British soldiers in Afghanistan.
Feature
Life under fire
by Diana Wichtel
Continued from page 2...
So, Mugabe: mad or bad? “Ha! I don’t think he’s mad. If you look back to when he first took power in 1980, and even before that, he’s always used violence when it suited him. He still speaks in sort of Cold War rhetoric, where he’s got the country still run by a Politburo … He hasn’t really changed. It’s the rest of the world that’s changed.”
There’s an element of hypocrisy in the outcry now. “The massacres in Matabeleland in which maybe 20,000 people were killed – he got away with that. He got a knighthood in Britain as recently as 1994 … He was this independence leader and it was supposed to be a success story.”
Instead, it’s become a recurring nightmare. “I was there last summer and met this group of teachers who were having to hang out in bars and work as prostitutes. Really dignified women who had been educated and never ever imagined they would end up doing something like that. But their salary worked out at about £3 a month. There was no way they could feed their children.”
Lamb is in her early 40s. After the bus bombing, she thought about packing it in. “There were too many near misses.” But the night she got back from Pakistan, she was in a debate about Zimbabwe. “One of the other people speaking was Beatrice Mtetwa, a human rights lawyer in Zimbabwe who I really admire, who is really brave. She was one of those who were beaten up badly last year when Mugabe’s people really brutalised a lot of people. She said to me, ‘Please don’t give up what you do because, whatever you think, it makes a huge amount of difference for us there in the country to know that what we’re doing is being written about outside.” They would give up, she said, if nobody took any notice. “That made me rethink a bit.”
A few days after our chat, Lamb emails: “Still think Mugabe will try and hold on to the bitter end, regardless of the cost to his people, as he has no real alternative. Nor do the ruling cabal around him.” She did get to finish her holiday, but she’s off to Zimbabwe again. As her son once announced at nursery school, “Mummy lives on a plane.”
Press Lamb on the dangers and you get the speech she often delivers to her long-suffering mother, about Margaret Mee, the first woman to explore the Amazon. Lamb is working on a book about her. “She was kidnapped by Indians, she almost died of malaria and had typhus, she was in boats that submerged in the Amazon, and she somehow survived,” she says. “Then she was awarded an OBE, went back to receive it and was killed in a car accident in Leicester,” concludes Lamb triumphantly. “You never really know where these things are going happen, so you should live life to the fullest.”
So, she’s not about to turn her back on Dubai Terminal 2 just yet, or those working holidays in Hell. “This, after all, is what I do,” she writes of her charmed, extraordinary life.
