Suffering has had at least one benefit for white Zimbabweans, says the writer Peter Godwin – it has brought them closer to the rest of the population
When Robert Mugabe dies — when the blood transfusions, the vitamin jabs, Botox and hate-filled rants come to an end — few Zimbabweans will miss him. Yet while reading Peter Godwin’s new book, The Fear, it strikes me that one group will have a reason not entirely to curse him: Zimbabwe’s whites.
An unintended consequence of Mugabe’s persecution of his Caucasian citizens — a revelation in Godwin’s book that might hasten the 86-year-old despot’s death in one last carpet-chewing frenzy — is that he has massively improved their reputation. I ask Godwin, himself a white ‘Zimbo’, about this: ‘You clearly depict them as being cleansed of their past.’
‘It involves whites coming to terms with not being the bosses,’ he replies. ‘The whites have lived for nearly 30 years under black rule, and it has been pretty militant rule. In the last ten of those years they have had fairly constant race-baiting from Mugabe.’
They have made an extraordinary journey. Even among whites in Kenya, we used to regard Rhodesians — ‘Rhodies’ — as being over the top in their racial bigotry. Rhodesians were depicted as oafs with ball-breaker shorts and mullet haircuts. There were liberals among them — people like Godwin’s family — but it didn’t matter. Their clipped accents marked them out for a hard time whenever they ventured overseas. A decade after Mugabe’s invasions of white farms kicked off, their population has sunk to 20,000, less than a tenth of what it was.
‘In Zimbabwe I’ve been struck at how the whites have lost critical social mass in many communities, where there are just a few left,’ Godwin tells me. ‘The white population has been decimated.’
But Godwin explains that the story goes way beyond winning sympathy as victims. The ruling party Zanu PF’s violence affected thousands of whites but millions of blacks. In the process it smashed racial boundaries.
‘There is more racial mixing than there was before, and the opposition to Mugabe has united Zimbabweans across the races, such that Mugabe has inadvertently brought about one of the more post-racial societies in Africa.’
Among those whites who stayed, many have been forced to do business with Mugabe’s cronies. For hundreds of farmers, managing land that was stolen from them or their neighbours is a matter of survival. For others, men who have gone over to the dark side, like Billy Rautenbach, who ironically became one of Zimbabwe’s biggest landowners, the chaos has proved immensely profitable.
In The Fear — Godwin’s eyewitness account of the 2008 elections that Mugabe lost but then stole until he was forced into a power-sharing deal with Morgan Tsvangirai’s MDC opposition — Godwin tells the story of how brave whites took a stand against Mugabe’s thugs.
In the eyes of many blacks, holding Zimbabwean passports did not make whites real Africans — whereas the sacrifices they’ve made in recent years did. Godwin tells the story of a man called Brian James who underwent this metamorphosis.
James previously ‘thought a gook was a gook, and that they were going to stuff the country up…’ War veterans invaded his farm, doused him in petrol and threatened to set him alight. Amazingly, the ordeal didn’t shut him up or drive him into exile. He entered politics, where voters ‘accepted [him] as a Zimbabwean’. He is now the mayor of Mutare.
‘Before, there was an us-and-them gulf — but that’s been bridged now,’ James tells Godwin. ‘It’s changed my attitude. I think this applies to a lot of us. This process, as tragic as it is, has brought us close together… We are on the same team.’
Godwin paints MDC leader Roy Bennett as a hero precisely because he is a Rhodie. Bennett’s understanding of the local dialect is ‘so unnervingly authentic that his race is undetectable over the phone’ (the idioms of which he learned so well because as a policeman in the 1970s he became good at interrogating African guerrillas).
‘He has black populist appeal, yet a Rhodesian back-story. He has not reached his pre-eminence as a politician through the usual route of white liberalism. His is not the Albie Sachs, Joe Slovo, comrades-in-arms story. And this, for Mugabe, is more than just an affront. It shatters his own mythology… Roy exposes the lie of what Mugabe pretends to be.’
I ask Godwin, ‘What will happen to Zimbabwe’s scattered whites?’ ‘I think that they will be absorbed by their new locations, if not in this generation then the next. A few are going home now, to give it a go, spurred on by the recession in the West…’
And what of the 6,000 farms they lost? Does Godwin see whites returning to Zimbabwe in a flood when Mugabe dies and if his Zanu cronies are kicked out? ‘There hasn’t really been any land reform yet, just a chaotic, arbitrary shoving off the land. Now we have a situation — no one has security of land tenure, or property deeds, and some farms are on their third or fourth “occupiers”, each booting the other off. Agricultural production has plummeted.’
Chinese conglomerates are now seizing tracts of land. But Zimbabwean lawyers I speak to say whites will have to be compensated at some stage in the future. They still hold their title deeds; an international court representing southern African countries ruled Mugabe’s entire land grab illegal, and land invaders are unable to borrow from commercial banks.
I ask Godwin if there’s any future for whites in Africa. For reasons I do not understand — since I live in Africa myself — there is a view by many that there isn’t one, which bothers me. Godwin says, ‘I think there is still a place for whites in Africa, but probably not as a bloc, just as individuals, people with skills, technocrats. We will survive like the Asians do, on our own resources.
‘I suspect that the whites in South Africa still have a huge problem ahead and the Zimbabwe outcome is of enormous relevance to them, especially in areas like land.’
In his several non-fiction books, Godwin has been the best chronicler of his homeland’s decline, much of it observed through his own family’s story. Yet Godwin himself hasn’t lived in Zimbabwe since the early 1980s. Instead, he’s in New York with his family. That he’s not ‘sharing the pain’ back home attracts sharp criticism.
‘I, and probably a third of the country, now live outside it,’ Godwin says in self-defence. ‘That’s the tragedy of the place: its best and brightest have gone — and I don’t mean me here, or even whites — educated, qualified black Zimbabweans are plying their various trades elsewhere. There is an extraordinary story unfolding there, a universal story — one that I’m part of, one that I find unbearably hard to walk away from.’
I saw just how extraordinarily tragic the situation was last year when I visited Zimbabwe. I had to pose as a salesman for bull’s semen, since being a journalist would land me in jail.
In Chegutu, west of Harare, I met farmer Ben Freeth and his family. I have rarely met such a brave man. Freeth and his father-in-law had been abducted, horribly beaten and menaced. The family’s Christian faith and various court orders were keeping at bay the gang of armed Zanu thugs outside, led by one Comrade Landmine. Shortly after I left the Freeths, Comrade Landmine’s gang attacked the house, threatened to eat the children, and burned his house down.
The Freeths are now in Harare, their superb farm in ruins. Roy Bennett has fled into exile. Mugabe is still in power. The sub-title of Godwin’s book is ‘The Last Days of Robert Mugabe’. But the fact is that Zanu, buoyed by huge discoveries of diamonds, is now training militias ready to menace the population once again ahead of the next national elections.
I ask whether MDC will be any cleaner than Zanu. After all, when Mugabe’s central banker, Gideon Gono, offered MDC MPs free cars, few if any refused him, despite Zimbabwe’s state of bankruptcy.
‘Some may be co-opted, bribed, bullied or otherwise compromised. Some will resist,’ says Godwin. ‘In general, though, when they are in the trenches, bruised and bloodied, and on the run, being abducted and murdered and imprisoned — I feel like perhaps they deserve a bit of a break.’
What happens after Mugabe dies? ‘The worst-case scenario is some kind of civil war — the best is a stable transitional arrangement while real elections take place.’
Mugabe’s mother died in her mid-nineties — so unfortunately, he may remain in power for years to come.
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