E-mail a friendChristina Lamb
airdate October 9, 2007
Christina Lamb is an award-winning war correspondent who was featured in the film, War Women. The British journalist has reported from many areas of conflict around the world and was the first journalist to obtain access to the interrogations of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11. Senior foreign correspondent for the Sunday Times, Lamb is an Oxford grad and on the board of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting. She's the author of 5 books, including House of Stone and Small Wars Permitting.
Christina Lamb
Tavis: Christina Lamb is the senior foreign correspondent for the "Sunday Times" of London, whose work has appeared Stateside in "The New York Times" and "Time" magazine. Twice, she's been named foreign correspondent of the year by the British Press Awards, primarily for her reporting from Zimbabwe. In 2005, in fact, she was declared an enemy of the state by President Robert Mugabe for exposing government-run rape camps.
Her new book is called "House of Stone: The True Story of a Family Divided in War-Torn Zimbabwe."
Christina Lamb, nice to have you on the program.
Christina Lamb: It's a pleasure Tavis.
Tavis: What's it like when one gets declared an enemy of the state by the president?
Lamb: Well, it was a little bit disconcerting, because I happened to be in the country at the time.
Tavis: At the time.
Lamb: So I was there for the elections in 2005, and I called a friend and he said, "I'm amazed you're in the country, I've just been listening to the presidential spokesman, and he declared you an enemy of the state." And in fact he went on to say that I had a penchant for finding corpses on golf courses, which is a rather odd thing to say.
Tavis: So practically speaking, though, when you are labeled an enemy of the state, what does that do to your reporting, what does it do for fear of your life? Do they kick you out of the country, what happens?
Lamb: Well, it's very difficult, anyway, for foreign journalists to report from Zimbabwe.
Tavis: In Zimbabwe.
Lamb: As you know, we're banned from reporting, so all the reporting really is undercover, and it means not only are you at risk, and they brought in a prison sentence two years ago for any foreign journalists that are caught reporting, but it also means that anybody that you interview you're putting at risk. And at the end of the day, I can fly out of the country and they have to stay there.
But once I had been declared an enemy of the state, I knew that I was actually going to be on lists at airports and that would make it much harder to get in and out of the country.
Tavis: What's the government's official position for banning foreign journalists?
Lamb: Well, officially, I think in 2002 they brought in an act which meant all foreign journalists had to have licenses to operate in the country, which in practice means that you can't go in legally because they won't give licenses to anybody that has done any reporting from there.
Tavis: And tell me more about these rape camps that you reported on that got Mr. Mugabe and company so upset.
Lamb: Well I've been going back and forth a lot since 2000 to Zimbabwe, and in 2001, 2002, some of the people that I was speaking to started telling me about not just torture that was going on, which we knew, but that there were these camps where young Zimbabweans were being trained, militants - they were called Green Bombers - to go and harass people and torture them, but that they were actually going into villages and going and raping women.
Daughters and wives of anybody - not just activists from the opposition, but anybody that might even be thinking about voting for the opposition. So I started traveling around the country trying to find out about it, which was difficult because obviously, it's very hard there, it's a very repressed society and people were very reluctant to speak about something like that.
So all the interviews had to be done secretly, and it was really very horrific, the stories that I was told by some of the women and young girls; girls just 12, 13, who were being taken and raped repeatedly by police or by these young Green Bomber militants.
Tavis: Dictators are not uncommon on the continent of Africa, but neither are overthrows. What's your sense of why Mr. Mugabe has lasted for as long as he has, and there's another election scheduled not too far from now which I suspect he'll win, as well.
Lamb: I suspect he will. Zimbabwe is the most frustrating story of any story that I've covered, because it's been going on for years now, this situation, and it really - you go there and you can't understand why, when the situation is as bad as it is, that people don't rise up and do something. And often, people there will say to you, "Why doesn't the outside world do anything to help us? It's because we don't have oil and they're just abandoning us."
And you sort of feel, well, why don't you do something to come out on the streets, as we've seen in Ukraine and Yugoslavia and other countries? But actually, in 2005 I was there during something called Operation Murambatsvina, which was when Mugabe started demolishing all of the suburbs of Harare and sending in bulldozers to demolish peoples' homes, and 700,000 people lost their homes.
