THE HOUGH FAMILY had gone to church as usual on Sunday morning. It was a glorious late summer day, a few small puffs of cloud chasing each other across the sky, and sun streaming through the church windows trapping long fingers of dust. As always, with getting the three children ready, they arrived late, creeping in the back expecting to find the service in full swing. Instead the congregation was very very solemn and praying and we didn't know what was going on so we stayed at the back trying to find out.
Marondera was one of the richest tobacco-growing areas in the country, and some of Zimbabwe's biggest farmers were at church. The New Life Centre was non-denominational and its Sunday morning service very much a social occasion-a chance for farmers and their families, often living on isolated homesteads, to get together. Afterwards they would head to the club for a braai or a roast beef lunch and a game of tennis or golf. It was their one chance in the week to take a break from worrying about absent rains or indolent workers.
But that Sunday was different. All around the Houghs familiar white faces were stained with tears or drawn tight with terror and there was the occasional stifled sob. It was clear something terrible had happened. Eventually someone whispered something so shocking that at first they thought they must have misheard.
A local farmer, David Stevens, had been murdered by war vets. Just round the corner in Borradaile Hospital, three other farmers who had tried to save him lay seriously injured. John Osborne, Gary Luke and Steve Krynauw had all been bludgeoned to unconsciousness and dumped in the bush. Two others, Stuart Gemmill and Ian Hardy, were still missing and a search party was under way.
Nigel and Claire were horrified. The results of the referendum in February had been followed by invasions of hundreds of white-owned farms by people demanding land. They called themselves war vets but most of them were youths who could not possibly have fought in a war that had been over for 20 years and were probably just drawn from the million-plus unemployed. Each invasion followed a similar pattern. Gangs armed with axes and pangas would move onto a farm, round up the workers, beat them and force them to attend all-night pungwes and chant party slogans as they had during the bush war. But until then nobody had been killed.
The Stevenses were not just anonymous figures to the Houghs. They had been friends of Dave Stevens and his vivacious Swedish wife Maria with her mass of curly black hair, and their children had even played together. The Stevenses’ farm was only about 13 miles away and Maria had just recently visited them to look at their ostriches. Now she was widowed at 39, left alone with four children, Marc, 15, Brenda, 13, and two-year-old twins Warren and Sebastian. Claire had taught with Gary Luke's wife Jenny, and both the Lukes and the Osbornes were members of their church. It was a real shock. These were people just down the road, not in Bulawayo or the lowveld; it was someone here, part of our community, people from our church.
Most of the congregation were farming families and the service ended with more prayers offered for the injured and missing men. I think every one of us was thinking. That could have been me. Afterwards, they huddled together in a state of shock to discuss what had happened and piece together what they knew.
As on many farms, war vets had been squatting on Arizona Farm in Macheke for about a month, constantly demanding food from Dave Stevens and harassing his workers. On the previous Friday evening, the squatters had beaten up some of the workers and allegedly raped the daughter of one. The following morning the farm-workers had retaliated and chased some of the war vets away. Police arrived and detained some of the workers. A large group of war vets then returned, this time armed, and demanded to see Stevens. He radioed the local network for help and telephoned his friend John Osborne. But before Osborne could arrive, Stevens had been overpowered, his hands bound up with wire, and pushed into the passenger seat of his own Land Rover. He was then driven off, in between a car containing two armed men and a minibus packed with around 30 war vets. The group that remained set fire to the tobacco barns, then looted the house.
Osborne had rounded up two other farmers to help, Gary Luke and Steve Krynauw. They arrived at the dust-track turn-off to Arizona Farm just as the convoy was roaring off along the road spraying dust. They saw Stevens's vehicle and he lifted up his wrists to show that he was handcuffed so they raced after it to Murehwa, about 25 miles away. As they entered the township, one of the war vets opened fire on them out of the window of a vehicle, so they drove into the courtyard of the police station to seek refuge. But the police simply stood by as the war vets marched in, one of them waving a rifle, and seized the farmers one by one.
