Retain Economic Power : Now, Whites ‘Surviving’ in Zimbabwe

The farmhouse on the hill, overlooking the greening winter wheat and catching the last rays of orange sunsets, belongs to Geoff Calmeyer, his wife and four young children, and attests to their unshaken confidence in a future for whites in Zimbabwe.

The house is still staffed with the same black servants who have been around for years, and the farm’s 100 black workers, some third-generation Calmeyer farmhands, still live on the shaded hillside.

Small wonder that Calmeyer feels a sense of relief, looking back on seven years of black majority rule in Zimbabwe.

“We’re behind the wave of one man, one vote,” the lanky, fair-haired 43-year-old said recently. “If whites can’t accept a multiracial society, they’ve got to get out of Africa. We’ve decided we could accept it.”

120,000 Whites Remain

Most of the 120,000 whites remaining in Zimbabwe--down from 270,000 here at independence in 1980--seem pleased with their lot. As white-dominated Rhodesia became independent, black-run Zimbabwe, they have survived the transformation with their livelihood and life style intact.

Surprisingly few mourn the passing of their political might, but then they still wield enormous economic power: 4,000 white commercial farmers produce more than half of the country’s food, and whites hold 188 of the 200 top executive posts in the country’s industry. Blacks express remarkably little resentment.

The sad state of the nation’s economy, not politics, occupies the minds of white Zimbabweans these days. A foreign exchange shortage has spawned shortages of everything from tractor tires to prescription drugs, and white farmers and businessmen have been complaining loudly.

But such criticism is a prerogative of the citizenry. And Zimbabwe is, as the whites like to say, their country, too.

Always a Minority

Whites never accounted for more than a small fraction of this country’s 9 million people, even in the old days. Their numbers fell precipitously immediately after independence but have now leveled off.

“Those of us who live here now are here to stay,” said Zdenek Silavecky, an economist at a Harare bank.

Zimbabwe’s natural beauty, its pleasant climate and the ease of life here are among the reasons many whites say they have stayed. Harare, the capital and largest city, more resembles a city in Iowa than in Africa, with wide boulevards, angle parking and a Woolworth’s store on the pedestrian mall.

Geoff Calmeyer lives about an hour’s drive west of the capital, along a two-lane blacktop road that meanders through land browned by the nip of a Southern Hemisphere winter. Giant fir trees cling to small rocky hills, and, here and there, new crops are sprouting in irrigated green rectangles.

White commercial farmers, with their large investments, were among the first to realize they needed to work within the new political system to have any hope of keeping their economic stake.

“I’ve gone out of my way to show them (blacks) this is my country, as much as it is theirs,” Calmeyer said recently. “I wanted them to know that this bloke is a white but he’s here to work for the betterment of the country.”

The day-to-day work on Calmeyer’s 1,400 acres of potatoes, wheat, corn, onions and soybeans, and the milking operation with 1,000 head of cattle, is managed by Leonard Ntini, a black Zimbabwean.

Like most commercial farmers, Calmeyer spends more time than he’d like handling paper work. “This farm is run by black people,” Calmeyer said. “I just live here and work in the office.”

The majority of Zimbabwe’s whites are neither farmers nor industrialists. They are accountants and lawyers, small-business operators and shopkeepers, clerks and truck drivers. They hold Zimbabwe passports, earn Zimbabwe dollars and have lived here most, if not all, of their lives.

Even some of those who left after independence have begun to return. But the number of white professionals still dwindles, partly due to one of the highest income tax rates in the world--63% for anyone earning about $10,000 a year, for example.

Zimbabwe is losing some of its young whites, who see better futures elsewhere. But the children of farmers are staying. The average age of white farmers has fallen since independence, to 37 from 54, a sign of the new generation’s confidence in this country.

“I think the white farmer will be (here) forever,” said Klaas Forkersten, a 56-year-old cattle rancher in central Zimbabwe whose 30-year-old son has become part of the operation.

“I don’t worry about us being taken over or anything,” he added. “The government will leave us alone as long as we are earning money for the country.”

Vital to Economy

For now, the whites are “absolutely vital to the economy--and are recognized as such,” said a European diplomat in Harare. But how long the government will encourage whites to stay is a question that lingers here.

Tony Hawkins, a white professor of business studies at the University of Zimbabwe, said some whites worry that “they’re using us while we’re here. Once they don’t need us anymore, they’ll drop the curtain.”

One reason for that fear is Prime Minister Robert Mugabe’s Marxist dreams for Zimbabwe. But, for now at least, Mugabe has encouraged whites to stay and has maintained a relatively unfettered business environment.

