THE drums and chanting started soon after dark. Fires had been lit all around
the farmhouse - nearly 50 of them. In their flickering light it was easy to
see the militia leaders waving guns and the terrified faces of the hundreds
of farm workers they had been rounding up all day and bringing in on
tractors, trailers and buses.
Inside the terracotta-walled house that Ben and Laura Freeth had built for
themselves and their children in the once peaceful farmlands of Chegutu, 70
miles southwest of Harare, the couple held each other and prayed.
As they paced around their bedroom they tried not to think of the stories they
had heard of people having hands, lips and ears hacked off. To block out the
sound of the pro-Mugabe slogans they repeated over and over the words of
Psalm 118: “The Lord is with me. I will not be afraid. What can man do to
me?”
“There was no way we could sleep,” said Ben Freeth. “The chanting and
sloganeering was military style - all in unison for hour after hour after
hour all the way through the night.”
Their sons Joshua, 8, and Stephen, 5, had been sent to stay with friends for
safety. Somehow Anna, their two-year-old daughter, slept in her wooden
truckle bed, looking like an angel with her white-blonde hair. Their four
dogs prowled restlessly.
The Freeths are among the last white farmers still on their land in Zimbabwe,
where only one in 10 of the original 5,000 remain. They live on Mount
Carmel, an estate owned by Laura’s father, Mike Campbell.
Earlier that day they had refused to supply food to a rally for President
Robert Mugabe and there were sure to be reprisals. At any moment the crowds
outside could be turned on them and they could be dragged out to join the pungwe,
the local Shona name for the allnight indoctrination sessions.
“We’d had letters as well as verbal warnings from people all over the
district,” Freeth said. “The election campaign is being fought on ‘100%
empowerment’, that is, taking everything that belongs to people who are not
black and giving it to the ruling party faithful.
“People were told that Mount Carmel cattle and potatoes would be dished out to
them. The party has got nothing else to offer the people . . . We assumed we
would be evicted that night.”
With his neat moustache and military bearing, Freeth, 37, is not easily
intimidated. Born in Sittingbourne, Kent, he comes from a line of military
officers – his father, grandfather and great-grandfather all served in the
Royal Artillery. He fell in love with Zimbabwe, where his family had moved
after independence in 1980 when his father was hired to set up a staff
training college for the national army.
Instead of following the family tradition Freeth went to the Royal
Agricultural College in Cirencester, Gloucestershire. “I thought there was
more to life than being shot at,” he explained.
He thought about that desire to avoid violence last Saturday night as the
beatings of workers got under way in a packing shed for mangoes that end up
on the shelves of Marks & Spencer.
The terror campaign taking place there and all over Zimbabwe is masterminded
by the officers whom his father trained - Constantine Chiwenga, commander of
the Zimbabwe Defence Forces, and Perence Shiri, head of the air force.
Freeth could not help recalling a story his father told him of catching
Chiwenga cheating. He was about to be thrown out of staff college but the
following night was rushed to hospital with two shots in his chest. “Somehow
they had missed every single vital organ,” said Freeth.
As the pungwe went on and the clock ticked towards midnight, a call
came from a neighbour, Marius Erasmus, who told them he had heard the
commotion from the main road and tried to drive to the farm but had been
stopped at a roadblock.
He managed to get through, only to come to another roadblock where war
veterans put burning logs on his bonnet and tried to force their way into
the car. He turned around and escaped through the first roadblock as his
windscreen was showered with rocks.
Laura’s brother Bruce also called from Chegutu police station, where he spent
six hours trying to get the police out.
“It is clear that they are under orders not to react,” said Freeth.
Not long after this telephone call the electricity went down and both mobile
phone networks went dead. “We were left with no communications and our way
out onto the main road was sealed off by a roadblock.” Once more they prayed
and read Psalm 118.
Eventually the sun rose with streaks of pink across the sky, heralding another
beautiful day. But the light brought no end to the horror.
“When dawn broke and the birds started to call, the chanting broke into a
noise that sounded like a terrible swarm of bees on the rampage,” Freeth
said. The beatings had started again.
Anyone believed to have supported the opposition Movement for Democratic
Change (MDC) in the first round of the presidential election in March was
made to kneel down with their heads on the ground. Cold water was then
poured over their heads until they were freezing. “We had frost that morning
and it was bitterly cold,” said Freeth.
The noise went on for several hours. Later the couple learnt that the workers
had been forced to beat one another with sticks.
“There are lots of allegations that Zanu-PF are beating people,” shouted the
leader. “We don’t beat people. You people beat each other.”
The Freeths shivered at the screams they heard. This was not the life they had
envisaged when they had married at the safari lodge built by Laura’s father
on the Biri River, where the guests sat on hay bales and a piano in a pickup
truck filled the air with music.
Today the lodge is in ruins. In one of several acts of intimidation aimed at
forcing the family from the farm, all the doors and windows were stolen, the
lavatories and sinks smashed and the thatched roofs burnt. The wildlife that
was Mike Campbell’s pride and joy has been slaughtered. Of 45 giraffes, 300
impala, 150 wildebeest, 50 eland, water-buck, warthogs and zebra, not so
much as a warthog remains.
