Zimbabwe’s second innings

Finally, it rained. I stood on the lawn with arms outstretched like a scarecrow, bare feet rooted to the sodden soil, droplets dancing on skin. They call this city “Skies,” and in all weathers the moniker proves apt. From horizon to horizon, a vast glaucous cloudbank roiled and swelled, spilling water in great sheets to quench the earth and clean the dust from the air.

October was not yet fully past when the first rains of the summer arrived that year. I was in Bulawayo to cover a pair of matches between Zimbabwe and the West Indies. It would be a positively profligate ten days of Test cricket—the sport’s longest and highest-level form—at Queens Sports Club in the City of Kings, another of the city’s titles. The change of season had been heralded by a wild fluctuation in the mercury: the week of the first Test, the temperature shot up to 38 degrees before plummeting down to 14. Then the rain arrived, early and dramatic, amid thunder that cracked the sky and gusting wind that shook the trees in the yard around me, spattering and spraying raindrops even under the covered verandah. Signs and wonders.

Zimbabwe stumbled to defeat in the first game, failing to build upon the advantage their bowlers had earned on the first day—but they rallied to save the second. Hamilton Masakadza scored his final Test century (a score of 100 runs by an individual batter in a single inning) versus the same team against whom he’d scored his first, as a teenager, all the way back in 2001; Sikandar Raza’s allround brilliance kept Zimbabwe in the match; and Regis Chakabva and Graeme Cremer batted together for more than two-and-a-half hours to draw the game on the fifth afternoon.

Having arrived so spectacularly, the rain never really left, settling into a steady mizzle that people here call guti. We were listening to the water dripping through the gutters and onto the verandah stonework of that house in Hillside—a suburb a couple of kilometers from Bulawayo’s city center—when the rumors began to circulate. Labeled a “coup plotter” by then-First Lady Grace Mugabe, Emmerson Mnangagwa had been dismissed from the vice presidency on November 6th and left the country in dramatic circumstances. His whereabouts were unknown. The following week, tanks and armored personnel carriers were seen moving around the outskirts of Harare, with video clips being shared rampantly across social media.

We scrolled through hot takes, speculation, and memes; blasted Bob Marley’s “Zimbabwe” out of subwoofers with bass to rattle your soul; and wondered what would happen next. Our host assured us that he knew all the best caves in the nearby Matopos hills to hide out in, should things come to that. But there was as much curiosity as there was trepidation, and once the situation really started to move, I knew that I had to be in the capital to witness, in person, whatever was going to happen.

The rain beat me to Harare. In fact, it arrived in time to stop play after tea on the second day of the Logan Cup match, where the Mountaineers faced the Rising Stars at Harare Sports Club (HSC) on 13 November. Masakadza played in this game too, but there was no century this time. The Logan Cup is Zimbabwe’s premier cricket competition, the trophy having been contested since 1903. Its cricket games are played over four days with two innings per side, with breaks for lunch and tea in the afternoon and a pace of gameplay that can vary from frenetic to glacial. This is cricket in the classical sense.

On that same drizzly afternoon, General Constantino Chiwenga, the head of Zimbabwe’s army at the time, held a press conference backed by almost 90 senior army officers at military headquarters in Harare. “The current purging,” he said, “which is clearly targeting members of the party with a liberation background, must stop forthwith. We must remind those behind the current treacherous shenanigans that when it comes to matters of protecting our revolution, the military will not hesitate to step in.”

The next day, the military stepped in, with heavily armed soldiers in armored vehicles taking up key positions around the city and entering the studios of the state broadcaster, ZBC, from which Major General S.B. Moyo delivered his famous speech early on the morning of the 15th.

“Good morning, Zimbabwe,” Moyo said. “The situation in our country has moved to another level.” And so it began. Was this a coup? A soft coup? #NotACoup? Schrodinger’s coup, perhaps? Or, best of all, playing on Zimbabwe’s pseudo-currency: not a coup but a “Bond Coup”—it has 1:1 value with a coup but can only be used in Zimbabwe.

