We spent a lazy Sunday with the Babyfather’s parents, at a lovely Hampshire pub. On the way back, we popped into Blockbusters to pick up a DVD (Little Miss Sunshine) to round off a lovely weekend. The last thing I expected was bad news, but a message left by Busy while I was out of range, and picked up on our return to the house, tore a discordant hole through the evening. A rally in Zimbabwe (masquerading as a prayer meeting) had been disbanded by police. One activist had been shot dead by police. Along with roughly 110 people, the leaders of the opposition party on both sides of the recent split were arrested.

But, most upsettingly for me, Busy and Blonde’s uncle, Mike Davies, chairperson of the Combined Harare Residents’ Association, was arrested with them. Mike is also a close friend of my parents, and I phoned my mum but they had no more news than what we already knew: lawyers were being denied access, and Professor Arthur Mutambara (the leader of the side of the opposition party which split from Morgan Tsvangirai’s last year) was missing. Missing is not a good thing to be in a Zimbabwean prison.

We have trickles of news coming through today, but more annoyingly, floods of rumours too. Many of these masquerade as news, and if you type in Zimbabwe on the Google news site as I write, you will likely still see a story which says that Mike and two others he was arrested with had been transferred to the Goromonzi torture centre. This is a relic of colonial days which, along with the intelligence body the CIO which used it then and now, Mugabe retained in his government, in what would be an amusing Orwellian parody if it wasn’t so bloody awful. High profile detainees there have included Philip Chiyangwa (cousin to Mugabe, and supposed ring-leader of an espionage ring passing Zimbabwe’s secrets to the South African government), and Ray Choto and Mark Chavunduka, journalists at the Zimbabwe Standard arrested in 1999 and tortured by the army. It’s not a good place to be, but we soon hear that Mike isn’t there, but in the relative safety of Highlands police station – in the leafy Northern Suburbs most popular among the remaining middle class white Zimbabwean. Which cells in which police station matter in these circumstances – some are definitely worse than others. As my younger brother – who, in his time as a young idealist political activist in Zimbabwe, spent time in most of them, good and bad, around Harare – will tell you, some of them are notorious for bed bugs, some for lice, some for cockroaches. Catching TB is a huge risk, and the standards of cleanliness vary from one to another, although none of them are clean. And those are just the comfort issues. If they want to torture you, you’re more likely to go to certain stations or camps.

Not knowing for sure is a really hard thing to cope with, and for that more than anything I sympathise with all of Mike’s family, at home and over here. We’ve had emails through from his family back home to say they now know he is definitely at Highlands, and one from my mum to say it looks like a bail hearing is set for tonight. So at least they should get to see him. If that is, in fact, true. I’ve lost count of the times in the past I’ve had phone calls to say my mum, stepdad, or brother have been arrested back home for various supposed transgressions against the regime, but I thought we’d stopped having to worry about this sort of thing. Until contact is made, it doesn’t matter that the sensible 99% of you knows that all will be well, that the police know the world’s eyes are on them and will be too scared to perpetrate severe acts of violence, that the people arrested are savvy and resourceful, you can’t help thinking that they are suffering with the 1% of your brain too worried to be sensible.

In the meantime, Mugabe announced today his intention to stand in the next elections, meaning if he wins (and how can we believe different given recent elections) he will be 90 when the next term of office runs out, and his dictatorship will have lasted 34 years. In the meantime, the man shot dead leaves behind a widow and three children of school age. In the meantime, Morgan Tsvangirai, president of one side of the split MDC has been seen with severe swellings, and with injuries limiting his vision and preventing speech. He has apparently passed out several times. Having ascertained that Mike is at Highlands Police Station, we are left wondering where are those who were supposed to be with him at Goromonzi: Nelson Chamisa, the Member of Parliament for Kuwadzana, and Elton Mangoma the MDC deputy treasurer. Mutambara’s whereabouts are still unknown, and Lovemore Madhuku, National Constitutional Assembly (NCA) Chairman was rushed to hospital with a broken arm and other serious injuries early in the morning. A human rights lawyer trying to see his clients, at one of the police stations to which they were believed to have been taken, was assaulted, and denied access to them.

And last night, in the streets of Highfields, the high density suburb where the rally was due to take place, police continued to clash with ordinary citizens, assaulting members of the public who, in the absence of anything better, armed themselves with stones to fight off an attack by water cannons, tear gas and guns.

New Year’s eve, 8am, sitting in the overcrowded cafe area outside Harare airport. The airport was chaotic with the bluster which goes with having 2 international flights leaving in the same morning (this qualifies as remarkable in the tourist-shunned Zimbabwe of the present day). We’d found out our plane was delayed by two hours. We’d been shouted at by an irate official when we lifted the barrier to get in the queue (which we joined legitimately at the back – we just hadn’t been able to manoeuvre the pram around the milling hoards), and told, and I quote ‘no no no no no no no no that is not how it works, I am going to report you to the head of the airport’. We’d then queued for 45 minutes before seeing other passengers with babies being graciously ferried to the front of the line. We’d had very little sleep and I had a chest infection. Babyfather had angrily told me I was being ungracious with my parents after their warmth and generosity to us over the course of our 18 day holiday.

