When a Crocodile Eats the Sun Page 7

  I AM SUPPOSED to be writing an article about the attacks on white farms, and my father has carefully clipped articles he thinks will be of relevance and stored them in a box file that he now pre-sents to me. On top of the pile is a piece about David Stevens, the first farmer to die, on April 15, and another prominent member of the MDC. He was abducted from his farm, Arizona, by forty armed men who arrived in a bus. His hands were tied behind his back and he was driven away. White neighbors who came to his aid were shot at and took refuge at the local police station, but the gunmen followed, dragged them out, beat them and tortured them, forcing Stevens to drink diesel oil.

  One was witness to Stevens’s death: “I saw a man step forward and shoot Dave in the back and then in the face with a shotgun — he literally blew him away,” he said.

  His widow, Maria, is a friend of ours, so I call her. “I’m also supposed to be writing a piece on . . .” I swallow back my embarrassment. “On all of this,” I say. “So you don’t have to talk to me if you’d rather not. Or at least not on the record. Or if this isn’t a good time . . .”

  “Why not?” she says. “They’ve already killed my husband, what else can they do to me?”

  David Stevens came up to Zimbabwe at independence from South Africa because he wanted to live in a free country. Here he met Maria, a Swede, recently arrived as part of a Scandinavian aid program. Now a handsome woman in her late thirties, I visit Maria in her temporary Harare refuge, a suburban house owned by the Swedish Embassy. Her twin twenty-month-old boys crawl restlessly over her.

  “They don’t really understand that their father has been killed,” she says. Her voice is flat. “I don’t really know how to explain it to them.” She arbitrates a squabble between the boys, and sits one on either thigh.

  “We bought our farm from a black man in 1986. It was a rundown overgrown mess,” she remembers. “No rivers flowed there. It was called Arizona because it was arid and rocky. Now all the rivers flow. We grew tobacco and corn, and I bred ostriches. We employed seventy-five families. David spoke fluent Shona and was on the local council trying to sort out the roads in the communal area. Eventually he got involved in opposition politics and joined the MDC. There was even an MDC rally held on our farm.

  “When the war vets first invaded, we had fairly good relations with them. But then one weekend when I was away they raped a little girl in our compound, and our workers got the hell in with them.”

  That’s when the trouble started. The workers chased the wovits off the farm, and soon they returned with reinforcements and seized Stevens.

  “When David was taken away by vets, the last thing he said to me as he left was, ‘Don’t worry, darling, I’ll be safe.’ I never saw him alive again. I haven’t been back to the farm. The vets have burned down the compound and looted our house. They took the bag in which I had packed all our valuables: birth certificates, passports, jewelry. So now we have nothing.” And then she is crying, for the first time this afternoon, and it’s her tears that capture her sons’ attention as the abstract news of their father’s death cannot. On her lap, they finally still; they look up at her in alarm.

  “David always said that he was not a hero or a missionary,” she says, “that if it got dangerous, we’d leave.”

  NEARLY A THOUSAND white-owned farms have now been invaded by the wovits, but the CFU has told their members to sit tight while they negotiate with Mugabe. The CFU has warned the farmers that any of them named in the media will risk being singled out for reprisals by the government. And the wovits themselves are very hostile to strangers coming onto the farms, especially anyone suspected of being from the media. Photographing farmers is hugely problematic; photographing war vets is almost suicidal. Nonetheless, the New York Times has sent Antonin Kratochvil, a Czech photographer, now a New York resident, to cover this story with me.

  Antonin cuts an unlikely figure here. Corpulent and bearded, he speaks American English with a Czech accent. He usually has a cheroot in the side of his mouth and he laughs constantly, a booming rumble that rises from his belly. He is a tropical Santa, able to suck the tension from a room. His very strangeness makes him a perfect choice. I collect him from the Meikles Hotel, where he stands waiting on the lion paw-print carpet in his sleeveless khaki camera jacket, his little Leica over one shoulder.

