Hostages of Hostilities in Their Homeland

The warning came to Neville Tapson and his son one recent night that squatters were on their way to their tobacco and livestock farm. The Tapsons were expecting them. Two weeks earlier, invaders had planted pegs marking off sections of the 7,400-acre ranch. Terrified, the elderly white farmer, his wife and their son abandoned most of their belongings and fled to a neighbor’s house.

A day later, reports came that 150 black men had arrived by tractor, swarmed the Tapsons’ land and beat the farm workers. The black foreman’s wife was doused with gasoline and set ablaze. She survived, but her face and body were badly disfigured.

The invaders slaughtered and barbecued two head of cattle and two sheep. Then, Tapson learned later, they went back to the farm workers’ quarters “to do some more beating.” They failed to burn down the Tapsons’ farmhouse, but they did torch tons of tobacco worth $250,000.

The 69-year-old farmer’s eyes welled with tears as he discussed the possibility of fleeing Zimbabwe. “I was born here. My dad came here in 1908 from South Africa,” he said. “We were brought up here, and now . . . what can you do? We feel so helpless. They can do what they like because we’re the enemy. We can do nothing.”

Squatters led by pro-government veterans of the country’s 1970s independence war against white rule have occupied more than 1,000 of the country’s 4,500 predominantly white-owned commercial farms. They argue that British colonists stole the land more than a century ago. Now they want it back.

The white farmers feel unfairly targeted, saying they remained to help build the country when other whites fled with the advent of black rule. They consider Zimbabwe their home.

President Robert Mugabe has sanctioned the invasions, arguing that the veterans are demonstrating for land reform. Earlier this month, he pushed a law through parliament, which is dominated by his ZANU-PF party, allowing the government to seize white-owned farms without compensation for redistribution to landless blacks. A February referendum in which he sought approval to seize the land failed.

Disparity in Land, Income Distribution

The government claims that the 4,500 farmers own 70% of the country’s productive land. The Commercial Farmers’ Union of Zimbabwe says the figure is closer to 40%. Either way, the distribution of land and income in Zimbabwe, which won its independence from Britain in 1980, is grossly distorted in favor of the white minority, which makes up just 1% of the country’s 12 million people.

“Our land has been occupied since 1890, and we are still fighting to liberate it,” said Chenjerai “Hitler” Hunzvi, the left-wing guerrilla leader who heads the country’s war veterans association.

This is what Mugabe says he is out to achieve. But commercial farmers and Mugabe’s political opponents argue that the president botched opportunities to rectify the inequities and is using the issue now for political benefit. In a country where poverty is widespread, unemployment soaring and hopes for the future bleak, the promise of free land is an easy and natural pitch.

Upcoming parliamentary elections are yet to be scheduled, but Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front knows that it faces its greatest challenge yet from the new Movement for Democratic Change. Analysts believe that the embattled Mugabe is trying to paint the opposition group, known as the MDC, as a white party and is using the whites’ wealth and status to evoke old anti-colonialist sentiments.

“Mugabe, having realized that he is losing power, is now resorting to violence,” said MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai, who accused the president of turning to thugs to do his dirty work.

Unrest Takes Toll on Farmers, Mugabe Foes

Two months of unrest have already claimed at least 10 lives, including white farmers, laborers and Mugabe’s political opponents.

Among them were David Stevens, an active MDC supporter who was abducted from his farm about 75 miles southeast of Harare, the capital, earlier this month along with his black foreman, Julius Andoche. Stevens was beaten and shot in the head at point-blank range. Five of Stevens’ friends who tried to rescue him were severely beaten. Andoche’s body was found a week later.

Mugabe has blamed the white farmers for provoking the attacks. He has called them “enemies of the state” and given them the choice of surrendering their land or leaving the country.

The number of farm invasions has dropped in recent days, and the violence is now focused on the farmers’ black field hands. Still, some whites like Tapson say they are contemplating leaving Zimbabwe. Already, scores have fled their homes for safety in town, and many of those of British origin have sought United Kingdom citizenship in order to be prepared.

“It’s a little difficult when you’re 70 to get out,” said Joan Tapson, Neville’s wife. “It’s our life’s work.”

Others said they had no place else to go.

“I don’t have any other allegiance,” said James Sinclair, who farms tobacco, cattle, pigs and maize on 5,680 acres that have been in his family since the 1930s. “As far as I’m concerned, this is it. I’m a Zimbabwean. There is no question of fleeing anywhere. If the roof falls in, then it falls in. We’ve put a lot of money and time into running this farm.”

“Where the hell can we go?” asked David Hasluck, director of the Commercial Farmers’ Union, whose ancestors settled in southern Africa in 1893. “This is our country. I am born and bred in Africa.”

With independence in 1980, there were high hopes that things would be different. Mugabe promised reconciliation and racial unity after the long civil war against Ian D. Smith’s white-minority government. Unconvinced, 80% of the 300,000 whites left the country, formerly called Rhodesia. They were stripped of their citizenship and forced to sell their farms and businesses for as little as one-tenth of their worth.

Whites Stayed for Love of the Country

Those who decided to stay say they did so because they truly love Zimbabwe, its breathtaking natural beauty, climate and laid-back pace of life. They knew that they needed to work within the new political system to survive.

