In great contrast to Malawi and Tanzania and Kenya, Zimbabwe was not a destination for the white Land-Rover and the charitable effort and the foreign agent of virtue. There was little for the Hunger Project or Save the Children to do, since there was no starvation and the children were in good shape. The country’s patchy history as British-ruled Southern Rhodesia, the renegade white-ruled Republic of Rhodesia, and finally Zimbabwe had already forced people to learn important lessons in self-help. But the minister’s mention of the pariah status of Mugabe’s government I saw as my chance to bring up the subject of the war veterans and the farm invasions. I said, ‘Doesn’t this situation worry you?’
‘It is complicated. Everything has been mixed up together.’ He clawed at the back of his neck and went on gabbling, embarrassed by my direct question. ‘Yes, some land has been taken away and some farms have been resettled by so-called invaders. But the people who have taken the land are being productive. It is not what the papers are saying. People reporting should see for themselves.’
‘I’m going to look. I’ve heard that the seized farms are a lot less productive and that there’s a maize shortage,’ I said. ‘But even so, taking the land by force is illegal, isn’t it?’
‘Maybe you could say we need a level of political maturity,’ the minister said, with what I felt was unusual candor. ‘Competing parties have to speak to each other. We have to see that the country is more Important than our philosophies. And maybe you can help us.’
I leaned forward and said, ‘What would you like me to do?’
‘You can portray the positive aspects of life here,’ the minister said. ‘You can dispel the image of instability.’
‘I’ll do what I can, sir,’ I said, and then with gusto he went back to discussing the ambiguous prohibitions of the Shona people.
The day that I drove out to Peter Drummond’s farm I heard on the radio that the British government had stopped aid to Zimbabwe and canceled a large loan, because of ‘the resettlements’ — farm invasions. Two reasons for the British move were mentioned — the land was not being given to the poor, and none of this was being done legally. That news had Chenjerai (‘Hitler’) Hunzvi screaming denunciations of the British.
‘You can see for yourself,’ Peter Drummond said. He had picked me up at my hotel. ‘Talk to the squatters. Talk to my people. Talk to anyone you like. Stay on the farm.’
I told him the conciliatory remarks the minister had made, about the need for political maturity in Zimbabwe and the necessity for different parties to speak to each other.
‘Maybe he was telling you what you wanted to hear,’ Drummond said. ‘But also there are a lot of reasonable people in the government. I’m sure you’ve heard that it’s a one-man problem.’
‘Everyone says it.’
‘He hates us.’
In that year’s Independence Day speech, President Mugabe referred to whites in Zimbabwe as ‘snakes,’ saying, ‘The snake we thought was dead is coming back again. The whites are coming back!’ And the opposition Movement for Democratic Change he saw as ‘a puppet’ of the whites, who were anti-government.
Zimbabwe farmers generally were so accustomed to adversity that simple-minded abuse — being called snakes — just made them shrug.
Outside Harare the road straightened, became narrower, closely fenced, with plowed fields on either side and tall regular stands of trees marked the presence of farmhouses. After twenty miles we were in open country, grazing land and in places tall maize stalks drying and turning brown, awaiting the harvest.
‘How’s business?’
Drummond chuckled. He said, ‘Could be better. There are the thefts, of course. We discovered that between November and March several of the workers have been stealing chickens. Quite a few. So for three months we lost all our profit. Also, because it was an inside job, the thefts buggered our books.’
‘What happened to the thieves?’
‘They still work for me. I couldn’t sack them, because they’re politically connected — there would have been trouble. The police wouldn’t have been helpful either.’
Thefts by employees were not unusual, he said — old-timers stole diesel fuel, maize bags routinely disappeared from trucks on the way to market, tools were pinched. But so many chickens had been stolen that the bookkeeping and delivery figures were skewed, and the loss meant that for three months he could not service his bank loan.
‘It’s pretty funny,’ he said. Then he gestured out the window and said, ‘My estate starts about here.’
We drove for miles after that. Drummond explained that he had recently learned that a mining company had been given permission from the government to look for minerals on his land. The miners had discovered a vast deposit of platinum in an extensive dyke that ran across his property. The bad news was that though he owned the stony fields and the pigpens and the chicken houses and the diesel that were being raided, this platinum deposit was not his.
‘I don’t own what’s under my land. That belongs to the government. They can do whatever they like with it.’
Drummond’s house was on a little hill, a kopje, at the end of a dusty track. On the way, we passed some of his workers — men repairing fences, cutting grass, tinkering with the plumbing at water troughs. Drummond spoke to them in Shona and the patois known in Zimbabwe as Chilapalapa.
The house he had built for himself was made of bricks he had fired in his own kiln, and thatched with grass that had been cut on his own land. The mortar was made from mixing the clay from anthills with sand. It was not large, a squarish house with a sitting room upstairs in what would have been the attic, several rooms cluttered with books and files, much of it decorated with African handicrafts. Nearby were stables and staff houses, clumps of banana trees and a lovely rose garden. The compound was simple and comfortable while retaining the look of headquarters. Drummond’s great regret was that he had not put in a fireplace in the house.
‘It can get cold here. We have frost in June.’
His estate lay on the shores of a large lake, Manyame (formerly Lake Robertson). After he had taken me around some of his land I had the impression of his farm being more than a simple settlement but rather something like a small town, with the same solid infrastructure. It had good roads, a gas station, a fuel depot, a substantial machine shop, a garage, a main road, a piggery, sheep and lambs in the fields, a chicken factory, cattle grazing, lots of crops and plenty of water. The various operations were located on different parts of the land, requiring a great deal of driving. He had 200 workers and, including dependants, there were 400 people altogether on the property in a workers’ village of substantial huts.
I remarked on the completeness of the place and its orderly appearance. I was impressed by the way he recycled the chicken by-products, using the manure and the plucked feathers to fertilize the crops.
But he dismissed my praise. He said any look of prosperity was illusory and that ever since diesel fuel had been rationed he had had to cut back on his operation. ‘What you see is a farm working at half its capacity.’
At the chicken station he said, ‘A woman came here not long ago and told me she wanted some of my land. The Zimbabwean women are keen and they have a good work ethic. She said she wanted to build a house here’ — he indicated a field near a warehouse. ‘She planned to hook up her electricity to my line there. That way she’d have lights and I would be paying her electric bill for the rest of her life. Good arrangement, eh?’
‘Was she a war vet?’
‘That’s what I asked her!’ he laughed, remembering the woman. ‘She said, “In a way.” I said, “Where were you fighting?” ’