The Unbearable Whiteness of Being: Farmers� Voices from Zimbabwe

Introduction: Why the Voices of White Farmers?

1 If Karenin had been a person instead of a dog, he would surely have long since said to Tereza, ‘Look, I’m sick and tired of carrying that roll around in my mouth every day. Can’t you come up with something different?’ And therein lies the whole of man’s plight. Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition. Yes, happiness is the longing for repetition, Tereza said to herself. – Milan Kundera.1 ‘We call them gooks’. – Farmer 3.2 In 2006, after having been out of the country for a while, I returned to Zimbabwe and took up employment with the Research and Advocacy Unit (RAU), who assisted various organisations and civic bodies with research they were undertaking in Zimbabwe. The first (and last) project I was contracted to assist with was interviewing white farmers about their experiences since 2000 with the commercial farming lobby group, Justice for Agriculture (JAG). That project sought to document the abuses suffered by (white) commercial farmers and the losses they had incurred as a result of the state-sponsored land occupations that began after the Constitutional Referendum in February 2000. It was while working on this project that I became interested in the history and evolution of the white farming community in Zimbabwe. Working alongside and conducting interviews with evicted white farmers gave me direct and unadulterated insights into what they had undergone, as well as first-hand experience of their responses to what had transpired. Alongside the very visible emotional and psychological scars of the land occupations and evictions, many of the farmers I interviewed related their experiences in what I initially found to be remarkable ways.3 They described the people who moved onto their farms, and the events Introduction Why the Voices of White Farmers? 2 The Unbearable Whiteness of Being: Farmers’ Voices from Zimbabwe that followed, in language and terminology reminiscent of the Liberation War, which had ended over 20 years earlier. As the epigraph to this introduction attests, the use of such words as ‘gook’, ‘terr’ and mujiba were commonplace, all highly loaded and negative terms that came into prominence within the white farming community during the war. (‘Terr’ is/was shorthand for terrorist; ‘gook’ was adopted to describe black guerrillas after US veterans who had served in Vietnam joined the Rhodesian forces as mercenaries; and mujiba was the Shona word for young boys who acted as informants and messengers for the guerrilla forces.) Such language and reaction made me question why this response was so widespread, and the ease with which the discourse of the Liberation War was so easily resuscitated. One of the farmers I interviewed mentioned that his son had recently completed a thesis on white farmers and their interactions with the state. This was Angus Selby’s ‘Commercial Farmers and the State: Interest Group Politics and Land Reform in Zimbabwe’.4 He lent me his copy, which, because of its broad historical overview of white farmers, proved invaluable reading. However, about language and discourse of white farmers after 2000, Selby had very little to say. His only comment was, ‘Like ZANU-PF’s reversion to liberation war rhetoric many older farmers resorted to terminology from that era, referring to invaders as “gooks” and younger invaders as “mujibas”’.5 No explanation was given as to why this was the case. This book is an attempt to provide answers to the clear and obvious echoes of past discourses in the white farming community. It seeks to explore the voice (or voices) of white farmers in Zimbabwe in order to establish a deeper understanding of their attitudes not only towards events of the very recent past (2000 and after), but also of the longer trajectory of Zimbabwe (and Rhodesia’s) history. Throughout Zimbabwe’s tortured past, land has been one of the categorical focal points for control, mobilisation, resistance and nation building , evidenced in both its colonial and post-colonial manifestations. As a result, the country’s white farmers, on and around whom so much of the countryside’s formative legislation and development has hinged, have not only received a great deal of attention from politicians, writers, journalists and intellectuals, but have also played a dynamic role in cataloguing and representing their own affairs. The dramatic events in Zimbabwe’s countryside since 2000 once again brought Zimbabwe’s white farmers into the spotlight. The wholesale...