Dark Star Safari

17. Invading Drummond’s Farm

Zimbabwe had a fearsome reputation for political mayhem at the time I walked across the eastern border from Mozambique into Mashonaland and caught a bus to the capital. Everything was wrong in the country, so I heard, and it was growing worse: dangerous, disrupted, dispirited, bankrupt. But I couldn’t wait to see such extreme strife for myself — the journalistic exaggeration, the possible drama of it, ‘these are the lucky ones.’ The way strife makes people talkative was a gift to anyone who wanted to write about it. The admonishment Stay away from farms, in a US Embassy advisory on Zimbabwe, made me want to stay on a farm. I had no names, no contacts, yet I had the idle wanderer’s distinct confidence that having arrived here I was available for some sort of enlightenment; that I would meet the right people; that I would be fine. I had no idea at that early stage how any of this was going to happen, for I didn’t have a friend in the whole country.

Don’t go, some people said. But they had warned me about going to the Sudan and I had loved that big dusty place. Sitting on the Harare bus, traveling the road through Zimbabwe’s Eastern Highlands, the farming country from Mutare to Marondera, an intimation of distress was visible to me. I made a note at the back of the book I was reading, Not many cars. It was a beautiful land of tilled fields and browsing cattle and farmhouses; yet it seemed rather empty, as though a plague had struck. Much of what I saw could have been the set of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers for here and there were perambulating Africans, and I got glimpses of Spam-colored settlers, yet apart from these few individuals the place seemed curiously unpeopled and inert.

The book in my lap, which I’d bought in Mutare, helped me understand a little of what was happening. It was African Tears; The Zimbabwe Land Invasions, written by Catherine Buckle, a woman who had been robbed in installments. Her Marondera farm had been snatched from her in piecemeal and violent intrusions over a six-month period.

‘It’s a one-man problem,’ many white Zimbabweans explained to me. Depending on who I talked to they said variously, ‘The president is out of his mind’ or ‘He’s lost it’ or ‘He’s off his chump.’ Even the kindly winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, Archbishop Tutu, said, ‘The man is bonkers.’

The Robert Mugabe rumors, which I solemnly collected, depicted the poor thing as demented as a result of having been tortured in a white-run prison: long periods in solitary, lots of abuse, cattle prods electrifying his privates, and the ultimate insult — his goolies had been crimped. Another rumor had him in an advanced stage of syphilis; his brain was on fire. ‘He was trained by the Chinese, you know,’ many people said. And: ‘We knew something was up when he started calling himself “comrade” ’. He had reverted, too — did not make any decision without consulting his witch-doctors. His disgust with gays was well known: ‘They are dogs and should be treated like dogs.’ He personally banned the standard school exams in Zimbabwe ‘to break with the colonial past.’ Some rumors were fairly simple: He had a life-long hatred of whites and it was his ambition to drive them out of the country Of the British prime minister he said, ‘I don’t want him sticking his pink nose in our affairs.’ But noting all this I kept thinking of what Gertrude Rubadiri had told me, ‘We called him “Bookworm.” ’ Really there was no deadlier combination than bookworm and megalomaniac. It was, for example, the crazed condition of many novelists and travelers.

The long lines I saw at gas stations told part of the story: there was a serious gasoline shortage. The new $500 million Harare International Airport had run out of aviation fuel. No hard currency meant a severe reduction in imported goods. There had been food riots in Harare. The opposition parties had been persecuted by the ruling party’s goon squads. The unemployment figure had risen to 75 percent, visitor numbers had dropped by 70 percent, the irrationality of the president was so well known his accusations had ceased to be quoted in the pages of the world’s press, except for his maddest utterances, such as ‘I have a degree in violence.’ But also foreign journalists had been attacked and some seriously injured, others had been deported for trying to cover stories of intimidation and disruption. Fearing the same fate, under ‘Occupation’ on my entry visa application I wrote ‘Geography teacher.’

