Wild Life | 26 September 2009

Kenya

An image I will never forget is of Ben Freeth’s three little children on the front lawn of their farmhouse west of Harare with Comrade ‘Landmine’ and his gun-toting, drunken gang zooming up the driveway. The ZANU-PF attackers threatened to burn down the house that day if the white farmers did not leave. I was very nervous being there. But when I looked at Ben’s kids, they hardly flinched. They had taut, blank faces. Later, after I was safely overseas, the thugs returned to the Freeths with burning tyres after dark. They howled like hyenas, broke into the bedrooms and threatened to eat the children.

This month Landmine’s gang did burn the house down. It was a lovely thatched place full of family photos, nice books and a beautiful garden. They burned the dog inside. They also torched the workers’ houses and the home of Ben’s elderly parents-in-law, Mike and Angela Campbell, which had been seized and pillaged earlier this year.

This ordeal has been going on for years. The Campbells once had a tourist lodge on their farm, Mount Carmel. That was razed too. All the wild animals were poached. Last year Landmine’s men took Ben, Mike and Angela into the bush at night and beat them with rifle butts. Between the three of them, 13 bones were broken. Mike has never fully recovered.

Mount Carmel was once Zimbabwe’s biggest mango producer. They exported to Marks & Spencer’s in Britain. When I visited, 50 tonnes of mangoes were rotting in the pack sheds because the workers had been chased away. A fellow named Nathan Shamuyarira, Mugabe’s personal biographer, is ultimately behind the invasion though he has already stolen several white farms. Landmine, who wears a Huggy Bear hat, is just an enforcer.