Marshmallow Fishes

By Kathleen O'Dea

Captured by murderous land-grabbing 'war veterans', former Zimbabwe international swimming star Kathleen O'Dea and heavily pregnant Heather, wife of anti-Mugabe politician Roy Bennett, were forced to watch the horrific beating of Bennett's loyal black farm workers, some of whom were raped and murdered. Under threat of death from the machete-wielding mob the two women had to chant pro-Mugabe slogans. Heather later lost the baby she was carrying. Bravely defiant, Kathleen stayed to help other white farmers, getting caught up in more terrifying farm raids, before she fled to England with only £10 in her pocket, believing that she might get the British Government to stop all the brutality in her beloved homeland. Sometimes disturbing, sometimes sad, sometimes wickedly funny, Kathleen's extraordinary story personifies the impact Mugabe has had on the lives of thousands of "wandering Zimbabweans."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Legend Press
• Release date: Oct 16, 2015
• ISBN: 9781785071201

Book preview

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Preface

Those silent tears

I GREW up in Zimbabwe. Actually, I was born in Southern Rhodesia in 1964. I grew up in the Rhodesian war. My brother, Patrick, was blown up four times. We don’t talk about it too much. The last landmine got him. I will never forget that day because I was so young. My dad could not sleep that night. He could not do anything that day because we did not know anything about it at the time. My dad hardly ever went to the movies but that day he went by himself. He left half way through the movie.

I have a strong religious belief. Not fanatical but a strong one. I am not one of these people who knock on your door and tell you to repent (What do you get if you cross a Jehovah’s Witness with a Hell’s Angel? Someone who knocks on your door and tells you to f*** off!) but I do believe in a higher power so I had given my brother a rosary from Lourdes made of wood by an ex-nun Elizabeth, who now lives in Dorset in the UK. My brother wore it around his neck with his dog tags. I don’t even know what age I was back then. It was in the 1970s. My brother is nine years older than me.

The day he got blown up badly he was escorting Water Development, part of the government, in a convoy through a hostile area. He was the convoy commander. He was wearing the wooden beads I gave him around his neck. His vehicle hit a landmine. Patrick says it was a boosted TM46 vehicle mine. I don’t know what that means but I do know how much damage it did. The vehicle’s safety harness saved Patrick’s life but he fractured his vertebrae, broke both his ankles, one a compound fracture, and smashed four ribs. I can still see the blood seeping through his plaster after operations on his leg. The nurses had drawn a ball point pen mark around it so they could see if the seepage was getting any bigger.

When I first looked at him after the explosion I thought of those old Laurel and Hardy films when stupid Stan Laurel would accidentally blow himself up and make his hair stand on end except this was not funny. Patrick was fully black from the cordite. His whole skin looked like he’d been dipped in gunpowder.

In those days you always dreaded that knock on the door, or that guy in army uniform walking up your garden path. In that split second, before they actually tell you, you have this enormous dread. Is he alive or is he dead? Then when you know he is alive your emotions take a different turn. Has he got all his limbs? Are his brains intact? Then when you hear what has happened you can’t settle – not until you actually see him. All that was left of the rosary beads Patrick was wearing around his neck was the wooden cross. So don’t tell me there’s no higher being involved here.

My parents went to Bulawayo Central Hospital and waited for him to be evacuated from the area. When he arrived at the hospital he was in terrible pain. My mom said that when they brought him out on the stretcher silent tears were rolling down his face. He opened his hand and in it was the wooden cross I had given him. I know now, from my own experiences, all about those silent tears. There are no words to describe this anxiety.

It was feared that Patrick might have to have his leg amputated. He has had numerous operations. His one leg is shorter than the other and looks mangled. He is in pain all the time. It hurts all of us but I am helpless to take away his pain and what it represents: the loss of his youth as well as a truly horrific era in our country’s history and the pointless loss of life.

Patrick lying injured after hitting the landmine.

In 1980, British politics put Mugabe into power. I was 16. There were restrictions on the amount of time we were allowed to spend out of the country on holiday and it was about to be cut again so my parents took my sister Theresa and I on a six week holiday to Rome, Scotland, Montreal, Ottawa, New York and Fort Lauderdale. I remember sitting cross legged on the floor at my Aunt Jean’s house in Glasgow watching on TV the change of government that was to change our country for ever. I cried and cried because I was so scared of what might be going to happen.

