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Posted on 06/27/2002 2:25:45 AM PDT by Clive
SELOUS — It is just before midday when we trudge along a dusty road leading to Sandriver Farm, home to David Fowler who has exactly 43 days from today to leave the property he has called his own for most of his life.
Fowler, his brothers and sisters have survived on the proceeds from the 1 160-hectare farm, 90 kms southwest of Harare, since 1974.
He inherited the property from his parents four years ago but his future and that of 70-plus families who work the farm is now uncertain as a deadline imposed by the government for white farmers to vacate acquired land approaches.
A cloud of uncertainty hung over the Selous farming district at the weekend when a Financial Gazette news crew toured the area.
A sombre mood gripped the neighbour-hood, usually a hive of activity at this time of the year when farmers tend their tobacco seedlings and grade last year’s golden leaf.
Selous is a key tobacco growing area.
As the Financial Gazette team arrives at the Sandriver farmhouse, our host is impatiently pacing up and down outside his house.
"Did you meet anyone at the gate?" he asks with a voice of a man who has seen enough terror.
Fowler then says that the interview can no longer go ahead because war veterans and officials from the local district administrator’s office warned him the previous night that they knew the Financial Gazette would be visiting his farm.
We plead with him and, after 15 or so minutes, he reluctantly agrees to be interviewed.
Fowler, like nearly 3,000 other white commercial farmers, has been affected by the government’s amended Land Acquisition Act which gives him only 45 days to wind up his farming operations and another 45 days to leave the farm.
While the leadership of the Commercial Farmers’ Union this week tried to show bravado by saying farmers would defy the law, it was not the same with Fowler here.
"I am abiding by the law," Fowler says in a dejected tone. "I have to stop or be arrested and the last thing I want to do is to end up in jail.
"I will only start working again when I get a directive (from the government)."
Fowler says he has written to Agriculture and Lands Minister Joseph Made to be allowed to finish grading his tobacco crop but there has been no response.
The district administrator had told him to stop farming by Tuesday this week.
Made this week told state television that the government would deploy its officers on all farms issued with eviction notices to make sure that the farmers observed the law.
Fowler’s property is a single-owned farm, spanning 1160 hectares. He grows about 130,000 kilogrammes of tobacco a year, 30 ha of maize and 10 ha of paprika.
Fowler, who also rears horses, says he is in the process of de-stocking his large cattle herd and now remains with 300 cattle.
He says it takes him 110 days to grade his tobacco crop and has only done 45 days of grading. Although he has sold some tobacco, the remaining crop is worth more than US$400,000 ($22 million) at current prices.
But even then, Fowler still has to worry about his huge bank overdraft which has kept him going all along.
"Tell me what I can do. I still have 65 days left of grading and my bank phoned me last week inquiring whether I will be able to continue farming," Fowler says.
For a while, he gazes into the distant and empty sky and, after summoning courage, he says it is the workers and his young wife and two children he is mostly worried about.
There are 70 workers on the farm, each family having an average of six people.
All the 420 or so people resident here have nowhere to go. They say they have not known any other life other than farming.
"We all don’t know what to do because we have been told that when your boss goes, you also go," says Peter Matiringa, a veteran of 27 years on the farm.
"When the (March presidential) elections came, we voted for the ruling ZANU PF but now they are chasing us away. Is that fair?
"Now we are being told that if you want land, you have to talk to the war veterans but you have to give them something."
Matiringa says only five out of the 70 workers have been promised land on the farm by the veterans.
The commercial farming sector is estimated to employ 300,000 workers, most of whom could be out of employment this week and have not benefited from the government’s controversial agrarian reforms.
This week all workers at Sandriver were sadly sent on early leave because they will not be able to work following the expiry of the first 45-day period on Tuesday.
Fowler says he will not be able to pay his workers their retrenchment packages until the government pays compensation for his farm, which might take years.
The government is still to evaluate his farm.
Miriam Chandisaita, a mother of six and a worker on the farm, is shattered and almost at a loss for words.
She does not know what the future holds for her and her family. "I don’t know what to do," she mutters with a resigned shrug.
"It is a problem that is so close to our hearts and we are not sure where we will go. We don’t have anywhere to go."
The farm workers described the close relationship they had forged with their employer, saying all of them had become one large family.
"We have been living here like one big family with the farmer without any problems," Matiringa noted. "He has been helping us with everything whether it is money or anything. It will be sad if we have to go our separate ways."
Fowler said he had not contemplated leaving Zimbabwe to farm in neighbouring nations such as Mozambique, where some Zimbabwean white farmers have fled.
But he denied the government’s claim that commercial farmers had had it too good for too long, ignoring the plight of their black workers.
The government also accuses the farmers of seeking to derail its land reforms by backing the opposition Movement for Democratic Change.
"If we have had it cushy for too long, then we would be having foreign currency accounts and we would not worry about anything," Fowler said.
"But we are Zimbabweans with Zimbabwean passports and where else in the world do you go and farm?
"We agree that there is need for land redistribution, but the government should also let us get on with farming — this is what we know best — to produce food and exportable commodities and earn foreign currency that we need for our country."
Fowler’s dream has all but crumbled.
And for most farmers such as him and workers like Chandisaita countrywide, it will be game up shortly when, come August 10, they will have to part with the only life they have ever known.
And someone call Jesse Jackson.
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He probably begged the reporter to put that line in for his own health and safety....
How long do they think they have before they simply begin to disappear in convenient lots?
The best farms have already been picked over by Mad Bob's new bestest friends, the Libyans.
Islam marches on.
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