Some tourism

I'm reading "African Laughter," by Doris Lessing, an account by Lessing of a series of visits back to her homeland between '85 and '92 -- a very engaging read in these times, sometimes very sad in its early naivety about Mugabe, sometimes disturbingly accurate in its predictions, all of it uncannily recognizable in Zimbabwe 2008. Especially disturbing are the white Zimbabweans one meets, still nostalgic for colonial rule in the same way as Lessing's contemporaries.

I crawled inside a hollow baobab tree in the countryside the other day. I didn't notice any creepy crawlies inside the baobab tree -- just dust, dust, dust, dust, dust, inches thick. The pictures from inside the tree are generally long exposures, because the flash just bounced off of particles of dust -- I can show you when I get home. I have a great picture of Louise's 82-year-old grandmother crawling into the tree through all the dust, with admirable intrepidity. And yes, the baobab trees are from Le Petit Prince. I picked up a baobab fruit (a source of cream of tartar) as a souvenir -- it's oblong, as hard as a coconut, but with soft green velvet all over the outside. There was a rock ledge near the big baobab, where baboons use rocks to smash open the hard fruits and eat the seeds inside. We did find some hyena dung nearby, though -- white, dry, and full of hair like an owl pellet, because they eat bones and hair and greedily digest the rest.

At Kariba Dam there's a statue of a river god: when the dam was built and that portion of the valley flooded, the Tonga tribe (fishermen) were forcibly relocated to miserable, unfarmable areas where they were told to abandon their ways and learn to farm. With, as one would expect, terrible results. The holding wall built to contain the river while the main dam was built was tall enough to contain a 1000-year flood (the largest flood predicted for a 1000-year period, given the probabilities), but shortly after came a 1 million-year flood, overwhelming the holding wall and ruining the construction. The Tonga concluded that Nyami Nyami was angry at the attempt to contain him, and that the project was doomed -- but it went ahead, as these things do, and they remain displaced.

An anxiety dream

Now that the elections are over things seem a bit quieter here. There are still reprisals going on in the countryside, but the feeling of tension has begun to subside. The week of the elections I had a series of anxiety nightmares. That Thursday, I dreamt that I was on my way home from a ZANU-PF rally that I was forced to attend, but the streets were full of eerie, distended soldiers, ten feet tall and as thin as poles, blocks and blocks of them without faces marching in impeccable formation. I kept my ZANU-PF hat on and my recruitment literature prominently displayed, thus avoiding trouble until I got to the car I was driving. But after a few blocks of driving, a cataclysmic storm engulfed me, washing away the roads and trees, and cracking buildings right in half. I got out of the car to walk home, but the asphalt was floating away on whitewater rapids, tipping like sheets of ice as I jumped from floe to floe. Somehow I managed to get to the shopping center near Louise's house, but it had blown away, leaving just the iron framing.

So it was a pretty tense week, but now it's all over -- and not over. I don't feel anything like the same anxiety, but I know that reprisals are starting in the countryside, and there's still no political resolution in sight.

But I'm in a very good mood, generally, especially looking forward to this next week. Louise's cousin is getting married, and the wedding is at her house. Then we're all going on a family picnic to Lake Kariba on the Zambian border (did you hear? their president just died, repercussions for Zim yet to be seen), to stay on a house boat, camp in a game park, drink gins and tonics, and generally lead the high life. Also, on Saturday I'm going to the annual Fourth of July picnic at the American embassy (invitation only), where I hope to meet all sorts of eccentric expats, about whom I will send a full report. Dzimbabwe and David (two guys in the office) were very eager to come, because (and I quote) "The beer will be flowing, and there will be white chicks," so I've managed to get them on the list to get in. Should be much fun.

One day until the elections

One day until the elections and then -- who knows? Anything could happen now.

Yesterday Lou and I followed a truck full of riot police -- a huge, military green truck with a double-sided bench running down the middle, although only ten or so police in their blue helmets with batons and shields. We followed them to the South African embassy, where several hundred people whose rural homes had been burned by ZANU PF were protesting. As soon as the riot police showed up, though, the embassy opened its gates and let everyone in. That was how things stood for a while, so we went home, but this morning there were police roadblocks all along the road to the embassy, stopping and searching cars. We were waved through, and saw that the people were still sitting in the embassy parking lot in a standoff with the police. Who knows what will come of them? If the embassy kicks them out, the riot police will beat them and torture them; but they're all Zimbabwean citizens, so it's a bit tricky for the embassy to keep them indefinitely. Interesting times, as Tafadzwa is always saying.

