But others stayed on, as the transition to black rule did not change the good life they enjoyed. Most whites in Harare, the capital, had servants and swimming pools. The good life diminished after when Mugabe began seizing white-owned farms and his rhetoric became more belligerent. His government embarked upon uncontrolled spending to ensure support of the black veterans of the bush war and Zimbabwe's economy plunged into crisis.
While Zimbabwe has modern health facilities, they are all privately-run and benefit only those with expensive insurance. In Britain the elderly whites will be cared for by the National Health Service which is free. Now this forlorn little community of pensioners, many in retirement homes, is kept going by remittances from their offspring and surreptitious local generosity.
She came out in , married and raised a son who is now 52 and lives in Zimbabwe. In southern Zimbabwe's Matabeleland the state of siege has never really ended for most white farmers.
For the past 14 years, Mike Wood has run his 14,acre cattle ranch near Nyamandhlovu in Matabeland. But it is no easy life. Both he and some other white farmers who have chosen to remain in that region have suffered from three years of bad drought. Homesteads are protected by security fences, one avoids traveling after 5 p. Wood, who packs a pistol at his hip. Despite such travails, one hears little criticism of the Prime Minister, whom many whites consider to be their best guarantor.
Most are encouraged by Mugabe's reconciliation efforts and seem committed to the new Zimbabwe. They are also keen to participate in its development. We've done well. Most whites here remain apprehensive about the future. Events in South Africa forbode tough times ahead. Cynical whites point to the economic disasters elsewhere on the continent to show what South Africans should expect under black rule.
The majority, however, are extremely nationalistic and resent what is widely seen as South Africa's efforts to destabilize neighbor nations under black rule. I'm not just saying this now, but some of us realized that black rule was inevitable.
We could have done without the war and been at a much better advantage today. That's what those thick Afrikaaners should realize. I tell you, man, there's a lesson to be learned. Another concern is that tribal division and an erosion of civil liberties under a one-party dictatorship could severely undermine the country. The detention of two white customs officers earlier this year, despite a Supreme Court order for thier release, has already given many whites cause to worry.
So has the recent unconstitutional decision of the home affairs minister Enos Nkala to revoke the Zimbabwean nationality of a white reporter. Journalist Jan Raath's nationality was revoked for allegedly providing Amnesty International with information on human rights abuses.
As it is, Zimbabwe's whites can expect major constitutional changes in the year ahead. Mugabe has said that he intends to abolish the 20 parliamentary seats reserved for whites under the present political system. Many accept this as inevitable and are reluctant to oppose it for fear of arousing racial tension. For the moment, however, many whites do not necessarily see politics as the best way to represent their interests.
The Commercial Farmers' Union, for example, has long been the best platform for expressing the views of white farmers. As with many former Rhodesians, Mr. Bennett feels that, at least for the present, their best form of representation is through the quiet lobbying of professional organizations such as the Commercial Farmers' Union, rather than through members of parliament.
Already a subscriber? Nearly forty years ago Ian Smith, the Prime Minister of Rhodesia, became the first and only white colonial ruler to break away from the British Crown. He had tired of London's nagging about the subjugation of Rhodesian blacks.
In Smith declared independence. Although Rhodesia in was home to just over , whites and four million blacks, Smith shared Rhodes's belief that black majority rule would occur "never in a thousand years. Smith was of course wrong. In , after a civil war that cost 30, lives, the black majority took charge of the country, which was renamed Zimbabwe. Robert Mugabe—the nationalist leader whom Smith had branded a "Marxist terrorist" and jailed for more than a decade; a man who had once urged his followers to stop wearing shoes and socks to show they were willing to reject the trappings of European civilization—became President.
Zimbabwe, one of southern Africa's most prosperous countries, held great promise. Its Victoria Falls was one of the seven natural wonders of the world. Its gushing Zambezi River boasted wildlife and pulsing rapids. Its lush soil was the envy of a continent. And, though landlocked, the country had modernized sensibly: it had a network of paved roads, four airports, and, thanks to Mugabe's leadership, a rigorous and inclusive education system.
