Deslocado Redemption

Download or read book Deslocado Redemption written by Chris Cocks and published by Lime Tree Press. This book was released on 2018-06-01 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Deslocado is Portuguese for ‘displaced’. This is a story of redemption set in Zimbabwe, Zambia and Mozambique in the mid-1990s, a time of nervous energy, opportunity and fear, in a region that has only recently emerged from bitter colonial wars of independence and subsequent civil wars. The peace is delicate and rancorous, racial attitudes coagulate and retribution is borne on the wind of change. Mike, a white Zimbabwean in his mid-thirties, a former Rhodesian soldier who fought against Robert Mugabe’s guerrilla armies, is struggling to find his place in the world. His marriage is crumbling against a backdrop of PTSD, alcohol and self-recrimination. Phoebe, a black Zimbabwean, grew up in Mugabe’s guerilla camps of central Mozambique. Her mother, a guerrilla herself, was killed in a Rhodesian raid in 1977. Unbeknown to Phoebe, her father is Norman Mubvunduku, the Zimbabwean minister for state security who controls the sinister Central Intelligence Organization (CIO). Salim, a member of Frelimo, the Marxist party that holds power in Mozambique, manages the state-owned hotel in the central Mozambican port city of Beira, from where he runs the city’s prostitution ring. Norman Mubvunduku, on his many official, and unofficial, visits to Mozambique is counted among Salim’s most valued clients. Salim’s star performer is Phoebe whom he ‘rescued’ from the UNHCR camps in the mid-1980s. Mike does business in Beira—where the disfigured street urchin, João, ‘adopts’ Mike as his patrão, his patron, guarding Mike’s pick-up truck being among his many self-appointed duties—a city that Mike visits more than is necessary to escape his atrophying marriage and the stifling racial attitudes of Zimbabwe. He meets Phoebe—emerging from a brutal sexual assault by one of Salim’s clients Norman Mubvunduku)—at a local club and they fall in love, just as a violent cyclone sweeps up the Mozambique Channel. An irresistible train of events is set in motion: Phoebe walks out on Salim; Mike is fired from his job in Harare and leaves his marriage; Salim has João picked up and cruelly tortured in an effort to find out where Phoebe is; Mubvunduku sets his CIO onto Phoebe’s trail in an effort to establish her identity, at the same time inculpating Mike in her disappearance; and Mike and Phoebe flee to Lusaka, Zambia when it becomes clear that their lives are at stake. In Beira, Mubvunduku and Salim are killed in a grenade explosion as João takes his revenge—with João presumed dead—which clears the way for Phoebe and Mike to return to Mozambique. UNHCR documents come to light, proving Phoebe’s father was Mubvunduku. It also emerges that Mike, as a soldier on the 1977 raid, witnessed Phoebe’s mother’s death and in fact ordered the troops not to shoot the girl. Phoebe remembers his voice. However, it is all too much for Phoebe to absorb and her final parting from Mike is acrimonious. But separation is transient: João, now an amputee, returns from the dead several months later to announce to Mike that he has been sent by Phoebe to find him and bring him back to her.