ZIMBABWE: you have a lot to answer for.
February 2012 is the heart of a fierce Mozambican summer, but Jay and I are traveling west, through Chimoio and back over the Bvumba. I have been dreaming about writing a book about the story of our horses—but first, I know, I must see what has become of the country we used to love.
It is the first time I have crossed the border into Zimbabwe since we were forced to leave. It is after dark by the time we are through the checkpoint and traveling down the other side of the mountains. Mutare’s streets are heavy with the scent of flowering trees along its roads, and a rush of nostalgia hits me. It is like an epiphany: for a while, we were happy here.
We spend the night with old friends, but in the morning we are gone west along the Harare road. Even the main highways are pitted with potholes now, and Jay must constantly slow and swerve to avoid smashing the car’s chassis. Along the banks of the road, the telegraph poles are down, lying in tangled heaps, and the fields we pass, once rich, verdant farms, are either gone back to bush or planted with thin, straggly crops. Every ten kilometers we come to a checkpoint where police pull drivers over, ostensibly to fine them for dirty windshields or fractured mirrors, but really to ask for bribes; not even the police are paid in Zimbabwe now, and they must make their living on the country’s roads like bandits of old.
Before we venture back “home,” Jay and I head for Grasslands Agricultural Research Station at Marondera, one of the very first places Pat and I lived as a couple. The research station is wild and overgrown now, but on the outskirts of the local town lies a little graveyard. This, too, is overgrown, unkempt and untended, but we fight back the thistles and long grass and find a grave I have not seen in many years: the resting place of Nicholas, the baby we had to leave behind. We spend some time cleaning his grave and leave flowers to wilt in the harsh African sun. I do not know how long it will be before I will see him next, and as we head off, I am left with a feeling all too familiar: Zimbabwe has made me abandon him all over again.
In the afternoon, we reach Harare and spend the night at the home of my old friend Carol Johnson. Carol is widowed now and lives alone, with a dog named Scruffy, a Maltese poodle who walked in through her gate one day and has never left. There is no electricity in her part of Harare—it seems that the only way to have a constant supply is to live near a minister—and she must buy her water privately. Jay, Carol, and I spend the day fortifying ourselves before setting out. We drive north from Banket on the Chinhoyi road. In the fields there is maize, tall and strong, and for a moment my heart soars: something, I think, has survived. Then, Carol shakes her head. These are not Zimbabwean farmers, she tells me. These, Carol explains, are the Chinese. Since 2008, when the U.S. dollar was legalized, effectively ending the old Zimbabwean currency, Mugabe has been selling his country wholesale to investors from overseas, India and the Far East. Seeing the farms from which we were evicted going to waste, Mugabe sensed an opportunity to revitalize the ailing economy. Now, these lands are contracted out to mechanized Chinese farmers, the grain and other produce shipped thousands of miles to feed the starving mass of inland China.
After all of Mugabe’s rhetoric about taking the farms from the hated white colonists, he has opened his arms and invited in a colonist of a different sort. Zimbabwe is being colonized economically. He has found yet another way to rape the land.
When we get there, Two Tree Hill Farm is still and silent, its fields unfarmed, bush creeping down from the hills. Down at the dam, three black men wearing only rags see our car approaching and, fishing spears in hand, approach us and block the road. In the backseat, Carol and I listen as Jay engages them in Shona. For a moment, it is unbearably tense; I do not know what he is saying. Then, at last, the men begin to laugh. Jay draws the car around and we climb toward Crofton. I ask him how he explained who we were, that this is our land, that they are fishing the waters of our dam. He looks at me, perplexed. Of course, he said no such thing. He told them we were lost, looking for somewhere to fish. The dam, they said, is empty now. It was once so full of bream, but they have taken it all.
We reach Crofton, and Crofton isn’t there.
The only part of the house left standing is a tiny corner of brick wall where Jay’s bedroom used to be. We climb out of the car. Except for that small pile of bricks, you would not know that a house had ever stood here. You would not know that there was a garden where my children played, a paddock where our horses grazed, a corner where Kate used to hide with a Scottie pup whenever we had to sell one. I cannot even pick out the place where I lay down with Frisky as she died.
“There’s still the mango tree,” says Jay.
The fruit is unripe, but he reaches up and plucks one.
