When a Crocodile Eats the Sun by Peter Godwin Read Free Book Online Page B

“might be a bit of a reach.”
    This trip to Harare is a personal detour from another
National Geographic
assignment, this time on the last of the San, Africa’s aboriginal people. I have been camping with them for weeks out in the Kalahari Desert in Namibia and Botswana, and now I badly need a drink.
    The city is somnolent and soggy with a summer downpour in its third straight day, but Georgina is determined to take me out. We’re in her Renault Four. It’s the car I learned to drive in twenty-five years ago, and it was already old then. The gearshift comes straight out of the dashboard and looks like an umbrella handle. Once behind the wheel I see why she has asked me to drive; the Renault refuses to budge into second or third gear no matter what tactic I try, double declutching and fingertip gentleness or brute force. So we drive through rain-swept Harare alternating from an over-revved first gear to a lurching fourth. The internal fan has also given up, leaving the windshield permanently fogged.
    “I just had it serviced,” observes Georgina mildly, lighting up another Madison and throwing the scrunched red-and-white packet onto the backseat where it joins dozens like it.
    Jeremy is away, running a course training hotel waiters, and all she can find for us to do this wet Monday evening is an Irish-themed event in Avondale at a pub called the Phreckle and Phart. It is not an uplifting occasion. Inside, half a dozen white men and two white women, dressed all in green, are huddled in a corner resolved to get drunk. An up-tempo Irish jig executed on a lone fiddle buzzes out of the faulty overhead speakers.
    Georgina brings news of ex-President Banana, who is finally about to go on trial for sodomy. Prurient details have emerged from Jefta Dube: waltzing lessons to Kenny Rogers ballads, with the ex-President Banana holding him so close that he could “feel the stubble on his chin”; Banana’s erection digging into his belly; the former president lacing his Fanta with a sleeping potion and him then waking up facedown on the red carpet of the State House library, clad only in his shirt, with the beaming Banana looming over him announcing in a soft voice, “While you were sleeping, we have helped ourselves.”
    Dube has been telling how he pleaded with Banana to stop the abuse and how Banana refused, pronouncing, “We are the final court of appeal.” And how Banana worked his way through the State House Tornadoes, the soccer team of strapping young men he handpicked for their looks. Dube had appealed to his boss, the commissioner of police, and to the deputy prime minister, only to have them shrug and do nothing. Even Mugabe was informed, but instead of the news sparking his rabid homophobia, he too was strangely acquiescent. Until the day the taunt incited Dube to take fatal action.
    “How are things otherwise?” I ask Georgina. I’m feeling a bit out of touch since I moved to America.
    “It might still look just about OK from the outside, but I think we’ve been white-anted,” she says.
    White ants devour wood from the inside out. A wooden chair or bed may look fine from the outside, but when you sit on it, it will collapse into a heap of dust.
    “I’m thinking of leaving ZBC,” she continues. “There’s so much political interference now, I can’t bear reading the news anymore. It’s lies, total crap. I’m beginning to feel like such a hypocrite.”
    One of the white women at the Phreckle and Phart has wandered over to the dais and is tapping the karaoke mike with a long red fingernail. She has bottle green platform sandals, thick green eye shadow, and a big green cardboard shamrock pinned to her green tube top. It soon becomes apparent that she has misjudged the key of “Danny Boy.” Her voice breaks into a tragic squawk, and she quickly retreats to a lower octave.
    “Oh, God, this is just too depressing. Let’s go,” Georgina says.
    As we try to leave, a terrible commotion begins outside the