Power-sharing has not loosened Mugabe’s iron grip, says Ben Freeth, a farmer whose home and livelihood were destroyed by Zanu-PF militants
On Sunday 30 August last year, as we drove back from church to our home in Chegutu, northern Zimbabwe, my wife and I spotted a large swirl of white smoke in the distance. We soon realised, to our horror, that the thick fumes were coming from our property. Our farm was on fire.
By the time we reached the drive, the flames were tearing across our land, heading towards our workers’ homes, the orchards and our own house. We needed water, and lots of it, fast. But we were at a major disadvantage. Several weeks earlier the Zanu-PF militants (the same men who, we can be certain, started the fire) had stolen our tractors, water carts and fire-fighting equipment, leaving us no means of dousing the flames. In desperation, we took some green branches and beat frantically at the fast-advancing walls of flame. It was no use: the wind was strong and in a matter of minutes the blaze had spread to our thatched roofs. I ran in and out of the house twice, grabbing our most important documents and our computers. But the heat was unbearable, and soon it was impossible to go back in.
Two of our workers managed to remove some chairs and a table from the house. All we could do was sit down and watch hopelessly as the fire devastated everything: the little linen factory we ran on the farm, our possessions and our home. Our life’s work — our history — was consumed in about half an hour. A few hundred yards away, I saw one of the thugs sitting on one of our tractors, laughing at us. After the fire, my nine-year-old son Joshua approached me and asked, ‘Is water stronger than fire, or is fire stronger than water?’ I thought a bit and said, ‘fire is very strong... but if there is water then fire is weaker.’ I think he understood. Two days later, they burnt down my parents-in-law’s house as well.
Fire is only the latest ordeal that our family has had to endure under Robert Mugabe’s regime. In the last ten years, we have been remorselessly harassed and persecuted on our property by violent men who think white people don’t belong in Zimbabwe. On 29 June last year, the day before Mugabe was sworn in as President for a sixth term, a group of armed militiamen raided our farm, kidnapping my wife’s parents, Mike and Angela Campbell, and me. We were badly beaten, abducted and dragged to a pungwe — a mass all-night indoctrination meeting led by a brainwashed nationalist mob — then beaten again. Angela, 67, had her arm broken twice and a red-hot stick thrust into her mouth. Mike, 74, had his ribs smashed and bones broken in his hands and feet. He suffered brain damage from repeated blows to the head.
We are not the only ones, of course. Many other farming families have been through similar experiences. Some of my friends have been killed; many more have been left traumatised or debilitated. More than a million Zimbabwean farm workers have been forced from their homes.
My family has tried to resist, but with little success. After the latest invasion that started in April this year, we won two high-court orders decreeing that the criminals occupying our land should be removed. But the police refused to obey them. Last year, the Southern African Development Community Tribunal issued a ruling supporting our family’s property rights, and later pronounced the Zimbabwean government in contempt of court for failing to comply with the judgment. The SADC’s intervention seemed a major breakthrough for Zimbabwe’s farmers, the first time that an international court had condemned Mugabe’s appropriation of our land. Again, though, nothing happened.
We’ve filed other suits, including one against our local police department head, Chief Inspector Manika, who on countless occasions has looked the other way as the invading brutes have destroyed our property and brutalised our workers. The authorities, perhaps sensing some pressure on Manika, elected to dispatch him to Liberia — to serve a UN peace-keeping mission.
This is the madness of Zimbabwe, where small currents of order and justice appear only to vanish into a hellish swamp of oppression and corruption. In the eyes of the outside world, our country has recently improved. The so-called ‘unity government’ that emerged in February, with opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai as Prime Minister, was greeted as a great triumph for free people everywhere. Hyperinflation stopped with the final collapse of the Zimbabwe dollar, and everyone thought the economy might show signs of growth. The European Union, apparently convinced that Zimbabwean democracy is on the mend, has re-entered negotiations with Mugabe, who in reply makes noises about ‘fresh and co-operative relations’.
Don’t believe a word of it. In rural areas, Zanu-PF is consolidating its power with a terrifying zeal. Tsvangirai may be prime minister, but he has little or no real influence. Mugabe still controls the army, the police, and the Ministry of Justice; and he still has his appointees in the Supreme Court. In Chegutu, I see children as young as ten being trained at the police station. They are being prepared, we fear, for the next election, when Mugabe will squash whatever democracy is left.
For all the talk of progress, Zimbabwe — a rich agricultural land — remains one of the nations most dependent on food aid. That problem is not going to resolve itself while the vicious destruction of the farming industry continues. This year, we expect the national wheat harvest to be less than a tenth of what it should be, because so much equipment has been destroyed, so many crops damaged.
On that terrible day in August, one of the many treasured possessions my family lost was a battered old wallet belonging to my mother-in-law. In it, she kept a heavily creased black-and-white photograph that she had recently inherited from her father. The picture was of Angela as a young girl. On the back was marked ‘Stalag 4’, the name of one of the Nazi camps where her father, a South African prisoner of war, had been incarcerated. He used to tell us about his wartime experiences. He would describe how, interned next to the concentration camp at Dachau, he could smell the bodies burning in crematorium incinerators.
When I look at the charred ruins of our home, I think of him and the horrors he witnessed. It is hard for me not to see a parallel between the situation of white farmers in Zimbabwe and that of Jews under Hitler. Zimbabwe’s nationalist leaders today hate the white man just as Nazis despised the Jew. Mugabe blames us for the chaos he has created, just as Hitler pinned all the problems of Germany on to a small Jewish minority.
The white population of Zimbabwe, which at its height numbered about 270,000, has now been whittled down to around 20,000. Only a few hundred farmers remain. Our tormentors grow bolder and more violent. We wonder how it will end.