Mugabe knew that whites drove the economy, and he was pragmatic. In a cordial meeting with Smith, Mugabe acknowledged that he had inherited the "jewel of Africa," and he vowed to keep it that way. He was very courteous: it was 'Mr.
Smith this' and 'Mr. Smith that. But it is even more remarkable that the man who once ran an election campaign promising "a whiter, brighter Rhodesia" does not live as other well-to-do Zimbabweans do—behind a bolted gate manned by forbidding security forces. For three years, with Zimbabwe imploding politically and economically, Mugabe has been inciting violence against whites. Yet Smith's spacious home, next door to the Cuban embassy in the capital, Harare, is shielded by neither a guard post nor a guard dog—only by purple jacaranda trees.
When I visited him, earlier this year, Smith's driveway gate and his front door stood wide open, offering passersby an inviting glimpse of his plush Victorian furnishings.
Swallowed up by a Queen Anne armchair, Smith, a bone-thin eighty-four-year-old, told me that all he ever wanted to do in life was manage his 4,acre farm, miles southwest of Harare. He grows oranges and seed potatoes, and raises cattle. But in Zimbabwe, where whites owned the finest farmland and most blacks remained dispossessed two decades after independence, politics and land became inseparable.
A few days before my visit Smith was reading the morning newspaper when he came across a government notice listing the latest batch of farms designated for seizure by the state. His farm was among them. For a man who had just learned that he would lose his livelihood, his passion, and his family home, Smith was strangely unflustered.
Largely ignored since independence, he seems to have found in the blind bungling of Robert Mugabe's regime a grim redemption for white rule. We thought you were too rigid and inflexible. But now we see you were right. You were so right: they were not fit to govern.
The "they," of course, is the black majority. But Smith is drawing the wrong lesson. Although Zimbabwe is as broken as any country on the planet, it offers a testament not to some inherent African inability to govern but to a minority rule as oppressive and inconsiderate of the welfare of citizens as its ignominious white predecessor. The country's economy in was the fastest growing in all of Africa; now it is the fastest shrinking. A onetime net exporter of maize, cotton, beef, tobacco, roses, and sugarcane now exports only its educated professionals, who are fleeing by the tens of thousands.
Although Zimbabwe has some of the richest farmland in Africa, children with distended bellies have begun arriving at school looking like miniature pregnant women. How could the breadbasket of Africa have deteriorated so quickly into the continent's basket case?
The answer is Robert Mugabe, now seventy-nine, who by his actions has compiled something of a "how-to" manual for national destruction. Although many of his methods have been applied elsewhere, taken as a whole his ten-step approach is more radical and more comprehensive than that of other despots.
The Zimbabwe case offers some important insights. It illustrates the prime importance of accountability as an antidote to idiocy and excess. It highlights the lasting effects of decolonization—limited Western influence on the continent and a reluctance by African leaders to criticize their own. And it offers a warning about how much damage one man can do, very quickly.
I was told ahead of time by locals that the patrons would be mostly white ex-farmers "crying into their beer. Most were chain-smoking, and they did seem quite wobbly. A television hanging from the ceiling played reruns of Tim Henman's latest Wimbledon tease.
At the entrance to the club is a sports shop, which sells squash rackets and cricket bats. The place is Old England in a capsule, and yet the paint is chipped, the tabs are unpaid, and the lively chatter, once about crop yields and rugby scores, now focuses on court dates and emigration plans. Pat Ashton, a stocky, white-haired fifty-five-year-old farmer, stops in at least twice a month.
Ashton grew up in Cheshire, England, and moved to Rhodesia in Trusting Mugabe's moderate rhetoric, he made a down payment on a farm the year after independence.
It took him two decades to pay back his loans, but in he finally did so. His workers didn't earn enough to buy their own land "I probably could have done more to make them self-sufficient," he admits , but he did build them a village of some ninety houses, a social hall, a football field, and a medical clinic. Ashton reinvested virtually all of his surplus in the farm. In July of about fifty people who lived in the nearby town arrived on his land.