Now in all of that, only one person protested, and that brought home to me just how oppressed people are. Imagine losing everything that you'd ever worked for - your home, your livelihood, peoples' workshops and shops were destroyed - and to go through all that and not protest. And I saw people being told by the police "We're fed up with destroying this ourselves, and you go and take your own - destroy it yourself, throw your belongings on these fires."
And people were just obeying meekly, and that haunted me afterwards, seeing those peoples' blank faces as they just obeyed what the police said and just watched all they'd ever worked for go up in flames. And that was the first time that I really realized just how frightened people were in Zimbabwe. And so that, I think, is the main reason why people are not rising up.
But the other thing, too, is that Zimbabwe has seen a huge exodus of its population in the last five years. Around four million people have left the country, which is about a third of the population, and those are the educated people, the middle class, the people that might have been coming out in the streets and doing something.
And mostly what's left are either the people at the top who are benefiting from the situation, or a huge mass of people who are really struggling to survive. And to actually try and expect them to come out into the streets and protest is really just very difficult to imagine. And there's also a very high proportion of people that have AIDS; about a third of the population. So it's a very sick population, too.
Tavis: In the few minutes I have left, I want to get to the book here. But let me ask one other quick question, though: How a White woman comes to cover a story like this.
Lamb: Well, I lived in South Africa in the mid-nineties as African correspondent for my newspaper, so I traveled a lot in Africa, and really fell in love with Zimbabwe, actually, it's a beautiful country and the people are really friendly. Even today, after all the brutality, after all the very racist hate-speak on the radio, which is quite like we saw in Rwanda back in the mid-nineties, it's still an incredibly friendly place.
Tavis: Tell me about "House of Stone." It's really the story of two people, really; you focus on two characters, Aqui and Nigel. But tell me about the story.
Lamb: Well, in 2002, in the height of the invasions of farms where Mugabe's people were seizing people's land, there was one particular area called Marondera, which was a tobacco-growing area, and that became the front line, really, of the farm invasions, because those were the best farms to have. And it was also only an hour outside of Harare, so a lot of government people who had their eyes on farms thought they'd like one of those.
So I was spending a lot of time there, and I went to this place called Wenimbe Valley where all the White farmers but one had been kicked off, and so I went to see this one family that was still there on the Kendoa farm. And they sat and I talked to them, and then they said, "We'd like you to meet our maid, Aqui, because she's very interesting."
Now, that was the first time that any White farmer had ever suggested that I talk to one of their workers, I was surprised. And she came and sat with us and was a very feisty lady. A single mother who'd brought up five children and had a really interesting relationship with the White farmer. And they clearly respected each other a lot, and listened to each other's opinions.
And so I thought this is very interesting, and anyway, went away. A week later, I heard that the farm had been taken over and they'd actually, when I'd gone to see them and we'd taken tea, they'd had war vets living at the end of their garden already, waiting to take it over. And it was a kind of surreal situation because we were sitting drinking tea, talking, and there was all this smoke rising from these huts at the bottom of the garden.
Anyway, I then went back to London and a few months after that, the White farmer came to London and we met up. And he said to me, he told me the story of the farm takeover and he said, "Do you know, the worst thing about it, do you know who was behind it?" And I said, "No idea." And he said, "It was Aqui, our maid." And I was astonished, because they had had this very close relationship.
And it was quite clear that to him, the fact that it was Aqui taking over the farm was much worse than actually losing the farm, because he felt that she'd brought up their children for them, he'd helped her children, they'd had this what appeared to be very close relationship, and then at the end of all that, she'd betrayed them.
Tavis: What do we learn about their relationship thereafter, after the betrayal? I've only got just a few seconds left, I'm sorry.
Lamb: Well the interesting thing is that at the end of all this, she gave the farm back to them, and they've become good friends again. So I actually think for all the depressing things happening in Zimbabwe, that this book has a message of hope, that Black and White can work together. And for all Mugabe's attempts to try and divide the communities, he's actually in a strange way brought them closer together because they're all fighting together against him.
Tavis: I don't want to give the story away, but I did want to get that question out so that people know that reconciliation and redemption is possible. The new book by Christina Lamb is called "House of Stone: The True Story of a Family Divided in War-Torn Zimbabwe." Nice to have you on the program.
Lamb: It was a pleasure, thank you.
Tavis: Pleasure's all mine.
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