Where we have Hope: A Memoir of Zimbabwe
by Andrew Meldrum
(Jonathan Ball)
Andrew Meldrum’s May 2003 deportation ended his 23 years as a foreign correspondent in Zimbabwe. Yet, when he first arrived, in 1980, he had planned to stay a mere three years.
He had arrived in a country about to gain independence, filled with optimism and sympathy for prime minister-elect Robert Mugabe. He settled in Harare, established a network of friends, married someone who, like himself, had come out for a stint and stayed. For the 23 years Meldrum worked in Zimbabwe as a journalist, he reported on the country’s development and growth, marvelled at the mood of reconciliation, noted with unease the first signs of authoritarianism and hoped they would pass, but came to see that tyranny was on the increase and that the once-thriving nation was reaching a state of meltdown.
Fairly early on, though, he had found himself puzzled and troubled by Mugabe. After interviewing him the first time, he came away more confused: the prime minister (later president) was urbane, intelligent, eminently quotable — yet evasive about one-party rule. Soon afterwards the hostilities between Mugabe and Zapu leader Joshua Nkomo emerged, and rumours began to spread of repression in Nkomo’s southwestern stronghold. It would be years before the extent of these atrocities would be known.
Increasingly, the question of rule of law and basic civil liberties in Zimbabwe arose as the economy started to weaken. Questions were raised about corruption, sometimes corruption close to the president — in the person of his businessman brother, Leo Mugabe. And then there was the start of the land occupations.
One senses how Meldrum really wanted to see Zimbabwe as a success story, a beacon of good governance and human rights in Africa; yet he was also a journalist who sought to tell the truth to the best of his ability. Truth won out over optimism.
By the late 1990s, being a reporter in Zimbabwe was a dangerous job. Meldrum and his Zimbabwean colleagues in the independent media had frequent brushes with the law. Arrests, harassment, accusations of lying were laid against them. A number of Zimbabwean journalists were arrested and tortured. Foreign journalists were hounded and often deported.
When he reported an allegation of murder by youth militia in Britain’s Guardian newspaper (which turned out to have been false and for which he then wrote a retraction), Meldrum was arrested and charged in June 2002 under a new law, the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act, a singularly draconian piece of legislation. Meldrum was acquitted. Almost immediately the state moved to get Meldrum deported anyway, which it finally accomplished in May last year.
In Where We Have Hope, Meldrum gives us a fascinating and fast-moving memoir of his time in Zimbabwe, a time in which he observed the nation decline from democracy to virtual dictatorship. He is not naive, or some rightwing “When-we” sympathiser. Matters such as land reform and economic equality are real issues. The question that he raises is how to deal with these effectively — and here we could have done with much more analysis.
Despite the repression, we see a different Zimbabwe through Meldrum’s eyes, one of courageous journalists and lawyers, honest political analysts, brave MPs, an opposition movement that persisted under increasing repression, and ordinary people who somehow manage to survive. It is such people who offer the hope of Meldrum’s title.