I met Arnold Tsunga -- the founder of ZLHR -- yesterday. It was a big surprise to find him in the office, as he's been in exile in Zurich for years. Apparently he sneaks into Zimbabwe occasionally when big things are happening. I told him I hadn't expected to meet him; he asked if I was keeping my head down and staying off the radar; I said It's hard to tell with radar, but I hope I'm not on it -- I'd be more worried about myself if I were you; he laughed and said Personally, I'd be more worried about you, my friend. Then he gave me some chocolate from Switzerland.

Tongai got back from his week off last night. He said it was terrible -- that every night militias came to his house and forced him to go to ZANU PF rallies. Same story as always: they make speeches, chant slogans, publicly beat MDC supporters. They keep a list of who attends each night, and beat up anyone who misses. They also stop people and demand to know last night's slogan, things like "Total Independence, Total Control;" or "Robert Gabriel in the office, Tsvangirai at the gate;" or "Total Empowerment." Everyone in the countryside wears ZANU PF bandannas and t-shirts or carries ZANU PF flags or puts ZANU PF stickers on their cars (if they have them).

I had a conversation with one of our lawyers yesterday after work -- his father, who must be at least sixty or seventy years old was beaten up for the second time on Friday for supporting MDC. Now he's in hiding with his son, unable to go the hospital for fear of being arrested again.

Reassurances

I received an email from a friend worried about safety in Zim. Here's the story.


While I'm not technically working with the opposition, I am working with Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights, an extremely disfavored group of people at the moment. Some high profile human rights lawyers have been profiled, and it's been impossible for some time for less well-known lawyers to practice -- going to prisons to represent clients or to court houses to serve papers is too dangerous these days. But I feel pretty safe, because Harare remains a bubble of peace in the midst of the rural violence. The violence in the cities is targeted at leading, vocal critics of the government and at MDC leadership. In the townships and villages the story is different.

As for where I'm staying, it's quite secure. First of all because it's in a well-off low-density suburb with a lot of whites in it, and second of all because my girlfriend's parents, like most "middle class" people here, have walled off their land, topped the wall with an electric fence, and installed an electric gate.

The building where I work is a generic office building, and while ZLHR's address is well known (it has to be for them to practice law), there's no reason for anyone seeing me walk in to assume that that's where I'm headed. Also, I know one of the partners at a private law firm one floor up from me, who has kindly let me work from their library whenever I feel nervous. If it comes to it, he's offered to cover for me by saying that I'm interning for his firm over the summer -- which is what I tell just about everyone I meet.

So I feel pretty safe, but tense just about all the time. This is a tense time for everyone -- me least of all, in fact -- as the run off approaches on Friday, but with MDC out of the picture I think the worst is over for now. What happens after the election is impossible to know, but there's nothing to be done but wait and see, and make choices accordingly.

A question of doctrine

David just came in with Connie and another woman whose name I don't know. They all lined up in front of me, giggling fit to bust, and David said "Alex, we have a problem which we cannot settle amongst us alone, so we put it to you. This woman here is claiming that although she has lost her virginity, she has regained through the power of God her 'secondary virginity,' whatever that may be. What do you think of this?" I was rather stumped, so I said that I didn't think it was so unreasonable, and that what she'd gotten back was her chastity although technically not her virginity. Then I pointed out that there's an operation to restore the hymen for those who care enough. But she said she'd gotten that back too, at which point I said that I would have to take her word for it.

Weird.

Caving?

Some notes on the atrocities going on in the countryside. It seems strange, but I haven't felt any real threat from that kind of violence -- for years, Mugabe has been careful about where he places violence and whom he targets. All of the people who are suffering at the moment are either opposition leaders, or poor blacks from rural areas. There's been some violence in the cities, but that's concentrated in the townships (what they call the ghettos, which are miles from the center of town), or at opposition rallies (court orders allowing the rallies notwithstanding).

