The Last Resort Read online

  EIGHT

  The Old Boer Wants His Cattle Back

  THE MOST FAMOUS farmer on the property was harder to pin down.

  Piet de Klerk – Oom Piet, as he was known for miles around – and his wife, Mienkie, occupied Cottage 6, Cassia, the one farthest from my parents’ house, in the saddle of the hills, under the shadow of a tall blue-gum tree.

  He was hard to pin down because every morning we would see his battered jalopy clatter down my parents’ driveway, turn left on the main road, and disappear.

  ‘There goes Piet,’ Dad would say. ‘Off to try to get his cattle back.’

  He would be gone much of the day, and I didn’t want to disturb them in the evenings. Piet was 76, Mienkie 74, and while they were in excellent health, they were very much the senior citizens of the property. I had heard about Oom Piet since I was a skinny kid kicking a rugby ball around the fields of Chancellor Junior School. His youngest sons were my seniors in high school and very good rugby players, but Piet was a legend: not only had he captained Rhodesia and come close to playing for the Springboks, he’d also once scored a try against the mighty All Blacks.

  I finally got to meet him the week before I returned to New York, but only because his car had broken down. I ended up spending several evenings with him and Mienkie on their porch, gazing out at the giant blue gum casting a long shadow across the vlei.

  Piet was a giant of a man. Over six foot five tall, with legs like baobab trunks and hands the size of baskets, he had to stoop just to get through the doorway to the veranda. Like Frans, he too had a scrapbook, but it wasn’t filled with rugby clippings. It was a collection of articles from foreign and local newspapers that chronicled the destruction of his farm, Kondozi, a story that had taken on the dimensions of Shakespearean tragedy in the area. It was said that even senior members of ZANU-PF were ashamed of what they did to that farm.

  It was a 3,500-hectare horticultural farm 24 kilometres southwest of Drifters that exported runner beans, baby corn, sugar snap peas, mangetout, red peppers and other vegetables to Sainsbury’s and Tesco. The mangetout I bought at the Clapham Tesco down the road from my London hovel in the late 1990s were grown on Kondozi.

  It hadn’t always been a horticulture project.

  Piet, who’d come to Rhodesia from Cape Town in 1953, bought the farm in 1968 and originally grew tobacco and raised cattle. He stayed on the farm throughout the guerrilla war, miraculously escaping with his life after being blown up by a land mine while driving in an armoured truck on the edge of his land in 1976.

  After independence he became the chief instigator in the construction of Osborne Dam, finally completed in 1990, which overnight brought irrigation to the driest parts of the valley. You never could have grown vegetables for export in the area before the dam.

  By 2000 Piet and Mienkie had retired to a farmhouse on Kondozi – named for a river on the land – and three of their four sons, Piet junior, Thewie and Koos, ran the operation. Kondozi was unlike other large commercial farms in the area in that it operated on an outgrowers system. The De Klerk sons trained teams of black agronomists and technicians to travel the area on motorbikes teaching black peasant farmers to grow vegetables to the standards demanded by European supermarkets. Dawson Jombe was one of their first technical managers.

  Kondozi provided small-scale black farmers with seeds, fertiliser and advice, and then bought the vegetables from them at harvest (minus the inputs they had given them), thereby guaranteeing a market. Six thousand people were directly employed on the farm – the biggest employer in the valley. But eighty small-scale black farmers in the area had become prosperous and successful through its outgrowers scheme, and the project supported some seven thousand black families in the region – probably as many as thirty-five thousand people.

  ‘We had a beautiful thing going there,’ purred Mienkie, a classy Afrikaner who spoke in fast, clipped sentences between elegant drags on her Kingsgate extra-longs. ‘We had a bus that would drive out from Mutare every day with our accountants and technicians. We had a modern office complex filled with computers. A clinic with a doctor, four nurses and an ambulance. We had a very beautiful thing going there.’

