Jim Steele was mad as hell. His blacks were messing with the farm, with the land, and the land was always personal. He'd been born on this farm. Like many Rhodesians, his parents had planted his umbilical cord in the ground so the boy's life and the good earth would nourish each other forever. This land held the blood of his dead brother, his soul mate, thirteen months younger, who at age 19 had reached into the truck for the shotgun and accidentally tripped its hammers, taking both barrels in the stomach and crying "My God!" as he fell. The blood of my brother in the ground. Though Steele called himself a Christian, the earth itself was his real religion; and his good and proper use of it, a form of worship. Any abuse of the earth or the fruit it brought forth was an assault on his person.
The barn boys had been abusing that fruit, killing it with their neglect. A line had to be drawn. You could not show heel to the African. He'd take advantage every time. Everybody knew that. Lord, all that work: Two months ago, he'd patched the cavernous tobacco barn until it was airtight. A month ago, he'd begun harvesting the leaves and hanging them in the barn to dry. Now it was a matter of carefully controlling the humidity and temperature in the barn, keeping the iron furnace stoked day and night. And his blacks had gone lazy on him.
Every day at dawn, Steele drove down to the barn to check the leaves. And every day for the past two weeks, he'd walked into a cold barn.
"It's cold in this barn," he said on the first day.
"No, Oom Jim," said the barn boy on duty, using the Afrikaans word for "uncle." "Check the thermometer."
The thermometer read as it should have, 38 degrees Celsius, but Steele knew the boy had been sleeping on the job, letting the fire die—had heard the boss man's truck and stuck the thermometer atop the furnace for a few seconds before hanging it back among the leaves.
Steele looked at his barn boy. The boy looked back.
"Yes, Oom Jim?"
"Stoke the fire," he said, and left.
For two weeks the charade continued, until the morning that it didn't. Steele woke angry. It was still dark when he got into the truck, but he could see his own breath in the glow of the dashboard, and this made him angrier. As he drove the rutted dirt road to the barn, the head of his watch, worn on the inside of his wrist to preserve its life, rattled insistently against the steering wheel, and this, too, fed his anger. By the time he reached the barn he was teetering. He threw the barn door open, stepped forward, exhaled, watched the breath curl from his mouth.
"It's goddamn cold in here."
"No, Oom Jim. Look at the thermometer."
It was then, in 1964, at the age of 27, that Jim Steele—a man who, per his father's orders, hadn't shed a tear after his brother's death—lost control. Without another word he grabbed a cloth, gripped the handles to the furnace doors, and opened them. The fire had faded to embers, but it was still glowing. Then he turned, braced one of his thick, flat, dirty hands against the boy's chest while thrusting the other around and between his legs, lifted him off the ground, and shoved him face-first at the fire.
"Tell me," he roared. "Does that seem hot enough for you?"
The boy threw his palms against the furnace wall to prevent his face from entering. The farmer could hear the flesh burning but didn't pull the boy back until he could smell it. Patches of the boy's palms remained on the furnace wall, curling. The farmer continued to embrace the boy for a moment, one broad arm around the boy's back, the boy arching, squirming, his other forearm jammed against the boy's forehead.
"Is it hot enough?" he yelled again. "Is it?"
Something touched him then. It wasn't so much that he was throwing the boy to the ground as another force, like wind but solid, was casting the two of them in opposite directions. In an instant they were on the ground, facing each other. The boy held out his hands in supplication. Then, in a childlike voice, he began to weep. Oom Jim, Oom Jim, oh, it is so hot, Oom Jim.
An unreflective man, Jim Steele had only ever known himself by the things he had done. Now he had done this. For a few moments, he lost the feeling of his own body, of his presence in it. He had a queer sense of floating, of being given a glimpse for the first time in his life of what lay beyond the surface of himself. What he saw there was not bad. It was worse: It was nothing.
Before coming to his senses and going for help, Steele sat dumb on the floor of the barn, listening to the boy's mewling, smelling his burnt hands. He could not shake a growing conviction that he was somehow at the mercy of the boy, that the boy had in fact acquired great power over him—a power he would hold forever.
···
Paul Mufanebadza learned to hate women before he could speak, before he could even know what hate was. He was an ill infant, feverish and limp—poisoned by his own malice, it was later said. The poison killed him. Among his people, if a baby dies before it cuts its teeth, elderly women must bury it that very day, before sunset, in a wet place. When Paul stopped breathing, four village elders came, put their ears to the child's mouth to confirm it was dead, then carried it out to a riverbed. They dug a shallow grave in the mud and dropped the baby in. The instant they did, its eyes flashed and a careening blood scream issued from its mouth. When the boy was old enough to ask why people called him the Spooky Child, his mother told him he'd been hed by women eager to steal his father from his family. So it was that Paul Mufanebadza learned to believe women were witches.
Two of these witches dwelled in his home. Paul Mufanebadza Sr. was a regimental sergeant major and one of the two highest-ranking black men in the Rhodesian army, which fought throughout the 1960s and 1970s to preserve the country's minority white rule. The sergeant major was a man of means, a man who could afford to live polygamously. Paul junior's mother was his first wife, the domestic queen. Paul senior brought the second and third of his five wives—and the children he sired by them—to live in the queen's home in the city of Masvingo.
The sergeant major didn't much care for his namesake. "Father," his boy would say, pointing to his tattered shoes, "the other children are laughing at me. May I have a new pair?" As was his custom when the Spooky Child asked for his help, the sergeant major would pull a thick sheaf of cash from his breast pocket and show it to the boy. "I've got the money here," he'd grin. "And I'm not giving it to you." The Spooky Child knew who was enjoying his father's money. Though he dreamed of killing them, he hated the witches too intensely to hurt them—hurting them would have meant touching them, and touching them would have compromised the purity of his hatred. In the teen years, as other boys chased girls, Paul Mufanebadza refused even to look at them. Instead he gazed inward, at the gleaming black obelisk, ever larger, ever harder, of his own spite.
