Two Farms: One Black, One White

By the time I returned to Zimbabwe to report the 2002 presidential elections, I couldn’t visit the Douses’ farmhouse either. It was surrounded by a drunken mob chanting, shouting and drumming all night. The war vets had set up a roadblock at the gate, which Glenda crossed twice a day to get to her job at the hospital in Marondera.

‘They put rocks in the cattle grid. One day when they screamed and shouted at me I got out my camera and took a picture, which they didn’t like. Another day they stopped me and asked for my ZANU-PF card. I said I had an MDC card. Some of them just started laughing because it was such a stupid thing for me to say, but others were kicking the wheels and banging the windows, so I had to reverse and go and stay somewhere else that night.’

A ZANU-PF campaign video repeated endlessly on state TV showed grainy footage – presumably from the war – of a group of whites setting an Alsatian dog on a black man, while the pop star Chinx Chingaire sang in Shona:

‘You think they like you,
But they don’t.
They only smile because they want something.
Underneath, they’re devils.’

The strategy worked. Mugabe won the presidency. Six more years to add to the twenty-two he had already served as leader of Zimbabwe. The war vets celebrated, while the Douses at first reverted to type and did what Zimbabwe’s whites always do when times are bad: they went to Inyanga for the weekend and lived the white African life, drinking cocktails and fishing for trout. They returned to a rented town house in Harare and hoped that the gooks who were going round assaulting MDC activists would not come for them. The white manager of the next-door farm was beaten so badly he was taken to hospital covered in blood. He and his young wife and baby left the country as soon as he could walk.