Zimbabwe had been for years one of the great African destinations, for it had the Zambezi, river rafting, bungee-jumping off Victoria Falls Bridge, and so many wild animals that big-game hunting was freely available. Gun-toting hunters banged away at the Big Five — elephants, rhinos, leopards, lions and giraffes. A Zimbabwean guide told me that some foreign hunters were very fussy and would decline to shoot certain elephants if the creatures’ tusks were four feet instead of five feet long. Zimbabwe was perhaps the only country in Africa where you could legally buy those elephant’s foot wastebaskets that gave environmentalists the horrors. Huge newly chopped-off ivory tusks were also available in Harare shops, and so were the skins of lions and leopards, crocodile belts, elephant or hippo hide wallets, and such curiosities as a yard-long giraffe femur with an African landscape scratched on its shank in scrimshaw.

But tourists and curio collectors and travelers were staying away. The problem was land invasions. The president had actively encouraged veterans of the guerrilla war — ‘landless peasants’ — to invade, occupy and squat in the fields of white farmers and to take their land by force. Many black Zimbabweans had done so to white Zimbabweans, some of them violently. Eight white farmers had been murdered by these intruders, none of whom had been prosecuted — indeed, they were congratulated for achieving their objective, having seized the whites’ land and become landowners and gentry themselves. When a High Court judge questioned the legality of the farm invasions he was attacked by the government and he eventually resigned. As for the stolen farms, in some cases the government had failed to supply the invaders with free maize seed, fertilizer and tractors, and so they had left the land and returned to city life. Almost 2000 properties had been invaded and occupied; more were promised, so the threat was real.

Whenever a local paper wrote critically of the land invasions the journalist on the story was arrested or harassed. Foreign journalists were thrown out of the country or their work permits revoked. The editor of the independent Daily News and two of his reporters were charged with ‘criminal defamation’ after reporting a well-sourced story about kickbacks connected with the new airport. The briber, a Saudi Arabian, had whined publicly that he had not received a fair return for his bribe of $3 million.

The editor in chief of the Daily News had been the target of an assassination attempt. Zimbabweans said that the proof that it had been government-inspired was its cack-handedness. That it had been botched was certain evidence of government connivance, since the government could not do anything right. Another paper, The Independent, was being sued for ‘contempt of parliament’ for its verbatim reporting of an incriminating parliamentary debate. Another bill had been passed stipulating that music, drama, news, and current affairs programming on Zimbabwean radio and TV had to be purely Zimbabwean ‘in order to foster a sense of Zimbabwean national identity and values.’ Since Zimbabweans had already established themselves as some of the greatest innovators in African music, and its musicians played to large crowds in the US and Europe, the intention of this bill was to make white Zimbabweans nervous.

‘Everything Mugabe says and does is intended to drive the whites away,’ a white Zimbabwean told me. I replied that it seemed to me that black Zimbabweans were enduring an equally bad time, with such high unemployment, high inflation, unstable currency and an economy in ruins. Blacks were being driven away too — many had fled to South Africa.

But Harare did not look like a ruin. Even in its bankruptcy, Harare was to my mind the most pleasant African city I had seen so far — certainly the safest, the tidiest, the least polluted, the most orderly. After traffic-clogged Cairo, overheated Khartoum, crumbling tin-roofed Addis, crime-ridden Nairobi, disorderly Kampala, demoralized Dar es Salaam, ragged Lilongwe, desperate Blantyre, and battle-scarred and bombed-out Beira, Harare looked pretty and clean, the picture of tranquility, and the countryside was an Eden.

Much of Harare’s apparent peacefulness was due to the extreme ension in the city, for its order was also a sort of lifelessness, the unnatural silence of someone holding his breath. I had the premonition that something was about to happen, in months or a year perhaps, and this was an historical moment of silence and inaction before an enormous collapse, a violent election, social disorder, even civil war. It was wrong to mistake this silence for obedience and belief, since it was more likely the natural reserve of people who had already been through serious upheavals. British rule had ended abruptly with the white minority’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence in 1965, sanctions had followed thereafter, and the ten-year guerrilla war which ended in the black majority taking power in 1980, and brought about twenty years of Comrade Bob.

Years of sanctions had made Zimbabweans resilient and self-sufficient. Zimbabwe was at its core an independent and proud place, a country that had a manufacturing industry. There was hardly any gasoline or diesel fuel for sale but most other necessities were avaiable. Even in these hard times, Zimbabweans were still making things — stationery, clothing, household furniture, shoes, frozen chicken, canned beans; they had dairies and bakeries and breweries. There were many good hotels, though most of them were empty.