Osborne was the first taken, driven along the road to the local ZANU-PF office where he was beaten with fanbelts and sticks until his glasses were smashed and his head was pouring with blood. Then he was thrown into a room at the back where Stevens was lying on the floor with his hands tied. Both were beaten once more, then put into a car with a blanket over their heads and driven into the bush. There they were dragged out, harangued for not supporting ZANU-PF and struck with clubs and iron bars over and over again. Suddenly a shot rang out and Stevens's body slumped to the ground. Osborne waited in horror for the same to happen to him when the voice of a woman he had once helped suddenly called out, ‘He's all right, he's Mr Bluegums!’
‘Yes, he's all right, he's Mr Bluegums,’ shouted someone else. Osborne had no idea what they meant, but his life was spared. Bruised and bleeding, he was left at a house in the township from where he was evacuated to Borradaile hospital at about 10 p.m. on the Saturday night.
Meanwhile Steve Krynauw and Gary Luke had their hands and feet bound with wire, then were blindfolded and bundled into Stevens's Land Rover. They were bumped around for a while until the vehicle lurched to a halt and a heavy object was thrown on top of them. It was ice-cold and with dread they realized it must be the dead body of Dave Stevens.
The two farmers were taken to a hill north of Murehwa where another mob had gathered waiting to beat them senseless. ‘You're MDC supporters and you're going to die!’ shouted the crowd as they pounded them with iron bars, axe handles and large rocks. Convinced they were going to be killed, the men were tossed into a Toyota pick-up and driven around as they drifted in and out of consciousness. The vehicle eventually broke down and they were whacked a few more times and left for dead on a bridge.
Both men came to in the early hours and managed to untie each other's hands. It was raining heavily and the waters of the river below were rising. The two men began to fear that the pick-up would be swept off the bridge and they would be drowned, thinking that perhaps that was why they had been left there. They managed to break out of the back and started walking, barefoot and bleeding, through the bush. After about ten miles they came to a farm, only to find the owner had fled. But he had left his Land Cruiser so they broke in and drove to safety. They too were taken to the hospital in Marondera. There it was discovered that, aside from massive bruising, Luke had a fractured skull and Krynauw a fractured cheekbone.
Two other farmers, Ian Hardy and Stuart Gemmill, who had driven into Murehwa to try to find out what had happened to the others, had been taken to the ZANU-PF headquarters. There they were savagely beaten, then driven to some hills where they were forced to walk up to a cave. They were beaten long into the night and eventually abandoned, gagged and bound with nylon rope, bleeding from their wounds. At the time of the church service they still had not been located.
As the Houghs listened to the initial garbled accounts of what had happened, Claire felt her insides twist with terror. They had bought their farm, Kendor, for US$350,000 just after getting married in 1995 and put everything they had into it. Apart from growing tobacco, they kept ostriches and had borrowed a further US$200,000 to set up a factory producing shoes and bags from the leather as well as safari clothes. Until that Sunday morning, they had thought the farm invasions were just a ploy to intimidate people before the forthcoming elections in June. Now it was something much more sinister. As they left church, other farmers from the area around Arizona Farm were arriving in Marondera in pick-ups piled high with cases, all fleeing Macheke.
She could not imagine what Dave Stevens's widow must be feeling. Maria Stevens was not even from Zimbabwe but had met Dave while working for an aid agency, so she had not grown up through the experience of war like the rest of them. The only blessing was that she and the children had been away on a trip to Harare when the attack happened.
Maria's good looks had made her a talking point among the male farmers. She was a very energetic lady with lots of hair, said Nigel. This guy Sir Nicholas Parr used to sit next to me at the ostrich meetings and he'd say very loudly in his posh British accent, ‘I only come to these meetings to look at Maria Stevens's lovely legs.’ He was deaf and didn't realize that everyone could hear and I used to be very embarrassed.
