It’s a Small World

Political violence that still haunts me.

Shortly before Thanksgiving, 1987, my wife and I were in Boise, Idaho, where we were enjoying our first visit home from Africa since 1984. As I drove around town, I listened to a local radio station and I noticed that the local news announcers made no mention of the “Zionist Entity,” “Racist South Africa,” and “Imperialist America.” It was a pleasant change from Modern Socialist Zimbabwe’s jingoistic government-owned stations. I was half distracted until I heard “in other news, 16 missionaries, including children, were massacred by political dissidents near Figtree in western Zimbabwe.”

The report left me stunned. We lived near Figtree. Were these people I knew? I drove to the radio station and asked to read the report, which contained few details. It wasn’t till I bought a New York Times newspaper the next morning that I learned what happened.

Here’s an excerpt from the Christian Science Monitor:

“Shortly thereafter, late at night on Nov. 25, a 20-man unit of axe-wielding dissidents killed two Americans, one Briton, and 13 Zimbabweans, including four children and a six-week-old baby. Two children survived.”

“The grisly murders marked one of Zimbabwe's worst massacres since independence in 1980: More than 70 white farmers have been killed.”

I won’t recount the details of what happened. I can’t. A Google search for New Adam’s Farm Massacre will show links if a reader is interested.

I learned more when we returned to Zimbabwe before Christmas, when I talked to a local farmer who was part of a group of first responders who arrived shortly after massacre. More troubling than his words was the expression on his face as he told me the who and the how. That expression is one I’ve often noticed among people who have experienced unspeakable horrors. It is something I have experienced myself.

Life changed for us after the New Adam’s Farm massacre. The Zimbabwean government provided armed militia for security when we traveled to and from Bulawayo. We stopped traveling after dark. Even when we went on a picnic in the kopjes or near the reservoirs outside the security fence, the militia were with us. As soon as we drove out the security fence gate, we heard the metallic click of a magazine inserted into an AK47. And every time I drove home from Bulawayo, I thought about what I could do if I was ambushed along the for signs of land mines.

The trouble in western Zimbabwe, Matabeleland, intensified as Robert Mugabe sent his North Korean-trained 5th Brigade committed genocide among the Ndebele people, a genocide he called the “Gukurahundi,” “the early rain that washes away the chaff.” Sometimes at night, I heard ZAF Alouette helicopters flying nearby and sometimes, in the distance, I heard machine gun fire. I am still triggered by the sound of helicopters.

I didn’t realize how small the world was that morning as I drove down Fairview Avenue in Boise, Idaho, until I heard a news report about something that happened on the other side of the world that changed my life irrevocably.

Clarification: The news report said two children survived, but my friend who was one of the first responders at the scene said the only survivor was a twelve year old girl who was forced to witness all the murders, including her parents, for some vague belief by the killers that her eyewitness account would serve as a warning to Mugabe’s government.

Fog of war discrepancy, I suppose.

Apart from that, I have no way to reconcile the two accounts.