I was still a bit young and because of the war in Rhodesia we had grown up in a time warp while the rest of the world was getting on with life. When we were growing up, our moms and dads were living with the pain of listening every day to the radio to find out who had been killed that day, hoping against hope that it was no-one you knew.

There were days when it wasn’t safe for us kids to go to school so we couldn’t, which was cool. It’s funny how a child can see things. There’s this bloody war going on yet we were happy not being able to go to school! Maybe God protects children as much as He can by giving them minds that can think like that because they will see enough shit when they grow up.

Other days, helicopters would be flying above us in case of riots and some kids had to travel in convoys between towns for their safety.

When Mugabe came into power I tried to overcome those teenage fears. I dared to believe that this could bring us peace and normality. I was hoping he was going to be a good guy.

Unfortunately not.

The Entumbane massacres, which came soon after Mugabe took over, are engraved in my mind. These happened when Mugabe set out to destroy Joshua Nkomo’s opposition Zapu party. The Gukurahundi was taking place.

Gukurahundi is Shona for the early rain which washes away the chaff before the Spring rains.

Sounds nice, that doesn’t it?

Poetic, even; nature’s gentle purge.

But it was bloody genocide on a massive scale.

This was done by Mugabe’s Korean trained 5th Brigade. The 5th Brigade’s objective was to totally crush the people of Matabeleland and so end their loyalty to Joshua Nkomo. Thousands of innocent civilians, up to 30,000 some say, were executed by the fearsome 5th Brigade in their red berets.

Wives lost their husbands. Children were orphaned and left to live with the unimaginable horror of witnessing the most appalling violence against their loved ones. Thousands of people just disappeared, their bereft families not knowing their fate or where they were buried.

This carnage was a backdrop for my teenage years. The executions were often public, with people being forced at gunpoint to dance on the graves of their relatives and chant slogans in praise of Mugabe.

This is what we called the dissident war of the early 80’s. I could hear gun fire and mortars and see smoke in the air. It was surreal watching this and knowing what was happening and not being able to do anything about it.

Evelyn, an African woman, worked for my brother and she had very much pain. She said they were piling bodies onto the backs of trucks and she had to go and find her husband among all those bodies.

Two young girls who were pregnant after being raped for several days by members of the Zimbabwe National Army during a mass beating of villagers, were shot when the soldiers returned to their village months later. Then they bayoneted those poor girls’ bellies open to reveal the still moving foetuses.

The 5th Brigade went to a village school and took 60 pupils aged over 14. The pupils were all beaten for three hours and questioned about dissidents. Twenty to thirty of the girls were raped then ordered to have sex with some of the boys while the soldiers watched.

Both those cases were documented by the Catholic Commission for Justice in Zimbabwe in a dossier they called Breaking The Silence – Building True Peace. That document contained many more cases.

So it went on and on and on. The Gukurahundi was just bloody inhuman; inhumanity on an absolutely appalling scale; just as bad as the Nazis in Hitler’s Germany; worse, even, with all the one-on-one rape, torture and horrific cold-blooded brutal murder.

And the rest of the world did nothing to stop it.

I give Britain ten points for at least trying to sort things out by putting Mugabe in power. But I do not forgive them for turning a blind eye to those atrocities. I reckon they thought it was not politically correct to do anything about it because Nelson Mandela was now a big hit in South Africa. ‘So let’s just ignore this mass murderer Mugabe and hope that he goes away.’ It was such hypocrisy. I didn’t see any celebrities visiting Nelson Mandela when he was in jail; only after his release; plenty of them, then. And I didn’t see any celebrities at Number 10, Downing Street asking what the world was doing about the mass executions in Zimbabwe. F*** celebrities.

I remember meeting this politician in Australia. He was a political adviser to the deputy premier of Western Australia. Because of that time warp we ex-Rhodesians grew up in during the war we obviously lack social skills and that’s why this politician asked me: Are you unique or are they breeding a whole f****** nation of you? Then he met my friend Deidre, whose sister was killed in one of the passenger Viscounts that Joshua Nkomo shot down and he said: "My God, there is a whole f****** nation of you!"

I used to swim for Rhodesia. I was national backstroke champion. I represented Rhodesia in 1979 in Port Elizabeth and in 1980 in Cape Town, South Africa against the Springboks. We were not allowed to compete against the rest of the world because of the politics of Ian Smith’s government. Otherwise I would probably have represented my country in the Moscow Olympics. Because of Premier Ian Smith’s conduct the world had sanctions against Rhodesia. Crazy isn’t it? Whatever you thought of Smith’s minority white government, genocide was not being committed yet, in 2002, they allowed the cricket World Cup to be held in Zimbabwe, where genocide had and was being committed.