As for the MDC pulling out of the run-off, it's still too early to tell how that will play out -- we only just heard about it last night. But I'm very hopeful that it will mean some reduction in violence. I'm convinced that it's a good move -- even if Mugabe doesn't call off his dogs straight away, pulling out of the run-off has concentrated international attention on Zim in a whole new way, and seems to have dealt the coup de grace to Mugabe's credibility. Maybe more importantly, it's shifted huge pressure onto Thabo Mbeki to actually mediate some sort of solution instead of pursuing the "wait and see" approach. At least that's the common wisdom at this point, who knows what it's worth. But without any need to intimidate the electorate, and with the whole world suddenly watching, and arguably having won his way, I see little reason for Mugabe to keep waging de facto war. Hell, I could even see this turning into an exciting time, if they manage to come to some sort of power-sharing agreement. And if all that happens is a restoration of the status quo, so be it.

Adjusting

From an email to a friend:

First of all, the bad news. The rural areas here have degraded into total lawlessness -- genocide is no longer much of an exaggeration, according to the reports that trickle out. As Dzimbabwe (the international litigator here with whom I'm working) pointed out, Mugabe has never been known to bluff, so when he says that he won't give up power, he means it. The regime is desperate and has very little to lose -- they refuse to believe that MDC will actually offer them immunity from prosecution in exchange for a peaceful transition of power.

But there's good news, too. Harare is still a bubble, and MUST remain a bubble as long as the UN envoy and SADC election monitors are in town. Although the police have been shutting down the offices of various political groups, there haven't been any arrests that I know of (with the exception of a couple of very high-profile lawyers). I'm doing all that I can to keep myself safe -- I never drive here, as traffic stops can sometimes result in arbitrary arrests. I know one of the partners at a private law firm upstairs, so when things get hot I go up there and work from their library. I'm a few doors down from the back stairs in case of an emergency. Most importantly, I'm a white American -- the police are not inclined to make serious trouble for whites who don't pose a major threat, and even less inclined to make trouble for Americans. I know they gave the Ambassador trouble a while back, but he has been going out of his way to expose the people in power, and he has the clout to really do it. Unless the police actually come to our office, which is extremely unlikely, there's really no way at all that they would discover me. I'm only seen for a few seconds as I leave Louise's car every morning to come into the building, where I claim to be working for my friend at the private firm -- he'll vouch for me if it's necessary.

Also, it's important for you to know that I'm NOT participating in the crisis work that's going on here. I'm working on a law suit being filed in the African Commission for Human and Peoples' Rights on a ZANU-PF initiative from a few years back. I'm not going to courtrooms or prisons -- in fact, ZLHR, has pretty much stopped representing people itself as it's too dangerous, instead recruiting private attorneys who aren't known.

As for my own threshold, I have honestly lost track of it. I exceeded what I thought was my threshold about two months ago: first I thought that if the elections didn't go smoothly I wouldn't come; then that if there was a crisis I wouldn't come; then that if there was violence I wouldn't come; then that if political groups were targeted I wouldn't come. All that happened (and worse), but here I am. At this point, I feel totally at sea. The other night I had lunch with a couple who work with torture victims throughout the country, who have returned from forced exile despite the danger, and who continue to publish rigorous, damning reports about torture under the auspices of an officially banned organization. I had a long talk with the directors of Doctors for Human Rights, who document the injuries of victims of political violence, despite the fact that the police periodically purge the hospitals of MDC supporters. Two of my bosses have been arrested and beaten in years past, but they keep doing their thing. Hell, my fellow intern from the University of Zimbabwe got a visit from the Central Intelligence Organization the other day telling him to shut down his Catholic Peace and Justice Commission and that they'll be keeping a close eye on him, but he's holding another meeting tonight, with God only knows what results. So you see, if I'm looking for guidance as to when I should think about pulling out, I won't really find it here. Nobody will judge me or think less of me at all if I turn tail, but nobody's going to do it before me either, so I'm sort of on my own.

Now, these people really suffer. Not like the people who are being beaten and tortured in the countryside, but still -- it's very evident that they're struggling just to keep their heads above water, always just about to be overwhelmed with the things that they see. But when I see them at dinners and parties, it's also evident that they have a real capacity for joy. That's really where I begin to gain some sense of perspective on what's happening here. When I read about the courts or the police, which have become political weapons, I find myself unable to wrap my head around the fact that people continue arguing cases and filing motions and all that. But it seems to me that it's just another way of trying to turn things right-side up in this country. The fact is that the police here do absolutely anything they want, utterly unencumbered by any consequences. But maybe the constant pressure on them to act lawfully highlights their lawlessness. Anyway, life goes on.

