Mutoko Madness

Angus Shaw

Description

How do you behave in a poker game with a genocidal murderer? General Mohammed Siad Barre of Somalia had a revolver lying beside his overflowing ashtray on the baize card table. Dictators bully and cheat, not only at cards. Field Marshal General Idi Amin Dada of Uganda, fleeing his overthrow, abandoned his mansion on Kololo Hill. Amin's mansion showed us his madness, his vanity, his love of the cartoon characters Mickey Mouse, Goofy, Popeye and Olive Oil, and his hypochondria - the bathroom contained more medicine than a chemist's shop. On their trips to African summitry, Iraq's Saddam Hussein and Libya's Muammar Gaddafi, worldly yet fanatical, were an enigma. Yasser Arafat and King Hassan of Morocco were diminutive men, but charming in meetings face-to-face. Arafat was full of bonhomie as he tapped the pistol on his belt. Angus Shaw, an award-winning international journalist, was born in Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. In this brutally honest memoir, he tells of friendship, joy and pain, of lies, of moral decay, and of sex, drink and drugs, as he journeys through seven blood-steeped African wars, culminating in that pinnacle of madness and depravity, the genocide in Rwanda. His story is peopled by cruel dictators and warlords, fighters whose dreams of freedom went unconsummated, great statesmen like the icon of peace Nelson Mandela, the jet-setting Pope John Paul II making pilgrimages to Africa, and idols of movies and music who visited his beleaguered Paradise of Fools.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Memoir

Informations

• Publié par: Boundary Books
• Date de parution: 20 avril 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780797455238
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Mutoko Madness
Angus Shaw

Boundary Books
Published by Boundary Books
P.O. Box 785
Harare, Zimbabwe
E-mail: [e-mail]
2013 Angus Shaw
ISBN 978-0-7974-5493-4
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means - electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise - without express written permission of the copyright holder.
Cover design: Pamela Dhlamini
Cover photograph: Thomas Waas
Designed and typeset by TextPertise, Harare, Zimbabwe
Dedicated to the memory of
Brian Tetley, a fine story-teller,
and Tony Curtis, the Hollywood actor,
whose role in all of this was greater than he ever knew.
Contents
PROLOGUE
The Home for the Bewildered
ONE
Beginnings
Tea and sympathy
Forebodings
How to kill people
Bye bye, Benny
Crows requiem
The peace train
TWO
Back to the Swinging Sixties
THREE
The conscripts camp
Shuttle diplomacy
Council of war
The general s beer
War of the flea
Visiting hours
Rock and revolution
FOUR
The Place of Cold Water
FIVE
The charnel house
Read all about it
Mogadishu in October
Siad s poker school
War in the Ogaden
Learn all about it
The cruellest cut
SIX
The place of cold weather
True madness
Afterlife
Valium to the rescue
The Street of Shame
SEVEN
Good years
In the chair
The new information order
Curious years
Generations
Teddy s sojourn
Papal attraction
Colonel Mengistu
Kamuzu
EIGHT
Name-dropping
NINE
Death in Mogadishu
Yankee, go home
Hades
Au revoir, apartheid
Killing fields
Roots
TEN
Endgame
Game over
ELEVEN
McLeod s battle for redemption; well, almost
Knocking on Heaven s door
Question time
The Bakerloo line
Astran
TWELVE
Thinking-man s Joubert
EPILOGUE
The toll of bells
Talking to God
In memoriam, Brian Tetley
In memoriam, Tony Curtis
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
EXTRACTS AND QUOTATIONS
PROLOGUE
The Home for the Bewildered

The man in the next bed,
Thought he had a coffin
Growing out of his head.
He couldn t wear his hat,
What do you think of that?
I n the clinic, the Home for the Bewildered, the woman from Alcoholics Anonymous asked me if I had smuggled in anything to drink. AA was always ready to help. Don t be shy to come to our meetings, she said. Eric Clapton wasn t.
Clapton had had a concert down the road from our rehab. Wherever he went in the world, Clapton dropped in on the local AA chapter.
I m Eric, and I m an alcoholic, he said.
What do you do for living, Eric?
I m a musician.
Any money in it, Eric?
The recovering alcoholics had been too drunk in the culturally starved but well-liquored southern territories to follow the rise to wealth and stardom of the finest guitar player in the history of the instrument.
Now we re all great fans of Eric s and we re buying all his records when we can find them, said the woman from AA.
So they were getting their rush from Clapton now.
A witchdoctor came to the Home for the Bewildered to exorcise the man in the next bed. The wailing and throwing of bones went on for hours.
It didn t work. The man with a coffin growing out of his head still couldn t wear his hat.
He had blood-chilling nightmares. I tried to console him. I asked him if he had been smoking Mutoko Madness, our greatly efficacious wild marijuana plant, or the equally powerful Chinhoyi Chaos or Binga Bang, or Malawi Gold, the sought-after smuggled variety. He said he hadn t.
I am confused, too. I don t know who I am. I have demons growing out of my head, I said.
I can t see them, he said.
I can t see your coffin. It s not there. There s no coffin. It doesn t exist. That s the truth.
But the demons and the coffin certainly existed somewhere.
I placed the hat on the man s head. It was a perfect fit.
But the man said the hat was above him, on top of the coffin. He said he looked silly.
Well, you could go into opposition politics. That ll cure you.
Mr Mugabe s men would cut his head right off, coffin and all. Or they would beat him until the coffin was the last thing on his mind.
I was born here and I grew up here. I had been round the block a few times now, but at what a cost - to one s liver and one s sanity. I d seen seven African wars and fought in one of them. Some countries had two wars - insurgencies or conventional ones - in the span of a working life that put me in jail three times.
I had met the Pope on his African pilgrimages. Catholicism had lost ground to the revivalist and gospel churches - they had less of a problem with condoms, polygamy and sex outside marriage.
I d met Henry Kissinger and other world statesmen trying to negotiate peace in Africa. I d met dictators who had slaughtered innocents. They didn t have coffins growing out of their heads. They slept soundly at night.
I d met film stars and music stars on their visits, and I d spent time with all manner of people drawn to drink and drugs. The spliff of the great Hollywood actor Tony Curtis had to be top of the range. Eric Clapton stayed clean after rehab - perhaps it was easier with all that money to spend on other things. I had even met Sharon Stone before she famously opened her legs in Basic Instinct .
A different, bigger hat was tried.
It s no use. The coffin s still there, the man in the next bed in the Home for the Bewildered told me glumly.