Zimbabweans, black and white, grumbled openly. This was new to me. Tanzanians and Malawians had seemed much more supine and oblique, they had surrendered, and having abandoned any hope of things improving were reduced to unapologetic beggary that contained a subtext of entitlement: My country has failed me, therefore you must help. Some exasperated Zimbabweans talked of leaving. The man who had sold me my bus ticket asked me where I was from and responded promptly, ‘I want to go to America.’ Another said, ‘Three years ago this was a good place — but, ah, not any more.’ An African woman tapped her head and said in that accent peculiar to black Zimbabwe, ‘You will be laining a loat’ — learning a lot.

Malawi had lowered my spirits. My interlude on the Shire and Zambezi rivers had lifted my mood. In central Mozambique’s blighted bush and decayed coastal city my guard had been up. Now, in Harare, I could indulge my passion for walking, for it was a city of sidewalks and parks. I felt stimulated, sensing that I was witnessing something that did not yet have a name; yet the very absence of drama signaled the suspenseful onset of a period of historical change. Something radical was going to happen — no one knew what. At that point catastrophe was just a warning odor, a tang of bitterness in the air, the sort of whiff that made people put on a listening face and wrinkle their nose and say, ‘Do you smell something?’

I walked, I began eating good meals — a great novelty on this trip. I went through the market, I stopped in shops to look at merchandise and note the prices. And at each opportunity I encouraged people to talk about what was happening here. The fuel shortage was on most people’s minds, but inflation was at 65 percent and salaries were staying low. A recent strike by government workers had been broken up by police, many strikers had been injured. For most black Zimbabweans the issue was money — the collapsing economy; for most white Zimbabweans the issue was security, for the lawlessness of the farm invasions made all whites, even the urban business people, feel insecure.

Soon after I arrived in Harare a morning headline in the Daily News was ‘GOVERNMENT TO ACQUIRE 95 MORE COMMERCIAL FARMS.’ The text explained that this was not a business deal — no money was changing hands. This was ‘compulsory acquisition as part of the ongoing land reform and resettlement program.’ These ninety-five brought to 3023 the number of commercial farms singled out by the government as ripe for invasion in the past three years. The names of the farms were listed.

The leader of the militant War Veterans’ Association was an angry AIDS-stricken doctor named Chenjerai Hunzvi who had nicknamed himself ‘Hitler.’ Well-documented stories had appeared in Zimbabwe newspapers stating that Hitler Hunzvi’s suburban medical office was used for viciously torturing men who refused to support him. Hunzvi threatened whites and sent gangs to their farms. Hunzvi’s bluster was the irrationality of someone who knows he is doomed, raving in his ill health; yet Mugabe’s government backed him up in his most reckless threats.

So, because he was a white Zimbabwean (and there were many), a farmer who had already been up for hours at his chores would go back to his house for breakfast and, finding his name in the morning aper, could expect a mob of war veterans to camp on his land before lunchtime. If he were lucky they would demand a portion of his property; if he were unlucky they would threaten him with weapons and tell him to leave, screaming (as many of the farm invaders did), ‘This is my farm now!’

This is precisely what happened to Catherine and Ian Buckle, as recounted in Mrs Buckle’s African Tears, which had just appeared in the bookstores. One day in March 2000, three dozen men invaded their farm, singing songs and shouting ‘Hondo’ — the Shona word for ‘war’ and also a popular song by the Zimbabwean singer-composer Thomas Mapfumo. The Buckles had owned the farm for ten years and had been assured on buying it that it was not designated on the government list for resettlement. But that was a detail: events moved quickly. A man introduced himself. ‘I am the one sleeping on your farm.’ The reason for his salutation was that he needed the Buckles’ help: would they give him a ride into town so that he could get some money to pay the other men who were illegally squatting with him? A week or so after that a Zimbabwean flag was hoisted on the property. An African beer hall was built and soon there were drunks on the farm, and a larger squatter camp, and more singing on the premises.

Neighboring farms were occupied. Farmers who resisted were attacked. A number of them were murdered. The Buckles appealed to the government to help them stop the illegal occupation of their land. Nothing was done. No police were sent, though more war vets showed up and demanded that the Buckles loan them their farm truck so that they could go to political rallies to denounce white farmers.