Stevens seemed an unlikely victim for a racist attack. While some white farmers still whipped their workers and one even had a portrait of Mussolini over the fireplace, he had been regarded as a good and fair boss. With interest rates that had hit 55 per cent, and inflation more than 60 per cent, it was increasingly difficult to make a living from farming. But even though his 400-hectare farm was heavily in debt like those of most farmers, he maintained a school and beer hall for his workers and gave them 10 per cent of his earnings as an annual bonus.
It was clear that Stevens had been carefully targeted to send out a warning for another reason, and it was this that really alarmed Claire. Mugabe's proposed new constitution, which would have enabled him to seize all white land, had galvanized many white farmers into getting involved in politics for the first time since independence. They had helped the newly formed opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) with funds, offices, organizational skills and transport to take workers to vote No in the referendum. This enabled Mugabe to blame a ‘conspiracy of whites’ for blocking his new constitution, and his spin doctor Moyo even claimed that they had brought fellow whites from South Africa for the weekend to vote.
Stevens was an active MDC supporter and had paid for his backing with his life. The reason that Claire was so worried was that Nigel too had been helping the MDC. So involved was he that an official letter from its leader Morgan Tsvangirai was on the desk in his study, authorizing him to solicit funds in South Africa.
When they got home from church, the couple sent their children outside with their maid Aqui to play on the trampoline and in the Wendy house. Their wide-screen satellite TV was usually tuned to sport but that Sunday they switched it over to news. On every channel-Sky, BBC, CNN, SABC-Zimbabwe was suddenly the headline story. The Commercial Farmers' Union had hired planes to search for the missing farmers Gemmill and Hardy, and they had finally been found and also taken to hospital in Marondera. The BBC had already interviewed some of the survivors, lying in their hospital beds, bloodied, bruised and deeply traumatized. John Osborne had an ugly black eye, and had suffered concussion, five broken ribs and a collapsed lung. ‘It was unreal,’ he said, breathing with difficulty. ‘These guys are not playing, they are deadly serious and out of control.’
Television footage showed the blackened remains of the Stevenses' farm. It had been razed to the ground along with the couple's entire tobacco crop and many of the workers' houses. All 300 workers were now left homeless and jobless. Other farmers were filmed fleeing the area-around 50 families had left Marondera that day.
As Claire watched the reports, with the bright sun outside and the sounds of the children playing happily with Aqui, laughing and clambering over her, she felt a cold dread creep over. I had young children and I suddenly felt very vulnerable. If it came to it, how would we know who to trust? I wanted to leave.
That morning Mugabe had flown back from Cuba where he had been visiting his friend and ally Fidel Castro and attending a summit of developing countries. The BBC report showed him arriving at Harare airport to be greeted by large crowds of toyi-toying supporters in T-shirts bearing his bespectacled face or wrapped in bright cottons printed with cockerels.
Nigel turned up the television. We expected him to condemn the murder and rein in the war vets. Instead, they watched the President be warmly welcomed by the war vet leader Chenjerai Hunzvi, who had recently adopted the name Hitler. Mugabe was on fist-waving form. ‘There is an expectation that I will say to the war veterans “Get off the land,”’ he said coldly. ‘I will not do that … we warned the white farmers not to be provocative, not to take up weapons. If you do that you will suffer the consequences.’
As he watched Mugabe speak, Nigel's usual cheerful bluster deserted him. I realized that we were alone. The government was not going to do anything to stop the invasions; in fact it was beginning to dawn on him that it might even be behind them. Many of the farmers whose land had been invaded had reported that the squatters had been brought in on government and army trucks.
Although the identities of the Macheke war vet leaders behind the killing of Dave Stevens were well known to the police, no action was taken for the killing of Stevens. Later, government authorities even blamed Stevens for his own murder, and claimed it was he who had provoked the violence. Mugabe told journalists: ‘He was the one who started the war. He was the one who started the firing.’
