Two Farms: One Black, One White
‘Houthop means “woodhead”, from the Afrikaans. Munt comes from the Shona word muntu meaning person. Kaffir you already know.’ Phil Matibe was remembering the insults white boys at his secondary school had used for the handful of black boys in their midst. ‘Af, of course. Toe-ee because most black kids only had one pair of tackies, so their big toe showed through. And floppy because when they killed black people during the war their bodies went all floppy.’
‘And what did you call them?’
‘We didn’t have those kinds of words. There was murungu, which means a white person, although in Malawi it actually means God and it’s not an insult. And bhunu, meaning farmer, wasn’t derogatory in those days, although it’s used that way now.’
Phil, handsome and athletic, always eager to talk and argue, laughed. It struck me that under the joshing and flirting ran a clear current of aggression, carefully controlled and managed, like a river dammed and directed into canals to prevent it from bursting its banks. We were drinking tea in the reception-area lounge at the Meikles Hotel, a genteel Harare institution still run by the descendants of Thomas Meikles, who followed the pioneer trail to Rhodesia in 1892. The walls were decorated with sepia prints of hunting expeditions and scenes from the capital and other towns in days gone by: SALISBURY IN 1924, THE MEIKLES STORE IN BULAWAYO, 1933. The nostalgic representation of colonialism is for tourists – or it would be, if there were any tourists.
While living on a gold-mining compound, Phil’s family was incorporated into what was called ‘The Harmony Programme’. In 1978 Prime Minister Ian Smith, famed for saying that Rhodesia had ‘the happiest black faces in the world’, introduced a limited scheme of integration in order to fend off criticism that Rhodesia was an apartheid state like South Africa.
‘It was the first experiment. Four black families were going to reside in the white area, and we were chosen by my father’s seniority because he was in charge of paying black workers. My younger sisters were allowed to go to whites-only schools. But what was amazing was that we were made to live on the periphery of the white residential areas, and it was during the war, so we became a buffer zone – if the compound was attacked, we’d be hit first!’
They weren’t, but the fighting beyond the boundary was never far away. In 1972, when Phil was five, the guerrillas made their first attacks on isolated white farmsteads. By the time he was nine, they were making regular incursions from Mozambique and Zambia. Young white men were conscripted, and black men were also recruited as soldiers on the Rhodesian side. Like all guerrilla wars, it was cruel: white troops would round up and ruthlessly interrogate peasants they suspected of feeding and helping the guerrillas, who would, in turn, torture villagers they regarded as ‘sell-outs’ to the whites.
The mythology of the war was strangely seductive to a young black boy, attracted to what looked at the time like the winning team.
‘We had to caddie for the whites at the Country Club. I was paid one Rhodesian dollar and fifty cents, which went to the Dalny Mine school for development. But I would sneak out to the rifle range and pick up spent cartridges, and for a bag full of cartridges I’d get twenty-five cents pocket money. There was a fire force stationed at the police station, and I’d go and clean their boots. I saw the bravado, the helicopters, the dead freedom fighters – they called them terrorists or “terrs”. We had a TV, so I saw the Rhodesian propaganda. I viewed the Rhodesians as the ones safeguarding us from communism. If the war had continued, I would have joined the Rhodesian security forces. I saw that the white side had all these amenities, and they seemed so polished – but all I saw of the other side was broken bodies, half-dressed and scruffy. I would never have joined them.’
When international pressure forced Smith to negotiate an end to the war, and white rule gave way to independence in 1980, thirteen-year-old Phil was sent to what had previously been a whites-only school. There might have been a new black government in Harare under Comrade Prime Minister Robert Mugabe, but it made little difference to schoolboys at Jameson. Blacks sat at the end of the dining table and ate from crockery marked with green paint. When Phil carried a white girl’s satchel, he was beaten by a group of sixth-formers armed with cricket bats and hockey sticks. That was lesson one: never, ever be seen walking with a white girl.
‘I started to feel I wasn’t wanted, I was inferior. So I decided to be ten times better than any of them at anything. I did cricket, rugby, debating society, astronomy, swimming – everything.’ It didn’t work. The bullying got worse. One day he found his exercise book had been defaced with the words: WE ARE KAFFIRS, WE EAT SADZA. Sadza is the staple food of Zimbabwe, a stiff maize-meal porridge that few whites would ever touch. Phil began getting into fights with white boys. At sixteen, a week before his O Levels, he was expelled.
He still wanted to do what the white man did, but better. After independence, whites still grew most of the country’s export crops and food. Common wisdom had it that only a white man could run a successful commercial farm, because blacks were too ill-disciplined and incompetent. Phil wanted to prove them wrong. He went to a crammer to get O and A levels, and won a scholarship to agricultural college in England.
He began to reflect on what made the races different from each other. Several of the men in his class at college were Zimbabweans – white Zimbabweans. In England, they were all foreigners together, but difference still had to be acknowledged.
‘We became friends. But the fabric that makes me African makes me fundamentally different from you. I have never hugged or kissed my mother. In my culture it’s unheard of. I hate playing in water, while you love swimming.’ He also thought about the differences he saw within the same racial group.
‘I found that whites in England were not the same as whites in Zimbabwe. In England I started to realize that something had gone terribly wrong with our white people. All this time I had thought it was impossible to love a white person, but in England I even dated white girls.’
On returning to Zimbabwe, he got a job as a farm manager. ‘My grandfather fought for the British in Burma and Malaya, and when he returned to Rhodesia the colonial administration rewarded him with a bicycle. There was a white man called Leslie Edwards who did the same, and he was given a farm called Inshallah. When I got back from the UK, it had been passed to his son and I worked for him.’ He found it hard not to be resentful. The white Zimbabweans who had been on the same course as Phil in Wiltshire inherited farms on their return. When he walked into the local Country Club, there was no hostility from them, just distance. He was not part of their world. Zimbabwe’s white liberals tended to live in cities, and most farmers had accepted independence without challenging their prejudices or way of thinking. A munt was still a munt.
‘I learned never to greet a white person, unless he greeted me first,’ said Phil. ‘I was embarrassed too many times.’
Phil eventually earned the money to buy Paarl Farm from running a successful business selling meat to the army.
‘I joined the Country Club. I took out a life membership—just to annoy them.’