At last, the leader of a drunken gang showed up and chanted, ‘This is my fields! This is my cows! This is my grass! This is my farm!’ He ordered Mrs Buckle to leave her house. ‘This is my house!’ Still, the Buckles resisted his intimidation. But soon after, the defiant group of war vets started a grass fire on the property, and when it overwhelmed the farm and threatened the house, the Buckles’ will was broken. A malevolent man appeared from the smoke and said fiercely, ‘Siya’ — Leave. And so, six months after the first threat the Buckles departed, fearing for their lives, losing everything.

In his introduction to African Tears, Trevor Ncube, editor in chief of the Zimbabwe Independent newspaper, described the story as ‘one family’s struggle against state-sponsored terror.’

All this news was fairly fresh. Less than a year after the Buckles were forced off their farm I had passed near it, outside Marondera.

And then I was in Harare, on my walking tour. On a side street, in a shop that sold African artifacts, I was examining some objects that looked old — that is, used by a practitioner. Any carving that had acquired a distinct patina or was worn smooth by years of handling or had the smoke-smell of use attracted me. Cooking implements — bowls, spoons, stirrers — interested me, and so did wooden tools — clubs, hatchets, digging sticks, stools. I happened to be holding a carved wooden slingshot. Turned upside down it was a figure with a head and wide-apart legs.

‘What’s the story with this?’ I asked the woman at the counter. ‘Is this old?’

She said, ‘See how it’s blackened? It’s been scorched in a fire to harden the wood. It’s Chokwe, I think.’ She thought a moment and added, ‘But I go on the assumption that nothing is old.’

That wise and honest statement from a dealer in artifacts made me trust her. She was a woman of about sixty, white haired, plain spoken, African-born of English parents. Her son was a farmer, and of course worried about his fate, but he had not been invaded. We talked some more. I said I wanted to meet a farmer whose land had been invaded.

‘I know one. He’s rather outspoken. He might talk to you. He’s got a mobile phone in his truck.’

She picked up the phone and made a call to him, explaining my request in a few sentences. Then she listened closely, thanked him, and hung up.

‘He’s rather busy but he’ll be at this coffee shop later this morning.’ She wrote the name of the coffee shop on a piece of paper. ‘He said you’re welcome to join him.’

That was how I met Peter Drummond, a tall white-haired man in his mid-fifties, his weather-beaten face softened by his blue ironic eyes. He had been aged by military service and farm work and the political harassment, which was a condition of being a white farmer in Zimbabwe. He was gentle, but very tough, and full of plans. He had a habit of prefacing a remark by saying, ‘This is a very funny story,’ and then relating something horrific, involving machine guns and blood. ‘Very funny’ usually meant a narrow escape.

He owned a 7000-acre farm outside the town of Norton, which was about fifty miles west of Harare. He grew maize for seed, grew vegetables, raised cattle and pigs, and had a dairy; two of his sons helped him. Peter himself ran the chicken operation. Every week he imported 23,000 day-old chicks from the United States, and these he reared for local consumption, slaughtering them, freezing some, selling others fresh. He trucked 4300 dressed birds, some fresh, some frozen, into Harare every day, and supplied markets, shops, hotels and restaurants. Like many other big farmers he was helping to feed Zimbabwe, but he was not finding it easy.

What concerned Drummond was the war veterans trespassing on his land, the disruption, their violent threats, their drunkenness, their cutting down his trees, killing his animals, frightening his family. And the shortage of diesel fuel meant that he could not operate many of his tractors. This season, a great deal of his land had gone unplowed and unplanted. Weeds grew where there should have been crops.

‘The funny thing is that I was on Japanese TV talking about the situation,’ he said. ‘I was pretty frank. The afternoon of the day it aired I got a death threat.’

‘Verbal or in writing?’

‘Phone rang. African voice. “You’ve been pushing the MDC” ’ — the opposition Movement for Democratic Change — ‘ “We’re going to kill you.” ’

The Movement for Democratic Change and its party leader Morgan Tsvangirai criticized the government for its policy of sanctioning the ilegal farm invasions and turning a blind eye to the violence. The government ruling party reacted by accusing the MDC of being in cahoots with the white farmers and refused to allow them to use rural sports stadiums for political rallies. The reporting of any criticisms was suppressed.

