Two Farms: One Black, One White

On the Douses’ bookshelves I found a collection of colonial literature, including a volume of poetry by Hylda Richards, a farmer’s wife who had written popular verse for the Rhodesian Herald in the 1940s and ’50s under the byline The Poems of T. The doggerel catches the mood of the time:

Oh I would go a-farming in the veld so wide and free,
Where the purple sheen on grasses, stretch around me like the sea.
Against the veld so wild, alone I’d set my hand;
Oh, I would go a-farming, for my heart is in the land.

The book, full of jokey rhymes about drought and crop failure and the impossibility of communicating with the natives, was entitled Next Year Will Be Better.

The Douses thought that next year would indeed be better, because they believed the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), of which they were members, would win the forthcoming election. When the MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai visited the Marondera Country Club to meet farmers, Glenda Douse was impressed.

‘We could never bear Mugabe and I didn’t trust him,’ she said. ‘During the war, when I was working in Harare Hospital, I used to see atrocities committed by his men. Ears and lips chopped off. There was a war which had to be fought, but he was so rabid and extreme. After independence he toned down a bit, but in the last few years he’s gone back to what he was. He hates whites.’

Glenda had been brought up on a ranch, a huge expanse of bush in what is still called The Midlands. ‘I had a blissful, old-fashioned farm childhood. My brothers and I had 50,000 acres to wander around. Our nearest neighbours were fifteen miles away, and all through my childhood we never had electricity—just a generator, gas lights and candles.’ The week before Christmas 1978, when the war was in its final stages and Glenda was away in Harare working in the hospital, her father was killed in an ambush.

‘The gooks had come in before to hack the cattle’s hamstrings. My father and both my brothers were on a routine patrol when they were attacked. They fired back for three hours. It was awful. The army was everywhere and there were bombing raids, but it was all too late. My dad’s body was still lying there when I got home. Then my mother was injured hitting a landmine as she tried to move off the farm. The army told her the farm could not be defended, and she was trying to get the equipment away.’

It didn’t dim Glenda’s desire to farm, nor her belief that once the war was over, white and black could live together. She and Graham came from more liberal families than other farmers, and while many whites were educated overseas, the Douses went to Harare University where they met and made friends with the black elite, children of businessmen and aspiring politicians. But afterwards somehow the two groups drifted apart.

‘The blacks we went to school and university with are now Zimbabwe’s captains of industry or have left the country, and we’re out here farming, so we don’t move in the same circles,’ Graham said. ‘They’re managing directors of banks, they have tea with Bob Mugabe and drive Mercedes.’ His former running partner from university, a black Zimbabwean, went on to Oxford. ‘We went to stay with him once and had supper at the Gridiron Club. It was a strange situation. He really attracts ridicule because of his anglicized attitudes—he talks with a plum in his mouth. I only speak Shona to him.’

After they bought Nyagambe Farm from Graham’s father, the Douses slipped seamlessly into Zimbabwe’s segregated social life. It was not very different from the life their Rhodesian parents had known: holidays in Beira on the Mozambique coast, where the beaches are clean and the lobster delicious. Weekends boating on Lake Kariba, or trout fishing and game spotting at Inyanga park. Two sons boarding at a private school. Worrying about the rain – too early or too late, too much or not enough – trying to develop new products, like paprika, and new markets in Europe.

The black people Graham knew best were his farm labourers. He tried to treat them with respect, providing decent accommodation and health care, but the divide between two ways of living was unbridgeable. When he took me down to the tobacco sheds, he spoke Shona to the foreman and workers, who were friendly and polite, but this was an essentially colonial relationship – the white baas was in charge. Graham had believed that land should have been redistributed, and that white farmers could have done more to help black farmers. He wished he had made the effort to integrate more with the black middle class, but he hadn’t been able to work out how to start, and farming life was challenging and profitable, so he stopped thinking about it. It wasn’t until they joined the opposition that the Douses found themselves mixing with the black middle class from Marondera town.

‘At the hospital we all used to work together fine but we didn’t socialize. It was them and us – they had their lives and we had ours, even the doctors,’ said Glenda. ‘But when it became known that we were MDC, we became buddies.’

‘It’s good for all of us,’ added Graham. ‘We remained very separate as a group of people, the farmers. We just didn’t come into contact with other people. But now we’ve got a tremendous respect not for the black elite who we went to university with, but for the middle class – tradespeople and professionals.’