The road from Crofton to the farm has disappeared. There is a deep gully and we are unable to drive the car down to River Ranch to see what remains of the farm we started from virgin bush. Would the tobacco barns and sheds still be intact, or would they have been dismantled like the homestead on Crofton? Just as well, I think. It would bring back too many painful memories.
We head back toward Chinhoyi, but we cannot get near Palmerston Estates. A village has grown up around the old farmstead and we are not welcome here. Instead, we drive on, taking the worn, uneven road up to Carol’s old home at Anchorage Farm.
Carol, it turns out, was approached a season before by a young white man, the son of a farmer who was evicted ten years before. He had a proposition: Anchorage Farm was going to waste, unused by the war vets who occupied her; what if he were to lease the land from them, develop it for commercial agriculture again, and share a fraction of the profits with Carol? Seeing it as a way of getting something out of the farm she had loved throughout her life, Carol accepted the proposition.
Now Anchorage Farm is slowly returning to full use. There are potatoes high in the barns and workers in the fields. The Anchorage farmhouse still stands, though its grounds are overgrown and nobody has tried to beat back the bush that has taken over. Inside, the house is just a shell, only one room inhabited by a settler and his wife, the others filled with goats whose mess covers the bare ground. At first, the war vet’s wife is happy to show us inside. Even so, I feel a hundred eyes on me, the men at work in the barns and yards turning to stare at us, wondering who we are.
We wander from room to room, seeing the places where Carol used to host dinners, the room where my son Paul and her son Andy would play. None of it is familiar, and as we go from room to room, Carol begins to grow more jittery.
“Keep calm, Carol.”
“I am calm,” she insists—but she is not.
At last, as we step back out of the farmhouse, goats flocking out of our path, Carol turns to the woman.
“You know, this is my farm. You’re living on my farm.”
I am frozen, but the war vet’s wife says nothing. It is only now that I realize: I am not the only one afraid. The war vet’s wife looks suddenly bereft, unable to find the words. We are, both of us, trapped by this situation, standing on opposite sides of a chasm Mugabe himself has opened up.
“Yes, madam.”
She has adopted the old words of servitude, even though it is she who now lives on this farm.
Jay and I steer Carol toward the car, eager to be off Anchorage before it is too late.
Carol, I understand now, is not the only one entering into pacts with the war vets. Across Zimbabwe, the younger white generation—those with the skills to use the land like their fathers—are leasing land from those who took it from us. To lease land back to farmers like Pat and me would be frowned upon, but to lease to the younger generation is somehow more palatable. They call these people the Born Frees, white Zimbabweans not tarnished with the same stink of the colonial, the stigma of having fought for Rhodesia in the bush war. That they enter into these pacts is perhaps understandable; but so too is the hate the farmers of old feel at seeing their farms taken by new hands. Farmer is being set against farmer while, just outside their lines of sight, the country is being sold to the Chinese. Mugabe has achieved his objective of remaining in power, but the cost has been so great. In the morning, we drive back toward Mutare to cross back into Mozambique, and neither Jay nor I can comprehend how quickly Africa’s jewel has become a symbol of her ruin.
In Vilanculos, Pat is waiting. I will have to tell him the epiphany I have reached: Zimbabwe, like Rhodesia, is already gone. That little fire in my heart that I have always nursed, the hope that one day we might return, has finally been extinguished. You can never really go back home.
At our little rondavel by the sea, gazing out over azure waters with the archipelago hanging on the horizon, Pat is looking at photographs. Of the one hundred and four horses we brought over the mountains, we have only twenty-six left—but the herd must live on. Across the world, horses need rescuing. For us, the land invasions threw this into stark relief, but in every corner of the world the story is the same.
In the photographs, eight horses—bays and grays, geldings and mares, a small skewbald foal with inquisitive eyes and a startled expression—stand in a South African field. The farm on which they live is being sold for redevelopment, and they must find new homes. Our hope is that they can stay together, come north over another border and join us here. One day, Africa willing, our herd will be strong again—and, in that way, we will all live, the horses repaying our faith in them, Pat and I repaying their faith in us.
Together, we walk along the beach and up to the stables. There is yet time for a moonlit ride. We saddle up our old friends Lady and Brutus and take to the clifftop road. From here, we can see for miles.
I will have to tell Pat about his home, but we look out over this beautiful, chaotic corner of the world that has harbored us, and my lips remain sealed.
There will be another night.