  Kondozi earned US$15 million a year in vital foreign currency for the country, and under the government’s own land reform laws was classified as an export processing zone, which meant it was exempt from resettlement. In 2001, hundreds of settlers began staking out plots in fields that were supposed to grow prize vegetables. Instead of confronting them, the De Klerk sons started training them to grow vegetables. In two seasons, settlers with little farming experience were suddenly producing food fit for European markets.

  But if Unita Herrer’s mistake was to offer her land to the government, the De Klerks’ mistake was much bigger. They were involved in politics. The sons secretly funded the opposition, and had hosted that clandestine meeting before the 2002 election for MDC volunteers. The government, it turned out, knew all along.

  The sons were warned by the area’s local MP, Chris Mushowe, to stop funding the MDC. The sons refused. The backlash was brutal – and personal. In the end it wasn’t ordinary ruling party officials who claimed Kondozi farm: it was the country’s Minister of Agriculture, Joseph Made, and Mushowe, who by then had been promoted to transport minister.

  In 2003 Koos de Klerk and his young family were tied up in their home for two days, their young daughter threatened with rape. When they left the farm, Mushowe moved into their house. On Christmas Day 2003, Made arrived and declared that Kondozi was being taken over by the Agriculture and Rural Development Authority, which already owned a twenty-thousand-hectare ranch, Transsau, right next door, on which nothing grew. Made ordered Kondozi’s workers to leave. They refused.

  It was common by now – and astonishing, given the colonial history of Zimbabwe – for black farmworkers to side with white landowners. What was not so common was for farmworkers to attack and repel better-armed invaders. But it happened at Kondozi.

  ‘It was amazing,’ Piet recalled. ‘Some of our female workers were picking green beans when they were approached by thirty war vets. The leader told the female supervisor to get off the land because they were taking it. She refused. He started beating her with a stick. She screamed for help on her mobile radio. The call was picked up by a team of fifteen young men erecting trellises for runner beans with fence posts. They each grabbed a post and ran to the rescue.’

  Mienkie chuckled.

  ‘Some of the men were the settlers who first occupied us in 2002. They were making a good living now. And they didn’t take kindly to the war vets beating their women.’

  A fight ensued in the middle of the bean field. The war vets were routed. Three were badly injured, others scattered, and one disappeared. The next day the police arrived searching for the missing man and accused Thewie de Klerk of abducting him. The man was finally reported spotted in a town thirty-two kilometres away.

  ‘It seems that he didn’t stop running,’ said Mienkie.

  But the fight back was only ever going to be brief. When the war veterans returned weeks later, they came with the force of an army. Water cannons were used to crush the last resistance. Within a month, one of the most productive and progressive farms in Africa collapsed.

  Millions of dollars’ worth of equipment, including forty-eight tractors, a dozen high-tech transport buses, twenty-six motorbikes and tons of fertiliser and chemicals, were looted. European supermarkets cancelled their contracts. The outgrowers scheme folded. Outraged at what had happened, a local chief named Marange, whose villagers worked and farmed for Kondozi, went to Harare to confront President Mugabe himself. He got an audience with Vice President Joseph Msika, who launched an investigation. It was said that even the Top Man was ashamed. The fallout from the collapse of Kondozi went right to the very top.

  Incredibly, Piet and Mienkie remained on the farm after all their sons had been evicted.

  ‘At one point I went to the Odzi police station,’ Pie
t said. ‘I told them: “Go tell Mr Mushowe that if he wants my farm, he must come and shoot me and bury me there.”’

  The message got through. When the police produced a map of how Kondozi would be divided, a red circle had been drawn around Oom Piet’s house and section. It was marked Mr de Klerk’s land. He would be allowed to stay. But by then the old couple were isolated: their sons had all left, and the farm they had created out of raw bush thirty-six years earlier had been ransacked. They joined the convoy of refugees to Drifters.

  I paged through the scrapbook as Piet and Mienkie spoke, and I came across the same article I had read – and then smoked – down at the camp with John Muranda a week earlier, the one that reported a government minister’s telling villagers at political rallies that Piet de Klerk was related to FW de Klerk, the last white president of South Africa, and that he wanted to enslave blacks and bring apartheid to Zimbabwe.

