The Last Resort Read online

That Monday, 150 settlers arrived at her home and began offloading chickens and goats on her lawn, while she frantically tried to gather forty years of her life. When the sun fell and she was still not packed the leader came to her. ‘He had a stick. He stood there like Hitler, tapping that stick on my floor: “Out! Out! Out! I want you out before dark!”

  ‘I fell down at his feet. I said, “Please, I can’t. I am tired. Please, just let me sleep, let me sleep on the carpet here tonight, I am so tired.” And he said: “You are out. Tonight!”’

  Tears were rolling down her face as she spoke. She was whispering again. ‘And you know, at eleven o’clock that night we drove away, and the gates closed behind us.’

  She spent that night at the home of a friend. Another friend called my parents. She arrived at Drifters in a convoy of battered trucks in a state of shock. ‘Your parents were good to me, God bless them. They would take in all the destitutes.’

  My father said later: ‘I’ll never forget what they did to that woman. I will never forget.’

  Unita spoke with contempt of the councillor who’d kicked her off her farm, but she reserved particular vitriol for the official in the Ministry of Lands she had gone to see. When she spoke of him she clenched her teeth, and her tiny fingers rolled into fists.

  ‘He was very nice to me that day. Oh, very nice. He smiled and he promised me in all fairness. But he broke his word. He broke his word.’

  I had the distinct impression that if she ever ran into him again she would draw her guns: perhaps the Beretta in one hand, the Bruno in the other, both barrels blazing.

  It was dark outside now. The humped hills behind us were domed shadows. Frans was snoring. It was time to go. I thanked Unita for her time and hugged her on the porch.

  She saw my tape recorder and said she had one more thing to tell me. She gazed up at the stars and whispered: ‘I am returning to my place of birth, but my first love is Zimbabwe. This is where my heart is, this is where my blood is, this is where my roots are, this is where my children were born. My Zimbabwe. My Zimbabwe …’

  It was a beautiful theatrical flourish, and tears welled in my eyes.

  Then she switched back to her normal voice.

  ‘Did you get all that? Come on, give me another go – I can do it better.’

  And she said it again. She had finished her final close-up.

  Friends of Unita’s, Mary Ann and Gerard ‘Hammy’ Hamilton, tobacco farmers in their late fifties, would find sanctuary in Cottage 8, on the lower slopes of the hill. Cottage 8 overlooked the reservoir that mysteriously had never filled with water again since the visit from the Top Man, and to me it was the prettiest house of all, shaded by a dense thicket of creepers and palms. It reminded me of a jungle guesthouse I’d once stayed at in Laos.

  Mom arranged for me to meet the Hammies, and she was rather excited at the prospect.

  ‘You’re going to meet the red Indian,’ she said.

  ‘The red Indian?’

  ‘Yes, Hammy’s daughter, Angie, is married to a red Indian. From America.’

  ‘Um … Ma, I think you mean a Native American.’

  ‘He looks like a red Indian to me,’ she said, perfectly convinced.

  I arrived in time for sundowners.

  Hammy, Mary Ann, Angie and the ‘red Indian’ were tucking into beers and menthol cigarettes on a cluttered back porch, a mound of newspapers, documents and magazines – Farmer’s Weekly, tobacco monthlies – piled high on a wrought-iron table in front of them. A fat black crossbred mastiff waddled around the yard with a bone in its mouth.

  The ‘red Indian’ was Chris, a handsome forty-year-old ponytailed part-Cherokee from the Midwest who had been a US Navy chef on ships sailing in the Persian Gulf. He’d been in Africa for three years and had no interest in returning to America.

  ‘I’ll never go back, man. Too many people, too developed. How can you live there?’

  ‘I like all the people and the development,’ I said.

  Angie had studied hotel management, and she and Chris had worked together at luxury safari lodges and resorts all over southern Africa. Which helped explain why Chris liked it out here. They were currently on leave from an island resort they were managing in Pemba, northern Mozambique, the same area where Helen had her plot of land and where I’d tried to get Mom and Dad to move eighteen months earlier.

  Hammy and Mary Ann were glad to have their daughter and Chris home, and it was touching to hear Chris, this all-American boy, call his Zimbabwean father-in-law ‘Pa’.

