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Chapter 1
ELLIS: THE WHO THE HELL IS HE MAN
On a bright afternoon in the spring of 2015, driving past the mall near his suburban Johannesburg home, Tom Ellis spotted his assassins. He didnāt know they were his assassins ā they hadnāt introduced themselves to him yet ā but for the past 20 minutes, since heād left his meeting at a Sandton hotel, a white Toyota Hilux, two black men inside, had been on his tail, and Ellis knew they were bad news.
A good-looking man of 55 ā slim, tall with a healthy mop of salt-and-pepper hair and hazel eyes that glistened like a leopardās ā Ellis (not his real name) had faced his share of danger. He had smuggled an activist in the boot of a car across the ZimbabweāBotswana border, been arrested during a violent election season in Zimbabwe, met with fugitive exiles from the Mugabe regime in the sketchier parts of Johannesburg. But this was different. This was blocks from his Randburg home, where his wife Clare and four kids would be waiting for him to get back. Clare had been followed recently ā a black Merc with tinted windows had tailed her to the school gate on the kidsā run ā and the couple were wary. Ellis had a good idea who the men were. He knew the game. Heād expected as much, ever since he and his friends had taken a new direction. When you set out to remove a dictator ā when you reach out to those close to the dictator ā the dictator is eventually going to find out about it.
Approaching a set of lights at Northgate, Ellis made his move. He slowed his vehicle on green, watched the car behind him get close, then simply stopped and waited for red. The Toyota bakkie, unable to keep its distance, was forced to pull up behind him. Ellis exited his car and walked towards his tail.
He could see the men were dressed casually in polo shirts. The passenger was in his late 30s: a slight, bony, clean-shaven man with thick wire-rimmed glasses and hollowed-out eyes; the driver was a bit older, in his early 40s, and thick-set, with the harder features ā a scar on his left cheek, a chipped front tooth ā of someone whoād known a rough life. Ellis reckoned he might be handy with a knife or a gun.
He walked to the driverās side.
āGuys,ā he said, leaning in as the driver rolled down the window. āI know youāre following me. Letās go get a drink.ā
The driver, irritated and aggressive, scowled at him; his passenger stared straight ahead, pretending he wasnāt there. āShamwaris,ā said Ellis, mangling a plural out of the Shona word for āfriendā, āI know youāre following me. Youāve been on me since the hotel. So, letās talk. I know a place.ā
The men in the car looked awkwardly at each other for a while, then shrugged and nodded. They could use a beer. Ellis smiled and sauntered back to his car. The two vehicles pulled away as the light turned green.
Ellis liked to work in bars. A builder by trade, he ran a small home maintenance company but, much to his wifeās alarm, heād largely abandoned that over the years to focus on his āthingā. His thing ā his love, his passion, his all-consuming obsession ā was the politics and business of Zimbabwe, the country of his birth, a country heād left in 1980 as a 15-year-old kid and not lived in since. He wasnāt built for desk work, though, and the Sundowner bar in Randburg had become an informal office for him over the years. It was a run down, working manās joint with rugby on the TVs and the permanent smell of cigarette smoke and spilled beer. The Rundowner, he and his mates called it. They didnāt stand on ceremony. Heād held countless meetings here: with potential investors, opposition activists, human rights lawyers and displaced white farmers. He had planned visits to the International Criminal Court at The Hague, even brainstormed a visit to the Obama White House to press the case for human rights in Zimbabwe.
The vehicles parked and Ellis, wearing slim-fit jeans, a short-sleeved checked cotton shirt and the trademark veldskoens common to white Zimbabweans of his generation, led the way, the two men following awkwardly behind. Ellis clocked their well-worn trainers: footwear to move fast in. Ellis hugged Heidi, the owner, a bob-haired blonde, chose a table at the back by the pool tables, and ordered his usual drink, a cold Hansa. The two men ordered Castle.
They introduced each other. As Ellis had guessed, they were Zimbabwean. The driver, Kasper, the senior of the two, said he was a plumber. The passenger, Magic, said he was an accountant. Ellis knew they were more than that and these werenāt their real names. South Africa is a hotbed of Zimbabwean spies ā freelance and full-time agents for Mugabeās expansive CIO, keeping an eye on the three-million-strong diaspora ā but he didnāt push it. Besides, he was enjoying their company. They talked about work, family and home; how the country they loved was tearing itself apart.