‘So I made a tape of all the news that was appearing on the BBC, Sky News, South African News, and CNN,’ Drummond said. ‘I had about twenty minutes of it, showing what the foreign correspondents were saying about Zimbabwe. And I played the tape to my workers — I’ve got about two hundred of them. I said, “You look at this. It’s what the foreign press is saying. I’m not saying a word. If I get involved I might get killed.” ’

He had bought his first farm in 1975, during the struggle. ‘I didn’t have much money, but lots of farmers were being killed, so farms were cheap. I bought a 3000-acre farm on the never-never.’ He worked the land and assumed he would be there for some time. ‘But we were attacked in 1979 by a group of fifteen men. It’s quite a funny story.’

It was a terrifying story. He was woken by the sound of gunfire, thirty shots, an entire magazine of an AK-47 fired into his cook’s house. ‘Missed him! Providential, I say!’ He had an AK himself. He crept out of the house, which was surrounded by a barrier wall. ‘That was to protect us from rockets. They were using Russian RP-7 rockets, which explode after they penetrate a wall. That way they would explode after the first wall and leave the house intact.’ He took a brick out of the barrier wall and emptied a magazine at the intruders. ‘Two of my men started shooting. Everyone was shooting.’ The fifteen attackers fled. And when the Farmers’ Reserve Rescue Team hurried to help they found an arms cache on his property — weapons, explosives and landmines — enough for the all-out assault that was thwarted.

‘Like I say, this is quite a funny story,’ he repeated. ‘My boys were five, four and one. My wife went to wake them up. My son Garth said, “What’s all the noise?” “It’s nothing,” my wife says. Garth turns over and says, “Dad will shoot them.” He was so calm, we were all calm.’

He sold that farm and bought another, sharing pastures with a friend on a large piece of adjacent land. These two farms were sold to the government for resettlement.

‘We had reassurances from the government that when we bought again there would be no more resettlement issues — no invasions.’

With the proceeds of the sale he bought the land he presently farmed, the 7000-acre Hunyani Estate. He planted trees, he built a house to live in and a machine shop and the chicken operation. He plowed, he introduced cattle, and in one section some wild game — eland and impala. All this investment meant he had to borrow heavily. He was paying off a housing loan as well as a half-a-million-dollar overdraft at the bank.

‘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.’

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?” ’

‘You talk to Africans about these things?’

‘Oh, sure. I tell them I was fighting for my side,’ he said. ‘I ask them where they were fighting. I tease them a little. They can take it. As ex-soldiers, we have a lot in common. That war is history. It’s over. It was foolish for us to think that a small number of whites could govern millions of Africans.’

‘Do you get into the specifics of the war?’

‘Yeah. I often say, “Oh, you were in that sector? I was in that sector, too. I was probably shooting at you.” ’

‘What kind of a reaction do you get?’

‘A good one,’ Drummond said. ‘We often talk about the people who didn’t fight — the informers. I say, “Oh you had information from whites? What did you think of that?” They say, “We just used them.”. No fondness for them, see. I say, “Well, we had African informers. We just used them, too.” ’ Drummond looked at me to make his point. ‘The informers weren’t fighting. I can’t talk to an informer, but a fighter — that’s another story.’

Back in the car, driving through his estate he must have been ruminating on this and wanting me to understand, because out of the blue he said with emphasis, ‘A certain bond exists between ex-fighters — the soldiers. We each had our own side, but we shared a common experience.’

That night in his farmhouse, poring over a map of his estate he told me of various plans he had to make the place viable. One was to subdivide a portion of the land and sell off parcels to Zimbabweans who would become smallholders, growers of flowers or vegetables, making the place a sort of cooperative. The idea was not to hand the parcels out to invaders and squatters but to sell each one with a legal title.

‘Or maybe time-share cottages,’ Drummond said, sketching a corner with his finger. ‘And this whole area could be retirement homes.’ He indicated some waterholes and said, ‘Perfect for camp grounds. Already this area attracts eland, kudu, and impala. We could put up a huge fence and manage some of the estate as a game reserve.’

I looked at the map and imagined the cottages, the bungalows, the tents, the long-horned animals.

‘Or maybe I’ll go to Australia,’ Drummond said. ‘But I really want to stay here. The trouble is I have this debt. Inflation is sixty-five percent, I get my chicks from the US and have to pay in US dollars, and the Zim dollar is falling.’