  ‘What did you think when you started hearing that?’ I asked.

  Piet smiled and shrugged. Then he said something that almost made me fall off my chair.

  ‘But I am related to FW de Klerk. I come from the same Burgersdorp De Klerks. That was about the only thing the bloody minister got right about me.’

  I was stunned, but now that I looked at him again, I could see the resemblance. They had the same bald, ostrich-egg head, the same receding crown of hair, even the same wire-rimmed glasses. Oom Piet was a decade older and about a foot taller, but they could almost be mistaken for brothers.

  Mienkie said, ‘They look the same, but of course my husband is much sexier.’

  The De Klerks, I discovered, were more than just new residents on my parents’ land. They had become close friends with my parents. Dad and Piet would watch rugby games together on TV and talk about what the best possible Springbok team was. Typically, Piet being Afrikaans and my father a half-English South African, they never came close to agreeing. When a dear friend of my mother’s – the last of her bridge ladies – died of cancer, Mienkie walked up to the house with flowers and a fresh-baked melktert. ‘Ros, I know you’ve lost someone very dear and I can never replace her,’ she said, ‘but I want you to know I am here for you always.’

  Mienkie was a former teacher like my mother, but even better read, given to quoting Shakespeare and Proust one minute, dirty one-liners the next.

  ‘Look at your husband, Minks,’ Dad once teased her. ‘Struggling all day to get his cows back. A good man is hard to find.’

  ‘A hard man is good to find,’ she said, deadpan, between drags on her cigarette.

  It was wonderful for me to see that my parents had these new friends. They were helping one another, adapting, hanging in.

  One of the reasons they got on so well was that they were in the same boat. Like my parents, the De Klerks had invested all their money in their farm; they hadn’t filtered a fortune out of the country, as other white farmers – wisely, it could now be seen – had done. They were paying a price for investing in their own country. Their children were scattered, too, but not to foreign cities. Thewie was farming in Mozambique, Piet junior and Koos in Zambia – countries whose black governments welcomed skilled white farmers.

  News of the tragedy at Kondozi had reached as far as Zambia. Mienkie told me that she and Piet had recently been to visit their sons there. ‘We were driving through immigration on the Zambia side and this uniformed black customs lady ran after our car. I got such a fright. She came and tapped on my window. “Are you Mrs de Klerk? The farming De Klerk?” I was horrified. I thought, Oh, God, what have I done now? I rolled down the window, and she said: “I am sorry about what happened to your family in Zimbabwe. It is an honour to have your sons in our country.” I mean, what could I say? I had tears in my eyes. What a beautiful thing to say.’

  I loved the evenings I spent with Piet and Mienkie, and I especially enjoyed Piet’s old rugby stories. He told me about the try he’d scored for Rhodesia against the All Blacks. In that 1960 game he locked against Colin Meads, one of the greatest rugby players of all time. Piet chuckled as he recalled the story.

  ‘At one point I was on the ground and Meads was standing right on top of me in his big boots. I thought, Meads, you bastard! Our captain caught the ball at the next lineout. He kicked it ahead. I went charging full speed after it. I was pretty fast at that time. I used to train by running through my tobacco fields at night with a flashlight. I collected the ball on the twenty-five-metre line. Meads was chasing me. He caught me about three metres out, but I carried him on my back over the try line. I had scored! Hell, ja, I enjoyed that. It was a good try. Of course, Meads stepped all over me after that. Like he was crushing grapes.’

  Piet was still in touch with all his rugby friends in South Africa, many of them famous Springboks, and he said they all thought he and Mienkie were mad to still be living here. One had even offered to build a house for them on his farm if they just would leave.

  ‘That was nice of him, ja, but ag no, we can’t go live down south.’

  I thought I knew why. The deaths of fourteen white farmers in Zimbabwe had made front-page international news these past five years, but it was a little-reported fact that far more white farmers – some said as many as a thousand – had been murdered on their land in South Africa since 1994. But that wasn’t the reason Piet and Mienkie wouldn’t go live there.