“We want the whites to stay happy, and we’ve done a lot to keep them happy,” Zimbabwe Information Minister Nathan Shamuyarira said recently. Among other things, the government has increased prices for agricultural products, the backbone of the country’s economy.

Whites here tend to look beyond the government’s Marxist rhetoric. What they see is “a high degree of pragmatism and realism,” according to J. R. Rutherford, president of the Commercial Farmers Union, which represents white farmers.

For that reason, whites are not particularly alarmed by the impending abolition of the last remnant of their political power. The 20 seats set aside for whites in the 100-seat Parliament by the constitution adopted at independence can be abolished this year with a three-quarters vote of Parliament. Abolition is virtually assured.

“It’s crazy that we had the white seats in the first place,” said Calmeyer, echoing the sentiments of many whites here.

Political Clout

Although only a handful of white bureaucrats remain in the government these days, whites still manage to influence government decisions on economic matters through the powerful farmers union and a similar association in the manufacturing industry.

“Our representation doesn’t need to be in Parliament,” farmer Forkersten said.

Not all whites in Zimbabwe are glad to see the white seats in Parliament go. A dwindling band of so-called unreconstructed whites see the government’s action as just another step along the downhill path they see the country taking.

Sometimes called “Rhodies,” a reference to white-minority ruled Rhodesia, such people spend evenings at clubs where blacks are made to feel unwelcome, criticize Zimbabwe and wish they could turn the clock back to the days of white political power and privilege.

They look to the jut-jawed former Rhodesian prime minister, Ian D. Smith, for their ideology.

Smith complained in an interview about the rapid growth of inefficient government bureaucracy, a poorly managed economy and “consistent attempts by this government to provoke and humiliate the white people by blaming the problems here on the previous ‘racist’ regime.”

While whites here agree with some of Smith’s opinions, few see much point in his antagonistic stance. Political analysts say Smith has lost most of his support. If an election were held today, they say, Smith’s Conservative Alliance of Zimbabwe Party would be out.

White Minister Fired

In the 1985 elections, Mugabe had predicted that Smith’s party would win only two of the 20 white seats. But a low turnout and what one white Zimbabwean called an “appalling choice of alternative candidates” gave Smith 15 seats.

Mugabe was so angered by Smith’s good showing that he fired Denis Norman, the white minister of agriculture installed at independence to keep the white farmers happy. Norman still remembers Mugabe’s parting words: “The whites don’t appreciate what you and I have been trying to accomplish, so I’m asking you to leave.”

However, race relations are generally excellent, especially when compared to South Africa, for example, where a much larger percentage of the population is white.

“There’s very little racial tension at the moment. But then there never was,” Norman said recently. “Even in the old days the problem wasn’t black and white--it was on ideology that we were miles apart.”

With their sizable financial investment here, however, most white Zimbabweans spend little time worrying about anything except the economy.

Zimbabwe still has the most industrialized economy in black-ruled Africa, produces more than enough food to feed itself and exports large quantities of tobacco and minerals. But huge foreign debt payments, low world prices for tobacco and drought in some areas have created a severe foreign exchange shortage.

It has hurt factories that rely on imported raw materials to produce everything from car tires to clothing, farmers who need imported spare parts to plant and harvest their crops and shopkeepers who fill their shelves with imported goods such as textbooks.

Slayings by Rebels

White farmers also have been concerned lately about what they call “the security problem.”

Five white farmers were killed in May, apparently by anti-government guerrillas who have prowled the wide-open spaces of southern and central Zimbabwe since independence.

The government has expanded its efforts to hunt the rebels, who seem more interested in banditry than political causes. Farmers in southern Zimbabwe have long had government permission to travel with their own four- or five-man militias, and the same protection recently was extended to farmers in central Zimbabwe.

Spates of similar killings have occurred periodically here, but they haven’t scared the farmers away.

Jeffry Perlman, who has farmed 2,500 acres in eastern Zimbabwe for 35 years, remembers that half a dozen farmers in his area were murdered by some of the armed guerrillas shortly after independence.

“We didn’t think of leaving Zimbabwe, even then,” the 62-year-old white farmer said. “This is where we are. What we’ve got in life is here on our farms.”

In fact, Perlman and his 27-year-old farm manager, Peter Ziegler, the son of a white commercial farmer, recently have been planning for the future. In addition to tobacco, their main crop, they are growing produce and putting it on the overnight flights to London for sale the next day.

Earning foreign exchange for Zimbabwe is one of the things white farmers believe will keep the government’s hands off their operations. Ziegler is optimistic about his future in Zimbabwe.

“I intend to farm here my whole life,” Ziegler explained.

His wife, June, watching their 1- and 3-year-old children, nodded her head in agreement. “We’ll be here through thick and thin.”