So we found ourselves scrabbling for seats in the cafe, ignoring a bizarre altercation in which racist insults were being hurled, all, it would seem, because of the refusal of one person to give another a match with which to light his cigarette. Babyfather was feeding Doodle (nee Bubble), the parents were talking to some friends who happened to be there, and looking round I saw the front page of what passes locally for the Sunday Papers, depicting a lifeless Saddam Hussein suspended by the neck.

I have ambiguous and vacillating views on the execution of Saddam Hussein. On the one hand, I oppose the death penalty entirely. I think that no person, or group of people, can claim the right to decide to end a person’s life. On the other, isn’t that exactly what he did, several hundreds of thousands of times over in the course of the last few decades? On the one hand, the people whose family were amongst those hundreds of thousands deserved closure. On the other, the conviction leading to his execution was only for a hundred and fifty odd of those, and many, including the Kurds, feel he should have been held accountable for all of his atrocities. On the one hand, his hanging serves as a rallying call to those who still supported his regime. On the other, his continuing to live was considered by many who had opposed his regime to be proof that he could return.

All of these points have been endlessly debated in the many media which always serve as the platform for such cogitation. But there is something beyond the easily circumscribed ‘issues’ which has bothered me about the news. When I had heard, the day before, that he had been executed, we had been on a jaunt out of newspaper range in the Eastern Highlands of Zimbabwe and I hadn’t been aware it was due to happen. It left me cold and I am still struggling to work out why. Perhaps because a part of me felt that it was just and fitting, and I was disconcerted to feel this reaction to the news of someone’s execution. Present with us on our jaunt was an old family friend, Lawyer, who said ‘well, you either believe in the death penalty or you don’t.’ Younger Brother, whose opposition to the Mugabe regime resulted in him suffering personally, and losing friends to politically motivated murder, said that he supported the Saddam decision, and I recalled agreeing with him when he said that the most just punishment for Mugabe wouldn’t be to execute him, but to let him loose, unarmed and unguarded, onto the streets of a high density suburb where the poverty and repression he had inflicted on the masses are such that in their anger, YB believed that they would turn on him. I am not so sure now that I would support this – for it, too, would satisfy a blood lust which seems to me to be at odds with the idea of justice. And even if justice is being meted out to someone who has caused incomprehensible suffering, do we not have cause to worry if we get a frisson of satisfaction out of seeing even the most execrable man die?

Skip forward, and back in Harare airport Parents, Babyfather and myself were discussing it, and I was asserting my belief that the English papers wouldn’t show those pictures because of good taste holding sway. Babyfather wasn’t so sure.

Skip forward again – to a semi-deserted Sainsbury’s on New Year’s morning, populated by walking wounded of the night before, a few elderly people wondering aimlessly and a nose-ringed couple staring quizzically at the Belazu products on the ‘posh product’ shelf. We’d arrived back at the flat the night before, three hours late at around 10 after an eventual journey time of around 18 hours. I’d fallen asleep on the sofa before midnight, and having woken up to an empty fridge, gone out to supply us with the makings of breakfast. I was looking forward to coffee and croissants, a little light levity in the papers as they discussed the New Years honours. But inevitably, the image which greeted me on the front page of The Guardian was again of the hanged man. And I was angry at the paper for not allowing me to decide myself if I want to join the hordes worldwide gorging on images on the event on YouTube. Queen of Cakes, who works for The Guardian, says that it is just a representation of an historical event. And the thrust of that particular article was, indeed, about the fact that the images were around the world almost immediately – and that a grainy camera phone video clip made the execution available to anyone who wishes to see it. Later in the paper a very well-written obituary level-headedly charted Saddam’s life. I hadn’t known much about it. About his murder as a teenager of three people to prove his machismo to male relatives. Of the whimsy with which he would order people executed. Or the lack of any kind of belief system to underpin his political aspiration.

The comments on YouTube have been predictably puerile. Almost Beavis and Butthead-ian in the ‘cools’ and drooling ‘wows’. The last minutes before he hanged, it has been revealed today, were filled with taunts and insults from bystanders. And yes, he deserved nothing less. And yes, it’s one life in exchange for the many that this butcher took. And yes, maybe justice has been served. But it still bothers me that we all have to participate in a global feeding frenzy at his corpse.

28 April 2006: female offspring of Recidivist and Babyfather was born by emergency caesarian after a long labour, weighing 8lb 2 oz and measuring 55cm.