The night was cold and clear, the bright moon reflected on the lake. Except for the barking dogs — a big Labrador retriever and a frisky Jack Russell terrier — there was silence. But when the dogs yapped I thought we were being invaded and imagined war vets, thieves, opportunists, predators.

‘I’ll just check those dogs,’ Drummond said. Perhaps he was anxious too?

But I preferred this farm to Harare, to being in a hotel, a town, or a city. I kept thinking how much like Old Russia this was, Old America, too. And how the stories I liked best had seldom been tales of the city but nearly always the Gothic fictions and tragicomedies of rural life, Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm and Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing (set near Drummond’s farm), Chekhov’s provincial dramas, the work of writers of the American South — Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor, the best work of Mark Twain, all of their comic gloom and isolation summed up in Gogol’s evocative title, Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka.

Morning at Drummond’s farm was clear and bright, the cold dew sparkling on the long grass. I had been woken by the dogs and by Drummond’s comings and goings. At breakfast he said he was off with two of his men, to Karoi, about 120 miles north, to build a classroom as payment in kind for his daughter Misty’s school fees.

His parting words were, ‘My son Troy will be over to take you around. Talk to anyone you like.’

Troy was twenty-six, an Olympic windsurfer who had recently represented Zimbabwe in an international tournament in New Caledonia in the western Pacific, earning a respectable place. He was modest, soft-spoken, and easy-going, knowledgeable about modern farm methods. He and his brother Shane supervised the seed maize, the pigs, the horses and the vehicles. He had farmed the tobacco but ‘My father doesn’t smoke, tobacco’s against his philosophy, so we phased it out.’

He said, ‘My father said to show you anything you wanted to see.’

‘I’d like to talk to the invaders.’

‘We can do that.’

‘But don’t tell me anything in advance. I want to get acquainted myself.’

Laughing, Troy said, ‘They’re friendly blokes anyway.’

We drove across the estate, and again I was reminded of the size and complexity of the place, which seemed bigger than a town now and more like a whole county.

The first invader was not at home. Stakes had been pounded into the ground to mark his fields — quite an irony, too, since the stakes were also a warning to possible intruders on the land he had seized. I saw no crops. The hut was a shanty, the improvements derisory.

‘Not much action here,’ I said.

We took another road and after fifteen minutes or so turned off on to a narrow track. At the margin of the track was a field planted with maize that looked just sprouted — though this was nearly the harvest season. Nothing was pickable.

‘That’s not a crop,’ I said. ‘There’s nothing to eat here.’

Obeying my request not to tell me anything, Troy shrugged.

In the distance, in front of four round well-made huts with conical roofs was a skinny tortoise-faced man in a dirty T-shirt waving his arms.

‘That’s another one,’ Troy said.

Attempting to ingratiate myself, I greeted the African in Chichewa. I wasn’t surprised that he answered me, since Chichewa was widely spoken outside Malawi. But he said that he had learned it in Zambia, where he had lived for twenty-one years. His mother was a Zambian. His name was Reywa, he had a large family, all of them living with him on the land he had seized from the Drummond family.

‘What were you doing in Zambia?’ I asked him in English.

‘I was a driver.’

‘Are you a war vet?’

‘No. No fighting. I am landless.’

‘I thought only war vets could invade the land.’

‘A war vet said I could come here,’ Reywa said.

I said to Troy, ‘He’s just a guy who wants land.’

Troy said, ‘Right.’

‘Reywa, your garden isn’t doing too well.’

He started to scream at me, his tightened face even more tortoise-like. ‘Garden is nothing! Because I planted too late! The government promised seed, fertilizer, use of a tractor. But they didn’t give me! I just waited for them until it was too late. They didn’t help me!’ He was whining and moaning. ‘I did this all myself by hand — yes, myself!’

‘But there’s nothing to eat here.’

‘Near the anthill, some maize is bigger.’ He indicated a mound about forty yards off with tall plants on its dome. ‘I have some pumpkin blossoms to eat, some small tomatoes.’ He turned to Troy and said, ‘I need a fence. The animals will come here and eat my plants. Tell your father he must put up a fence, or else.’

‘Or else, what?’ I asked.