Sometimes I cannot understand our world.

I am going to say this right now: There might have been a lot that was wrong about Ian Smith’s policies. But whatever the rights and wrongs of black and white, was Smith wrong to try to prevent all that happened after Mugabe came to power? As a country we were self-sufficient, despite sanctions. We knew that our police force was made up of law abiding people and that they would protect us; not beat, rape, electrocute and torture the citizens of their country. In Mugabe’s Zimbabwe police beat, raped, electrocuted and tortured the citizens of their country.

Anyway, back to swimming and not being allowed to compete against the rest of the world. Being young, I did not understand politics. I was pretty pissed off with everything and everyone around me. I mean, you try swimming 20,000 metres every day, counting the tiles at the bottom of the pool day in and day out and knowing that you aren’t going anywhere because they won’t let you. What’s the point of competing against yourself? Just before Mugabe came to power we were even stopped from competing against South Africa. So I quit the sport.

We’d been a family of top class swimmers. The Bulawayo Chronicle headline said: It will not be the same without O’Deas. There was a picture of me with the caption: "Kathy O’Dea closed a chapter in our country’s swimming history."

Closing a sporting chapter. Kathleen O’Dea pictured after her last event swimming for her country. Picture by kind permission of the Bulawayo Chronicle.

With the dissident war going on in 1985, I emigrated to Australia with my mom and dad who were fearful for our futures in Zimbabwe. I was very sad and displaced. The song USA For Africa was out. I listened to this on the plane all the way to Australia and my heart was breaking because of the state of our beloved country. I was hoping that things would settle and that in years to come no young people would be feeling what I was feeling at that moment. But nearly 30 years down this road we still don’t have a birthright and there are tens of thousands of confused Zimbabweans wandering all around the world.

I am one of those wandering Zimbabweans.

When my dad died the words of a Chris de Burgh song came to me and now I think of those words nearly every day:

Restless hearts, it has been a long time out here on the journey, on the road to Paradise. It’s getting hard to find a place where peaceful waters flow.

We left Zimbabwe, my mom, my dad and me, to start a new life with one thousand dollars in our pocket. I had one sister in Australia, one sister in South Africa and my brother stayed in Zimbabwe. Little did I know that nearly twenty years later I would be doing it again and arriving in Britain with ten pounds in my pocket.

Comparing Australia to Britain, I find the British people harder to fathom. What Australians have in common with Zimbabweans is that we both say it as it is. English people seem to beat about the bush. I guess weather has a lot to do with the development of our characters. I find the average English person more sincere and gentle than the average Australian. Sorry, guys, I don’t mean to offend anyone. I wouldn’t want to analyse a Zimbabwean. That would be a scary thought.

There are only about 25 million people on that massive Australian island and there are about 60 million on that tiny British island so I guess that is why the British beat about the bush. If they said it as it is, like we do, there would probably be riots. There are just too many people crammed together.

I find the way Britain works makes its people a bit like sheep. Soon after arriving in England I got off a train at the wrong stop. I thought: ‘I’ll go and have a look around, I haven’t been here before.’ But I could not do that because my ticket was not for that stop. I didn’t understand that.

Almost everyone in England seems to have a nine-to-five job. They go to the pub at a certain time. They seem to live to a routine. In Africa we do not have a routine. You can get blown out of the water at any moment; they change the goal posts every five seconds. We have learned to survive on this. We are resilient fighters and survivors. I think we have bred a nation of adrenalin junkies, so when you have calm you don’t quite know what to do with yourself. This has given us a colourful background and it has given us heart and soul.

I read somewhere, I can’t remember where: Africa is not for sissies. We deal with the real issues in life, God and the devil. And ain’t that a fact! From so much suffering you develop a sort of over-awareness that fits in Africa but seemed out of place in England.

I said to Neil Parish, an English Member of the European Parliament with whom I went to 10, Downing Street: You know, Neil, in Africa the sword is mightier than the pen; in Britain the pen is mightier than the sword. But in Africa and Britain, money is mightier than both.