  WE HAVE FOUND one farmer, Rob Webb, who’s willing to talk. He owns Ashford Farm in the Centenary district, a hundred miles north of Harare. The drive takes you through the lands of milk and honey: neatly trammeled fields of corn standing eight feet tall, manicured groves of fruit trees on the vast Mazowe citrus estates, black-headed sheep and plump Hereford cattle shining with good health. In the fields, black workers are stooped over the rich red earth, planting winter wheat. Huge metal irrigation gantries spritz the contoured grooves of the earth with water.

  And, periodically, bursts of gaudy bougainvillea mark the houses of white men. Bougainvillea is exotic to Africa, just like the white man. It hails from the rain forest of the Amazon. From the air, you can trace the progress of the European by the bright scarlets, mauves, and pinks of bougainvillea. The corrugated-tin roofs of the homesteads peek through thickets of musasa trees.

  On the sides of the road, black men in yellow fatigues try to keep Africa at bay, slashing at the elephant grass that plumes out of the shoulders and threatens to envelop the road completely. Coming in the other direction, straining back up the escarpment toward the capital, Harare, are trucks piled high with bales of golden Virginia tobacco, destined for the auction floors. Zimbabwe is the world’s second biggest producer of Virginia tobacco, and the crop provides nearly half of all the country’s foreign exchange. Buses too groan up the hills on their way to the capital, their roof racks towering with luggage, ears of corn, bicycles, chicken coops, and the odd hobbled goat.

  Centenary farming district has seen more than enough trouble in its half century of white settlement. Originally opened to the white man in 1953, it was apportioned and sold mostly to commonwealth ex-servicemen fresh from World War II. In late 1972, its farms came under guerrilla attack in the first shots of the decisive phase of the Rhodesian civil war.

  Ashford is one of the last farms before the earth falls away dramatically down the escarpment to the great Zambezi River, which is only ten miles away as the fish eagle flies. Just inside the farm gate are dozens of rough grass shelters erected by the “war vets” who have invaded the Webbs’ farm. “If they challenge you, say you’re a fertilizer salesman,” Webb had told me.

  The wovits are sitting, sleeping, listening to a radio, washing their pots, sharpening their pangas. They stare at me, and one gets up and walks toward my car. He squints at my license plate and jots it down. Antonin and I wave blithely and drive slowly on, and he makes no move to stop us. At the top of an avenue of flame trees is a lawn of lush Durban grass around a hacienda-style homestead where Rob and Jenny Webb sit on their barred-in veranda. Behind them is a wagon wheel, a common household emblem embedded in walls or gateposts by pioneers when they finally arrived at their destination, their trek over.

  “Sorry my house is a bit bare,” apologizes Jenny. “I stripped it of anything that meant anything to me and sent it to Harare for safekeeping.”

  They are a good-looking middle-aged couple, tanned and fit from an outdoor life, surprisingly calm and considered, given their current situation. We sit down at the dining table for lunch, and Jenny reaches to tinkle the bell to summon the cook, and then remembers it is not there. She apologizes for the second-best cutlery we are using too.

  Rob slices the rare roast beef. “This place was mostly unpopulated when we arrived,” he says. “There were tsetse flies, so no cattle could survive. No cattle, so no people. Whites used to come here to hunt lion, that’s all.”

  His grandfather came out to Africa as a veterinarian with the British cavalry fighting the Boer War. His father served in the police force of old colonial Bechuanaland (now Botswana). Rob’s uncle wrote the Kenyan constitution.<
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  After lunch, the Webbs take us for a drive to show us the lay of the land. Rob points to a prominent rock outcrop, Banje Hill, visible across the district. It provided the main navigation point for the guerrillas as they infiltrated the country during the independence war.

  “We survived seven years of war,” says Jenny. “The roads were land mined, and I was here by myself with the children when the house was attacked.” But after the war ended and Mugabe asked white farmers to stay on, the Webbs did.

  At its height, Centenary boasted 154 commercial farms, but that is now down to 96. At independence, the eastern area, which abuts a crowded communal land, was handed over for black resettlement.

  “We told the government,” says Webb, “if you’re going to take land, do it in a planned way, rather than just extending subsistence farming.”