His beaky face became agitated and he said, ‘Or else there will be war! Because I must have a fence.’ He kicked at the edge of his garden in frustration. He said, ‘Next year will be better. The government will help me.’

‘What if they don’t help you?’

‘Then Mr Drummond will help me.’

‘Why should Mr Drummond help you? After all, you invaded his land.’

‘Because I was landless.’

‘Now you have land.’

‘What good is land if I don’t have a tractor? Mr Drummond has a tractor. He must help me. He will plow for me.’

‘Why should he do that for you?’

‘He has money!’ Reywa screamed. ‘I am poor!’

‘He owes twenty-two million dollars to the bank,’ I said.

‘I don’t care. If Mr Drummond does not plow for me then’ — Reywa paused and scowled at Troy, conveying a message — ‘then we do not understand each other.’

Having invaded the land and staked his claim, and put up four big huts, he now wanted free seed, free fertilizer and the fields plowed at his bidding, his victim working the tractor. It was like a thief who had stolen a coat insisting that his victim have the coat dry cleaned and tailored to fit. Reywa was very cross in anticipation of any delay in these demands being met.

We sat in front of the largest hut and I sketched a hypothetical episode. Reywa had seized a large piece of Mr Drummond’s land, too large for him to plant it all — that was obvious. What if, I said, someone came and saw that little work had been done on the farthest acres — for ‘neglected land’ was one of the conditions that sanctioned a farm invasion; what would happen if someone wanted to squat and build a little hut on that corner of his land? What would Reywa do to an invader on his farm?

But almost before I finished speaking, Reywa was frowning with aggression and he was hyperventilating through flared nostrils. ‘No! No! I have nothing! I would chase them away!’

He saw no contradiction; the thought of someone taking even a small part of his land just enraged him. He got up and began to pace. He shook his fist and then pointed to his stunted maize.

‘It almost happened. A stupid war vet from here needed some money, so he sold some of my land. People came! They said, “This i our land.” ’

‘What did you do, Reywa?’

He clamped his teeth and said, ‘I send them away!’

So what I had given as a grotesque hypothesis of ingratitude had actually taken place.

Troy said, ‘You want to see the others?’

But I said no. I didn’t have the stomach for this absurdity. I hung around and looked at Troy’s horse and then at an old 1962 Land Cruiser he was restoring to its original luster — ‘Notice the bullet holes in the door? They’re from the struggle.’

Near the lake, later on, I chatted with an African who owned a fishing cooperative. He was Joseph, a Malawian, who said the farm invasions were ‘a disaster.’ I asked him what he thought of his homeland, Malawi. ‘Hopeless,’ he said. But he added that he seldom went home, because it so happened that he was successful in his fishing business.

‘If I go back to Malawi my relatives will borrow money and eat my food and make me poor.’

Joseph explained that protecting what you had achieved was a serious problem in this part of Africa. He was not speaking of the white farmers whose land had been invaded, but he could have been. If someone had money or land or food, onlookers were attracted, feeling they were entitled, and everyone tried to take something.

Later that day, Troy drove me back to Harare. He pointed out various farms that had been invaded. He indicated something else — how Africans took short-cuts through fields of maize on the white farms, both as a convenience and as an insult. These tracks ran willy-nilly through otherwise neat rows of maize.

Seeing an African man and woman hitchhiking, Troy slowed, asked them where they were going. ‘Harare,’ the man said, and Troy said they could get into the truck. This was the countryside. It was usual to pick up hitchhikers or people waiting at bus stops.

I said, ‘If I were hitchhiking here, would an African pick me up?’

‘Probably,’ he said. ‘But they’d expect you to pay them something. They know we never ask. But they always demand money from each other.’

Like his father, he spoke without bitterness. Then we jogged along the country road in silence, in sunshine, under a big blue African sky, until the people in the back rapped on the window, asking to be dropped off.

I stayed in Harare a few more days, fascinated by the apparent order — children in school uniforms, solemn policemen directing very little traffic, big empty department stores, flower sellers, coffee shops, street sweepers — and a serenity which I now realized was extreme tension.

One of the Americans I met in Harare was a former journalist who owned a house in the suburbs. He had no plans to leave. He said, ‘This the best city in Africa. This is a wonderful country. It’s going through a bad patch at the moment.’ Another man was a diplomat. He said, ‘I want to stay here, to see how things turn out.’