high-density suburb, Hilary Gava, 56, a former policeman, now selling hardware on the streets, said: “This was long overdue, the army should have taken Mugabe, Grace, [Saviour] Kasukuwere, Jonathan Moyo [key figures loyal to Mrs Mugabe] to a firing squad for all the crimes and suffering they have caused to the people of Zimbabwe. Will we ever recover?”
For many ordinary Zimbabweans, the drama of high politics means nothing. But that could be dangerous. “It’s pretty calm. But Zimbabweans have been through so many crises in the past few decades they have learnt to get their heads down and get on with their lives come what may,” said Doug Coltart, a Harare-based human rights lawyer. “The crisis has been going on for so long that people are somewhat numb to it.
“But there is a sense people are excited, are happy to see some form of change. I think there is a level of naivety about that. People are so frustrated with the failure of politics over the past decade they are happy to see any change, even if it comes in the form of a military coup.” Zimbabwe has experienced a world changer. It has had a coup d’etat, but no one will say those words.
Even seeing the bright beauty of the gardens in the suburbs on the way from the airport, I felt a sense of dread. Will it be more of the same? Will people still fear to speak their minds?
We have lived so long being careful that it is too soon to know.
It still feels like the old Zimbabwe.