  But as we drive through it, most of the land — once some of the most productive in the country — stands empty of crops, choked with undergrowth. Farms lie abandoned, their buildings stripped of their tin roofs.

  “Just look at it,” says Webb in dismay. “It’s such a terrific waste.”

  Webb shows me the Farm Development Trust, an old commercial farm converted into a tobacco training center by white farmers. More than a thousand black farmers pass through it every year taking courses to learn how to grow tobacco commercially. “Some of the farmers being trained there are those now invading us,” he says. His wife choruses this hymn of despair. “This will never end. If they get more farms, in five years’ time when our corn is ten feet tall and theirs is only two feet, they’ll come again and say, ‘We want your land.’ ”

  Only now does Rob take me on a tour of his own farms — he has three, combined into one unit. Here he grows coffee, paprika, wheat, sugarcane, soybeans, asparagus, tobacco. At his tall brick tobacco barns, workers are busy grading and packing leaves. “There’s millions of dollars’ worth of tobacco here,” he says. “And they’ve warned me that they’ll burn it all down if they lose the elections.”

  He employs 620 people, and, with their families, some two thousand live on the property. “We run an elementary school for the laborers’ children and a fully staffed clinic.”

  Rob Webb has gone to great lengths to stay on good terms with the ruling party as a political insurance policy for his business. His wife shows me a recent letter of thanks they received from Border Gezi, the local member of Parliament, and one of Mugabe’s prominent lieutenants. It is headed in bold type, “Appreciation of corn donation to Muzarabani Constituency,” and it acknowledges contributions Webb and his fellow commercial farmers have made to the ruling party. “Rob,” it continues, “the people have high regard for you. Please keep up the spirit of togetherness that you have demonstrated. This good work is highly commendable, and as your member of Parliament, I am proud of the cooperation that I have received from you, the commercial farmers.”

  But this was no use to him when a mob of a hundred people armed with pangas and rocks marched up the drive chanting hostile slogans and beating tom-toms and dancing the toyi-toyi, an African war dance.

  “They demanded to speak to me, and when I came down, they shouted, ‘We have come to take your land — that is what we have been told to do.’ ”

  They pegged land claims on his soybean fields, which were just about to be harvested, and demanded they be plowed immediately. When Rob insisted on reaping his crop first, they tried to set fire to it; only the greenness of the shoots prevented it from catching. Now Webb is combine-harvesting day and night to salvage as much of the crop as he can.

  Jenny Webb’s mother was ill with cancer and needed to be taken to the hospital. The wovits eventually permitted an ambulance to take her to town, “but they refused to let me go with it,” says Jenny. “Three days later my mother died, alone.” Her mouth purses with anger.

  The farm, a big business built up over decades, is on the verge of collapse. Webb is unable to plant winter wheat, unable to water his soy crop, unable to enter or leave his property without permission. His workers are scared and worried about their future. The occupiers spend much of their time drunk or stoned. They squabble incessantly, contradicting themselves from one day to the next. They live parasitically, depending on the farm for their survival even as they destroy it. Their behavior plays to every colonial prejudice about the chaos and hopelessness of Africa.

  “As far as I can see, they’re nothing but little warlords,” says Rob. “I’m being intimidated every bloody day. I give in to their demands so they won’t beat my workers. They constantly demand transport and food. But I’ve said it has to end. The political commissar of this bunch then threatened to stop all work on my farm, and I finally said, ‘OK, fine. Do it.’?”

  Now he is agonizing over whether to go to England this week for his son’s wedding. He can’t stand to miss it, but he’s afraid that if he goes the invaders will use his absence to move into his house, and he will lose his farm forever.

  Rob wants to go over to check on Peter Hulme, who farms on the Range, which is surrounded by communal lands and resettled areas. A group of 250 wovits has just pegged the whole of the Range and subdivided it into 101 plots of twenty acres each.

  Hulme gives us the all clear; his squatters have drifted away for the time being. They have marked their territory, though. On the gate to his homestead is a wooden sign hand-painted with a picture of an AK-47 spitting bullets. Below is written the name of the squatters’ leader, his political pedigree, and his new address: “Shack Karai Chiweshe, ex-combatant. Plot Number One.”

