Dictator

39

Justus Iluko had spent the day at a UN World Food Programme supply centre, trying to persuade officials there to double the size of their deliveries of maize to the refugee camp that had sprung up on his farm. ‘You bring enough food for ten thousand people, but there are many times that number now. You must send more,’ he begged.

The official’s name was Hester Thompson. She could not remember the last time she had stepped into a hot bath, or grabbed more than four hours’ sleep. Her greasy, unwashed hair was pulled back into a bedraggled ponytail, held in place by a rubber band.

She looked at Justus through eyes made red by fatigue and dust. ‘We don’t have more food,’ she said. ‘The UN has cut its food aid budget. We’re giving you all we’ve got.’

‘But people are dying of starvation. There is no fresh water, no sanitation. Yesterday we had twenty new cases of cholera, but we have no doctors, no medicine to treat them.’

‘I understand, and I sympathize, really I do. But even if I had all the money in the world to spend on food it wouldn’t make any difference because your government-’

‘They are not my government,’ Iluko snapped. ‘They are hyenas, feeding on my country’s corpse.’

Thompson sighed wearily. ‘Whatever, the Gushungo regime refuses to import more than a hundred thousand tons of maize into Malemba. The President says he does not need any more than that. In fact the minimum amount required to keep this country alive is close to six hundred thousand tons. Last week we cut our basic maize allowance to five kilos per person, per week. That works out at six hundred calories a day. And yeah, I know, that’s a starvation ration.’

‘So you will not help…’

‘Not unless I suddenly develop superpowers, no.’

Justus drove home empty-handed. He tried to call his family from the Toyota Land Cruiser he had bought, second-hand, with half the money Samuel Carver had sent him a decade earlier. There was no reply.

When Justus finally returned home he discovered the reason for their silence. Overwhelmed by grief and rage, he screamed out curses against Henderson Gushungo, and cried out to God for vengeance. As the sun set behind the western hills, he began digging Nyasha’s grave, completing the task by the light of a torch. She was buried wrapped in a blanket, and as a handful of refugees gathered round him, Justus said a few prayers to speed his wife’s soul on its way. When he asked the people what had happened to his children, no one knew. They had been taken away, two more recruits to the ranks of the disappeared. What difference did it make where they had disappeared to?

Late that night, in a brief moment of calm before the tears and fury consumed him again, he thought of the one man on earth who might be able to help him. He had always kept in touch with Carver, marking every Christmas with a long letter detailing his children’s progress as they made their way up the school ladder. Less regularly, Carver had replied, but the Englishman had always shown him friendship and respect. Justus could not afford to make an international mobile phone call, but what did that matter now?

He had a number for Carver. So he dialled it and hoped for the best.