Weekend 3 in Zimbabwe. A stormy lakeside weekend retreat.

 

The sky rumbled like rocks in an oil drum and roared like a wounded lion and the rain attacked the earth with breathless aggression.

 

I’ve not encountered a storm of such full-sky intensity. And this was not even particularly brutal by African standards. 

 

Proper stormy stuff.

 

We were staying at the weekend retreat of one of Zimbabwe’s wealthiest men (as you do) in an area of the country which is particularly hostile to whites at the moment. (Weren’t told that til we got there!) On a scale of one to dangerous where one is not dangerous at all and dangerous is pretty dangerous, this was by our british standards a 6. The people we were staying with probably thought it a one and a tiny bit, but they also told us fairly often of people they knew who had been savagely attacked, others killed, one just down the road, another a little way away, another on a neighbouring farm…. I take my hat off to them – I’m sure you develop coping mechanisms for living amid so much loss and frequent stories of danger – and they seem to have developed them very securely. 

 

Although to our Brit eyes this place was a lot more remote than secure. We reached the “retreat” having travelled the last 40 minutes of the journey down dirt tracks which would have been impassable for anything less mud-loving than the big 4 x 4. So, all in all, a little bit isolated.

 

Still, at least we had electricity.

 

Aha – not so fast…

 

Even the rich fall prey to the increasingly frequent electricity cuts in Zimbabwe – and we spent most of the weekend without power. Add to the mix, the white family who farmed the next door farm had just been told they were being thrown off the land and their farm taken over. 

 

Only a fraction of the farms are still in white ownership, a far cry from the white ownership of over 70% of the arable land a few years back. Many would be given 24 hours notice to pay off their workers and get off the land. They were not allowed to sell any machinery or stock and could only take personally owned items out of the farmhouse. 

 

Earlier that week we had stayed with a family who had been thrown off the farm they had built up over more than 25 years, and then lost everything overnight when a black Zimbabwean was “given” their farm.

 

Clearly the former distribution of land was totally wrong and many white farmers had for too long been made very wealthy while their workers remained isolated and poor. The old system was wrong to modern Western eyes, but the iron fisted solution with its nepotism (handing out of farms to the president’s chums), violence (all too often) and the giving of land to people who either just wanted to asset strip what they could, or simply had no knowledge of farming has left many of the once fertile farms overgrown and unproductive. We’ve seen plenty of evidence of that as we’ve been travelling around.

 

The government’s “solution” has left far more of a problem for the vast majority of Zimbabweans including large numbers of former black farm workers who are no longer able to even earn any kind of a living on the farms because many of them are not being farmed!

 

I wonder whether Mr Mugabe has ever met the retiring prime minister of Uruguay, Pepe Mujica – who drives around in a beat up old VW Beetle, gives away 90% of his salary to charity and lives in a small apartment with no frills. He’s soon to leave office – his successor is likely to follow his lead and avoid living in the presidential palace too – and the new leader will take over what’s probably the most socially stable country in South America. 

 

Come to think of it, I wonder if David Cameron has met him? 

 

Ah well, frying pan, fire …. Off to South Africa next, under Mr Zuma who is doing his best to avoid repaying tens of millions of tax payers’ money he has squandered on extending his private home.