Zimbabwe: A brave man’s words keep his memory alive

Stored for months, the creased pages are filled with untidy black ink, a scrawl of arrows, squiggles and scraps of shorthand. I’ve pulled out my notes to find a man named Gibson Tafadzwa Elliott.

Words leap from the paper, crows flapping out of a graveyard: Camouflage. Danger. Kidnapped. “Beat him up. He’ll talk.”

Touching fingers on the paper, I remember a warm July day last year in the garden of a friend’s house in Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare. The light was hard, dazzling.

A go-between had brought Gibson Elliott in a battered old Toyota to meet me. He came with a man named Noel Mukuti, the opposition Movement for Democratic Change candidate in his area, Midlands province, whom he referred to quaintly as “my Honorable” (from the parliamentary term “honorable member”).

Elliott’s clothes were shabby. He was tall and thin, with the face of a boy. From the smell of him it was obvious that the 23-year-old had been living badly. But there was something luminous about him.

I’d met plenty of young Zimbabwean men over many years who had been beaten or tortured. Gibson Elliott stood out.

Born five years after President Robert Mugabe took office, Elliott had a life-changing experience when he was 16, on the day the MDC held a rally near his home village in a small Midlands settlement called Nembudzia. Ruling party youths pelted the audience with stones. That’s when he made up his mind.

A long squiggly mark down the left of the page marks his words, in tiny handwriting: “I put my whole heart in the MDC. I just can’t work with people who kill people. I just loved working for the MDC.”

I turn back a page or two in my notes, looking for his story of last year’s election violence, when the ruling ZANU-PF party’s militias set up bases around the country to beat and torture MDC activists.

They grabbed him at the local store, tied his legs and hands. One of the thugs hoisted him over his shoulder and carried him about six miles through the bush like a sack of potatoes.

At their base he confronted a terrifying scene: hundreds of ruling party thugs carrying sticks and bars, dressed in blue uniforms, green uniforms, camouflage or ZANU-PF T-shirts and bandannas. There was a tent, one table, one chair, one boss, unshaven with long shaggy hair, wearing a red beret.

“I’m already dead,” he thought.

A terrible thought, but comforting too. It meant the worst had happened; there was nothing to hope for, or to fear.

Slumped on the ground in the tent were six people, some crying, some covered in blood. He knew he would be next.

“My heart was beating now. Very fast.

“They wanted me to give them information about my Honorables -- the MPs. They asked, ‘Where are they?’ ”

What made Gibson Elliott stand out? At a time when men were raping and killing MDC supporters for money, at a time when others joined in the violence because they were too afraid to stand up against it, he was brave.

“They beat me in water; they didn’t want me to stay dry. They beat me too much. I was really confused. I was not going to tell them the information. They must kill me.”

The second day they stripped him and beat him on the neck with copper wire. The next day they beat him and flicked his testicles with rubber. It went on twice a day, sometimes with sticks, sometimes with fists and boots.

He was beaten every day for a month.

Each day the commander in the red beret whispered seductively in his ear: If he surrendered, he could join them, beating people instead of being beaten.

“I refused. He said, ‘I am just trying to save you. If you don’t want me to save you, there’s nothing I can do.’ I said, ‘I am not afraid to die. Nobody can take my heart from the MDC.’ ”

He escaped after a month. Sent behind the tent by his captors to go to the toilet, he saw with surprise that no one was on guard. He ran, naked, without shoes. They chased, but their heavy military boots slowed them down.

The last page of the notes tells of his flight to Harare. The notes end with his feelings about Mugabe: “He’s sending people to kill people and beat people up. Some people hate him so much. I don’t hate him. I just want people to have change.”

Months later, in March, at a church in central Johannesburg, South Africa, where thousands of Zimbabwean refugees take shelter every night, I run by chance into Noel Mukuti, the man Elliott called “my Honorable,” the man he saved. I thread together the last few pieces of Elliott’s story.

In August, after hiding in Harare, Elliott and Mukuti went back to Nembudzia to distribute blankets and soap from UNICEF.

They were caught by ZANU-PF men almost immediately and taken with one other MDC activist to a different militia camp. They were beaten for days. Elliott began bleeding from his mouth and nose.

According to Mukuti, there was an MDC sympathizer among the ZANU-PF men, participating in the violence only to save himself and his family. At night, he untied the prisoners, urging them to flee. But Elliott couldn’t run. He told the others to go. He’d follow when he could.

A month later, after Mukuti made it to Johannesburg, he got a call from Elliott’s twin brother. Cattle herders deep in the bush had stumbled across a fly-covered corpse.

Hold a page of his words up to the light and it resembles a fragile leaf skeleton, a final trace of Gibson Elliott.

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robyn.dixon@latimes.com