_Jim Steele walks the 3,700 acres his family had farmed
since 1913. (His home is up on the hill.) Today hundreds
of settlers live and work on his land. _
At the nearly all-white British primary school to which his father sent him, the Spooky Child was compelled to take tea while the white wives of senior army officers corrected his poor manners. A bitter pill, but not enough. The white teachers unable to decipher his rural Shona accent, who yelled "Speak!" into his face, as if the sounds out of his mouth were not human language but the barking of some bush animal? Also a bitter pill, but still not enough. Even the worship they forced on him, of Jesus Christ, that meek little man who refused to stand up for himself: not enough.
No, it was the sergeant major's tears that finally caused all of the boy's hates to congeal into a single, self-defining thought.
"Father," he asked, "why are you crying?" The sergeant major convened the wives and children and announced that he had just received a great honor. A senior officer, a white man, had named his dog after him. "He loves his dog very much," Paul senior explained. "His dog is like his child. So he has named his dog Paul."
The thought young Paul had at that moment felt cool and clear and nourishing.
I hate women. I hate Christianity. And I hate white people.
Soon after this, Paul and his half brother, Paul Wonder—a hale and beautiful boy four months older than the Spooky Child and beloved of the sergeant major—were required to bring their birth certificates to school. The sergeant major produced the documents. Paul Wonder's read "Paul Wonder Mufanebadza." The Spooky Child's read "Paul Neshangwe."
"Who is Paul Neshangwe?" asked the Spooky Child.
"Do you want that certificate?"
After a long while, the boy said, "No."
"Go find another father," said the sergeant major.
Paul Wonder's mother had decided that the Spooky Child should not share her son and husband's surname. The sergeant major had agreed; "Neshangwe" belonged to some distant ancestor. The children at school were greatly amused with their new classmate, Paul Neshangwe.
"You are nobody's son!" they sang. "Nobody's son!"
Throughout his youth, Paul Neshangwe's hate attained a kind of perfection, the way the country's roilings—the racial hatred, the war, the sense of Rhodesia as a sentient being tearing its own heart out—seemed to affirm his interior goings-on. By the time he was 17, living on liquor, tobacco, and marijuana, he had developed the habit of bashing his skull against the cinder-block wall of his house. It helped.
One night he turned to his older (full) brother and said, "I want to destroy something." His brother nodded. "I want to destroy a person."
They decided to open Paul Wonder with knives. They accosted him outside his home. Paul Wonder fled, screaming. His mother ran into the street.
"Let's kill them both!" Paul's brother said.
But Paul wasn't sure, so they gave up the chase. Still, Paul couldn't shake his urge to destroy something. Several days later, he noosed his neck, stepped onto a chair, knotted the rope around a pipe, and leapt into the air. The rope snapped. He tried and failed twice more in the next month, once again by hanging and once with antimalarial pills.
Then the Christians came to town, tacking up posters for a movie about the life of Jesus—a white guy, apparently. Paul and his friends began tearing the posters down to use as rolling paper. As a joke, they went to a screening, sat in the back smoking their Jesus joints and shouting "Murungu!"—the Shona word for "white man"—whenever the lead actor spoke. In the lobby afterward, a young man approached.
"You have been taking down our posters."
Not an accusation. Just a statement of fact.
"That's us," said one of Paul's friends, pulling a joint from his pocket and lighting up. "That Jesus, he is your 'Lord and Savior,' jah?"
The man nodded.
"Well, we've been smoking your Lord and Savior."
Someone cracked a joke about God forcing Himself upon the Virgin and making Joseph take the rap for knocking her up.
"We will pray for you," the Christian smiled.
Fuck them, Paul thought, walking away. Fuck Jesus. Fuck the Holy Ghost. And fuck the Father.
Fuck the Father most of all.
···
Jim Steele knew what was coming. Wars of racial independence had been rippling across the continent, black Africans from Ghana to Mozambique to Angola overthrowing the European colonials who'd kept them under thumb for centuries. Now it was Rhodesia's turn. In November 1965, prime minister Ian Smith declared independence from Britain, which had begun urging Rhodesia toward democratic rule. The revolution began five months later—in the city of Chinhoyi, ten miles from Steele's farm—when government forces gunned down seven armed rebels. For some fifteen years the war raged, killing 30,000 blacks and 1,500 whites and ending in black-majority rule. On April 18, 1980, at a ceremony in a Harare soccer stadium in which Bob Marley performed freedom songs, Rhodesia became Zimbabwe, with a black militiaman named Robert Mugabe as its prime minister.
What shocked Jim Steele—and all his countrymen, black and white—was the inauguration speech by Mugabe, who'd spent ten years in a Rhodesian prison for "subversion" and risen to political prominence on a platform of black power. "If yesterday you hated me," he told his defeated white countrymen, "today you cannot avoid the love that binds you to me and me to you… The wrongs of the past must now stand forgiven and forgotten… It could never be a correct justification that because the whites oppressed us yesterday when they had power, the blacks must oppress them today because they have power. An evil remains an evil, whether practiced by white against black or by black against white."
For ten years, Mugabe lived those beautiful words. By 1990, thanks to his embrace of the country's whites, the economy was humming, and Zimbabwe was known as "Africa's breadbasket." The prime minister (and after 1987, president) vastly improved education and health care and brought blacks into the economy.
Shona blacks, that is. When members of the country's minority Ndebele tribe, which had been shut out of the new government, mounted a protest in the early '80s, Mugabe dispatched a shadowy militia known as the Fifth Brigade to slaughter some 30,000 Ndebele men, women, and children and to terrorize those they spared. The brigade forced survivors to sing Shona songs praising Mugabe's political party while dancing on the fresh graves of their families, and shot or hacked to death those who grieved openly.
Such a strange, divided man, Robert Mugabe. A charismatic Roman Catholic with seven university degrees. A reconciler and poet who raised his country from the ashes of total race war. And a man without hesitation or limits. By the time, years later, Zimbabwe's whites learned along with the rest of the world of the Fifth Brigade's obscenities—learned that Robert Mugabe was not the precursor to Nelson Mandela but a psychotic in the mold of Idi Amin—it was too late.