It's easy enough to rationalize my being here. Seeing as how bad things can happen anytime -- car accidents, muggings, diseases, etc. -- there's no sense being timid. If I were a short story writer (and I hope sincerely that God is not one), I would have myself come home from Zimbabwe for fear of things to awful to contemplate, only to get run over by some stock-broker's Beamer while crossing Palmer Square to get to the ice-cream store.

Already I feel like I've been here forever, even though it's only been three and a half weeks. Frankly, I keep expecting someone to look up and ask me why I'm still here and what on earth I think I'm doing. But nobody is doing it -- they long ago lost any sense of cognitive dissonance, arguing cases in courts that have been hopelessly corrupted, or living the life of a middle class professional under the sword of Damocles. I guess everyone who could be scared away already has been, and the only people left are people with a bottomless capacity for coping. And people who have no choice but to cope, people without money or education or connections enough to run away.

The ZLHR lawyers have developed an incredibly dry sense of gallows humor. Tafadzwa is like the Dread Pirate Roberts -- every night when he goes home, he says "Good night everyone. I hope to find you all here when I come back. If I come back." Dzimbabwe was bragging that he's just one arrest away from landing a cushy job teaching human rights at a Western university. He's been antagonizing the Commissioner of Police -- an extremely dangerous thing to do -- to get back some papers they confiscated at the airport several weeks ago, and the letter he got back was the subject of much mirth in the office. David (the student leader being monitored by the CIO) spends all day cracking jokes about "Our dear Bob."

Hm. This email is neither short nor reassuring. I keep doing that -- starting a brief note to a friend and looking up 1,000 words later without having related much more than musings. I really will write later with some more day-to-day news -- honest!

They can go to hell

I'm at work. There was a big blackout yesterday, so I couldn't get onto the internets. They have load shedding here, so at designated hours the electricity goes out in different neighborhoods (although it's usually far longer than it's supposed to be), but yesterday the whole city was out.

Wow. Some people just have NO idea what's going on here -- a woman just called from the Harare Interflora office to say that the Dutch office of Amnesty International had put in an order for flowers to be sent to one Jenni Williams (the director of a women's rights group here) at Chikurubi Maximum Security Jail. She knew that the flowers would never arrive if she just sent them on, so could we please help?

Chikurubi is one of the most notorious prisons here, which must make it one of the most miserable prisons on earth. Inmates are starved, overworked, overcrowded, diseased, beaten, and generally forgotten. I gave the message to Dzimbabwe: he just laughed and said they should go to hell.

Closed for raids

Another email:

Home from work today, as I don't know if ZLHR is open or closed. Nobody's picking up the phone, and the Internet is down. Once again, a strange life -- I'm writing on the shady veranda looking at the flowers waving under the jacaranda tree watching the gardeners going about their business and Louise's grandmother tending to her nursery. But God only knows where the ZLHR lawyers are. I don't know if they went home yesterday to hide away or if they went to Harare Central Police Station to try and bail out all the human rights activists they arrested yesterday. I hope they didn't go to Harare Central -- it's a genuine house of horrors, that place, and by now they know the ZLHR lawyers well. If they went to the station, it's entirely likely that they were all rounded up and are in some concrete cell. Meanwhile, I'm safe and sound in the compound under a blue sky.

More and more stories are starting to trickle out of the countryside. Mbuya's brother Edward was telling us yesterday that every night his son is rounded up by ZANU-PF militiamen to attend nightly "re-education" rallies where they hold bonfires and make vicious lying speeches all night long. They register everyone in a book (a genuine Doomsday Book), and retaliate brutally against anyone who misses a night.

Hopefully monitors will start coming into the country over the next couple of weeks, so things should quiet down a little bit, at least in the townships (which is what they call the slum areas of the major cities). The rural areas are totally sealed off from foreigners, though, so they'll keep doing whatever they like out there.

Sorry for all the politics -- it's all anyone talks about these days. There's just no end of horror stories -- people who have spent a night or two in jail, "domestics" whose relatives are suffering in the countryside, news reports from exile newspapers, speculation about coalition talks, NGO news, so on, are all our conversations. What will actually happen after the election nobody thinks about.

Anyway, my life is very pleasant. I'm going to a dinner party tonight with some guy from Amnesty International, then to a party with Golden Boy. Might play squash this afternoon. Going to a play tomorrow night, then a lunch party on Sunday. Colonial life continues apace, crisis or no crisis. It's a nice tune we fiddle while Harare burns.

