Two Farms: One Black, One White

The black-and-white tragedy of two farming families in Zimbabwe.

A few weeks before the Zimbabwean parliamentary elections of June 2000, I went to visit a white couple, Graham and Glenda Douse, at their farm near Harare. Nyagambe Farm is about an hour’s drive south-east of the capital, beyond the small, neat country town of Marondera. Turning down the murram road that led through the farm, I passed rich, brown, ploughed fields on either side and a dam the Douses had constructed for irrigation. During the course of the next eighteen months, I would spend several hours sitting on the edge of the dam, watching dense white cumulus clouds mass and disperse in the blue arc of the sky, while small black swallows swooped and dived over the waterfall.On that first visit, labradors bounded up to the car as I approached the low, whitewashed farmhouse. Graham was tall, dressed in white shorts and long socks, with a tidy beard and the beginning of a paunch. Glenda, hospitable and energetic, worked as a pharmacist in the local hospital. They were both in their early forties. We drank tea on the veranda, watching the dogs play as the water sprinkler greened the lawn. This was the Africa of the white man’s dream, where nature can be subdued inside the compound, but where the bush extends in its thrilling wildness just beyond the fence.