Zimbabwe court rules seizing of white-owned land legal

Houston Chronicle ^ | December 5, 2001 | Houston Chronicle News Services

[Cincinatus' Wife]

The end of an era for Zimbabwe's last white farmers?......His mother, he says, built the 700-pupil local school, his father sat on the local council, and whenever his black neighbours need helping out - be it a fellow farmer borrowing a tractor, or the local police borrowing fuel for their cars - it is his door on which they knock.

....He has already handed over another farm he owns to a group of black settlers who turned up in 2006, since when, he says, he has done his best to be neighbourly.

He helps prepare the land for cultivation and offers advice when they need it, although driving through his estate, it is clear that some of what is now in black hands is being used for little more than subsistence agriculture.

Such goodwill, however, counts for little when groups of club-wielding "war veterans" - ostensibly men who fought in Zimbabwe's war for independence, but in practice often just hired thugs - turn up to demand a farmer's departure...

...What stung more, though, were the "Go back to Britain" slogans they shouted - meaningless to a man who is in fact of French Huguenot stock, has only ever held a Zimbabwean passport, and has nowhere else to go even if he wanted to.

Infuriatingly, the view that he has no longer a citizen of his own country is shared by the black prosecutor who will oversee his trespass case next week, who has described him in previous court appearances as merely a "visitor".

"I have never viewed myself as anything other than Zimbabwean, and that is what hurts me most," he said.

"We are not being looked at as citizens of this country, yet my father was born here before Robert Mugabe. What future do we have when you are fighting people of that mentality?"