Raids and stuff

The police raided two other human rights group earlier today, so our office shut down in a hurry and forgot to tell the interns! David and I were working away on our respective projects until we noticed the eery silence. We left the room to find that all the offices were locked and most everyone had gone home except receptionists and one or two staffers, and there was a sign outside saying "Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights is CLOSED until further notice." Luckily, I have a connection through Louise's parents with a partner at a law firm in the same building, so I just nipped up the stairs and am writing from their rather elegant, if small, library. I expect I'll work from home tomorrow. It's a bit much, I think, shutting down the office for fear of raids by the ZRP's Law & Order division (notorious torturers) and simply forgetting to inform the interns. Anyway, I'm safe and sound.

I met some Lefto revolutionaries who work with torture victims. And the heads of Doctors for Human Rights. All on the verge of nervous breakdowns, as you would imagine -- terrible, terrible reports from the countryside. Amputations, burnings. A friend of Louise's mother was arrested on a routine traffic stop and held in a cell for a little while, for no reason at all. While she was in the cell, police kept coming in and raping two girls held on shop-lifting. They're absolutely lawless right now, killing and raping just because they can. Truly, dogs of war.


The parties here are pretty fun. Liquor is hard to come by, so they're not especially well lubricated. The party yesterday was full of NGO types. UN, WHO, UNICEF, ZADH, ZLHR, Amani Trust, Amnesty, IWSHF -- it's hard to keep track of the alphabet soup. Ranging from a rather bewildered German undergrad doing his internship at the worst possible time to die hard revolutionaries who have been in and out of exile and are compiling lists of people to destroy in the event of government change.

Then there are a lot of local people of our generation, some of whom are also NGO types, but some of whom are just floating. Sabibi is typical -- one week he's smuggling fuel across the border, the next week he's trying to sell hot tubs to businessmen. Has no idea what he'll do or how he'll do it, but has vague plans in place to leave the country. Everyone seems bound for Australia or the UK with no firm plans once they get there.

Disconnected

I think the lawyers at the office quite consciously keep me out of the loop. There's a palpable sense of crisis pretty much all the time, people rushing in and out, clients crowding the waiting room, phones ringing off the hook. Most conversations are conducted in Shona, so I usually have no idea what's happening. I know that at least some of the lawyers have started to bunker down in the office, putting off serving any papers or making any arguments in court until after the run-off, two weeks from Friday. It's an awful situation for them -- there are about ten human rights lawyers left in the country according to my boss, and hundreds of atrocities going on every day in the rural areas. But trying to bring suit at the moment is too dangerous to contemplate, so the lawyers busy themselves with documenting what they can and doing their best to protect colleagues who've garnered unwelcome attention from the government. Or, at least, that's my sense of what's going on, which is, again, sketchy.

It's hard to describe how strange everything feels right now. All day long I research government atrocities, continually discovering that some of them have been directed at my colleagues (rather a presumptuous word, I guess, but anyway people who work a few yards from me) -- harassment, beatings, death threats, you name it. And then I come back to the compound to eat family dinners, watch movies, and so on. It's like some bizarre parody of middle class working life. I guess a lot of things are bizarre parodies here. Louise and I had a rather heated discussion with her dad about the ins and outs of armed robbery here. It's hard to maintain any framework for judging crime here when the government is stealing land as fast as it can and torturing its own citizens, the police are corrupted beyond recognition, people are beginning to starve, prison conditions are unthinkable, and some miniscule portion of the population lives in compounds surrounded by electric fences.

The ZLHR office is just as strange. The other day I was having a funny, bantering conversation with David, the other intern (a student at the U of Zim) about Michael Jackson's merits and demerits, when Alec Muchadehama (the high-profile lawyer with the death threats) came sweeping in with some of our attorneys, who had clearly been up all night. They tossed David a set of car keys, told him to remove all the papers from a purple car on the corner and shred them, and then swept back out again.

My own work is very much unrelated to any of this, though. It's amazing to me how disconnected I feel from the things that I'm researching, even though they seem to be happening all around me. I guess that's just the nature of things here for the time being, as the government does its best to preserve a sense of normalcy in Harare while basically waging war in the countryside. Anyway, things should apparently quiet down shortly as observers start to trickle in from various treaty organizations in the region.