  Hammy and Mary Ann had lost their farm in the valley to a brigadier in the Zimbabwe National Army. It was what was called a ‘slow bleed’, a gradual takeover, and the stress of trying to hold on to it while their fields were trashed, their fences and machinery stolen, and their lives threatened had taken a heavy toll. Soon after they moved to Drifters, Hammy suffered a heart attack. They were planning a trip to South Africa so that he could get a bypass.

  I asked him how his health was.

  ‘I’m lucky,’ he said. ‘My wife’s the best-qualified person in Zim to look after me.’

  ‘How’s that?’

  Hammy took her hand. ‘Should I tell him, doll?’

  Mary Ann smiled and nodded.

  ‘She’s a nurse. And not just any nurse. Picture it: Groote Schuur Hospital, Cape Town, third of December, 1967. My wife was in the operating theatre with Christiaan Barnard during the world’s first-ever heart transplant. My wife – can you believe it?’

  ‘You worked on that operation?’ I said, impressed.

  Mary Ann smiled and nodded again.

  ‘I tell you what,’ I said. ‘My dad’s stressed, too. Can you help him if his ticker goes?’

  ‘Of course,’ she said, and we toasted the medical agreement over more cold beers.

  For a man who had lost his home, his farm, and nearly his life, Hammy seemed surprisingly upbeat, and it wasn’t just the early evening booze talking.

  ‘I think I’m going to get my farm back,’ he confidently told me.

  Seeing my surprise, he explained, ‘I know the vice president, Joice. Mrs Mujuru. I phoned her, told her what happened to me. She said I should come and see her. I have an appointment in Harare next week.’

  Hammy did indeed know the vice president. He had been for many years a prominent member of the Commercial Farmers Union, the mainly white farmers’ union that had held talks with the government since the 1980s on how to conduct proper land reform before it all blew up in their faces with the invasions in 2000. Joice Mujuru, a hero of the liberation war, was the wife of the former ZANLA guerrilla leader Solomon ‘Rex Nhongo’ Mujuru, and she had been part of those land reform talks over the years. Hammy said he got on well with her, and the fact that she had recently been named a vice president had given him a lifeline, access right to the top.

  I wished him luck, but I wasn’t sure it would work out. No white farmer had ever gotten his farm back. It simply didn’t happen. Besides, my dad already had told me Hammy had been to see Mujuru before.

  ‘Good luck to him, but I’ll believe it when I see it,’ he told me with a shrug.

  Hammy and Mary Ann had other projects besides trying to get their farm back. As stalwarts of the CFU, they were determined to correct what they called ‘the great lie’ that had been propagated around the world about white Zimbabwean farmers like them.

  ‘It’s all bullshit, you know,’ he told me.

  ‘What is?’

  ‘All this crap about us owning all the land. It’s bullshit. You saw it all the time on the BBC and on CNN and in respectable foreign newspapers: “Whites owned seventy percent of the land in Zimbabwe.” “White farmers had seventy percent of the fertile land in Zimbabwe.” The media kept repeating it again and again until it became a fact, but it’s a lie, total bullshit.’

  ‘So how much land did whites own before the invasions?’ I asked.

  Hammy had the stats, Mary Ann had the documents. She passed him notes and pages from the fi
les and magazines on the table, and he read extracts. They were a good team.

  ‘Let me tell you,’ he said. ‘Commercial farming makes up only twenty-eight percent of this country’s land. But there’s a black farmers’ union that represents six percent of that. The Development Trust, which is government, has three percent. There are black tenant farmers with four percent. And Forestry has one percent. That leaves whites with about fourteen percent of the country’s land. Doesn’t sound the same as seventy percent, does it? And that fourteen percent produced about sixty-five percent of all agricultural produce and fifty percent of foreign earnings, and employed or supported almost two million people. But all you ever heard about was us greedy white farmers.’

  Everyone has their truth in Zimbabwe, but Hammy was correct. The Mugabe government’s figures were routinely quoted by the world’s media, and they gave the impression that in a country as fertile as Zimbabwe, a mere forty-five hundred white farmers controlled seventy percent of its land mass. Who wouldn’t be outraged by that? But the seventy-percent statistic used by the state and repeated elsewhere ad nauseam applied in fact to only one region: the fertile Mashonaland tobacco farming belt around Harare.

