- In October 2002, my brother and his family were evicted
from the 7,000 acre farm in Zimbabwe which my father had first hacked out
of virgin bush in 1923. It was a productive and profitable operation to
the end despite twenty years of black rule: about 300 acres of top of the
line export tobacco, a thousand head of beef cattle and about ten acres
of greenhouse roses which were flown weekly to Europe.
-
- My brother had also set up in 1990 a three thousand acre
game farm along with his neighbours as a wild animal preservation, a cause
dear to his heart. This included seven giraffe and herds of impala, wildebeest,
gazelles and zebras. Periodically, hunter-tourists from the US would fly
in to cull the herds. About 200 blacks were employed on the farm along
with their families who were paid a government-set wage and given free
housing, electricity and running water. My brother, like many others, has
over the years paid huge taxes to the government.
-
- Most of the farmers living in the district suffered the
same fate. My niece, married to a local farmer, had to leave her home of
five years with her young family and move to Harare.
-
- Nearly two years later, all of these wonderfully run
farms have gone to hell.
-
- Ninety percent of the country's white farmers, numbering
about 3,000, have been forced off their farms without compensation. Most
of the farm employees have also been evicted by government-backed "war
vets". My brother was obligated to pay compensation to these ex workers.
-
- During the evictions, many of the farmers were barricaded
into their homes as hordes of Mugabe's squatters threatened to kill them.
Some whites were murdered; one of them was a neighbor and close friend
of my brother.
-
- Another held a posse of blacks at bay for two hours before
he was slaughtered.
-
- In the main, the farmers and their families abandoned
their property peaceably and left their life's work behind because there
was no other option. They did not seek violence. They were first-rate farmers
who loved the land where they were born but they were outnumbered and unsupported.
-
- Last week, Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe's elderly dictator,
announced that he wants the remaining 30,000 whites living in the towns
out of the country by the end of 2005. I am sure he means what he says.
-
- There hasn't been a word about any of this in the US
media.
-
- A little background:
-
- Cecil John Rhodes set up the British South Africa Company
in 1896 and sent a column of pioneers into the area bordering the Transvaal
north of the Limpopo River. Rhodes had amassed a huge gold and diamond
fortune backed by the British Rothschilds. His plan was to establish British
influence from Cape Town to Cairo and "Rhodesia" became the foundation
stone in his imperial dream.
-
- In this vast area south of the Zambezi River, there were
two tribal groups, the Mashona and the Matabele, an offshoot of the Zulus.
Within five years both had been quelled. My grandparents decided to try
their hand in Rhodesia and they moved in 1898 from Johannesburg to the
pioneer town of Bulawayo. They were doing what countless white American
pioneers had been doing for a century across the hinterland of America.
-
- Within twenty years the country was flourishing with
an infrastructure of roads, ailways, agriculture and a mining industry
which provided gold and chrome. Self-government was granted by England
in 1923. The black population, about 250,000 when the whites arrived, had
reached nine million by the 1980's. My grandmother, like many others, handed
out quinine and penicillin at the back door and probably saved thousands
of lives. Unlike the American Indians who were almost wiped out, the blacks
in Rhodesia not only survived but were provided with primary education
and low wage jobs.
-
- The Mashona, traditionally subject to raids from the
more war-like Matabele were secure for the first time in their history.
-
- My father was born in 1899 and grew up in Rhodesia, later
attending a public school in England. It was 1917 and soon he had joined
the Royal Flying Corps as a trainee pilot, flying early planes across the
Channel.
-
- After the war, he returned to Rhodesia and bought a piece
of land with the help of a government loan. It was a lonely life, travelling
around his property on a horse but he persevered and by the fifties was
running a prosperous tobacco growing operation.
-
- The same year he started the farm, 1923, a black child
was born on a Jesuit mission at Kutama, about twenty miles from our farm
as the crow flies. This child's name was Robert Mugabe.
-
- My father married my mother on a visit to England in
the 1930's. She exchanged a life of familiar English suburban comfort for
an unknown future in a strange land surrounded by blacks. They lived in
a thatched brick house at first and she soon adapted and raised us three
children.