What had happened to Stevens meant there was always this fear, that threat, there was now an uncertainty all the time, you never knew how far they'd go. They'd learnt the procedure where they'd go and get the guys drunk and high on mbanje. Then they'd come and jambanja you and once in that state anything could happen and you knew the authorities would do nothing.
Two days after Stevens's murder, Nigel played his weekly tennis match with some farmer friends. He was astonished when one of them asserted that Stevens had brought his death on himself by getting involved with politics, and soon found himself in a bitter argument.
I said, ‘So that's his crime, that he did the right thing?’ recalled Nigel. There were a lot of mixed feelings among our community about the situation: Do you do the right thing and openly support the MDC, or should we help them and do it quietly, or should we stay away altogether like the whites had done in Kenya and say, ‘It's their problem, the blacks, nothing to do with the whites, let them sort it out! A lot of people argued that we should work with the government of the day, they're the people in power and we have to work within their system.
Tuesday 18 April 2000, three days after Stevens's murder, was the twentieth anniversary of independence. It was a national holiday, but, far from celebrating, the white farming community watched the proceedings with trepidation, radios and mobile phones at the ready for any emergency.
Soon the radios and telephone lines were buzzing. Early that morning a second white farmer had been murdered. Forty-two-year-old Martin Olds had been surrounded at Compensation Farm in Nymandlovu near Bulawayo by around 100 war vets, some armed with AK-47s firing into the house. One of the bullets hit his leg, smashing the bone. He radioed for help but local farmers could not reach him because police roadblocks had been set up to stop them getting through. Olds managed to splint his shattered calf with a chair leg and for three hours held off his attackers by crawling from room to room firing out with a pistol. Eventually they set his house on fire by throwing in petrol bombs fashioned from beer bottles to smoke him out. He started running a bath to escape the smoke but he was gunned down in the bathroom and forced outside. As Olds lay spread-eagled on the ground, he was shot, then hacked to death.
There was no doubt that the brutal attack was a deliberate targeted killing with the collusion of the authorities. After killing him, the attackers returned through the police roadblock waving their guns and singing liberation songs. Like Stevens, Martin Olds had been an active supporter of the MDC. He left behind a disabled wife, Kathy, and two teenage children who were away in Bulawayo during the attack.
It was not the only incident that day. Later it would emerge that the same morning the car of the MDC leader had been ambushed in Buhera and set on fire. Tsvangirai was not travelling in it but his driver and colleague were both killed.
Once again, instead of denouncing Olds's killing, Mugabe's Independence Day address to the nation was laden with anti-white rhetoric. ‘What we reject is the persistence of vestigial attitudes from the Rhodesian yesteryears-attitudes of master race, master colour, master owner and master employer,’ he said.
Afterwards he gave an interview to Reuben Barwe of the ZBC that left no room for doubt over what he thought of the whites. ‘Our present state of mind is that you are now our enemies because you have really behaved as enemies of Zimbabwe,’ he complained. ‘We are full of anger. Our entire community is angry and that is why we have the war veterans seizing land.’
But far from a spontaneous uprising as Mugabe claimed, it was increasingly clear that this was an organized campaign. The war vets' trucks were brazenly left in the car park of the ZANU-PF headquarters and Hunzvi said the party had paid him 20 million Zim dollars (then about £330,000) to carry out the invasions. This was the ‘Unfinished War’, with prominent ZANU-PF figures and army officials from the liberation struggle directing events. One of the key organizers was Perence Shiri, head of the air force and former leader of the notorious Fifth Brigade.
He could hardly have chosen a more unpleasant figure to implement his operations than Hitler Hunzvi with his black leather trench coat and ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ ringtone on his mobile. Apart from his dubious war record and his ex-wife's allegations of domestic violence, his surgery in Harare was becoming notorious as a torture centre. The red-bricked building in the township of Budiriro with ‘Dr CH Hunzvi’ written in black over the entrance looked innocuous. But it was well known that anyone suspected of links with the opposition might be kidnapped from the streets and dragged inside to be beaten senseless with iron bars or clubs wrapped in barbed wire. Only when one man was tortured so severely that he died, sparking off riots in the township, did police intervene. No action was taken against Hunzvi.