With all the suffering in Africa there is also innocence. When I went back to Zimbabwe after eleven years living in Australia I was teaching Microsoft products at a place near Matopos national park, just outside Bulawayo. It was a research station growing sorghum, millet and maize for third world countries. Its head office was in India. I had asked those I was teaching to do a project using a power point presentation and one guy came up with the ebola virus. He was so brilliant and so very highly intelligent and well qualified, you would have sworn he had an encyclopedia under his desk, yet he had so much humility. I must have picked up an Australian twang. They treated me like I was much more intelligent than they were just because I had come from Australia; they assumed that because I had come from the first world I must know more than them.

One equally intelligent African lady in the class said to me:What we grow to feed people in the third world, they feed to pigs in the first world.

She did not say it with malice but with humbleness, as if she were ashamed of where she came from.

I smiled at her and I told her: Do you know how hard the first world is trying to get back to nature and rediscover the basics of life that we have in the third world? They have to buy things off a shelf. You know how to grow them.

Well, her face beamed.

Me: Kathleen O’Dea? I am proud to be Zimbabwean and if I am basic, so be it. It’s because of where I come from.

Beautiful though Australia is, through all those eleven years, ‘in exile’ as I called it, I still wanted to be at home. I wanted to go back to my roots; to be with the wild life and beauty of Africa. Because of the war, we could not enjoy that life and beauty as much as we had a right to when I was growing up. If you went into the bush back then you would come across a few terrorists and a few elephants. My eldest sister’s ex-boyfriend was killed in the army, not by a terrorist, ironically, but by an elephant. Anyway, when you have been forced out of your home it makes you angry - so I wanted to go back to that home.

Unfortunately, I am the type of person that always tries to make things better and fix things; make the world a better place. I cause myself a lot of pain. You know that Shania Twaine song that goes ‘when money grows on trees, happiness is free, people live in peace.’ That’s me. I would have made a perfect hippie. My ex-boyfriend used to call me a third world groupie. I don’t care about titles. I don’t care about money. In God’s eyes we are all equal. We just have different roles to play.

After Roy Bennett’s wife Heather and I had been held hostage by Mugabe supporting murderers described as war veterans we were driving from Chimanimani to Chipinge, analysing the situation in Zimbabwe together and taking a lot of strain. Heather said to me that this priest had given Roy Bennett words of comfort. The priest said it says in the Bible that leaders will lie down and eat grass with the sheep. It took another year for this to sink in. I learned from this: Mugabe’s supporters might be committing the atrocities but leaders like Thabo Mbeki, Tony Blair and George Bush have blood on their hands for sitting back and doing nothing. I sent an email to Members of Parliament in Britain, hoping it would get to Tony Blair. I wrote: Leaders will lie down and eat grass with the sheep but be careful that the sheep next to you is not Robert Mugabe.

That first time in Australia, I could not settle. I wanted to go home. Can you imagine eleven years of wanting to go home? I played sport. I guess it gave my anger an outlet. I represented Western Australia for five years and the whole of Australia for one year in underwater hockey and I was selected to represent Australia in fin swimming in Jakarta.

The first time I represented Western Australia I broke my leg. I don’t know what I was trying to prove to be honest. I was so angry with the world. I must have had an attitude problem, so I took it out in sport. I have a history of breaking my legs. I broke one leg when I was just ten years old and I fractured the other just by turning on my ankle on the way to work. This time I was in Perth, Western Australia. They put my leg in plaster. Then I said: No way! This would mean I would have to forfeit playing underwater hockey for Western Australia; my chance to see if I could make it in a big pond. I made them take the plaster off and I nearly fainted. Not from pain, though, I think it was a blood circulation thing. They wanted to put a screw in my leg but that would also have meant that I could not swim and keep up my fitness. So I told them just to strap it. The doctor was angry with me and told me not to come back.

No sense, no pain, huh?

There I was sitting on my butt on the pavement outside South Perth Medical Centre. This total stranger came up to me then went across the road to this chemist and hired a pair of crutches for me. Guess what? I did get to represent Western Australia in Adelaide and we won. Then in 1993 I was in the Australian team that won the Trans Tasman series against South Africa and New Zealand. We were the top three countries in the world at this event so you could call us world champions.

