‘Then we were invaded,’ he said, smiling grimly. ‘It’s quite funny, really. The guy’s not really a war veteran. He was a driver during the struggle. Just looking for free land.’
All this time, sitting in the coffee shop, I was scribbling notes in the little notebook on my knee.
Drummond said, ‘Aren’t you hungry?’
I said I was.
‘Come to lunch,’ he said. ‘I’m meeting my family in about ten minutes in a restaurant near here. It’s pretty good food. I sell them their chickens.’
Ten minutes later I was sitting at a big table eating roast chicken with the Drummond family — Peter, his wife, Lindsay, two of his four boys, Troy and Garth, and Garth’s girlfriend Lauren.
To be so suddenly and casually gathered into the bosom of this generous family on a hot day in Harare was one of the tenderest episodes of my trip. The hospitality of farmers in the bush of southern Africa is well known, but this was more than hospitality. I was a stranger, and sharing a meal is peacemaking, so their including me at their table represented a profound ceremony of acceptance and good will.
‘This is kind of a family council,’ Drummond said.
The specific purpose for their gathering, their deciding how to spend their spring vacation, made the meal even more significant. They talked about what they might do — go camping in the bush, visit Lake Kariba in the north, drive to the coast of Mozambique for a swimming holiday, stay on the farm together. ‘We have to do it cheap! We have no money!’ The discussion went round and round and to a loner on a safari through Africa this cozy manifestation of family life was like heaven.
After they settled on the trip to Mozambique, Peter Drummond said to his son Garth, ‘I told Paul about the time we were attacked by those fifteen guys.’
‘And you weren’t scared,’ I said.
Garth said, ‘I was never scared.’
Lindsay said, ‘We never made the war an issue. I just said, “If there’s trouble, get under your beds.” ’
‘Still, ten percent of the white farmers were killed and, of the rest, half of them left the country,’ Lauren said.
Lauren was a woman in her mid-twenties, attractive and forthright, brought up on a farm in rural Zimbabwe.
‘My father’s farm was occupied by invaders,’ she told me. ‘It was called Chipadzi Farm. My father had owned it for years. A local chap was Chief Chipadzi. One day he came to my father and said, “This is my farm” — just claimed it as his own. The government was against us. What could we do? My father and mother emigrated to Australia — Toowoomba, west of Brisbane. But they’re not farming anymore.’
‘What happened to Chipadzi Farm?’
Drummond said, ‘That’s rather a funny story. Tell him, Lauren.’
‘We went by it not long ago. There’s a little planting, not much — small patches of maize here and there. Just subsistence.’
They were back to hoes and hand weeding. But her father’s mechanized farm had produced enough maize to feed 1000 people.
‘The trouble these days is that we don’t have decent weapons,’ Drummond said. ‘We used to have AKs and back-up from the security forces. But if we have a problem now the police don’t help us.’
‘We’ve had war vets with AKs walking around our garden,’ Lindsay said. ‘I see them all the time. Trying to frighten us. I felt more secure before, during the struggle.’
‘I’ve got five big Combretum trees,’ Drummond said. ‘They’re indigenous, very pretty. I love those trees. Well, one Sunday we were coming home from church and saw a war vet there, just a local drunk. He had cut down one of my trees. It left a big gap. It was to send a message, see. But that made me angrier than almost anything I could think of. Came to my house and cut down my own tree!’
The drunk had another annoying habit. Whenever he needed money he met with local Africans and sold them parcels of Drummond’s farm.
‘They pitch up all the time, showing me pieces of paper that say that they now own some of my land,’ Drummond said. ‘You should come out and see them. It’s really quite funny.’
‘I’d love to invade your farm,’ I said, and we agreed on a day.
Since tourists and white hunters and even overland travelers were avoiding Zimbabwe I was curious to know what the minister of tourism was doing to counter the impression that Zimbabwe was a black hole. Impersonating a harmless journalist, I asked to see the man who held this post and to my surprise he agreed to see me. This was Edward Chindor-Chininga, Member of Parliament and Minister for Environment and Tourism.
When I went to the ministry, a secretary greeted me and asked me to wait — ‘the minister is running late’ — and I sat on the leather sofa in his outer office, put my head back and went to sleep. I awoke, refreshed, a half-hour later, ready to meet the man.
The minister was young and fat, hardly thirty and personable, wearing a tight dark suit and a silk tie. He was from Kanyemba, at the northeast corner of Zimbabwe, on the Zambezi.
‘Don’t the Two-Toed Va-doma people live up there?’ I asked.
He said that was correct but had nothing to add to what I already knew — a genetic trait in the hobbling, limping tribe produced people with strange split-apart feet, literally cleft footed.
The minister himself was a member of the Shona tribe and was quick to point out that the Shona were losing their cultural values and traditional beliefs. ‘People say our beliefs are devilish or what-what. But you can’t run away from your good culture.’
‘Give me an example of your good culture.’
‘The belief that no family can exist without respect for ancestors.’
‘But I believe that myself,’ I said.
‘I see how you people in the United States mourn your dead.’
‘Of course we do. Everyone in the world mourns their dead,’ I said.
‘And they must always be consulted, because ancestors control and influence our day-to-day life.’
‘I don’t know about “influence.” ’
‘Seriously influence,’ the minister said. ‘If there is a problem in a family here — a boy in prison or a girl unhappy — we consult our ancestors and find we can heal the problem. If something is wrong, I myself go to my home village and see my mondhoro’ — the healer, but the Shona word also meant lion.
This healer was the repository of all local history and especially knew the lineage of everyone in the village. The minister emphasized that the mondhoro had no books, nothing written: the history was all in his head. And so hearing of a certain person’s difficulty he could relate it to something that had happened in the past — a long-dead ancestor who was exerting a malign influence on the present. I liked this belief for its completeness and for its insistence that no one died: the dead were ever present.
‘We also have animals who help us,’ the minister said. ‘Every African in Zimbabwe has a link with an animal. When people meet here they often ask, “What is your totem?” ’
So I asked him, ‘What is your totem?’
‘A certain mouse,’ the minister said. ‘It is the one animal I cannot eat. For some people it is an eland, or a zebra, or an elephant. Mine is a specific mouse — nhika — I don’t know the name in English. It is very tiny. It has a white patch on its head. Some people, they eat it, but not myself, no.’
I mentioned to him that buses in Zimbabwe sometimes had an animal painted on the back.
‘Those are totems,’ he said. ‘So you see our people are respectful of animals because of their totems.’
‘How do you explain all the poaching, then?’
‘People are hungry. The economy is way down, in a bad situation,’ he said, and then he became cheerful. ‘There are benefits, though! The situation shows us that we need to be self-reliant. No one outside Zimbabwe will necessarily come to our rescue. We will have to learn to help ourselves.’