Two Farms: One Black, One White

As parliamentary elections approached in 2000, the TV news grew hateful. Mugabe’s equation was simple: to vote for ZANU-PF was to be patriotic and loyal to your racial group, while to vote for the MDC was to be a stooge of the white man – worse, of the white farmer, the most hated kind of white man. White farmers, like black opposition activists, were now being killed by Mugabe’s thugs. ‘You are now our enemies because you really have behaved as enemies of Zimbabwe, and we are full of anger,’ he told white farmers in April of that year.

‘The white man has not changed!’ he bellowed at a parliamentary election rally I attended. ‘The whites can never be our cousins. They are racists.’ His statements in Shona were more radical. His audience, many of whom had not been born when Ian Smith was in power, listened as Mugabe raised his fist and denounced his former rival as if he were still a current force, not an eighty-year-old whom Mugabe himself was allowing to live out a peaceful old age on his farm. It was like watching an old boxer punch an empty bag, reliving the fights of his youth.

Phil Matibe continued his campaign for the Chegutu parliamentary seat. He lost by a handful of votes. Believing the election to have been rigged, he took out a petition against the ZANU-PF victor.

In London a few months later I opened the Daily Telegraph and saw a photograph of Phil holding Mpho, his three-year-old son. They had been given the same punishment as was being meted out to white farmers: they had been thrown off their farm. I called their mobile and got Pearl.

‘We’re on the border at Beitbridge. We thought we’d better go to South Africa for a bit.’

‘Are you all right?’

‘We’re fine, we just grabbed what we could and left.’ Phil explained that a few days earlier an envoy from the victorious ZANU-PF candidate had come to tell him that if he did not withdraw his election petition by the end of the week, the farm would be seized. Phil said no. Two days later, a group of ‘war veterans’ arrived accompanied by district officials and villagers.

‘They had a hat full of numbered bottle-tops. The villagers had to pick a number, and that was the plot they were allocated,’ he said. ‘Maybe they’ll leave,’ he added, hopefully. ‘We’ll try to get back on the farm next week.’

The following week, their home (with most of their possessions still inside) was burned to the ground.

When I returned to Zimbabwe a few weeks later, Phil took me round the wreckage of his farm. The irrigation pipes had been pulled out, and parched barley stocks dangled brown and ruined. An emaciated old man who had previously worked as a farm labourer scratched in the dried earth for sugar beans. It looked like a scene from the Ethiopian famine. We wandered around the blackened carcass of the farmhouse, and looked out over the charred ruin of the barn and a heap of burnt maize cobs.

‘I’ve lost everything,’ Phil said. ‘All my life savings. It’s gone.’

We drove down to the workers’ compound. It could have been a village anywhere in Africa. Women sat breastfeeding outside clay and wooden homes, while barefoot children gathered excitedly to see the murungu. The men stood in the shade of the msasa tree while Phil tried to explain to them why they had not been paid. I could see a small, sullen group dressed in jeans and bomber jackets circling us silently around the edge of the compound.

‘Those aren’t my workers,’ said Phil, quietly. ‘I think we should leave.’ As we drove away, one of the group chased after us waving what looked like a machete. Phil said, ‘The worst thing is dealing with the workers. What can I say to them if I can’t pay them?’

After visiting the farm, I went to see Zimbabwe’s Home Affairs Minister, an affable man called John Nkomo who delights in showing journalists his novelty telephone which looks like a toy train and, instead of ringing, goes ‘choo choo’. He explained to me the problem with the opposition.

‘They’re a sponsored group, the result of efforts by white commercial farmers who wanted to defeat our land reorganization programme.’ I asked why Matibe, one of the country’s most successful black commercial farmers, should be ousted from his land in a programme which is meant to turn white-owned land over to blacks. He replied: ‘Anyone who becomes a tool of the colonial legacy cannot be safe’ – he paused for a moment for the message to sink in – ‘from the programme of land redistribution.’

Phil rang me to say they had offered him a new farm if he withdrew his petition.

‘I said no. If they give me a farm it’ll just be one they’ve taken from someone else.’ They found one which had not been confiscated and renewed the offer. As he rounded the corner to look at the proposed property, he was shot at by men positioned near the gate. Pearl started agitating to get the children out of the country. Local officials visited to say he could have two farms if he joined ZANU-PF.

A few weeks later, he rang me in London again.

‘I’m struggling with the pressure. They’ve pressured me up to the point where the next solution if I don’t conform is death. So I’ve withdrawn my petition. All I want to do now is make sure the family’s safe and I can get by.’ He sounded defeated.