Most were miners, and they were led by three officials from the Mugabe government. The group began surveying Ashton's property and marking out plots for homes. The next six months were a constant battle. The settlers returned and erected makeshift thatch huts in the middle of Ashton's maize and tobacco fields. They dug up his maize crops, beat up his farm workers, and removed and bent his irrigation pipes.
Still Ashton hung on, living in his farmhouse and planting and harvesting what he could. In January of four trucks arrived, containing youth militia and men claiming they were veterans of the liberation war collecting their reward for service.
This time the invaders attacked Ashton, with steel rods and an ax, cutting him in the forearm and badly damaging his pickup truck as he tried to escape.
They held two of his sons hostage for a day, threatening to execute them and making them chant songs in praise of the ruling party. As the invaders carted away all the Ashton family's transportable belongings—from crockery to toilet seats—the police watched with amusement and then decided to join in.
Ashton is more sympathetic than many other farmers, but the story of his eviction is fairly typical. In , about 4, large-scale commercial farmers owned some 70 percent of Zimbabwe's arable land. Nearly two thirds of these farmers had bought their farms after independence, and thus held titles issued not by Ian Smith or the British colonial regime but by the Mugabe government. Mugabe had long pledged land reform as a way of redistributing farmland to black peasants and dismantling what many saw as the country's "mini-Rhodesias.
Mugabe decided on what he called "fast-track land reform" only in February of , after he got shocking results in a constitutional referendum: though he controlled the media, the schools, the police, and the army, voters rejected a constitution he put forth to increase his power even further.
A new movement was afoot in Zimbabwe: the Movement for Democratic Change—a coalition of civic groups, labor unions, constitutional reformers, and heretofore marginal opposition parties.
Mugabe blamed the whites and their farm workers who, although they together made up only 15 percent of the electorate, were enough to tip the scales for the growth of the MDC—and for his humiliating rebuff.
So he played the race card and the land card. In the immediate aftermath of his referendum defeat Mugabe announced a third chimurenga , invoking a valiant history to animate a violent, country-wide land grab. Initially, the farmers held their ground, but it became clear after several white farmers were murdered that they were too few and Mugabe's regime was too determined.
Of the 4, large-scale commercial farmers in business three years ago, all but have been forced off their land. Most Zimbabweans including white farmers say that land reform was both necessary and inevitable. The tragedy of Mugabe's approach is that it has harmed those whom a well-ordered, selective redistribution program could and should have helped.
Generally the farms have not been given to black farm managers or farm workers. Indeed, because of their association with the opposition, more than a million farm workers and their dependents have been displaced, and they are now at grave risk of starvation. In fact, the beneficiaries of the land seizures are, with few exceptions, ruling-party officials and friends of the President's.
Although Mugabe's people seem to view the possession of farms as a sign of status the Minister of Home Affairs has five; the Minister of Information has three; Mugabe's wife, Grace, and scores of influential party members and their relatives have two each , these elites don't have the experience, the equipment, or, apparently, the desire to run them. About , formerly landless peasants helped the ruling elites to take over the farms, but now that the dirty work is done, many of them are themselves being expelled.
The drop-off in agricultural production is staggering. Maize farming, which yielded more than 1. Wheat production, which stood at , tons in , will hover at 27, tons this year. Tobacco production, too, which at , tons accounted for nearly a third of the total foreign-currency earnings in , has tumbled, to about 66, tons in Mugabe's belief that he can strengthen his flagging popularity by destroying a resented but economically vital minority group is one that dictators elsewhere have shared.
Paranoid about their diminishing support, Stalin wiped out the wealthy kulak farming class, Idi Amin purged Uganda's Indian commercial class, and, of course, Hitler went after Jewish businesses even though Germany was already reeling from the Depression.
Whatever spikes in popularity these moves generated, the economic damage was profound, and the dictators had to exert great effort to mask it. Zimbabweans get their news from state television, "the first and permanent media choice for every Zimbabwean. Many are wearing yellow and green, the colors of the ruling party.
One is wearing a T-shirt bearing the number 23, signifying Mugabe's years in power. The maize is shucked to the beat, and the hoes land rhythmically in the rich red soil.
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