  He looked out at the pretty garden in front of him, the grassy vlei, and the smoky pink sunset turning to black behind the bluegum tree.

  ‘Ag no, man. Mienks and I, we’re Zimbabweans. We love it here. I mean, look at this place. It’s beautiful. A cottage, a garden, our friends around us. What more could we want?’

  But there was one thing I knew Oom Piet did want, and very badly. It was what made him get up at dawn every morning, clatter down my parents’ driveway in his battered white Mazda, turn left on the main road and drive out toward that farm he had started out of virgin bush nearly forty years ago. He wanted his cattle back. When he and Mienkie left Kondozi, they had left behind 300 Simmental cattle, 170 head of sheep, some goats and a pet zebra named Stripey that thought it was a horse. For Piet, the loss of his livestock was never part of any land reform programme, and he was now fighting with the new occupants of the farm and meeting with local chiefs and ruling party officials to try to get them back.

  ‘All I want is my cattle,’ he told me one evening. ‘All I want is my cattle …’

  My heart sank when I heard those words. I thought of Hammy believing he would get his farm back. It would never happen. They were gone forever.

  And yet it wasn’t only an eccentric band of refugee white farmers who now occupied the cottages at the back of my parents’ land. I was surprised to discover that my parents had several black tenants besides Dawson, and as the likes of Unita and Lady Charlotte moved on, more black families moved in.

  It wasn’t as if my parents had turned down black tenants before. The cottages had all been purchased by whites back in the 1990s when they were first built, and when those owners left the country they either sold or leased their homes to friends or relatives. As the white population dwindled, however, those absentee owners knew no one left to rent to, and the houses stood empty. Empty cottages were routinely burgled by bandits, putting everyone’s safety at risk, so my father took it upon himself to find tenants. Cottages he didn’t fill with white farmers he leased to black families from Mutare or the valley.

  Growing the bush on the front of the land was a physical barrier, a camouflage; having the cottages occupied made sense politically. ‘Anyone coming to take this place will have to do more than just evict us,’ Dad reckoned. ‘They’ll have to evict a whole lot of black people, too. It might make even them question the morality of their behaviour.’

  My father was starting to play a cunning political game.

  I had already got to know Dawson on those evenings down at the bar. He had been referred to my parents by Piet and Mienkie de Klerk, who viewed him as the best technical manager they’d
ever had at Kondozi.

  The next black tenant, however, was chosen out of pure self-interest.

  One of the original cottage occupants, a stalwart of the community named Dave Burnett, mentioned to my father that a black businessman he knew from Mutare, a dapper, middle-aged gentleman named Charles Mhlanga, was interested in leasing number 11.

  ‘What does he do?’ Dad asked.

  ‘He’s a senior financial manager at ZESA in town,’ said Dave.

  Dad’s eyes lit up as if charged by a kilowatt of power from the national grid. ZESA was the Zimbabwe Electricity Supply Authority. The power on the farm was starting to fail regularly. The lights were frequently out. Bandits stole power cables and valuable copper wire to smelt down and export to China. It was hard to get ZESA technicians to tend to all the faults. But with a senior ZESA official living on the land? That would be different.

  My father practically pushed Charles Mhlanga into number 11.

  ‘ZESA Man,’ Mom and Dad nicknamed him – a superhero with a magical ability to create light – and for a while Drifters had one of the most regular power supplies in the valley. Within minutes of a blackout Dad would phone ZESA Man or simply drive around to his cottage. ‘Sorry, Charles, lights are out. Can you call your men?’

  Even Charles couldn’t perform miracles, though. Within a year the entire country was, quite literally, beginning to go dark. The power turbines at Hwange, near Victoria Falls, were collapsing because of mismanagement and the loss of skilled staff, and the government, unable to pay the bills for the power it now had to import from Zambia, Congo and South Africa, started introducing rolling blackouts known as load-shedding.