BULAWAYO, ZIMBABWE—I met Max Mkhandla in the sitting room of Radio Dialogue’s ninth floor offices in the southern city of Bulawayo. He wore an olive green jumpsuit and looked mildly contemptuous of all the soft couches. His fierce eyes squinted from between a shaved crown and a compact beard that jutted horizontally out from his chin and served to emphasize the thrust of his words. Max was to be my guide for a tour of the arid countryside surrounding Bulawayo. Here, in the province of Matebeleland, the effects of what Mugabe refers to as Zimbabwe’s “third chimurenga” — independence struggle — were said to be the most acute in the country. Max knew the region well, having covered it on foot as a teenage guerrilla during the second chimurenga of the 1970’s, when people still fought with guns. Then, the battle lines had been clear: black rebels versus the white soldiers of apartheid Rhodesia, as Zimbabwe was then known. Things are murkier now. Not only have dollar bills replaced bullets, but skin color is no longer a reliable determinant of friend and foe.
We planned the following day’s expedition as though plotting a military campaign. Max stroked his beard and brooded while I explained my desire to visit the rural communities of Matebeleland. To paraphrase myself, I wanted to see poverty at its worst.
He muttered into space for a few moments, then sat up abruptly, snapping his fingers and clapping his palm. He pointed forward. “Forty liters of fuel — that’s all we need,” he exclaimed. In a country where gasoline is solely available on the black market, and rarely in quantities greater than five liters, this was no small necessity. But Max assured me that if I had the money, he had the connections. “We leave early — early! Four am. We get there by dawn, you can take your footage, and” — snap, clap, point — “we’re back before the police even wake up.”
So eager was he to avoid road blocks that Max arrived twenty minutes ahead of schedule; I awoke to the sound of his weathered Mazda pick-up honking in the night. A light mist was falling from the sky, and by the time we were outside of Bulawayo it was raining hard enough to dim the headlights. “This is good weather!” Max said. The drought had broken.
Max had changed into a grey linen suit and, hunched over the creaking wheel, looked oddly dignified. He told me about the Zimbabwe Peace Initiative, a movement comprised of 2,000 disillusioned freedom fighters who didn’t like what the Zimbabwe they’d fought for had become. Max was their leader. “We are non-partisan,” he assured me. “We demand free and fair elections; and also, free distribution of Zimbabwe’s wealth.”
The president, Max felt, was guilty of hoarding.
I asked him if he wasn’t afraid of the government sending him to jail for subversion.
“They would not dare. I am very respected here. Very feared.”
In fact, he said, it was his own ZPI which acted as the local enforcement agency to ensure that none of the local politicians incited violence ahead of next year’s election.
“If anyone causes any trouble,” he told me, “we go to their house, and we beat them.”
His aspiration was to become Zimbabwe’s Minister of Defence.
In the meantime, he took great satisfaction in passing an unmanned roadblock. He clapped and pointed at the green military tent beside the road.
“Still sleeping!”
Even with his hands on the wheel Max had a tendency to veer unnecessarily. The asphalt narrowed to a single lane whose edges crumbled into gravel, and every so often Max would hammer a pothole at speed, shouting “bastard” each time. By now it was getting light, revealing a scrub-covered savannah dotted with conical huts and eucalyptus trees. The rain had subsided. People began to appear on the road, walking singly or, sometimes, piled into a donkey cart, moving off the pavement as we passed and left them inching towards their destinations.
It was three hours from Bulawayo by the time we pulled in to Nkayi. The highway had given way to a labyrinth of brown sandy paths winding through the bush, when suddenly an abandoned-looking town appeared. The few remaining inhabitants stood under tree canopies and the awnings of a derelict general store, sheltering from the rain that had come up again, more lightly than before.
Max took me to a fenced-off collection of small blue huts, which might have been the inspiration for the creators of The Smurfs. It was an orphanage. Some thirty children now lived here, bereft of their parents by AIDS. Max was their sole source of income.
“We used to take care of some disabled children as well,” Max said, “but the police kicked them out.” Apparently the government felt it was too close a reminder that it couldn’t take care of its own. Later we would drive another thirty kilometres to where a nine-year-old hunchback, a teenaged dwarf and a middle-aged victim of polio lived in total isolation, with three more orphans and a beautiful young nurse.
But first, I was told that one of the disabled children had come back to Nkayi. He had fallen sick, and needed what little help was available here. I was urged to visit him, and furthermore to take pictures, the impression being that I was here to solicit donor funding with the images my camera would bring to the world.
As we approached the small brick shack where the child convalesced, I heard a strangled moan, similar to a baby choking. And inside, there lay the most wretched human; a coarse blanket separated his stunted, emaciated body from the cement floor; another blanket covered him, which was pulled off to reveal the twisted bones of something resembling advanced cerebral palsy — no doctor had ever diagnosed him. He lay curled in the fetal position on the hard, damp floor, his eyes rolled back, moaning piteously; his skin was peeling in wide swathes from his knees and arms.
It was the very picture of misery — and my camera refused to take it. Moments before, I had snapped photos of the town as we entered; inside this excruciating shack, the internal mechanisms only whirred and clicked incongruously. The camera simply wouldn’t function. I turned it on and off, inspecting the settings while I pretended to snap photos for Max’s benefit; we spent an endless five minutes in that shack, and not once would the shutter open to capture the image before me.
We left the room, though its stench clung to my nostrils for a while longer, then said our goodbyes and drove away. I pulled my camera out. Relieved of the circumstances, it worked just fine.
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