How do you behave in a poker game with a genocidal murderer? General Mohammed Siad Barre of Somalia had a revolver lying beside his overflowing ashtray on the baize card table. Dictators bully and cheat, not only at cards.
Siad Barre s surrogates fought the biggest tank battle since World War II against Ethiopia in the Horn of Africa s Ogaden desert, but did anyone care? They were fighting over a vast dust bowl, like two bald men squabbling over a comb. A few natives breaking the toys the Americans and Russians gave them, said the British.
Field Marshal General Idi Amin Dada of Uganda, fleeing his overthrow, abandoned his mansion on Kololo Hill. What is intriguing about someone else s house is how it speaks of him. Amin s mansion showed us his madness, his vanity, his love of the cartoon characters Mickey Mouse, Goofy, Popeye and Olive Oil, and his hypochondria - the bathroom contained more medicine than a chemist s shop.
Ethiopian Colonel Mengistu insisted that people would unavoidably die during a pure Marxist revolution to wrest control of the means of production from the feudalists - you can t make an omelette without breaking eggs - but he denied suffocating Emperor Haile Selassie, the Lion of Judah and former Ethiopian Regent Rastafari, with his pillow. That was a lie of his enemies.
Our Mr Mugabe gave Mengistu asylum in Zimbabwe. He arrived on the very day that Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Ghandi died in the embrace of a Tamil suicide bomber. That was a much bigger news story.
On their trips to African summitry, Iraq s Saddam Hussein and Libya s Muammar Gaddafi, worldly yet fanatical, were an enigma. Yasser Arafat and King Hassan of Morocco were diminutive men, but charming in meetings face-to-face. Arafat was full of bonhomie as he tapped the pistol on his belt.
General Zia-ul-Haq of Pakistan wanted to discuss cricket, not his cruel military junta. An assassin s explosives hidden in a crate of mangoes was later to bring down his military plane, killing him and a coterie of senior officers.
Malawians filed in their tens of thousands past the open coffin of dictator Hastings Kamuzu Banda. We have come to make sure he is dead some said.
Revellers paraded the dismembered body of Samuel Doe through the streets of Monrovia in a wheelbarrow, but there was to be no vengeful closure for Amin. He lived to beyond eighty in exile in Saudi Arabia, watching cartoons.
Jean-B del Bokassa, the deposed ruler of the Central African Empire, given asylum by his French admirers and President Giscard d Estaing, departed his comfortable hideaway on the Riviera, not far from Baby Doc Duvalier s place, to go home and answer for his crimes. He couldn t stand France a moment longer. He yearned for Africa, he yearned for its smells, the smell of wood smoke, its sounds, and the cockerel s reveille. He was going home, even if it meant jail.
It did. The cockerel strutted in its coop outside the prison walls. Bokassa watched the dawn and dusk skies through the bars of the high window of his cell. The wood fires were lit in the yard. He was home at last.
Baby Doc eventually went back to Haiti.
Most of these despots are dead now, and rarely was it justice that brought them down.
In Rwanda, I saw children, inured to the killing, playing football with a human skull, a dry one not a fresh one. Kids across Africa made soccer balls with anything at hand - plastic bags tied into the shape of a ball - but a skull was something new to me.
Under an amnesty, Robert Mugabe had walked out of jail after ten years as a political prisoner. In Rhodesia, the forerunner of independent Zimbabwe, my liberal white friends and I had always ventured into the townships to score Mutoko Madness, listen to music, and drink in beerhalls, shebeens and hotels. Back then, we didn t have the same kind of strict segregation as our apartheid neighbours in South Africa.
Mugabe had become a political force in jail. We wanted to talk to him but he had gone to ground. I put the word out in the bars and soon enough it paid off. Mugabe was staying at his sister Sabina s house in Canaan, a warren of cramped Highfield township homes.
I knocked on the door and we talked on the front step. He was wearing his owlish spectacles, a white shirt, cotton slacks and sandals - flip-flops, we called them. He wouldn t speak to me alone, but said he would address a press conference if I arranged one. I have to say that I didn t warm to Mugabe then, but I had the distinct impression that here was a man of ambition I ought to keep