  The bitterest irony for Hammy, though, was that he’d bought his farm in 1985 after attending a meeting the president called to ask white farmers to stay in the country. Incredibly, it is estimated that by 2000, 76 per cent of white-owned farms had in fact been purchased after independence, and it became illegal after 1987 for anyone to sell a farm without first offering it to the government. My father made sure, before buying Drifters, that it had a Certificate of No Present Interest – confirmation that the government had been offered the land but didn’t want it. No one in their right mind bought a farm in Zimbabwe after 1987 without such a certificate.

  ‘You want to know the real reason for the invasions?’ said Hammy, taking a deep drag on his cigarette. ‘The government had run the economy so badly into the ground that they needed a distraction for all the people without jobs. And who took the hit? Us whites.’

  Hammy had another theory that flew in the face of much that I had come to believe: that very few Zimbabweans – black or white – actually wanted to be farmers. ‘You know how hard it is to farm? Let me tell you: bloody hard. And who wants to be on a farm when you have an education? This country was educated! Mugabe did that. People want to wear suits and ties and sit at desks and work on computers in town. Now he’s telling them to go back and sit on the land? It’s mad, year-zero stuff.’

  If I looked in the immediate vicinity I could see his point. I was a farmer’s son; I had no interest in farming. Angie had managed her dad’s farm, but she preferred hotel management. Unita’s son was working in the United States. The only young person on this farm who actually wanted to farm was Dawson Jombe, and he had been thrown off a farm and was now running my parents’ lodge – as a brothel.

  Hammy was on a roll. He could have gone on longer, but we were suddenly interrupted by a loud blast of music emanating from the backpacker camp. It was 8:00 pm, Sydney had his sound track on, the brothel was open, and 50 Cent, New York’s finest, was giving it his all, echoing up the hill: You can find me in the club, bottle full of bub, look mami I got the X if you into takin’ drugs…

  Chris and Angie rolled their eyes.

  ‘It could be another long night, Pa,’ Angie groaned.

  They sounded like homesteaders in an old Western movie, except they were afraid not of a late-night attack by bandits but rather of a musical assault by a DJ in a backpacker camp.

  ‘Ya, again,’ said Hammy. ‘We were kept awake by this rubbish the other night, too. Jeez, Drifters used to be so great. Pizzas. Braais. Tourists. Now? Now it’s just like a brothel.’

  I wanted to tell him it wasn’t like a brothel. It was pretty much the real thing.

  Another widow lived in Cottage 14, closer to the top of the hill, which appeared to suit her lofty social status. Her name was Charlotte Kok, but my parents called her Lady Charlotte. She was an Afrikaner blue blood, a true Boer Brahmin.

  ‘Don’t be late for Lady Charlotte,’ said Mom. ‘No one is late for Lady Charlotte.’

  Charlotte had invited me round for ‘tea and biccies’, and I made sure I wasn’t late.

  An elegant, slightly built woman, one year shy of her eightieth birthday, she stepped out to greet me in the garden, the breeze playing with her imperious bouffant and a rope of pearls around her neck. She spoke in a cut-glass accent more Victorian English than Afrikaans. Her daughter, Tess, an artist visiting from Harare, made us tea.

  Charlotte had pedigree.

  ‘Do you know that the city of Pretoria, the capital of South Africa, is named for my great-great-grandfather Andries Pretorius?’

  ‘Major Andries Pretorius,’ piped up Tess from the kitchen.

  ‘No, Tess,’ scolded her mother. ‘He was a general. A Boer leader at Blood River.’

  ‘Oh, sorry, Ma. Big stuff.’

  It was the aftermath of the Second Boer War that brought Charlotte’s family to Rhodesia.

  ‘I was born in the Orange Free State in 1926, and my father moved us up here in 1929. In South Africa it was brother against brother back then – the Boer War had divided whole families – and my father wanted to get away from all the fighting.’

  ‘Ironical, hey, considering …’ began Tess.

  ‘Okay, Tess, that’s enough.’

  Her father had bought land outside Rusape, a small settlement in the west of the valley.

  ‘Land was cheap then. A pound an acre. This government says we stole it, but the country was empty back then. No one around. We had to recruit workers from Mozambique and Malawi. We cleared the bush and planted tobacco. We were the only family in the whole area to have a car, an old blue Essex, which you had to crank to start. It would take us two days to drive to Umtali [Mutare]. Strip roads. We would pack a picnic. Those were the days.’

