Two Farms: One Black, One White

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.

In the corner of the dining room, the two-way radio crackled — a security measure. ‘War vets’ had occupied most of the farms in the neighbourhood, including part of the Douses’ land. President Robert Mugabe claimed that those seizing farms were people who had fought alongside him in the 1970s, when he led guerrillas fighting the white government of Prime Minister Ian Smith. Their aim, then, was to turn what had been a British self-governing colony called Rhodesia into the independent African republic of Zimbabwe. The cause was nationalist, the rallying cry was land. Black farmers had been pushed to the margins of existence in dry, dusty ‘tribal’ areas while white farmers had fenced off vast tracts of land that they turned into productive, commercial farms. Black men and women joined the struggle to get their land back, and the first guerrilla raids of the war were against white farmers on isolated homesteads.

But ‘war vets’ as applied to the people who occupied white farmland was a misnomer. They were unemployed youths, a mob for hire, not a force for liberation. Most of them were too young to have fought in the war. They supported ZANU-PF, Mugabe’s party, because they hoped to be given land or money. According to Mugabe, whites still owned seventy per cent of Zimbabwe’s land. The Commercial Farmers Union, representing the farmers, said whites owned just twenty-six per cent of the surface area of Zimbabwe. Whatever the figures, the farmers remained the most easily identifiable, and historically most hated, group of whites in the country.