Whatever it was, Moyo was insistent on what it wasn’t. “This is not a military takeover,” he said, incongruous words for a man clad in military fatigues on an unscheduled dawn broadcast. “Remain calm, and limit unnecessary movement,” he added. “However, we encourage those who are employed and those with essential business in the city to continue their normal activities as usual.”

He can surely not have been thinking of men, in flannels and floppy hats, playing a first-class domestic cricket fixture. But that’s exactly what the cricketers at Harare Sports Club did. It is worth pointing out that the sports club is literally next door to State House, the official residence of the president. So close is the country’s premier cricket ground to the president’s old digs that Nathan Lyon, playing for a visiting Australia A-side in 2014, claimed to have hit a six that landed on the presidential lawn. “I think Bobby Mugabe was under attack,” Lyon later claimed. “Second-last ball of the game, three runs to win, it went the journey.”

When Zimbabwe was a fledgling Test nation back in the early 1990s, Mugabe would often pop across the road to watch some cricket or welcome incoming captains. There are several photos of him at HSC, possibly the most (in)famous of which is that of his handshake with Michael Atherton, the English captain, during England’s ill-fated inaugural tour of Zimbabwe in late 1996. “Cricket civilises people and creates good gentlemen,” Mugabe has been quoted as saying (though the quote is possibly apocryphal). “I want everyone to play cricket in Zimbabwe; I want ours to be a nation of gentlemen.”

The English have not sent a team to Zimbabwe since 2004, and Mugabe moved out of State House in the mid-2000s. But it has remained a potent symbol of state power in the country, fortified and watched over day and night by the presidential guard. Fast forward to 2017, and it was only natural that the place would be the locus of a tectonic power shift—and so, outside the cricket ground were tanks and soldiers. This was ground zero of the palace revolution.

“There was speculation that something is about to take place,” remembers Vusi Sibanda, a veteran Zimbabwean international cricketer, and one of the elder statesmen of the Mountaineers side that played that game. “We knew that being so close, being in the vicinity of it all, that we had to tread very carefully. They said people should just stay away or stay indoors, or something like that, and we were in the middle of the game. I remember being told, let’s just turn up for the game, and see what happens. And if something is to happen, so be it.”

The city center emptied, and for a couple of blocks in every direction, cricketers and soldiers were the only people anywhere near HSC. “There was a time when everything just went dead quiet,” explains Sibanda. “Everything almost just stood still. We didn’t even know what to do. So we decided to just finish the game. We were waiting in limbo, not knowing what was happening next.”

Play on the fourth and final day of that Logan Cup match at HSC, on 15 November, was scheduled to start at 9:30 a.m to make up for time lost to rain earlier in the game. However, the damp conditions overnight delayed it until 10 a.m. Despite being 300 runs ahead, and the likelihood of losing more time to rain during the day, the Mountaineers did not declare their innings closed but continued to bat, with top order batsman Mohammad Eqlakh not out on 135.

Eqlakh’s story could fill a feature all on its own, but it’s worth racing through the key twists and turns of how he found himself playing professional cricket in Zimbabwe. Born in the tiny village of Nevada (population 1,300) in Uttar Pradesh, India, he played age-group cricket for Vidarbha’s regional team and caught the eye of the coach of Zimbabwe’s under-19 squad when they visited India. Expat cricketers are not unheard of in Zimbabwe—the national team’s star allrounder, Sikandar Raza, was born in Sialkot and originally wanted to be a fighter pilot in Pakistan’s Air Force before his path turned to cricket in southern Africa—and it seems that this was the route Eqlakh was pursuing.

Eqlakh arrived in Zimbabwe ahead of the 2017 summer, and in the space of six weeks he cracked a sparkling maiden first-class hundred in that fateful match at HSC, witnessed a putsch first hand, was hit by a car, and endured a torrid experience getting a head wound stitched in a decrepit public hospital. Worse was to follow. In December, it was discovered that Eqlakh’s work visa was not in order, and when he went to Home Affairs to get it sorted, he was promptly detained, and deported back to India days later. That, alas, is…