Hm, I seem to have made this sound like a war zone. Rest assured, it's not -- actually, it's eerily routine. I quietly read and write all day, joke around with people in the office (who admittedly have developed a powerful sense of gallows humor), see beautiful sights, meet people -- all that stuff. But at the same time, we all know that there's a crisis washing right past us, hitting everyone poor and black or vocal in dissent. It really is hard to describe.

Soldiers

No end of soldiers in the streets yesterday -- they're everywhere! You see them walking around in their fatigues or dress uniforms on every block, sometimes groups of two or three. A lot of people think that the military is basically already in control, and I must admit it looks that way. Enormous trucks carrying more soldiers roll by every once in a while, too. Some of them seem to be patrolling, but some of them seem to be headed somewhere carrying backpacks. God knows what's going to happen after the run-off, but hopefully someone will send monitors in and things will stay relatively quiet.

Plenty of police, too, many of them looking barely older than teenagers. They've put up roadblocks in a lot of areas, although they seem to wave most people through.

Random notes

The other day a group of policemen crossed the street in front of our cars. I was idly watching them go by, and I guess they didn't like it -- one of them glared at me and pulled a mock salute, and they all laughed.

The women here wear really old fashioned clothes, and like to coordinate their colors. Just now I saw three women go by in long skirts and blouses: one with a dark blue skirt and a light blue blouse, one with a dark green skirt and a light green blouse, and one with a dark peach skirt and a light peach blouse. Sometimes they wear little sweater vests, in which case skirt vest shirt are all coordinated that way. They look like walking swatches.

People here sell everything. You see groups of men walking right in traffic along busy roads, displaying their goods to stopped cars. Yesterday three men came up to our car at a stop light, selling mops and brooms, potted plants, potatoes, and framed samples of African fabric.

Also, everywhere I go shady looking men try to get me to change money at terrible, terrible rates -- US$1 to Z$100 million, even though the actual rate is approaching US$1 to Z$1 billion. When they want to change money, they hiss through their teeth and rub their fingers together as you walk by, or else they say things like "Excuse me! Excuse! I want to call you sir! I buy you some dollars!" Sometimes people spot me from a block away and come running through traffic to try and sell me random things, like watch batteries or toothpaste.

Just had a weird conversation with David in the office. He claims that he wants a white girlfriend, because he wants someone who can "point me in the direction of the ideal." He had to run to a meeting, so I didn't get to ask him about this at length, but as far as I can gather he wants a white girlfriend because Tony Blaire and Bill Clinton both stepped down when their terms finished without waging civil war.

I overhear some disturbing conversations here in the office. A small sample: just now some guy came in to talk to Dzimbabwe. As often happens, they were talking mostly in Shona, with a few English phrases tossed in here and there. So I hear "chatter chatter chatter chatter chatter chatter and now it is heard that the man is in political exile." Then, laughter all around.

First impressions

So here I am, safe and sound.

Louise -- my girlfriend's --  garden is straight out of the Old Testament. I don't recognize most of the plants in it, but there are giant ferns, climbing flowering vines, banana trees, palm trees, guava trees, avocado trees, and what is apparently the biggest jacaranda tree in all Harare. The fauna is just as impressive: yellow spiders five inches across that are harmless, tiny jumping spiders the size of a pinhead whose bite causes creeping necrosis (which they cut out without any anaesthetic, to avoid infecting the blood), African doves that hoot like owls. I've also seen the requisite giraffes and crocodiles and gazelles (no elephants so far).

Life here feels decidedly colonial. Louise assures me that she is solidly middle class in Zimbabwe, but it's not a middle class life that I recognize. We live on a plot of land big enough to hold the Garden of Eden, a two greenhouses, three brick patios, a veranda, four or five cars, a vegetable patch, and enough lawn to hold a soccer tournament. Not to mention the, uh, domestics' quarters. That is to say, where the, ahem, "domestics" live. To wit, a maid, a couple of gardeners, and their kids. All of which is enclosed by a high concrete wall with an electric gate.

I realize that it sounds like life as a British Viceroy, but it is not in fact an extraordinarily luxurious life so far. Or at least, comparatively speaking. You can drive for miles and miles around Harare and see nothing but the walled-in compounds of the "middle classes." A significant portion of the urban population really seems to live this way. And as far as having a lot of land goes, it's not just a luxury -- we really live on the vegetables from the vegetable patch and the eggs from the chickens. Then again, on the days when we sit on the veranda eating fresh passion fruit and drinking port, it's hard not to think of the "clubs" for empire-building whites in another era. Or what I had thought was another era. Still more reminiscent of those days was the restaurant I went to with Louise a few days ago, where a predominantly white crowd ate lunch on an expansive lawn behind a gate guarded by a man in khaki and a pith helmet.