White Zimbabweans are also industrialists, accountants, lawyers, small-business owners, shopkeepers and clerks. But the glaring wealth of most commercial farmers and the abundance of the land they own have caused resentment among poor blacks.

White-owned commercial farms produce all of the wheat and beef and much of the maize needed to feed Zimbabweans, in addition to tobacco, which accounts for more than a third of the nation’s annual export earnings and 20% of its gross domestic product. The southern African nation is the world’s second-biggest tobacco exporter after Brazil. Zimbabwean tobacco earned $335 million last year.

“I don’t know why I’m being called an enemy of the state when I’m doing my best to earn money for the government,” Sinclair said.

Financial analysts warn that the economy would suffer if the white farmers pulled out and blacks were awarded the land.

“It would be a disaster,” said John Robertson, managing director of Economic Information Services, a Harare-based think tank. “You would be turning commercial agriculture into peasant agriculture. . . . We would probably lose our place in all of the markets we currently have for export production.”

Black Veterans See Racist Views

But leaders of the war veterans say it is insulting and racist to assume that black farmers would be unable to pick up where whites left off. They also argue that whites care nothing about the welfare of the black majority and are only now pledging allegiance to Zimbabwe because they are in trouble.

“They have no interest in the people of Zimbabwe,” said Agrippa Gava, executive director of the Zimbabwean National Liberation War Veterans Assn. “They are oppressors. They are cruel, selfish and greedy.”

Gava said the whites should just pack up and go, leaving behind for blacks what is rightfully theirs.

“Why did we go to war to fight if we wanted the British kith and kin to remain on our land?” Gava asked. “The white farmers must get out and try and find land in their own countries of origin.”

Although some of the white farmers claim that blacks would not use the land properly and vow never to give it up, many others say they recognize the need for land redistribution. However, they object to the violence and intimidation tactics.

“They have a legitimate case” for wanting land, Sinclair said. “But what they don’t have is the right to invade other people’s property, frighten people, kill people, take people hostage to achieve those ends.”

Paul and Jenny Hill were lucky. The five men who came to visit greeted the Hills with a handshake. A couple of them produced their war veteran identity cards. Hill showed them an aerial photograph of his 1,000-acre farm, two-thirds of which he maintains is not suitable for agriculture. The veterans decided that there was not enough land to resettle many people, and they left as quietly as they came. But the Hills believe that they’ll be back.

“We have to accept that there is unequal land distribution and people want the land, and they have to have the land,” said Paul Hill, 56, who grows roses for export.

“In the interest of peace, we are quite happy to give away a portion of our land if it stabilizes the country,” added his wife, Jenny.

But many farmers are loath to believe that those who want to grab their land are really interested in using it to its full potential.

“I don’t believe any of the war veterans that are doing this have any intention of being farmers,” said Hasluck, the farmers union director. “It’s about winning an election on the basis of delivery” of land.

The 25 men who invaded his 3,500-acre farm last month told him that they were being paid just over $1 a day by the local ZANU-PF branch office, plus rations, to occupy his land, he said. He eventually came to an agreement that one of them could build a shelter on his land while the others would have to commute to it.

Nhlanhla Masuku, president of the Zimbabwe National Chamber of Commerce, said that the land, regardless of whether it ends up being used for commercial farming, would provide a much-needed base of support in a country devoid of a social safety net.

“Land is social security because of the structure of our economies and the level of our development,” Masuku said.

Mugabe’s critics contend that the situation would have improved already if the government had not misused aid money donated for land reform, and if land acquired by the state for redistribution had not wound up in the hands of ruling party cronies. Early plans to resettle about 230,000 peasant families have largely failed.

Supporters of the government argue that the whites obstructed Mugabe’s land redistribution effort in 1990 and that allocating farmland to elite blacks was a way of creating a class of commercial farmers among them.

“If you’re going to have a commercial farm system, there has to be blacks in it too,” said Sam Moyo of the Harare-based Southern Africa Regional Institute for Policy Studies, who has written a book on land reform.

“Who said that a minister is not entitled to land, just because he is a minister, or a civil servant, just because he is a government official?” asked Gava, the war veteran. “We are talking about black empowerment. Even if [the land] can lie idle, it is better than being in the hands of foreigners.”

Blacks regard some of the whites as “unreconstructed” racists who claim that the land was not taken from blacks because it was unoccupied when whites arrived and that the blacks would only misuse it.

Few whites have accepted racial integration, socializing only among themselves or at clubs where blacks are often made to feel unwelcome.

“The commercial farmer, generally speaking, whether it’s peer pressure, just hasn’t been prepared to mix with [black] people who are exactly their equals, or even their betters,” said Hill, the flower farmer. “They’re an arrogant bunch. They’ve been used to the good old tobacco days, lots of money, being in charge and being the Big White Chief.”

White farmers are accused of mistreating and underpaying their black workers, allowing them to wallow in abject poverty despite the millions of dollars that blacks help their employers to earn.

Aware that their ancestral ties to the land and their economic livelihoods hang in the balance, white farmers are hopeful that a solution can be found that would allow them to remain--and continue to prosper.

“I love this country,” said Jenny Hill, whose ancestors arrived on the continent in 1910. “Africa gets into the blood, and that’s the truth.”