  Charlotte liked saying Those were the days. She got a dreamy look in her eyes.

  ‘Staying at the Cecil Hotel in town. You know, we used to order all our clothes from a shop in England called Swan & Edgar in Piccadilly Circus. The catalogues used to come regularly and we would choose: linens, silks, cottons. And in no time at all they would have sent a parcel out to us in the bush in Africa. They were never pinched in the post like they are now. Of course, it would never even get to you now. Those were the days.’

  By the 1950s she was married to a rugby-playing farmer named Basie Kok, and they’d established one of the country’s richest tobacco estates in Inyazura.

  It sounded as grand as a stately southern mansion: deep porch, sweeping lawns.

  ‘You had some wild parties there, didn’t you, Mom?’ teased Tess.

  ‘Oh, Tess, I don’t want to speak about that,’ said Lady Charlotte.

  Tess had heard about them, though. Apparently her mother would host fancy soirées, and all the rough-hewn tobacco farmers would come from miles around. They would always scrape off the black muck she put on thin slices of bread – they didn’t much care for caviar shipped via London.

  Speaking to my parents and other farmers, I heard similar tales about life in the valley: the swinging fifties, a very happy valley, key parties – apparently it would take a while for a newcomer to work out who was whose husband. There was a horse-racing track on one farm, even a motor-racing circuit with vintage cars zooming through the red dust. Landed white gentry and remittance men and their mistresses got sozzled on gin and tonics served by black servants in white gloves and fezzes.

  Then came the sixties. The good times rolled.

  ‘Mom, you went to parties at La Rochelle, didn’t you?’ Tess said.

  ‘Oh, Tess, I don’t want to speak about that,’ repeated Lady Charlotte, rolling her eyes.

  But Tess knew all about La Rochelle, too. It was the estate of Sir Stephen and Lady Virginia Courtauld, wealthy English philanthropists who flew the length of Africa in their own plane in the 1950s and landed up in th
e eastern corner of the valley. The estate was in dense tropical forest, the top of which we used to be able to see from the lawn of my parents’ chicken farm. Irises and tulips and acres of pruned white roses rolled for miles, and in the afternoons guests sipped tea and played croquet on the lawns under parasols as clouds of black butterflies flew overhead. Inside, the walls were hung with Turner paintings; the ballroom supposedly had the biggest Persian carpet in the world. The couple threw lavish parties, hosting visiting royalty, British stage actors who came to town and a few lucky locals. My parents never got the nod – “We were just bloody chicken farmers,” Mom noted. The Courtaulds were famous liberals, too. It was said that La Rochelle was the only place where white Rhodesians rubbed shoulders socially with black political activists, who were frequent guests. The first ZANU constitution was signed at La Rochelle in the 1960s, and the house was never attacked by Mugabe’s guerrillas during the war.

  ‘Do you know,’ said Tess, ‘guests had to carve their names on the glass windows in the ballroom with a diamond-tipped stylus? It’s still there – you should go and see it.’

  But, in truth, Lady Charlotte wasn’t much for talking about those days. Like Unita, she was getting ready to move to South Africa.

  She didn’t want to relive losing the family farm, either. Charlotte had moved to Drifters when her eldest son, Christo, lost that estate in Inyazura. This poky cottage must have been something of a comedown.

  I asked her if she knew who took the farm.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she said, ‘the minister. Who else? He has five farms in the area.’ The minister … the Top Man.

  ‘Hang around and you might get to see him take this place, too,’ I told her.

  ‘I couldn’t bear it,’ she said. ‘Why do you think I’m leaving?’

  Christo was now working in real estate in Cape Town, selling wine farms to wealthy Germans and Americans, and Charlotte would soon join him there. I could see Charlotte retiring to an estate in the Cape, that far southern tip of Africa, where her ancestors, like mine, had landed three hundred and fifty years ago before trekking into the interior of Africa. Charlotte was now trekking back. It would be a homecoming of sorts, a closing of the circle. Whites were gathering there in increasing numbers, their backs to the godforsaken continent, their feet on the edge of the ocean. It was, quite literally, the last stop. Still, I had the feeling Lady Charlotte would be okay. She had that air about her.