Dictator Read Free Page A

sculpted bone structure made all the more apparent by a shaven head, and full lips framed by a close-cropped beard. But as the horn-rimmed spectacles round his liquid brown eyes suggested, he took a much more earnest approach to his studies. Moses had attended the University of Malemba before being offered a graduate place at the London School of Economics’ Department of Government. As the first member of his family ever to receive a college education, he had no intention whatever of wasting it on girls and parties.
    Dick Stratten had insisted on paying the young man’s tuition fees and living expenses. ‘Moses is like a son to me too,’ Stratten had told the boy’s father, Isaac Mabeki, as they shared one of the bottles of thirty-year-old Glenfiddich they polished off from time to time, talking not as master and loyal servant but as one man to another. ‘I know he will do great things for this country one day. With your permission, it would be my pleasure and an honour to help him on his way.’
    Moses had spent the past three years in London, returning to Malemba only for occasional visits. Now, with his masters degree completed, he was coming home for good.
    The roar of the Cessna’s engines as it passed low over the house and made its final approach to the landing strip roused Jacqui Stratten from her reverie. She blinked, gave a little shake of the head and thought for a second. Yes, there would be time. Then she smiled at a servant who was hovering a few feet from the table. ‘Coffee, please, Mary,’ she said. ‘Mr Stratten and I will have a cup while we wait for the boys to arrive.’

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    The seventy-four-year-old man sitting behind his mahogany desk in a lavishly appointed office in Sindele had begun his career as a village schoolteacher, working in the same modest school where he had been given his own early education by Anglican missionaries. Had his life followed its expected course, Henderson Gushungo would now be retired, a respected member of his little community, spending his days sitting under a shade-tree, talking to the other old men, grousing about the way the world had changed and indulging his grandchildren.
    Gushungo, however, had had other, more radical ideas. He’d joined the resistance movement against the white minority who ruled his country as though it were still a colony of the British Empire. Like Nelson Mandela in South Africa, he’d burnished his reputation among his people and radicals around the world by going to prison for his beliefs. Unlike Mandela, he’d emerged from jail filled with a lust for revenge, not reconciliation. For years he had fought a war on two fronts: publicly against the whites, and privately against his competitors within the liberation movement. Now he held the entire country’s destiny in his hands. Having been Prime Minister, he had promoted himself to President, never submitting himself to any election whose result was not certain before a single vote had been cast.
    Gushungo liked to call himself the Father of the Nation. But he was a very stern and cruel parent.
    His soldiers were fighting in the jungles of the Congo. His henchmen were forcing white farmers off their properties and forcibly cleansing hundreds of thousands of black Malembans from areas where, in his increasingly paranoid imagination, they might constitute a serious opposition to his continued rule. His demoralized opponents, unable to remove him themselves, prayed that God would do the job for them. But the old man had no intention of meeting his maker any time soon. His hair was still thick and black, his face remarkably unlined, his posture erect. His mother had lived past one hundred. He still had a long way to go.
    One of the phones arranged to the right of his desk trilled.
    ‘It has begun,’ said the voice on the other end of the line.
    ‘Excellent,’ said Henderson Gushungo. ‘Let me know when the operation has been completed.’

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    When he met Moses Mabeki at