Hunzvi himself did nothing to dispel his violent reputation. ‘If the white farmers do not give us what we want they will bury themselves down six feet!’ he told cheering supporters at a rally.
Despite such provocation, the white farmers' union urged their members to show restraint and avoid confrontation, recommending in a special leaflet that ‘farmers endeavour to be constructive’ Instead the CFU leadership took the legal route to court to contest the invasions. But the High Court order they obtained declaring them illegal was simply ignored by the police.
By the end of April 2000, nearly 1,000 farms had been invaded and the numbers were increasing every day. Those under occupation faced daily harassment. Throughout the country, mobs were holding white farmers hostage inside their farms, smashing their windows with iron bars if they tried to resist. Makeshift roadblocks were springing up-logs balanced on oil drums manned by thugs who gave themselves names like Saddam or Napoleon and whose telltale red eyes usually meant they were high on mbanje. Rural Zimbabwe once more felt as if it was in a state of war, dark columns of smoke rising from burning fields.
With the President having declared farmers as enemies of state, ZANU-PF offices being used as headquarters for invasions, and the police refusal to uphold the court order, more and more farmers started to flee. Rumours abounded. According to one of the most widely believed, all the whites were going to be killed en masse on Easter Sunday. Trucks packed up with household contents started to be a regular sight, and auction houses were doing a flourishing trade in velour sofas, tasselled lampshades and Andy Williams LPs.
First thing every morning, long queues formed outside the British High Commission in Harare to apply for passports. Many had relinquished theirs because Mugabe had made it illegal to retain two nationalities. But the British government had revealed it had plans for the evacuation of its 20,000 citizens in Zimbabwe and everyone wanted to book their place on the plane out if it came to that. White farmers who had never queued for themselves in their lives stood meekly in line for hours.
The British evacuation plan was a sign of just how powerless Tony Blair's government had found itself in trying to contain the Zimbabwean President. Mugabe had always been an Anglophile, a professed admirer of the Queen, and a lover of cricket which he described as ‘a game that civilizes people and creates gentlemen’. Once he was even rumoured to be trying to purchase a castle in Scotland. But when he met Blair at the Commonwealth Summit in Edinburgh in 1997 just after the Labour leader had become Prime Minister, the two men had not got on at all. The relationship soured further when Clare Short, the International Development Secretary, wrote a tactless letter to Mugabe's Agriculture Minister, stating that the Blair government did not accept it had any responsibility to meet the cost of land reform in Zimbabwe, despite what had been agreed at Lancaster House in 1979. ‘We are a new government from diverse backgrounds without links to former colonial interests,’ she wrote. ‘My own origins are Irish and as you know we were colonized not colonizers.’
Mugabe had, however, struck a chord with Peter Hain, the ambitious junior Foreign Office minister. The perma-tanned Hain saw himself as a son of Africa, having been born in Kenya and active in the fight against apartheid as well as leading demonstrations against Ian Smith's Rhodesia. The two men had a long meeting on 31 October 1999 during a visit to London, with Mugabe affectionately slapping Hain's knee by the end. But the following morning, as Mugabe emerged from St James Court Hotel in Buckingham Palace Gate to enter his limousine with Grace for a shopping trip in Harrods, his right arm was grabbed. His assailant was the Labour activist Peter Tatchell, who had been inspired by the arrest of the former Chilean dictator General Pinochet in a London hospital the previous year while recuperating from minor surgery. ‘President Mugabe, you are under arrest for torture!’ yelled Tatchell. ‘Torture is a crime under international law!’