Jim Steele, too, was a divided man during the war. Not long before the first shots were fired in Chinhoyi, he decided to stop growing tobacco. No crop paid better, but what it exacted—the price of always having his money and his blacks on his mind—was more than he could afford. After 1964, Jim Steele used the 3,700 acres his father had begun farming in 1913 outside Chinhoyi to raise cattle and maize. This decision brought him a peace that remained and continued, quietly and slowly, to unfurl; while all around him, year after year, Rhodesia devoured itself, Steele devoted his time to his church, becoming an elder and lay preacher.
Jim Steele advises a local farmer.
Good, but not enough: One Sunday in June 1970, as he sat in his pew at Lomagundi Presbyterian Church in Chinhoyi, Steele felt a tiny tendril take root in his chest, a pinprick of bliss that soon thickened into rapture, then shock, then terrible longing. Slain, drunk, he stumbled to the altar, collapsed, and confessed.
"I have been full of pride! I must surrender!"
Surrender and commit: At a time when the rest of Rhodesia's white farmers barricaded their homes with razor wire and slept with their shotguns, Steele and his wife, Janette, traveled the country distributing Gideon Bibles.
"Church is an appointment with God," he said whenever his son, who lived next door on the farm, begged his parents to stay home on Sundays. "Such an appointment cannot be canceled."
Even before the war's end, Jim Steele became known throughout Chinhoyi among both blacks and whites as a man who feared God and was fair with his blacks, a demanding boss but a tireless worker himself, a man capable of anger, surely, but slow to it.
And yet, throughout the war, this peace within him lived side by side with its opposite. Steele could not keep the country's fear and fury from penetrating his surfaces. He detested the war that left his farm fallow, detested the whites who had provoked it and the blacks who waged it. Steele read his Old Testament. Vengeance was His. But leaving vengeance to God did nothing to cool his wrath. It was a physical thing, a rock in the belly. And it was frightening—not because he couldn't abolish it but because he couldn't afford to. Unfettered, rage had once prompted him to feed a human being to a furnace. But measured, kept on a low simmer, anger brought a certain keenness and clarity, tuned him into what he could and couldn't expect from those mysterious others, his blacks, without whom he and his land would be lost.
So was Steele, at heart, the same man at the end of the war that he'd been before it began? Steele thought not; thought that the man who had put that boy in the furnace had been vanquished, replaced. Yes, he was still a hard man, still enraged at what fifteen years of war had visited upon his country. But he had changed his ways, and this change has been rewarded with a new consciousness and, after 1980, a measure of prosperity, had it not? By the mid-1990s, Jim Steele was a man who prayed and even thought that he had atoned not only for himself, but also in some small way for the trickery and theft and murder with which white men had made this land their own. Was he not entitled to such a sentiment?
Jim Steele was a fool. His land and his god hadn't even begun to test him.
···
And then Paul Neshangwe changed. It was the strangest thing, not only because it happened but because it didn't take long—just a few months to begin altering the chemical structure of all that hate, of all those hates.
It was the Christians. They were Presbyterians, and they were relentless, coming for him in packs like hyenas after a blood scent. How did they find him?
Easily. After the movie, as Neshangwe and his friends smoked the Savior in the lobby, the Presbyterians politely asked them to write down who they were and where they lived. Paul's friends scribbled fake addresses. Paul…did not.
The Presbyterians gave chase for weeks on end. Whenever they rapped on his door, Neshangwe—a man temperamentally capable of murdering his own kin—was seized with terror, leapt out the window and ran. He eventually moved. And still, somehow, six months later, they found him. He was broke, three days without a meal, when they came knocking. He opened up, and there they were. Some black kids, Jesus boys, acolytes, whatever, and a murungu in a white collar. The murungu spoke a bit about the Man. Then he pulled the oldest evangelical's trick in the book.
"Salvation is a free gift. Do you know what that means?" Paul said nothing. The murungu fished a Zim dollar from his pocket, clasped its edges, and snapped it taut.
"Like salvation. A free gift. Take it."
The year was 1987. The Zim dollar was powerful. Paul bought bread, milk, paraffin. As he ate, an incomplete thought, thirteen words, played and replayed itself.
My own father, who has never in his life given me a dollar…
Not a lightning strike. He wasn't smote. But he started coming to church, just to see.
Still, the anger in this man, this boy, unnerved. After graduating high school, he interviewed for the ministry. "What Paul Neshangwe considers his calling is instead a confusion of rage," his evaluator wrote. He was ordered to complete university training in South Africa. Bitterly, he submitted.
The first time he preached at the university chapel, a commerce student named Lydia Chituku watched from her pew, trying to decide whether she believed the boy in the pulpit. She'd heard about the ministry student from Zimbabwe. Everyone had. An aspiring man of God who yelled down classmates and professors, smashed his head against walls, and didn't like women. Now here he was, preaching about…that very madness—his rage at women and white people and his father and Jesus and the church officials who'd questioned his call to the ministry. His voice was low and fierce. His eyes were hooded, half shut, as if to scorn the sight of the sanctuary. Yet he made himself so naked. He omitted nothing, spared himself nothing. He did not even claim to have shed his rage, though he did say that he was reborn and that he was learning to forgive those who had wronged him, to release them and himself.
"It's not that you hate the people and things you say you hate," she said a few weeks after they began dating. "It's that you just don't know what to do with them."
Though everyone who'd ever known Paul Neshangwe told him that his hate was a cancer, no one had ever suggested this—that what he comprehended as the core of his identity wasn't at all what he thought it was. Lydia became the first woman Paul Neshangwe ever loved physically and, after they married, the last. Later, after AIDS began to take his siblings—a brother, then another brother, then another brother, then a sister, then another sister, five of them—and Paul and Lydia began raising their orphaned nieces and nephews—nine through their home over the years, on a preacher's salary, including the children of yet another brother, who died of cerebral malaria—some began to ask whether Paul's refusal of all women before Lydia was part of God's plan, His mysterious way of sparing Paul the plague in order to preserve him for his work as a pastor. Paul always deflected the question. Even considering it made him feel unclean.
