Sometimes the façade cracks. Despite official rhetoric branding white Zimbabweans as everything from ‘traitors’ to (that perennial government favourite) ‘economic saboteurs’, race relations on the ground are quietly healthy. Even, it seems, amongst the shock-troops of Mugabe’s land grab: the infamous war veterans.
The epithet is somewhat elastic. Nowadays a good deal of the country’s self-described war vets today are rowdy teenagers, often when drunk on the local maize brew chibuku, spoiling for a fight or having been press-ganged by Zanu-PF heavies into invading some of Zimbabwe’s last remaining 400 white-owned farms. One long-time Bulawayo resident said: “They get together in gangs and start chant nationalist songs, generally being intimidating. Think Wolverhampton on a Saturday night transposed to southern Africa.”
One white woman, who recently returned to her native Harare after several years in Surrey, told me how she recently visited a previously white-owned farm – grabbed by war vets in 2003 – to buy maize mealie-meal at the knock-down price of Z$15 billion per 50 kg bag.
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