When veteran reporter Neely Tucker, a white man from Mississippi, came to Zimbabwe, his goal was to report on the country's political meltdown. But when a doctor at an orphanage forced him and his black wife to take home an infant abandoned at birth in order to save its life, their lives swiftly focused around adopting that infant. Difficult in the best of times, the adoption proved to be very nearly impossible in the anti-white, anti-Western, anti-American dictatorship of Robert Mugabe. When the Tuckers' very lives were being threatened, how could they adopt a child? Though spat upon by officials, they became consumed with saving baby Chipo, and the travails they underwent only make their story more harrowing and more uplifting.
The bureaucrat was not a happy man, and it didn't take long to understand that I was the source of his irritation. Richard Tambadini was a senior officer in Zimbabwe's Department of Immigration Control. In May 1997, in a drab office in a dreary government building known as Liquenda House, he looked over my papers. He was slow, careful of speech, and so disdainful he seldom looked up.
"You have sent your belongings here ahead of yourself," he said, sounding as if he were reading from an indictment. "You presume that we will give you a work permit. You think little black Zimbabwe needs big white American men like you."
He paused and looked out the window at downtown Harare. A car alarm was going off on the street below, the repeated bleating of its horn drifting above the sound of midmorning traffic.
I shifted in my hard-back chair. This was becoming embarrassing. Vita and I had packed up our belongings from our previous posting in Warsaw, Poland, a few weeks earlier. The crate had to be trucked to Gdansk, wait for a ship, then be carried across the Baltic Sea down to Amsterdam, transferred to another cargo ship, then sailed down the coast of Europe, the entire West African coast, around the southern tip of Cape Town, and on to the South African port of Durban. Then it had to be transferred to a rail car and hauled to Zimbabwe. The shipping clerk had said eight weeks at best; perhaps three or four months. My predecessor in Harare had assured me that the Zimbabwean government would issue my work permit as a foreign correspondent long before then.
The crate made it in three weeks.
Now I was in Harare, trying to explain to Tambadini why this unexpected delivery did not constitute an act of ugly American hubris.
"Mr. Tambadini," I said in an attempt to lighten the situation, "I'm five foot seven inches, and I don't think anybody has ever said I tried to act like a big--"
"We have just met, Mr. Tucker, and yet I know your kind very well," he cut me off, looking at his fingernails. "You come from America, a country that disparages black people. You are a rich man. You come here, you see poor little Zimbabwe, where even the people who administer the government are black, and you have assumed that we need you. You think we are so grateful to have you among us that you think we will exempt you from our laws. It is the way of the white man in Africa." His tone had changed to an icy disdain.
"So we have a system for people like you. We impound your goods in customs until you are approved, at the rate of a hundred U.S. dollars per day. If we decide to approve your application--and this could take months--then you will pay us and you may receive your goods. But you will pay us, Mr. Tucker, for your arrogance."
He was making a speech, and I got the idea it wasn't the first time, but I was still disconcerted. His insistence on characterizing a routine transit mix-up as a deliberate racial slight was unsettling, and the idea that I was a rich man might have been amusing in another context. But telling my editors they were about to be fined several thousand dollars was not a prospect I relished. So I took a deep breath and ate humble pie.
"Sir, if my company or I have made assumptions, I am terribly sorry, but they are not the assumptions you say. My paper, the Detroit Free Press, has been here seventeen years, the longest of any American media company. We have been in Zimbabwe since independence, since black Zimbabweans seized control of their own country. When every other American newspaper left to go to South Africa after apartheid, my newspaper stayed here, in a country that is ninety-nine percent...
A war reporter inured to violence and misery, Tucker is still overwhelmed by the plight of abandoned children in Zimbabwe, where he is temporarily living. He and his African-American wife, Vita, decide to adopt Chipo, a sickly baby girl, but the local bureaucracy objects because they are foreigners. Throw in Tucker's wild travel schedule, political events in Zimbabwe, horrors in the Congo and Rwanda, and a bit of Tucker's Mississippi white family history--and you won't want to miss a word, especially with Michael Kramer reading. Through a veneer of reportorial objectivity, you hear frustration, compassion, tenderness, and determination. Long African names roll easily off his tongue. A beautiful tale, sensitively read. J.B.G. (c) AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine
O, the Oprah Magazine...
"A triumph of heart and will."
Washington Post...
"An extraordinary book of immense feeling and significant social relevance. Love in the Driest Season challenges anyone--even those numbed by the world's abundant cruelty--not to care."
Pages...
"Unceasingly compelling and filled with soaring highs and lows, Love in the Driest Season is a remarkable memoir of love and family."
Publishers Weekly (starred review)...
"A gorgeous mix of family memoir and reportage that traverses the big issues of politics, racism, and war."
Booklist (starred review)...
"Utterly heartfelt and truly inspiring."
Orlando Sentinel...
"Tucker's hard-hitting memoir . . . is an almost unbelievable tale of bureaucracy, lunacy, and love. The suspense is stomach-wrenching and infuriating."