···
It was the oldest story in the world: A strongman becomes mesmerized by power for its own sake, transmogrifies, grows paranoid, intellectually unsupple, allergic to dissent; starts rigging elections, micromanaging the economy, imprisoning journalists he finds "offensive." By the mid-1990s, Robert Mugabe had begun turning Zimbabwe into a police state ruled by fear, censorship, and his omniscient Central Intelligence Organization. The first real threat to his regime came in 1997, when the country's war veterans—the only group capable of mounting a coup d'état—demanded giveaways. The unbudgeted $4 billion Zim-dollar (roughly $250 million U.S.) payoff Mugabe ordered pulverized the economy, but the vets pressed for still more. With no cash reserves, Mugabe began laying the groundwork for land confiscations, dubbing all whites "imperialists" and "colonial agents." Once this rhetoric became reality, it did not matter that virtually all the war veterans who took over white lands were uninterested in farming—that government-backed land invasions guaranteed economic ruin, if not famine. What mattered was Mugabe's continued hold on power.
_Steele and Paul Neshangwe after services at the formerly
all-white Presbyterian Church of Chinhoyi._
The Steeles knew their land would be taken. It was inevitable. Upon waking each morning, they took tea, then walked together to the balcony overlooking the fields to see if it had begun. They knew the invasion would be violating and psychologically violent, just as they knew it would begin in silence, with a stranger strolling onto their land and pushing stakes into the soft soil to mark his claim. Not yours. Mine. Yet even before the settlers came, Jim Steele pitied them. He knew, as they did not, that they were cannon fodder, dispatched by the government to intimidate him into fleeing his farm without a fight. This was the way of land invasions. Once the whites fled (if not from the settlers, then from the soldiers who followed), the settlers would be driven back into the bush so a war veteran or regime crony could claim his prize. Jim and Janette Steele therefore decided more than a year before the settlers appeared that they would accept their presence. It was the practical thing to do: If they made a stand, the army would take not only their farmland but their house and perhaps their lives. But it was also the Christian thing to do, a turning of the other cheek.
It began in March of 2000. One family at first, then two, then ten, twenty, forty, wordlessly forming their low circular mud huts and wood-stick chicken pens. The Steeles responded, as planned, with silence and peace.
Yet there was no peace. On his balcony each morning, teacup in hand, beholding the distant huts and pens and stick-figure humans etched against the dawn, Jim Steele felt all the old terror and rage he thought he'd shed two decades before, when the war ended. All he had ever wanted in his life was to work this land, be its steward, bring order to its natural state of chaos. Now the settlers were here with their primitive, piecemeal agriculture. In a year or two, the soldiers would kick them back where they came from, and Steele would have to watch his farm backslide into the sullen scrubland it had been before his father emigrated from Scotland to civilize it at the dawn of the past century. The farm had gone half feral in the war years. But Steele knew then that the war would end, that he would once again bring order to the land. This was different. This was far more personal. And this was forever. In a decade or two, he would go to his grave, and not a trace of what he and his father had worked for would remain to speak for him. He was old, afraid, angry, and now, he realized, trapped. Jim Steele stood each morning watching the strangers grow ever more numerous, ever closer, and said aloud to himself, "My God, what am I to do?"
···
By 1999, when he began substitute preaching in Chinhoyi, Paul Neshangwe, too, had a decision to make about the farm invasions and the devastation he knew they would bring upon his country. Robert Mugabe frequently linked Christian churches to the white "enemy." ("[When they] came to our land, they brought us the Bible and they taught us to pray. When we opened our eyes, we had the Bible and they had the land.") The CIO was even sending spies into churches to track sermonizing that was "slanderous" to the president. Most of the country's clergy decided it was not worth losing one's parish and perhaps even one's freedom to preach what everyone already knew to be true.
In July of that year, Neshangwe was invited to conduct a service at a local Methodist church. At the appointed time, he stepped up to the pulpit, closed his eyes, and prayed that his words would make him an instrument of his Father's will. Upon opening his eyes, he was surprised to find himself not with Jesus but with Moses: the wrathful Moses who killed an Egyptian because that man had abused a Jew; and the rueful Moses who subsequently witnessed a Jew beating another Jew and realized that oppressors could be Egyptian or Jewish. Then Neshangwe said it: "Oppressors can be white. Or oppressors can be black." The congregation gasped. The fear in the sanctuary was palpable, but so was the exhilaration.
Once Paul Neshangwe started, he could not stop. Could not stop preaching…the truth. Could not stop preaching that Zimbabwe's troubles were man-made and not "God's will." Word came one day that he was required to perform funeral rites for a deputy minister for justice. The service was held outside Chinhoyi on a stately farm, until recently owned by a white family, that President Mugabe had bequeathed to the deputy.
"You will speak first," an official told Neshangwe when he arrived.
"No," Neshangwe said, smiling. "I will speak last." Nobody spoke this way to regime officials. The man stared. Neshangwe continued. "God will have the last word. Not even our pompous and blustering minister of justice will be allowed to speak after God."
God, indeed, got the last word. His servant Paul began the eulogy thusly: "My mother has begged me not to say anything today that will get me killed. So I will endeavor not to say anything too inflammatory." He then gestured to the grandeur of the farm, the rolling red hills, the elegant homestead. "It is not for me to say whether this man was right to accept the free farm that came his way"—the pastor then pointed to the casket—"because this man now stands before the ultimate court, before the ultimate judge, in whose hands his case now rests."
The minister of justice stormed out. Neshangwe knew he was fortunate Robert Mugabe had been unable to attend. If he had, the president might well have rewarded the pastor with a death warrant.
Neshangwe frequently substituted at a Presbyterian church that had been without a permanent pastor for several years. Lomagundi Presbyterian was its official name, but around Chinhoyi it was known simply as the "white man's church." An elder, a white farmer in his sixties named Jim Steele, had been holding it together. A quiet man. Serious. All business. Not the most affable fellow, and yet Paul felt immediately and powerfully drawn to the old man, his ruminative, plainspoken tone, the way he did nothing with fanfare but just…did it. Steele in turn found himself fascinated with, even bewildered by, Neshangwe, a serious man of God who was nevertheless an imp, whose piety seemed to draw its power less from humility than from laughter. Moreover, despite the thirty years and color line separating them, Steele and Neshangwe each recognized the other as an increasingly rare breed of Zimbabwean: an authority figure with no patience for the politics of race allegiance. Steele saw in Neshangwe a man willing to state from the pulpit truths most white people wouldn't dare utter outside their living rooms; Neshangwe saw in Steele a man who recognized and even embraced the fact that as whites fled the country, Lomagundi Presbyterian would become either a "black man's church" or an empty building.