I went home to Zimbabwe in 1996 because my brother Patrick was very ill with pneumonia. There was a serious possibility that he might not make it and I had to be with him. He pulled through, thank God. In 2000, I went to help Roy Bennett, a Member of Parliament for the opposition party, on his farm. Roy was under great pressure. The people he opposed were trying to corrupt his finances because if you are bankrupt you cannot be an MP. Correct book-keeping was essential to beat this bullshit and I could do book-keeping well. Roy and Heather and his people had an enormous influence on me. Mugabe-supporting mobsters wanted Roy dead. That’s when Heather and I were held hostage and abused while Roy’s farm workers were being beaten to a pulp. Heather was five months pregnant. She miscarried. She lost her baby boy.

Then I got traumatised on another farm. I was seeing dead, brutalised bodies every day; witnessing and experiencing constant intimidation. It was too much for me to bear. In 2002 I resolved to go to England, where I would try to forget the horrors of Mugabe’s regime then, when this tyrant died, go back to Zimbabwe, if not to Australia. I managed to get to England, but not before I got robbed of all my foreign currency that I had bought on the black market in Kariba. I arrived in England on January 12th, 2002, shell shocked and post traumatised. For the first three months in England I lived and worked in a vacuum. When Mugabe got into power for a second time my wheels came off. Then I put my life aside in the hope that I could work to help my family and friends back home and to make the world wake up and realise they had sat back and let Hitler happen all over again.

My story goes on and in telling it I have, unfortunately, to expose who I am, which I don’t really want to do. It’s a story about healing and spiritual growth; about my hopes that if I got to England and told someone important how bad it was in Zimbabwe something would be done about it; about how my rose tinted glasses keep getting blown off my face; about how I keep trying to put them back on.

My hope and intention is that this book might help the healing process for people who still feel the pain of what has happened in Zimbabwe.

My share of any money that Marshmallow Fishes might make is going to a rural mission suggested by Father Peter, a truly wonderful priest who devotes his life to helping sick and elderly people, orphans and the poor in Zimbabwe. Father Peter is an inspiration to me. When I was in London, in shock and stressed out, I got a message from him. It included these words:

Don’t lose heart. Don’t lose hope. God is never dead or silent. You know God’s timing is not ours. When it comes, the evil will be put to death.

Chapter One

Marshmallow Fishes

I WAS born in Bulawayo. My dad was Scottish. He had emigrated to Rhodesia when he was in his early 20’s. He had a choice. It was Rhodesia or Alaska. (Shit! I could have been an Eskimo!) My dad, John McGarry O’Dea, was born in Glasgow in 1926. My mom, Daphne Lena Ferreira, was born in Gwelo, Rhodesia in 1927. Her dad, Thomas Ferreira was of Portuguese origin.

The name of Gwelo was changed to Gweru when Mugabe came to power. Just like he changed Salisbury to Harare, he changed the names of all the roads in Bulawayo. Overnight, Matabele names or English names became Shona names. Borrow Street became Samuel Parirenyatwa Street; Selborne Avenue became Leopold Takawira Avenue and so on. I think Grey Street became Robert Mugabe Way.

Tough shit for a visitor with a road map!

Before all that happened Mr and Mrs O’Dea happily reared four kids. Patrick, Sharon, Theresa and me. Their first born was named Patrick Finbar McGarry O’Dea. It was going to be just Patrick McGarry O’Dea to keep the family tradition (McGarry was my dad’s mom’s maiden name) but the Finbar got added on the day. The story was my dad was pissed and Finbar was the name of the priest who had to put up with them at the Christening.

I was the last of the four, born prematurely. I weighed 3lbs 16ounces.

All the girls went to convent school and Patrick went to Christian Brothers College. I started swimming before I was five. I was knee high to a grasshopper and very small for my age but I was always in the water. Rob Frauenstein taught all of us to swim.

We lived in the poorer part of town then, North End. Then we went to Hazelwood Road in Rowena and then to Marula Avenue in Sauerstown. Living in those poorer places never affected us. We would look up to the kids who had nicer things but we never felt deprived.

We had a dog called Shandy, a red haired cocker spaniel. We used to say to Shandy: Sing old man, sing. Then he would howl on key. We also had Butch, a red setter. I used to collect all the stray dogs. One was a black bitsa dog (bitsa this and bitsa that!) that we used to call Blackballs. I used to push Blackballs around in a doll’s pram and dress him up in my doll’s clothes. Whilst giving him credit for his temperament, he used to put up with me under sufferance. He would go wandering and bailing him out of the pound became an expensive pastime. My dad soon discovered that it was cheaper if he pretended he wanted to