Two Hangmen, One Scaffold Book I: Baiting the Hangman

Chapter 27

221 C Chapter 27 n the east, the rising sun was a nugget of molten gold, yokeyellow and mesmerising, that squirted Binga’s eyes. Looking forward to a romantic evening in Harare this day 30 November, he left PaGomo Heights in a taxi. It took him to the gate of the Kadoma Ranch Motel and Conference Centre, where he stood hitchhiking Harare-bound private traffic. Two cars stopped for him, but on seeing babies on board, he waved them away, baffling the motorists and the other occupants. After about fifteen minutes from the time the taxi left him, a lady-driven double cab pick-up stopped for him. The vehicle had one passenger in the front seat, and no children. The vehicle pulled away as he exchanged greetings with the driver and the passenger, a middle-aged lean man in an elegant navy-blue business suit. From the conversation of the two, he learnt they were a married couple and guessed the husband was probably a lawyer. Perhaps they were travelling to attend the High Court in Harare. They came to the rail-level crossing after Kadoma Police Camp. The warning signals were out of order and looked long vandalised. The car slowed down almost to a dead stop as the driver checked both sides of the tracks for railway traffic, and drove over. Beyond the rail level crossing, vast farmland on both sides of the highway began, but the arable land had gone fallow. This was the ripening time for most crops planted at the start of the season, but the fields that once flourished before the controversial agrarian reforms were overgrown and turning into wild forests. Thorns, spear grass and bitter apple shrubs grew in the fields spelling death to the economy. The expansive maize and wheat fields that flanked the Harare-Bulawayo highway for decades used to be the country’s commercial greenbelt. I 222 They drove past the cloth-dyeing plant at Martin Spur. No smoke belched from its chimneys. The firm reeled from electricity blackouts. The country’s power stations were underperforming due to a dearth of qualified and experienced engineers compounded by a critical scarcity of spare parts obtainable only in Germany and Britain, the country’s sworn enemies according to some politicians. As they were driving into Chegutu and parallel to the town’s David Whitehead Textiles plant to the west, three traffic police officers stopped them for over-speeding. The LCD on the police officer’s portable speed detector read sixty-four when sixty kilometres per hour was the lawful maximum on the stretch. The officers threatened to ticket them twenty dollars. The husband gave them two US dollars. The officers let them through. The couple’s conversation turned to the pathetic salaries the police officers and all the civil servants were getting. “I don’t begrudge the police officers for the two-dollar bribe,” the husband said. “It’s like alms giving.” Binga wondered if a genuine diamond-rich country would fail to reward its civil servants. Though Zimbabwe was auctioning rough diamonds worth millions of US dollars every month, its exorbitant stockpile of the precious mineral continued to grow. He believed someone was being heartless. “Our traffic police officers don’t look poor,” the wife said. “Their pendulous bellies betray an obvious fact: they’re overnourished and living outside their means.” “Most own expensive cell phones and fashionable cars.” The subject died when they stopped briefly for refreshments at a service station in the small farming town. Not long after, they drove past Rosebud Garden Centre & Restaurant, the commercial entity reminding Binga of how he met Matipa and the romance that followed. Recalling the two hundred dollars he gave Ivy for onward transmission to her, he missed his 223 wife. The amount would content her for many weeks. He was a responsible husband and father, he thought. Near Norton, they stopped at a tollgate. The woman paid one US dollar for passage. As they left the tollgate, which appeared like a refugee camp in its inception phase, the couple speculated the government was probably raising a lot of money through these gates; hence the sizeable security at the point. The husband said independent journalists brought it to the fore that the government misappropriated the revenue collected. The couple talked about the economic sanctions, concurring they had shattered the economy and devalued the local currency, a reality that glared...