Steele eventually told the other elders he wanted to offer the pastorship to Neshangwe.
"A black pastor?"
"This is not a white church," he snapped. "This is God's church."
But…Paul Neshangwe? Not just a black man but a provocateur? At a time when racial animosity was government policy? When Steele himself was on the brink of losing his land? Did the old man actually think the regime wouldn't take an active interest in such a church?
"So," Neshangwe smiled when Steele made the offer, "the white man's church wants a black pastor?"
Steele failed to see the humor.
"It's God's church!"
Neshangwe consulted his wife.
"My husband," said Lydia, tapping his forearm lightly as she always did when she needed to calm him or herself, "I do not wish to be a widow. Not just yet."
A whole year passed as Neshangwe mulled the offer. In the meantime, he worked as the church's full-time "interim" pastor. He was still mulling the offer during the first wave of the Chinhoyi farm invasions, when the settlers came to Jim Steele's land, and even during the second wave, when Mugabe's men came for Jim Steele.
···
Excepting Sabbaths, Jim Steele hadn't known an idle day in his life. Now, as the settlers took over more and more of his land, he had time on his hands. He found himself driving into town, to Paul Neshangwe's home. The men would eat sadza and beans, and talk. Neshangwe had never known a white farmer, so Steele told him about his life prior to the invasion, what running a farm took and what it gave back, what it was like to be a white African. Neshangwe in turn told Steele about his life in the ministry, what his white collar and black skin meant to him and to those he'd met.
One Sunday, hours before church was to begin, Steele appeared at his priest's door. Despite his abiding rage at the settlers, the farmer had begun to wonder: Was his acceptance of these people the Christian thing to do? Was he even doing anything?
Like Jesus, who saw little value in answering spiritual questions directly, Paul responded with a parable—his own. He told the old man about the place of hate he had come from, and about the people and moments of grace that had renewed him, expanded his sense of what was humanly possible. Jim didn't know what to believe about his priest's story—its alarming proposition that a man could be one thing and then, almost at once, its opposite. The men arrived at no conclusion together. They simply talked for a time and then went to the service. Jim returned early the next week, though, and the next, and so on, so the two men could reflect on the Gospels, on the color of their skin, on each other's lives, and on their country.
"Paul, what do you want?" Jim asked one day. With the church, in other words. Paul felt he wasn't being asked so much as dared. He told Jim he wanted to provide food, medicine, and spiritual support to AIDS victims; to procure tallow and sewing machines so jobless parishioners could make black-market soap and school uniforms; to pay the school fees of penniless children; to extend the church where the need was greatest—in other words, to become what others would surely call a "black church."
Jim knew the instant Paul began to speak that he'd expected his priest to respond the way he had. Had wanted him to. So that he could say yes. So he could be a part of Paul's plans. The farmer began to walk with the priest on his visits to parishioners in the city, holding hands and praying with urban Shona men, women, and children on the dirt floors of their cinder-block abodes, bringing milk to women too depleted by AIDS to breast-feed their infants, delivering the tallow and sewing machines in his truck.
The tract that no longer belonged to Jim Steele was vast. With time on his hands, he spent hours covering it by foot, just to see the cattle and the maize rows. Sometimes his workers walked with him. Sometimes his priest came out to the country to walk with him. Most of the settlers seemed not to notice the walkers. A few looked back blankly before returning to their work. Then one afternoon, because it seemed odd not to, Jim turned to Paul and said, "Come, let's talk to them."
In the weeks that followed, Jim Steele got to know the people who had come to take everything he had ever worked for. He spoke directly to those who knew English and, through his priest or his workers, to those who spoke only Shona. He learned their names, where they'd come from, how many children they had. With each, he found himself asking the same question he had asked Neshangwe. What do you want? Often his tone carried bitter reproach, sometimes mere curiosity, sometimes even concern. Regardless, the answer was always the same.
"To live, sir."
Steele had been around Shona from the day of his birth, worked side by side with them, learned to trust and be trusted by them. But as he spoke with the settlers, with the urban poor to whom Paul tended, with Paul himself, a realization dawned: He had never known a Shona man, woman, or child personally. It had never occurred to him to do so. Now it did. As soon as he replaced the old narrow questions ("Does he show up on time? Can he do the job?") with the single broad one ("What's he like?"), he began to see…every little thing. The way, for instance, a Shona's life was filled with "brothers" and "sisters" and "cousins" but no "friends," since to call someone a "friend" was to call him something less than immediate family, to denigrate him. Or the way a Shona and her "sisters" often broke into song—in four-part harmony!—not for any reason but because they drew no distinction between speaking and singing and breathing; understood the three as a single substance whose form, solid or liquid or ethereal, was determined by a person's spiritual temperature. Or the way a visit with a Shona never ended, because a Shona always walked out the door with him and Paul, accompanied them to the next home, sat a while and talked, somehow remained present after physically departing.
How had Steele failed to discern all this fluidity? Where before he had seen an impenetrable sameness, a mood, he now saw the many ways in which Shona's lives and thoughts and egos bled into one another. Their very speech, as they glided within a single sentence from Shona to English and back again, was edgeless, the native tongue glistening and ebulliently inefficient as it pushed and caressed but never cut the air. Even their understanding of time and distance was fluid: If Steele asked a settler on his land how far it was to Chinhoyi, the answer depended on where the sun sat in the sky at that moment. In the morning, it was "not far." If the sun was low in the west, it was "too far"—since (of course) one was on foot and had to consider what might emerge from the bush after dark.
"White men keep watches," Paul laughed when Jim asked. "Shona keep time."
