Two Farms: One Black, One White

It appeared that everyone had reverted to wartime roles and language. The Douses were part of a network of white farmers who used the radio to ‘keep coms’, checking on the movements of the ‘gooks’ and making sure everyone in the community was safe. A new verb had been created: to be ‘warvetted’ meant to have your farm occupied.

I went with them to see their red-brick tobacco curing sheds, where the war vets had gathered the labourers for a pungwe, an indoctrination session, just as they had done with villagers during the war. The workers were sitting on the ground in two lines and singing in Shona, ‘The land is ours, it doesn’t belong to the white man.’ Lookouts with knobkerries and sticks had been posted in a semicircle around the farm buildings to stop anyone escaping. I was with a cameraman trying to film, but we didn’t stay long. When we raised the camera, they chased us away.

I was uncomfortable being associated with the white farmers in this way. I did not want to like the Douses. I had lived in Kenya during the 1980s and regarded southern African whites as racist diehards, with no connection to liberal white people like myself who lived in Africa out of choice and because we felt we had something to offer a beleaguered continent. At a dinner party in Harare I had come across a white farmer who fitted my image of the breed, ranting about the ‘Afs’ and pledging undying loyalty to a Britain which he had left half a century earlier. ‘I support the Queen,’ he had said, raising his whiskey glass in unconscious fulfilment of the old stereotype that Rhodesians were more British than the British. ‘But I couldn’t go back now. Too many Afs and Pakis there.’