Staying On, Amid Zimbabwe's Madness

The dogs come in from the east: snarling, bone-thin mongrels the size of terriers, their howls echoing down the valley to the farmhouse. Following behind them, hacking their way through the bush with sticks and metal slashers, come their owners, six men usually, squatters from the neighboring farm who are ready to beat off the hounds after they have run down a zebra, bush buck or impala.

Three years ago, at the height of the land invasions, when my father first heard the dogs, he hauled out his shotgun and drove to the edge of his property. He fired two shots in the air and the animals fled, their owners in hot pursuit. These days when he hears the dogs, he just shrugs. The game he had stocked his farm with has all been slaughtered in the last few years or has fled through holes cut in the fence by squatters. The gun is now just a small measure of protection for himself and my mother should they be attacked by thieves or bandits who periodically roam their land.

It was with some trepidation that I returned to Zimbabwe last month, the country in which I was born and spent the first 22 years of my life. I was last here a year ago, and then things were bad. My parents had just received a Section Five: a notice that the government intended, with or without their assent, to acquire their 730-acre game farm "for resettlement." They had not yet received a Section Eight, their final marching orders, but their prospects looked bleak. For the first time since the liberation war more than 25 years ago, they slept with a gun by their bed, and my mother had taken to hiding her diamond ring in a window pelmet.

Via intermittent e-mails my father had sent in the interim, I gathered things had got worse: Most of their remaining friends had emigrated, their housekeeper had died of AIDS; the next-door farm, one of the most productive in the country, had been trashed by police and the youth militia, and its 4,000 workers and their families had been made homeless. The bush was rapidly closing in on my parents.

This is Zimbabwe 25 years after Robert Mugabe came to power. Initially he was seen as a unifier, and my parents, longtime liberals, chose to stay on, even as 150,000 of the 250,000 whites fled, unwilling to live under black rule. Despite a decade of relative prosperity, the last four years have seen the country descend into political turmoil and economic ruin. After losing a referendum in 2000, Mugabe accused whites of being racist colonialists and began violently seizing their farms. Blacks who opposed the regime suffered even more.