I just want SOMEONE to film one of these farm takeovers so that the world can finally see the brutality and racism that the mainstream press is ignoring...
Posted on 08/10/2002 11:22:22 PM PDT by chasio649
We were all hoodwinked by Mugabe
DECLAN WALSH IN HARARE
THIS weekend Colin Shand is truly home alone. His wife has left for England to stay with their daughter. His other daughter lives nearby but her farm has been claimed by a civil engineer from Harare. This week she fled with her husband and children to a rented house 30 miles away.
His closest neighbours are a group of settlers who seized control of his farm 18 months ago, but relations with them are not good. Last Tuesday night they tried to prevent him returning home, then attacked his vehicle with stones and axes. He was lucky to escape alive, he says.
Now Shand’s only companions are his 68-year-old cook, Steady, five dogs, one cat and the Colt handgun at his bedside. His lawyer has advised him that if attacked in his home he is within his rights to use the revolver.
"But the way things are now she says I’ll definitely go to jail, no matter what," he says matter-of-factly, hours before president Mugabe’s leave-or-be-evicted ultimatum expired.
The Shand farmhouse in Concession, 50 miles north of Harare, has a lonely, isolated air. Inside, Shand’s wife has stripped the walls of paintings and family photographs, "in case we are ransacked".
After independence many white Rhodesians packed up for South Africa. Shand stayed put. He believed Robert Mugabe’s promises of reconciliation, the 1980 television address where he declared to the nation: "Let us forgive and forget. Let us join hands in a new amity."
"He seemed like such a gentleman. Now we realise we were hoodwinked," he said, with soft bitterness.
Since then Shand has made friends with blacks. He is invited to the wedding of his cook’s son next month. The best golfer at his local club, where he socialises, is a black man. Sometimes he has black visitors to the house - but he would never allow one to marry his daughter.
"The black man and the white man, it’s different cultures. We’re not the same," he said, then added only half-seriously: "Especially now. I’ve become more racist since all this started."
As the night wears on, Shand sends e-mails and calls his wife. Then, at 9pm, the phone rings. There is talk of a compromise deal with lawyers from Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party. Shand is unsure what to do. He calls his neighbour, Archie. "We’ve lost, Archie, we’ve lost," he says, confused. "We’ve got to give them something."
But an hour later he has changed his mind. A conversation with a colleague from Justice for Agriculture - a newly formed group that is refusing to move off the land - steels his will. He will not sign any deal. "As far as I’m concerned my position is legal and the government’s is illegal," he declares.
In the morning, Shand shows me around his crumbling tobacco-curing sheds. Over the eight-foot security fence we see a man fixing the thatch on a new hut in an adjacent field.
Then a woman, probably a settler’s wife, spots us from the perimeter fence. It makes Shand nervous. "She has seen me now," he said. "Now she will tell the others that I’m here."
On Friday night he did not sleep until three in the morning. "I couldn’t get to sleep," he said. "It’s like waiting for a war to start."
Today he is locked inside his farmhouse, and won’t be leaving until the long weekend is over. "The majority of white farmers are in favour of land reform, but we want it done in a systematic manner, not like this," he said.
I just want SOMEONE to film one of these farm takeovers so that the world can finally see the brutality and racism that the mainstream press is ignoring...
You certainly won't see Amnesty International or the ACLU filming one of those farm takeovers...
When attacked by stones and axes you leave the axmen and stoners laying where once they stood. It does not take much to disinspire a rabble.
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Imagine how the press would covering a story about a white government driving blacks off of their farms and giving the land to their white cronies. I have a feeling it would be quite different.
And the horrifying consequences of Democratic totalitarianism.
It does beg the question, when are the people going to raise up and throw this s.o.b out?
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