A funny thing about Paul: The more time Jim spent with him and other Shona, the less incredible the priest's stories of himself—smoking Christ at 17; serving Him at 20—seemed. Steele had always thought people were what they were, the same at 60 as they'd been at 6, only more. Now he wondered: In a land where the concept of property, of boundaries, was (like Christianity) barely a hundred years old, why couldn't a person also be a flowing, shape-shifting thing, rather than a sedimentary accretion? Why couldn't a person have a change of mind—not just a change of opinion, but the kind of irrational, self-shattering change of mind that Paul's namesake, the great apostle, underwent on the road to Damascus?
Neither Jim nor Paul knew exactly what was happening between them. Each felt God was speaking to him through the other, teaching him, raising him up, offering answers to questions he hadn't even been aware he was asking. Only later was it clear that both men had sensed what was to befall the older man, and together were preparing him for it.
···
One night, Jim Steele woke with a start. A whispering in the garden, then in the room, then in him. He felt as he always felt when visited in this way: blissfully repentant. Janette woke.
"Emmanuel," he told her. "God is with us."
They prayed. Show us what you want us to do. By dawn they had their answer: It was not enough merely to accept what had befallen them.
Word eventually circulated among the settlers that the murungu's offer of free medicine was genuine. Not just over-the-counter remedies but inoculations, as well as sulfaguanidine for salmonella. Within a year, Jim and Janette Steele had cured more than a hundred malaria cases among the settlers, many of whom would have died without treatment.
Soon there was talk among Chinhoyi's farmers that Jim Steele was giving his settlers diesel and maize free of charge, even plowing (their? his?) fields with his tractor. Could any of it be true? White farmers either fled or shut themselves in their homes, then dreamed of retribution and reparation. They did not abet their own disenfranchisement.
But once Jim Steele started, he could not stop. He and his workers began refitting some of his unused farm buildings into a school for the settlers' children. There were one hundred pupils at first. But once word reached beyond the farm that the school was actually…a school, with paid teachers and books, chalk and boards, pencils and paper, 300 children from eight surrounding farms began attending. Was this enough? Was it enough for Jim Steele to give medicine and farming aid and cash loans and education to the people who had taken his inheritance?
His boss told him it was not.
"My wife and I would be honored if you would come to our church with us on Sundays," he told the settlers. Most didn't. Some did, and continued to go, underwent baptism, took Communion, accepted Jim's embrace at the offering of the peace, even as other whites in the pews refused to shake their hands or even look at them. "The commandment tells me to love my neighbor," Steele shrugged when confronted. "It does not tell me that I get to choose my neighbor."
There was more. Worshipping alongside the settlers, Steele came to feel a connection to the land they had taken from him—a connection he had not felt when it was his. A connection to the dirt, actually. He'd always noticed the way bare feet on dirt was not just an everyday but an every-moment-of-every-day fact of life for those many Shona who survived on what they grew themselves. Now he thought of how that fact would shape a person, how physically and urgently aware that person would be of the miracles—all of life itself!—made possible by that dirt. Such a person would accept the supernatural as a matter of course. Such a person would draw no distinction between his body and the world. His own mortality would feel dreadful to him, as ever, but also, in some small way, sweet. He would comprehend death not as an ending but as a point on an unending continuum.
So it came to be with Jim Steele. The dirt that settled on his skin when he was in the fields (making his white skin scuffed and lined and giving blue-black Shona skin, at high noon, an orange adobe glow), the fine red dust that in the hot months papered his nose and throat: With every breath he was communing with it, taking it—and a part of everyone and everything that had ever lived and died on it and in it, his mother and his father and his beloved brother and the numberless, nameless Shona—into his body. Dust to dust. The land was no longer personal; it was his very person. Jim Steele would always be a white farmer. He would always believe that he had rightfully owned his land and that it had been wrongfully taken. But now, when he considered the famous words supposedly spoken to Cecil Rhodes by a Shona chieftain ("Buy land? Why not also buy the wind?"), he found them instructive rather than amusingly naive. The underlying notion—that people belonged to the land and not the other way around—was disturbing, but also strangely beautiful.
···
On August 6, 2001, some eighteen months after the first mud huts appeared on Jim Steele's land, a band of settlers laid siege to the home of a neighboring farmer—in retaliation, they claimed, for an attack by a posse of white farmers. Police immediately arrested the besieged man, along with twenty-one of Chinhoyi's other white farmers, including Jim Steele. In fact, both the siege and the "posse" tale were orchestrated; the arrests gave the regime a symbolic victory in the days preceding Heroes' Day, the annual celebration of the seven martyred freedom fighters of Chinhoyi, who'd begun the war for independence in 1966.
Crowds gathered outside the police station the morning after the arrests to jeer and throw garbage at the white women who came to ask after their husbands. The war veterans on duty encouraged the fun, though they motioned the crowd to relent for a black visitor.
Paul Neshangwe, who was still acting as the "interim" minister of Lomagundi Presbyterian, announced that he had come for Jim Steele. The veteran in charge eyed Neshangwe's collar with puzzlement.
"Are you his lawyer?"
"I am his priest."
The veteran stared.
"Are you here to preach to the black prisoners?"
"I am here for Mr. Steele."
Now the veteran understood—a joke.
"So tell me, priest," he said, playing along. "How much have these varungu [white men] paid you?"
It was exactly then, in the face of the veterans' mocking laughter, that Neshangwe realized he could no longer ask God to be good to people he did not love enough to serve; he would be saying yes to Steele's job offer.
"I am his priest," he said again.
The veteran, now aware that the man was serious, rose and stepped close.
"Leave," he said.
On the third day, the police transferred the farmers to Chinhoyi's remand prison for accused criminals awaiting trial, where they were thrown in with the all-black general population. The decision not to isolate the white men during Heroes' weekend, which even in less inflammatory times was a holiday whites were wise to spend at home, spoke for itself: The varungu are fair game.
The guards stripped Steele naked, provided prison pajamas. No shoes. Within minutes his skin burned and itched—lice. Twelve-by- eighteen-foot cells, thirty-six men in each, six blankets. It was August, wintertime in Zimbabwe, bitter cold. At lights-out, the men lay, sardine-style, on the concrete floor. The first night was quiet. Steele had toiled alongside black men before, smelled their sweat, but this was different. The thirty-six bodies were pressed together, locked together, so that when one man turned over every other man was required to do the same. He could hear and smell the breath of the men on either side of him. Did he smell different to them? he wondered.