  “They raided my cornfields and my vegetable gardens and chopped down trees across all the exit roads,” says Peter Hulme. “We sat in the garden and watched their antics, beating drums and chanting war slogans and threatening us with axes and cudgels and pointing sticks at us as though they were guns, shouting: ‘Bang! Bang! You dead.’

  “Most of them were local peasant farmers, a lot of them I recognized, people who had worked for me on a contract basis, during harvest time. A lot of them I’d helped over the years. When I’ve seen them on their own, they say that they were forced to come. Their leader is a chap who still owes me sixteen hundred dollars for fertilizer I lent him last season so he could plant his own land.

  “Initially they set up their shelters on my land and then moved onto the next farms. The police then gave me permission to clear the shelters so that I could work on the field, which I did. The squatters were back within three hours — furious — and said that if I didn’t rebuild their shelters in six hours I would have to leave forever. So I got my labor force together and we rebuilt their shelters chop-chop.

  “My plans?” says Peter, repeating my question. “My plans are to . . .” He trails off. “I have no plans.”

  “Still,” he says, brightening. “It could be worse. Our neighbors’ wovits demand supper and beers and sit watching their satellite TV and sleeping in the guest room. You know, the irony is that this farm has been offered to the government twice for resettlement. They turned it down both times.”

  As we leave, the Agric-Alert radio in Rob Webb’s Land Rover splutters to life with a message that a special task force established by the CFU to try to control the outbreaks of violence over land invasions is about to arrive by helicopter. Louis Maltzer, of McClear Farm, is being threatened by a local wovit commandant. Rob is asked to join the delegation to help Maltzer. We decide that I will join him in the guise of a fellow farmer — somewhat unconvincing, I worry, with my New York pallor. Also I am the only white man in long trousers. Antonin doesn’t stand a chance, and anyway he won’t be able to photograph this, so we drop him back at Ashford Farm with Janey.

  The chairman of the task force is a black Jesuit, Father Fidelis Mukonori, Mugabe’s confidant (Mugabe was mission educated by Jesuits), who is supposed to be trying to broker peace here. With him are three CFU representatives, a police officer, an army colonel, and a man, I’m told, who is a senior member of the Central Intelligence Organization (CI
O). Rob introduces me with a false name, and I move down the delegation shaking hands until I come face-to-face with a farmer I know well, Johnny Heynes, with whom I was at elementary school. Johnny is standing next to the CIO agent, and he starts to greet me by my real name. I cough and frown at him and he gets it and greets me as a stranger.

  McClear Farm sits on the very lip of the Zambezi escarpment, the first commercial farm you come to if you walk up from the neighboring tribal lands. Louis Maltzer is waiting at the gate when we arrive. He tells us that his occupiers arrived a few weeks earlier. They felled a huge gum tree across his drive, making it impossible for him to escape. They cut through the fence and came up onto his veranda where they lit a fire and began to drum and dance and chant “Pasi ne maBhunu!” which in Shona means “Down with the Boers!”

  Today, only a few teenage wovits are around. They seem suddenly small and vulnerable. Father Fidelis tells them they must stay in their own bit of the farm and let Maltzer and his workers get on with farming, and the kids nod emphatically.

  But as our convoy drives out, we are intercepted at the farm gate by a battered pickup truck. The door opens and a stout black man jumps out wearing long trousers and flip-flops and a Zimbabwe War Veterans Association T-shirt that strains to encompass his belly. He waddles quickly over to us, losing a flip-flop in his rush and hopping the last few yards. He is Comrade Mavusi, he tells us, “the local commander.” He is followed by a group of young men armed with pangas, hunting knives, clubs, hoes, metal staves, and axes. One of them reverently lays the missing flip-flop on the ground, and Mavusi slides his plump foot into it. Alcohol scents his breath. “Why did you invite these people here?” he shouts at Maltzer in English. Before Maltzer can answer, Mavusi turns to Father Fidelis. “Why have you come to interfere with us down here?”