Zimbabwe Democracy Now

A dispossessed white farmer and a former Rhodesian SAS trooper, the archetypal “Rhodie” in safari shirt, knee-length shorts, powder-blue golf socks and trainers, Mike Mason was an unlikely activist for a mostly black Zimbabwean pro-democracy movement.

In every election since 2000 he was crucial to the logistics of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change’s election campaigns for an end to repression.

He routinely took his life in his hands to ensure that the horrific brutality of President Mugabe’s militia and security forces in the 2008 run-off presidential election campaign was brought to the world’s television screens. That year he also supervised and helped carry out the dangerous rescue of hundreds of dead and wounded MDC supporters from hostile ZANU(PF) territory.

The footage of mangled torture victims, rampaging youth militias, and terrified refugees, raised international awareness of the carnage that ended with the election being dismissed across the world as a violent fraud, and saw Mugabe forced into a power-sharing agreement with his nemesis, MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai.

Colin Michael Mason was born in Norton, Rhodesia, in 1960, the family’s second generation in the country. After school he served with the Rhodesian Special Air Services regiment, the elite commando paratrooper regiment, for a year before the civil war ended.

After independence in 1980, he studied agricultural science at university in South Africa, returned home and, in 1991, bought his own land, Ian Penny farm, in Tengwe, about 200 km north of Harare.

The wave of hope for political change in late 1999 that swept the country caught Mason, and like many young white farmers, he threw himself into organising logistics for the MDC. But right after Mugabe launched the invasions of white-owned farms in early March 2000, Mason was a marked man.

He and his family underwent relentless harassment on the farm, besieged by violent, armed mobs for days on end. Once a war veteran was on the point of bringing down an axe on his head, but his Jack Russell, Pebbles, sank her teeth into the man’s ankle, giving Mason valuable seconds to escape. Under pressure from his desperate family, he finally agreed to leave in 2001.

His back-up work for the MDC grew. In each of the five national elections since 2000 elections he helped organise the deployment of an election agent to every one of the country’s 5,000 far-flung polling stations, each agent equipped with a specially procured copy of the area’s voters’ roll, provisions, sheets of tables for meticulous recording of voting data, and a toilet roll.

Getting them to their stations often involved taking obscure back roads or disguising vehicles as hearses to avoid police roadblocks set up to arrest MDC polling agents. Mason’s system ensured that the MDC had a comprehensive record of cheating by ZANU(PF).

Tsvangirai won the presidential election in March 2008, but falling just short of 50 percent of the vote, a run-off was scheduled. It marked the start of the most horrendous period in Zimbabwe’s history since the massacre of an estimated 20,000 people in Matabeleland by Mugabe’s forces in the mid-80s.

By this time, Mason was almost alone in the support group, but he also took on the task of despatching pick-up trucks at the dead of night into rural areas swarming with ZANU(PF) militias or soldiers who had left whole village populations with smashed limbs, burned, maimed and raped, and brought them back to Harare for treatment.

Once his team stole into a hospital where two days earlier staff had been stopped by secret police from treating an MDC supporter shot in the leg by ZANU(PF) MP. They removed the man from under the noses of his captors, so he could at least have his leg amputated.

Mason and his team often had to collect the bodies of victims of Mugabe’s death squads, abandoned in the bush sometimes for weeks. These and others who died in hospital were buried in graves with a large red cross, provided by Mason’s wife, Sharon, to mark them as the victims of ZANU(PF).

Eventually, Harare’s hospitals were overwhelmed with the mass of wounded from Mugabe’s terror campaign. The Masons set up a tented hospital in their large suburban Harare backyard, filled with 60 torture victims at a time.

After several weeks they were forced to stop when the riot squad raided — but just in time the Masons had opened a back gate to let the wounded escape.

At the time, Mugabe’s regime had placed a total ban on outside journalists, but Mason confounded the blackout by escorting camera teams from the world’s main television networks secretly across the country’s borders, through the bush and cordons of militia, sometimes eluding arrest by a whisker to see and film first-hand the atrocities. Most journalists were terrified by the experience. Mason, who was constantly harried by secret police, remained calm throughout.

Shortly before he died, he had been chosen by villagers in the remote Urungwe communal area, once a ZANU(PF) stronghold, to be their candidate in the next parliamentary election, due in about 2012.

Michael Mason, Zimbabwean pro-democracy activist, was born on April 10, 1960. He died of cardiac arrest on February 15, 2010, aged 49