They woke at five, ate, went into the yard. The farmers convened. Steele was the oldest. They addressed their question to him.
Oom Jim, what will happen to us?
Steele didn't know. How could he? He told them so. Yet still they asked, again and again, in the yard, in the mess, through the walls separating the cells, as if the constant repetition carried a warding power. Oom Jim, what will happen to us?
On the second night, just after lights-out, Steele was praying silently, asking for guidance—Show me what you want me to do, Lord—when a voice from another cell, quiet, unfamiliar, Shona, repeated the question that had been ringing in the air.
"Oom Jim, what will happen to us?"
A sarcastic little barb?
"Yes, Oom Jim." Another Shona. "What will happen to us?"
These men were in earnest. Steele knew then what he was being shown to do. His first prison sermon, delivered while he was prone and pressed between the bodies of strangers, was short and simple, more a sentiment than a sermon.
"God says we must live one day at a time," he said to the dark. "Whether we are here four days, until the end of Heroes' weekend, or whether we are here four weeks or four years, we must ask every day for His protection and peace."
That was all. No one else spoke, and the men went to sleep.
He preached the next morning in the yard. He was surrounded at first only by the other white men, who clumped together as a defensive measure when not locked in their cells. He preached about Jesus in the wilderness, alone and beset. As always, his voice and his manner were quiet and convincing. He spoke without fear and without reproach, as if he and the other farmers were in no danger at all. The Spirit moved him to preach at length, almost thirty minutes, and when he was done there were as many black inmates as white gathered around him.
Afterward, two black prisoners introduced themselves.
"We would like to sing you a song," they said.
They were Malawian, a bass and a tenor. They sang beautifully, in harmony, in their own language. Jim couldn't understand the words but knew without having to ask that it was a Christian song.
No one planned what happened that night. No one said, "We will do it this way." It just happened, and every subsequent night the farmers were in prison—eleven more in all. At eight the lights were extinguished. For a time there was silence. Then the Malawians began to sing. A few of the hymns were familiar. Most were not. All were sung in their native language, and the way the rest of the prisoners knew what was being sung at the same time that they had no idea what was being sung made the music even more rich and strange. Time lost its purchase when the Malawians sang, so it was hard to know if they were singing for thirty minutes or an hour or two hours. They simply sang until they stopped, and when they stopped there was an observed silence. The first night this occurred, after the singing had come to an end, Jim Steele had no idea what to do. He felt called to preach, but he also felt the Malawians had brought the spirit of God upon them all, and that it was not his place to break such a silence. Indeed, it was not. Quietly, one at a time, the prisoners began to speak into the dark. As they did, one of the men against whom Steele's body was pressed, an accused thief named Simon, translated the words of those who spoke in Shona. Some offered prayers. Some offered testimonies—who they were, what they did for a living, what they wished for. Others offered confessions. The prison was divided into two classes of inmate, violent and nonviolent, and though the men on this ward had been accused of nonviolent or mildly violent crimes, many of the voices issuing from the dark told of terrible acts. Some of the confessions lasted ten minutes. Some lasted ten seconds. A heavy silence separated each.
I raped a young girl.
_I stole from my neighbor. _
_I killed my wife. _
_I cursed God. _
_I hurt my child. _
The men told their stories knowing they were being listened to. Most asked for forgiveness. Some claimed they were beyond it. Jim waited until every man who wanted to had spoken, then began to preach. He spoke a sentence or two at a time, then waited as Simon called out his words in Shona. When Steele finished, there was an amen, then sleep.
On the first Saturday morning, the guards announced that the farmers' heads would be shaved. The lice, they explained. The younger farmers raged: This was about ridicule, not lice; they would not submit. Steele motioned them to be still. The yelling—it was just what the guards wanted, so they could later claim the whites had "rioted" to justify whatever violence they were planning.
"What should we do, Oom Jim?"
"As a sheep before his shearers, as a lamb before the slaughter…," he quoted to the farmers. Then to the guards: "I will be first."
There was a problem. Though the guards were prepared to beat the farmers, they hadn't actually prepared to shave them: There were no clippers in the prison. Clippers were delivered four hours later. Another problem: Since every inmate carried lice, and not just the white farmers, and since the shavings had been publicly announced, the guards were compelled to shave every head in the prison to save face. Most of the black inmates found this episode highly amusing.
That night, after the bald Malawians sang their songs, and anonymous bald inmates offered their confessions to the night, and bald Jim Steele preached his sermon and said his amen, a bald man from another cell whispered into the dark. A Shona accent.
"Oom Jim, do you really see the light at the end of the tunnel?"
"Yes, my friend," Steele said solemnly. "The truth will set you free."
A minute passed. Then, once more, the whisper.
"Oom Jim, do you think you could turn that light up a little?"
As the laughter of the prisoners faded, another voice.
"Very good."
Jim knew the voice was the warden's but couldn't read its tone.
The next day, as the prison's nonviolent inmates mingled in the yard, the warden, flanked by a dozen guards, appeared and ordered the men to sit. Then, in violation of prison policy, he ordered the so-called D inmates—the men charged with murder and arson and rape—into the yard.
This is it, Steele thought. The openness of it all surprised him. One would have thought the matter of doing in the whites would be a semi-discreet affair.
The warden ordered the D prisoners to sit. Then he pointed at Steele.
"You," he said. "Stand."
Steele stood.
"Preach."
Was this some form of mockery? Steele decided he didn't care. His job was to bear witness. He gestured to Simon. Simon stood. Then, with Simon translating, he began to preach.
"Some of you are guilty of the crimes you have been charged with. I have heard you confessing at night. Some of you are not guilty of the crimes you have been charged with. But whether you are guilty or not, you, me, all of us, are sinners. You have all done something you are ashamed of. I have done something I am ashamed of. We all need to be changed." He spoke about Daniel in the lions' den. "God was there, and God is here, in our midst. Do not be afraid," he said, smiling. "Do not be afraid. Because when you leave this place, the lions of the earth will be everywhere. Do not be afraid!"
Some of the D prisoners came to him when he was done, asking about his religion, offering confessions, thanking him. Two others—they happened to be nonviolents—wished to discuss something else.