The person who wants their farm is one of Mugabe’s closest cohorts, Nathan
Shamuyarira, information secretary for the ruling Zanu-PF. They have been
shot at, threatened, arrested and pelted with rocks at roadblocks while
their baby was in the car. The farm’s mangoes and oranges are constantly
stolen.
On the adjoining farm, occupiers have prevented Laura’s brother Bruce from
farming for five years although he still lives in his house. When Bruce’s
wife Heidi was four months pregnant with longed-for twins she caught
cerebral malaria and died, leaving him to bring up their five-year-old
daughter alone. The family believes the malaria was brought in by the war
veterans.
Despite such tragedy, the family has refused to give in, finding strength in
its faith and unity. Instead, Campbell and Freeth are the first farmers to
take the Zimbabwean president to an international court. Their case opened
in April at a tribunal of the Southern African Development Community (SADC)
in Namibia but has been repeatedly delayed by the government’s failure to
present its papers. Their fight is the subject of a forthcoming British
film, Mugabe and the White African.
Earlier this year they were hopeful of change, but since losing the first
round of the presidential elections Mugabe, who boasts that he has “degrees
in violence”, has surpassed even his own brutal record.
Posters on walls across the country proclaim “The final battle for total
control”. Pungwes have been under way all over the country to
make sure people vote “correctly” in the second round on Friday. Mashonaland
West, where the Freeths live, is particularly targeted as it is Mugabe’s
home province.
When last weekend’s pungwe finally ended, Freeth said, his
workers emerged “tight-lipped because they were told if it gets out they
will be killed. They go through the day mechanically with terror written all
over them”. He learnt that some had been flailed with barbed wire to rip the
flesh, then had herbicide poured into their wounds.
Under a system introduced after SADC negotiations earlier this year, election
results are posted at each polling station. This may have helped to prevent
Mugabe from rigging the first round, but Freeth points out that it has also
made it easy to target opposition supporters.
“Those people will not vote, still less be MDC polling agents in the next
election, because you have to vote in your own ward and they know, if they
voted MDC, their compounds will be hammered.”
Last month one of his friend’s workers travelled to his home village near the
Nyamapanda border post to visit his elderly mother. “In these areas any
movement needs written Zanu permits,” he said. “My friend’s worker was
stopped at a roadblock and had to wait two days to get someone to vouch for
him.
“During that time four people who had not got anyone to vouch for them were
asked if they wore long sleeves or short sleeves. The first replied ‘short
sleeves’. They cut his right arm off at the top with an axe. The other three
replied ‘long sleeves’. They cut each of their right hands off.
“I spoke to him when he came back and he was deeply traumatised. He said that
he saw the hands wriggling on the ground, detached from their owners. Those
hands cannot vote any more. I have heard of many other hands like that.”
So horrified is Freeth by what is going on around him that last Wednesday he
went to Harare to beg the international observers to visit Chegutu.
“I went to the Sheraton where the SADC observers are and Meikles hotel where
the African Union mission are based and pleaded with them, ‘You’re observers
you need to see’.”
He offered them beds on his farm but they were noncommittal. So far no
observer has gone to the area.
Meanwhile, the tide comes ever nearer. Last Tuesday their neighbours, the
Etheridges, were ejected from their farm and forced to watch as all their
belongings were looted.
Four years ago Freeth wrote a moving letter to his elder son Joshua, who was
then four, explaining why he and Laura had taken the decision to stay while
so many others fled (click
here to read the letter ).
It went on to list many of the terrible things that had happened but insisted:
“I feel this is my home and I’m not going to be pushed out by people who
just want to steal and destroy it.”
Since the night he wrote his letter to Joshua, however, the situation has
grown far worse than he had ever imagined. It is not just the violence. With
inflation estimated at more than 1,000,000%, there are eight billion
Zimbabwean dollars to the pound.
“The shops are empty,” he said. “In Harare this week we queued for three hours
to buy a loaf of bread at a cost of 2.5 billion dollars. To get food means
driving to South Africa, a 10-hour journey each way with often seven hours
at the border.”
The boys’ school is still open but Freeth said he had looked everywhere for an
exercise book last week. None was to be found.
Among his sons’ fellow pupils are the children of the deputy justice minister.
“He stole two of my friends’ farms but his son and mine play cricket
together,” said Freeth. “One part of me thinks I shouldn’t allow this but
the other part thinks we mustn’t let the future generation be contaminated
by hatred.”
Despite everything, he claims that they have made no plans to move, pointing
out that 250 workers and their family members rely on them. “We’ve come
through so far,” he said. “I believe we’re here for good and if we just
leave, we obviously lose everything - but what happens to everyone left
here?
“Of course we think about it and talk about it,” he added. “But our philosophy
has always been: where there’s darkness, you have to bring light, and the
way to do that is to pray and publicise and to bring cases to the courts.”
Last night new fires were lit and the drumming and chanting started all over
again.