It's important to remember, though, that Zimbabwean whites these days are difficult to pigeon-hole. There's no denying the colonial legacies, but Mugabe drove the vast majority of the whites away by authorizing his cronies to seize their land, killing, plundering, and raping in the process. The whites who remain -- about 25,000 of them out of some 300,000 -- are largely born and raised in Zimbabwe. Many of them work for aid organizations or schools. It's a very interesting setting.

Still, the shortages we here about in the states are not very much in evidence for people with some money. A couple of US dollars -- about Z$1.5 billion as of a week ago, so considerably more by now -- buys enough vegetables for a few days, and they're not hard to find. Some things are impossible to get, like wheat flour, cooking oil, and so on.

The money situation is insane. When I arrived, the exchange rate was six hundred million Zimbabwe dollars to one US. Someone in Louise's office exchanges money on the black market, so I gave her $30 to change -- she came back with a stack of bills six inches high, each one worth Z$50 million. We calculated that a single sheet of toilet paper costs at least Z$100,000, but that was a week ago, so the price has probably gone up considerably. The latest innovation is the "Agrobond," some sort of bearer's check in denominations of billions allegedly meant to make things easier for farmers. In reality, word is that the people in charge didn't want news of a billion dollar bill hitting the streets. People hand over huge piles of ten million dollar bills to get rid of them like spare change.

I've only been at work for a couple of days, but so far it's going well. They have me working on several papers at once, all transitional justice projects for various people. Of course, given the current state of affairs it looks like there will be neither transition nor justice in Zimbabwe in the foreseeable future, but it's interesting, educational work. I may have a chance to work on a report to the UN, which would be right up my alley, so I'm trying to sweet talk the right people. Part of my research will come from interviews we'll conduct, so at the moment I'm working on a set of interview questions for police who have been involved in violence or torture -- imagine a telephone survey with questions like "Have you ever raped anyone in custody?" It is, to say the least, surreal. But apparently they've got hold of a few officers willing to interview anonymously, so maybe it'll produce something valuable. Just to reassure you, I won't be conducting the police interviews myself -- not only am I working illegally, but most of them don't speak English. So don't worry about that.

So in short, the word for the week is "disorienting." I don't know where anything is, or what anything is, or who anyone is, or what to think of anything. But it's hugely fun so far, and very exciting.


On the flight over, we stopped in Dakar to refuel and pick up more passengers: tall, thin, black men in white robes and brimless hats; and a group of fat, red-faced, Afrikaans farmers with triple chins and beady eyes. Louise's father came to pick me up from the airport, where I arrived pretty late at night. He shushed me when I commented upon the five portraits of Robert Mugabe I saw on the way from the gate to the luggage carousel. The ride from the airport to Louise's house went through the industrial district of Harare. The street lights were out because of power cuts, but I could see groups of men sitting by the highway, or walking along with bundles on their heads. Andy said the area was known for smash and grabs, so he ran every red light and swerved around the huge potholes in the road like a maniac. The house is in a compound behind a high wall with an electric gate.


Went to the market today, my first trip outside the compound. The suburbs look almost rural, with trees everywhere and all the houses hidden behind concrete walls, but everywhere there are people along the road, or sitting selling miserably tiny piles of vegetables -- one man was sitting next to a stall with two tomatoes. We went to a fairly well stocked vegetable market, where a woman with an orange head wrap and an infant stared at me fixedly the whole time. Our pile of vegetables and squashes came to 1.4 billion Zimbabwe dollars, or about two American dollars. I can't keep track of the money -- people just say "three" or "four" and you don't know if they mean three hundred million or three billion. The banks won't let you withdraw more than five billion each day, which is woefully inadequate for most things. Louise and I had planned to go out to lunch, but her three billion wasn't enough to cover it, and the man at her office who trades currency on the black market can't get any until tomorrow.

We went looking at possible places to live, which meant going to a couple of different compounds. One, across the road, was owned by a man of eighty or ninety who took about fifteen minutes because he is "racked with arthritis." He told us that was about to go away to visit "a lady friend, a family lady friend of forty years standing, so don't snigger."