## Metadata - Author: [[Peter Godwin]] - Full Title: The Fear - Category: #books ## Highlights - The “land issue” was about so much more than land. It was about breaking up the million-strong voting bloc of black employees who worked on the farms, and who had voted for the MDC. Mugabe wanted to shatter that bloc. And they became the main, though largely unsung, victims of the land takeovers. ([Location 462](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0047Y0ET2&location=462)) - “The party elite who take over farms have access to U.S. dollars at the official rate of thirty thousand to one when the black market rate is eighty million to one. They can get loans at 25 percent per annum when hyperinflation is 200,000 percent, so they can make huge profits on the difference, buy forex on the street, generating income without actually farming.” This is the alchemy of the famous “U.S.$500 Mercedes,” where Mugabe’s favored can take just U.S.$500 and, in four black-market currency deals, turn it into enough to buy a brand-new Merc. ([Location 494](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0047Y0ET2&location=494)) - presidential bodyguards strut along the pavement, thrusting their AK-47s, bayonets fixed, at the passing cars, a ballet of the bellicose, ([Location 502](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0047Y0ET2&location=502)) - Here, on Garvin Close, is where Mengistu Haile Mariam, “the Butcher of Addis,” architect of Ethiopia’s Red Terror, has lived in a heavily guarded luxury home since being granted sanctuary by Mugabe in 1991, when his regime was overthrown. Mengistu also spends time on a ranch confiscated from a white farmer, and in his holiday villa on Lake Kariba. His security has been redoubled since two Eritreans tried to assassinate him here in 1995. During Mengistu’s seventeen-year rule, an estimated one million Ethiopians died in famines, exacerbated when he blocked emergency food shipments to areas sympathetic to his opponents. He had half a million more killed as “counter-revolutionaries” in his Cultural Revolution-style purge of the educated classes—especially students and their professors. Human Rights Watch described the killings as “one of the most systematic uses of mass murder ever witnessed in Africa.” Before they could retrieve the bodies of their loved ones, relatives were charged “the wasted bullet” tax, to pay for the execution. ([Location 513](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0047Y0ET2&location=513)) - Mengistu has acted as a security adviser to his host. In particular, it was he who apparently suggested that Mugabe launch Operation Murambatsvina, driving hundreds of thousands out of the cities, and bulldozing their houses. Mengistu has good reason to fear Mugabe’s overthrow—the opposition here have threatened that when they come to power they will ship him back to Addis to be executed by his compatriots. ([Location 527](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0047Y0ET2&location=527)) - We slow by one, to watch squatters hacking down a long roadside avenue of mature fir trees, for firewood. Their amateur felling has toppled several trees onto the telephone poles, and now a forlorn frizz of broken wires hangs from them. ([Location 543](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0047Y0ET2&location=543)) - To pressure Mugabe into releasing the vote count, the opposition announces a “stay-away,” asking their members to boycott their work places. But how do you tell there’s a strike when only 6 percent of workers are employed? ([Location 666](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0047Y0ET2&location=666)) - The panners ride here on big flat-bed lumber trucks called “goneyets,” after the hookers who service them. The hookers ask whether this truckful have “gone yet,” or still have carnal needs to be serviced. You can only imagine what the HIV rate is. ([Location 819](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0047Y0ET2&location=819))