Two Farms: One Black, One White

The Matibes, like the Douses, are farmers. Like the Douses, they are members of the MDC; unlike the Douses, they are black. Philemon Matibe bought Paarl Farm near Chegutu, Zimbabwe, in 1999, after years of working as a manager on white-owned estates. He planted barley, tobacco, sugar beans and wheat. His wife Pearl sat with the farm-workers’ wives making strings with which to tie up the tobacco plants. She was everything the ‘madam’ should not have been – young, elegant and black. They lived in a colonial-style, thatched farmhouse with a swimming pool at the back, and sent their two children, Phoebe and Mpho, to private school. They bought a pony for Phoebe, and Phil even dared to think that Mpho might inherit the farm one day. When he walked into the Country Club, Phil’s white farmer neighbours looked at him with suspicion – he was better educated and more westernized than the government ministers whom they would smile at in public and mock in private, but still they didn’t feel entirely comfortable. They would talk of tobacco prices and the state of the economy. The Matibes agreed with the white farmers that Mugabe was running the country into the ground, and Phil decided to stand for Parliament as an opposition candidate. They were optimistic that a new government would allow black and white to work together, and so end the hostility and suspicion that Mugabe had fostered during his twenty years in power.

I first came across Pearl Matibe in the offices of the MDC, where I was waiting to interview someone and she was collecting material for her husband’s election campaign. Her accent – tight and nasal like a white southern African’s – intrigued me. The next time I visited Zimbabwe I looked her up. I was reporting news, and she was not representative of the mainstream, but I thought she might help me understand the ease with which Mugabe was able to pit one group against another. Zimbabweans seemed to live in boxes marked ‘white farmer’ or ‘white liberal’, ‘urban population’, ‘rural population’, but Pearl Matibe could not be so easily defined, and I felt that she somehow held a key to seeing why it was so hard for Zimbabweans to escape the identities history had visited upon them.

‘Black people don’t like me,’ she said. ‘They call me “Nose Brigade” because I talk through my nose.’ We were driving to the Tobacco Sales Floor, just outside Harare, where Zimbabwe’s tobacco farmers auction their crop to middlemen who supply the cigarette companies. The Matibes were among a handful of successful black commercial farmers. They had several hundred hectares at Chegutu, and this was their first tobacco of the season. On the way, Pearl explained that the success of her father’s small chain of shops had enabled him to send his children to private schools.

‘I went to a boarding school called Arundel in Harare from the age of five. It was quite proper and rather snobbish. There were only five black girls in the whole school, and just two in my year. I would spend thirteen weeks at a time there, so I suppose I just picked up the accent. I’ve ended up mixed really. I didn’t really grow up in African society as such, because I was away at school so much of the time. I wouldn’t say I feel uncomfortable in African society because I know how I’m supposed to behave. But I get a certain reception because I’m perceived as untypical.’

Pearl was feeling her way back into her ancestral culture. Partly as a hobby, and partly as a business, she collected artefacts made by Shona people and sold them in America. She studied the customs and history as if she were an outsider, but in the end it was marrying her husband that had really tied her in.

‘There’s no such thing as divorce. If the relationship isn’t working, the only way to split up is if your husband gives you a penny; it’s called a gupura. I have an extremely hard time with Phil’s mother. She’s very traditional. When I visit her house, I become her maid, her morora. I have to sweep and clean and cook, and when family decisions are made I’m not part of the decision-making process.’

We parked, and entered the vast auction house. The concrete floor was covered in neat bales of yellow leaf, and the damp aroma of a million unsmoked cigars hung in the air. White farmers in blue short-sleeved shirts and khaki shorts, their faces tanned from a lifetime in the sun, knees red and knobbly above long fawn socks, walked along the rows comparing prices. The buyers stood in huddles talking quality. It is a ritual unchanged since the days when Rhodesia began to export tobacco in large quantities in the 1940s: a group of men shuffles up and down the rows; the ‘starter’ proposes a price for each bale in turn; the auctioneer chants a high-pitched, rapid-fire sing-song of competing prices from the buyers; and each bale is assessed, auctioned and sold in as little as six seconds. These days, starters and auctioneers are usually black, buyers and farmers white. Pearl, a self-possessed woman in her early thirties, received particular courtesy, and then respect, as her best bales retailed for the highest price of the day. Gnarled white men with faces wrinkled like brown paper bags wanted to know where she farmed and whether her farm too was in danger of being ‘designated’, seized by the government.

It was a surprise for them to find a black person sharing the same problems, because they rarely mixed. ‘The white community didn’t make any effort before because of fear,’ Pearl explained. ‘Mugabe is very cunning, so he allowed very little documenting of what really happened in the war. Whites were seen as such bad people, they were not given time to speak of their experiences during the war. Even among themselves they never talked about it. People have never been open about what happened. You could never say, “I killed so many black people,” because if you talked about it you might be victimized. There was no period of adjustment, and you can’t emerge from prejudice overnight. So they kept quiet, because they didn’t know how to behave. Everyone kept quiet.’