-
- One of our neighbors was the Taylor family whose daughter
became the novelist Doris Lessing. Her father, like mine, was a veteran
of the First World War but he didn't prosper whether due to bad luck, bad
weather or lack of capital. I never knew Doris Taylor who was born 25 years
before I was though my mother did. She resented her lowly status as the
daughter of a "poorer white" and identified with the blacks,
throwing her lot in with their plight and became a communist. I remember
listening to the grown ups on the verandah in the early 50's who were scandalized
that she had betrayed her white background with her first novel "The
Grass is Singing" which came out in Britain. She had touched on the
forbidden subject of black white sexual relationships. In those days there
was a law against interracial sex and although there were white men who
had "gone black" by taking a black mistress, white woman were
sacrosanct.
-
- I did my military service in 1964 in Ian Smith's army
and left the country for good in 1968. The writing was always on the wall
for me from the time I was a small boy. We whites were outnumbered and
it was obvious that Britain would undermine white rule at every turn, which
they did. My brother was the farmer in the family. He loved the life which
he had grown up with.
-
- The war years after Ian Smith declared independence were
difficult and many whites and blacks died. It was also a time of extraordinary
ingenuity with the government fighting sanctions. By the time Mugabe took
over, the Rhodesian dollar was still worth more than the US dollar, despite
16 years of sanctions. Under Mugabe the Zimbabwe dollar is about .0005
of a US dollar and inflation is off the radar.
-
- Conditions under white rule may not have been ideal.
There were many injustices but there were jobs, plentiful food and opportunity.
Under Mugabe, there are none of these. Mugabe, a Shona, has reverted to
the tribal tyrant which he always was. Like Idi Amin in Uganda, he views
the country as his personal fiefdom and is extremely skilled at manipulating
and buying off his supporters who form a privileged elite. He also has
the support of international corporate backers.
-
- One of the first actions Mugabe took when he came to
power in 1980 was to slaughter 30,000 of the minority Matabele tribe. I
believe that there will be renewed ethnic cleansing of the Matabele in
the near future.
-
- Barricaded behind high security fences in their houses
in Harare, my family may soon be forced to move again, this time from the
country they grew up in. It makes me very sad but also angry that the US
government and media are seemingly oblvioius.
-
-
- Comment
- From Hazel McKinlay
- 6-24-4
-
- My uncle immigrated to Zimbabwe in his thirties and made
it his home for half-a-century. He married a white Rhodesian and they enjoyed
an affluent and privileged lifestyle at the expense of the disenfranchised
'kafirs' whose land they lived on and whom they despised. If you hate blacks
so much, why live in Africa? Go to Russia!
-
- Last year, at the age of eighty-six, he and his wife
were expelled from the country and their extended family, who lost lucrative
farmlands, have dispersed to England, New Zealand and Canada. At least
they could, the Shona and Ndbele are left to deal with Lord Carrington's
Illuminati puppet dictator and the tribal bloodbath to follow.
-
- I'm afraid I can't weep for whites who whine about the
loss of luxury villas, swimming pools and 7,000 acres of tobacco crops,
grown on "virgin" bush, after the natives were "quelled"
- because this land was stolen at gunpoint and only flourished through
the exploitation and oppression of the indigenous population. It was never
yours to keep!
-
- Obviously, times have changed and whites have naturalized
in Africa and have every right to stay. We cannot be held accountable for
the acts of our forebears and expulsion is not the desirable method for
redressing an unequal distribution of land and wealth in Zimbabwe. If a
negotiated settlement had compensated all parties, production could have
continued unabated.
-
- Zimbabwe is a target for destabilization. The IMF and
weather modification has ensured that the 'Bread Basket of Africa' is empty.
Food is a weapon, or lack of it and conflict and chaos must result. The
country is neatly divided into two factions, pro and anti-Mugabe, all they
need now is Rothchild's agents to arm guerrillas and Zimbabwe will be at
war.
-
- Hazel
-
- P.S. I just realized what I wrote; "virgin bush"
- boythat was a long time ago!
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