The Zimbabwe of Memory, Eroded by a Deluge of Troubles

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Mugabe Claims Election Victory

Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe is officially sworn in as president after a sharply criticized runoff vote that was boycotted by his only rival, Morgan Tsvangirai.

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Today, it takes one trillion Zim dollars to make $100 U.S., and nobody bothers with words like "malaise" anymore.

"Every day is a real battle, just a grind of hunting and gathering, getting food, petrol, soap."

This is Angus Shaw talking, the Zimbabwean reporter who heads the Associated Press operation there. I called him up the other day to see how he was doing. Angus is white, and though he's known the government leaders since the independence war in the early 1970s, they turned on him years ago, accusing him of being a spy and worse.

Angus is not easily scared. He was orphaned at 9. He was standing a few feet away when a fellow reporter was beaten to death in Somalia. He covered the Rwandan genocide and remembers Idi Amin's death camps in Uganda, when "corpses had been bound with wire and pressed into grotesque bales forklifted onto trucks."

When his home country slapped him in jail a few years ago, he wrote that the prison survival kit "should contain strong sleeping pills, lice and mosquito repellents, remedies for dysentery and money for bribes."

He fled the country in 2005 to avoid another stay in prison, allegedly for practicing journalism without a license. (You have to have a license to be a reporter in Zimbabwe these days. Also, they don't allow any more foreign reporters to be based there -- they kicked out the few remaining in 2001 -- and the ones who come in now do so undercover and at risk.)

Angus came back home in 2007. I asked him if he could say what things were like now.

"The last six months it's been quite tense. I've had threatening phone calls, there are unmarked police cars parked outside my house, militia members in my car park. But I haven't been in jail for two years."

When I moved there in 1997, my wife at the time, Vita, and I walked into an orphanage one day a few months after arriving and there, in the second crib on the right, was the most stunningly beautiful child I had ever seen. She was 11 weeks old and had been left to die beneath an acacia tree on the day she was born. Ants were eating her right ear. Someone found her and called rural police. At the orphanage, the matron named her Chipo, the Shona word for "gift."

At three months, she weighed 4 pounds 3 ounces. She'd been hospitalized for pneumonia twice, and would be one more time before we could take her home. Eighteen children died in her orphanage during the time she was there.

These days she loves to read and play basketball. She is still beautiful.

We came in the house from summer camp the other night, and there was Zimbabwe, the old country, right there on the television. Here were pictures of Mugabe, smiling, waving to supporters, then a shot of soldiers and clubs and people running and smoke in the distance.