‘They turned me into an old man in one night.’ (1)
There is a moment in Mugabe and the White African that suddenly and vividly defines the banality, the infantile pointlessness, of those directing Zimbabwe’s violent collapse into anarchy. Peter Chamada, the son of Mugabe’s political ally Nathan Shamuyarira, has arrived on a white farmer’s land in his shining new ToyotaPrado and is taking photographs on an expensive mobile phone. He glares, wild-eyed with contempt, into the camera and declares, ‘This land is now my home. The government has taken it from you people [the white farmers] to redistribute to the poor black majority. This land belongs to the black peasants.’As the records show, the land taken from some 4,000 productive white Zimbabwean farmers, often with violent force, has been handed almost exclusively to Mugabe’s cronies – pliable judges, air vice-marshals, provincial administrators, girlfriends of ministers and assorted relations such as Chamada.
(1) One has to wonder what the Guardian newspaper and other “news” outlets were doing back in the 90’s when their own countrymen were initially being killed and disenfranchised in South Africa…