The two men were both supporting relatives back in Zimbabwe with remittances; Kasper had six children and a wife to feed in Harare. It was hard. He wished he was around for his young boy like his dad had been for him. He said his father had been a policeman in Harare. Ellis flinched a little. His father had been a policeman too, in a different era, when Zimbabwe had a different name, but he kept quiet about that.
It was during the third round of drinks, his guests switching to Johnny Walker, that Ellis asked the question again.
āSo guys, why were you following me?ā
They looked embarrassed but denied it.
āWe are not, we are just driving to the shops,ā muttered Kasper, who did most of the talking.
Ellis smiled and gave them his pitch.
āJust so you know. Iām not political. I donāt care what political party you are. All I want is good governance in Zimbabwe. Your families are hungry; you have to live here to feed your children back there. Thatās stupid. People donāt even like us Zimbabweans in South Africa. Me, my sister lost her farm in Bindura in 2005. Sheās now in Zambia. My family is broke. My wife is angry at me. Iām spending all our money on this game. The question is ā how do we get a fair system in Zimbabwe? How do we get a fair election, one where the peopleās choice wins and the military accept the results?ā
They nodded their heads in agreement. It was the odd thing about Zimbabweans. Everyone, whatever their race or their politics, knew there was a problem ā the disease had been diagnosed ā but they all claimed someone else was to blame and that their man was the one to fix it.
By 6pm Ellis was getting text messages from his wife, asking where he was. He wanted to keep talking but he had to go. He was about to ask for their contact details when Kasper requested his and said heād like to see him again. And so they ended up communicating on WhatsApp.
They met the following month, the month after that, and again a few months later, at the same table on different days. Mostly it was just Kasper. Magic had apparently landed an accountancy job at the South African Rugby Union in Newlands, Cape Town, and only occasionally came up to Joburg.
Ellisās wife Clare recorded the dates of some of the meetings in her diary. A tall, attractive blonde from a farming family in Zimbabwe, she had first met Ellis when he was 15. He had visited her grandfatherās farm with his best friend. She married the friend. They split up and she and Ellis got together.
It was the late 1990s. Ellis wanted to move back to Zimbabwe to be with her ā he hadnāt lived in Zimbabwe for 18 years now and was desperate to go back. But politics interfered: after years of one-party rule, Zimbabwe, once the model postcolonial African nation, was in economic turmoil and a popular opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), led by Morgan Tsvangirai, had risen to challenge Mugabe.
Rebuked at a referendum in 2000 ā when he shockingly lost a vote to change the Constitution, his first defeat in any national poll ā Mugabe set out to crush the MDC. He used veterans of the liberation war and a violent youth militia called Green Bombers to invade mostly white-owned commercial farms. Agriculture, the backbone of the country, collapsed, the West imposed sanctions and the economy went into freefall. Between 2000 and 2010 some four million Zimbabweans fled the country, Clare among them. Instead of Ellis joining her in Zimbabwe, she joined him in the Joburg suburbs, and here they were many years and four children later. Although, in truth, Ellis wasnāt here at all; mentally he was there, obsessed with the politics of a country he hadnāt lived in since he was 15 years old.
Clare knew it was his mission.
āI could ask him to choose ā me or Zimbabwe,ā she once said, ābut I know what he would say, so I donāt ask.ā And she had to admit: he was bloody good at it. He had a gift. There was no official role with any political party and few people knew his face or his name; he worked behind the scenes, connecting people. They came to him for advice, contacts, funding, legal aid, strategies, and he hooked them up.
A white Zimbabwean farmer named Pete Drummond (who appeared in travel writer Paul Therouxās African masterpiece Dark Star Safari) once received help from Ellis. It came out of the blue, without fanfare, but it saved Drummond at a desperate time in his life. Drummond called Ellis āThe Who the Hell Is He Manā. He was an African Pimpernel. Good things happened if you knew Tom Ellis. People trusted him. It was partly the leopard eyes. Those eyes looked straight at you when you spoke so you knew he was listening, that he cared. But it was also the voice. White Zimbabwean men of Ellisās generation can be loud and aggres...