"You are an old man," one said.
"Yes?"
The man pointed to Jim's eyes. "You do not see well."
"I see well enough."
"But you wear glasses?"
"They were taken when I arrived."
"No glasses," the man said, shaking his head. "Take off your tunic."
What?
"Your lice."
The men were offering to do for Jim what he, with his 64-year-old's eyes, could not do for himself: pick the lice from his prison pajamas. Then and every day thereafter, the two Shona, an accused thief and a vandal, meticulously picked the lice from Jim Steele's prison pajamas while the old man sat beside them in the cold air of the prison yard, naked and peaceful.
After seventeen days, when it became clear that the whites were not going to end up getting hurt, that their presence in the prison was in fact creating a most unpalatable racial harmony, that even the warden was developing worrisome tendencies, the order came down: Give the whites their bail.
They were freed with the stipulation that they leave their farms, and Chinhoyi altogether, for one month. On the day Jim and Janette Steele returned, they stopped in town for supplies. The tension was alive in the air—the sense of eyes, of suspended rules, of Chinhoyi having declared open season on whites.
Jim Steele and Paul Neshangwe said nothing when they spotted each other across the street. Just began walking. For several minutes, while the people of Chinhoyi looked on, the two men held one another.
"You are my pastor," Jim finally said. "You are my pastor."
"And you," Paul said, "are a father to me."
···
And still there is anger. At his government. At his losses. Even at the settlers he has provided for. Can it be reconciled with his forgiveness? Is he a changed man?
Jim Steele scorns such questions.
"Repent," he says early one Sunday morning. "Repent." His tone is harsh, his knuckles white as he skins a broken extension cord with a knife. "The word itself means 'to turn around.' There can be no forgiveness without repentance, without a turning around. Remorse is not enough. Judas had remorse. But did he repent? Did he ask Jesus Christ for forgiveness and vow to change his ways? No, he went off and hung himself. Remorse is not repentance. It is just an emotion. Like anger—just an emotion. Repentance is a process. It involves asking, 'Lord, how shall I proceed?' and then acting. It is an act of will. It is not for the weak."
Jim Steele is filled with grace, but he will never forget what has been done to him. Forgiveness is not a forgetting. Jim Steele is quite aware that he has lost many of his friends and most of his money, that paint peels from the walls of his living room, that he and his wife often go days without electricity, that their phone hasn't worked in years. He will never believe that the presence of settlers on his land is just. Justice is another issue for another day. Such is Jim Steele's forgiveness: While it creates peace, it is not an absolution or an excusing. It is, like his dirty farmer's hands, rugged and unpretty and functional, a thing he will be working with until the day he dies.
But then, after the sharp words, Steele smiles at his wife and says, "Let us go." The ride to church, in an old station wagon packed with settlers, is upbeat and chatty. Every few minutes, though, the car goes silent as those inside look out at the country Robert Mugabe has killed. Such a sad nation, Zimbabwe. The return to ancient slash-and-burn agriculture has turned the verdant earth into a moonscape of baked-black dirt and the air into an acrid broth. Mugabe's misrule has driven inflation to quadruple digits while AIDS has lowered the national life expectancy to 39. After this morning's service, many parishioners will return to squalid bos—sticks stabbed into the dirt and covered with rusted tin sheets—because their homes were bulldozed last summer as part of Operation Drive Out the Trash, a "civic beautification" project that serves to scatter into the rural areas those poor urban blacks most likely to coalesce into a force of opposition.
Zimbabwe, once lovely and flowing, is now frozen. No one can move; petrol is impossibly rare and expensive. No one can speak; CIO agents are everywhere. Those not demoralized to the point of paralysis leave if they can. Few dream of resistance. "Take up arms?" Zimbabweans say, time and again. "There is nothing left worth fighting for." Even the president has succumbed to some odd, whole-body petrification. At the dawn of Zimbabwe, Mugabe was a joyful and athletic orator. Now, at 82, the man appears embalmed, face locked in an inscrutable wooden stare, arms set as straight as oars down the sides, voice imprisoned in a narcoleptic two-note range.
The station wagon pulls up to the church an hour early, and as they have every Sunday for more than five years, Jim Steele and Paul Neshangwe reflect on their country, then choose which Bible lessons speak best to its plight. There is no acknowledgment of how radical this linking of the worldly and the otherworldly is. The growing number of black faces in what was once Chinhoyi's white-man's church speaks for itself. As does the occasional presence in the pews of CIO spies sent to report on Neshangwe's sermons. As does the charred hull of the church's parish office—firebombed during 2004's Heroes' weekend. ("Don't you think," one investigator coyly suggested, "that whoever destroyed your office is angry that you welcome both whites and blacks into your church?") Sometimes Steele's pragmatic nature prompts him to ask, "Is this too much?" Neshangwe's response is always the same: "Ah, Jim, the recklessness of faith!"
The service itself is joyously chaotic. There is no hymn list, and music doesn't occur, it strikes; seized by the Spirit, some guy in the back cries Hi-ya! Hi-ya! Hi-ya! in a piping high voice, and by the fourth Hi-ya! he's been joined in full harmony. As a white woman produces an acoustic guitar, two black men sprint, as if on fire, toward the altar and get to work on a bongo and a grotesquely out-of-tune upright piano.
In the middle of the madness is Jim Steele, with his old brown ill-fitting suit and his mussed hair. Is he a man who ever thinks to look in a mirror? It is not possible. Earlier, during the hour-long earthquake of Paul's sermon, he was fidgeting, flinty, tapping his watch, the disciplining father—prompting Paul to declare, without breaking the musical cadence of his sermonspeak, that "Brother Jim is tapping his watch, yes, yes…" But now, as he is enveloped in sung praise—in the voices of his brothers and sisters, whom he has loved and lifted and, in some cases, saved from death—the edginess, like the anger from earlier this morning, vanishes. Even the folds and shadows of his sun-baked farmer's face depart as he floats up on tiptoe, palms open and raised in supplication, eyes closed, a silly grin forming as he sings and prays. Is he still here?
He is not. He gave up his life years ago.