Zimbabwe's President visibly shook with rage. He was not used to coming in contact with the public; by then his motorcade had grown to 22 vehicles, including truckloads of crack bodyguards bearing AK-47s, and it had so many motorcycle outriders that locals referred to it as Comrade Bob and the Wailers. Worse still, Tatchell was a militant gay rights campaigner and Mugabe abhorred homosexuals, referring to them as ‘worse than pigs and dogs’.
As a dictator himself, to Mugabe it was unthinkable that such a thing could happen without Blair's approval, particularly as a Sky TV crew had been on hand to film the incident. He immediately denounced the Blair government as ‘little men’ and accused the British Prime Minister of ‘using gay gangster tactics’. Hain he described as ‘the wife of Tatchell’.
From then on, the Zimbabwean leader would lose no opportunity to irritate Whitehall. A few months later, he ordered customs officials at Harare airport to break open a British diplomatic bag in breach of international law. This prompted Hain to appear before television cameras on the steps of the Foreign Office and thunder, ‘This is not the act of a civilized country.’
To call Mugabe ‘uncivilized’ was one of the most provocative things he could have said to an African leader, and played right into his hands. Hain's unfortunate words enabled the Zimbabwe President to portray himself as the upstart leader whom the old imperial power could not stomach. They would make it extremely difficult for any African leader to be seen to be supporting the British against him and indeed only Mandela would dare criticise him.
In the increasingly paranoid mind of Mugabe, Blair was lumped with white farmers as part of the great conspiracy against Zimbabwe along with trade unions, non-governmental organizations, the World Council of Churches, the IMF and the BBC. It was a remarkably similar ‘axis of evil’ to that which was once the bane of his white predecessor Ian Smith. Barely a Mugabe speech went by without a tirade against the British Prime Minister, and the fact that the mobile latrines used in much of the country were called Blair Toilets would be endlessly milked.
Britain seemed to be at a loss on how to react. Development aid was frozen and a shipment of donated Land Rovers withheld. But Blair would soon be far too involved in the aftermath of 9/11 and the war on terror to focus on a small bankrupt African state with a pesky leader.
Some farmers were calling for foreign intervention, but Nigel was quite sure this would never happen. We had no oil or resources that really mattered to anyone. To the Blair government we white farmers were a hangover from colonial times, almost an embarrassment. Just like during the war we were on our own.
Networks of support were set in place as they had been during the bush war, with so-called Godfathers responsible for each area. No one went anywhere without a radio or mobile phone. Farmers and their families took to sleeping in tracksuits and shoes and had backpacks ready packed with torches, Swiss army knives, compass, matches, ammunition, bandages and their most important personal papers.
As in the war, the CFU began issuing sit-reps, at first weekly, then daily, with lists of violent incidents in each province. Stress seminars were organized and the Marondera Club held a two-day Medical Air Rescue Service course in which the unit on snakebites was replaced with one on treating gunshot wounds and setting up a makeshift drip.
The Houghs started keeping their gates locked during the day as well as at night. Every morning there was a roll call over the radio of the 24 farms in Wenimbi Valley. One by one their neighbours started radioing the chilling words, ‘They have arrived,’ and Nigel and the other men would rush to help. Although Kendor Farm had remained untouched, the mood was tense. Nigel's involvement with the MDC hovered over them like a warning sign. There was a feeling we were overtly political People backed off from us.
I was nervous, very nervous, said Claire. Every time there was an attack on a white farm in their area we heard everything on the radio so we were aware all the time what was going on, we heard everything, guys screaming, ‘They're at the door, they're at the door, we're going to shoot!’ I knew that what Nigel was doing was the right thing to do but I worried about the consequences.
As the centre for growing tobacco, still Zimbabwe's most lucrative export, Marondera was becoming the front line in the battle for land. The fact that it was only an hour's drive outside Harare made its farms particularly in demand. Gangs rampaged along the North Road only a mile or so from the centre of town, and there were stories of horrific beatings in workers' compounds, of men being abducted and women raped. Deserted farms were turned into re-education centres. Workers would be rounded up en masse in stolen trucks and trailers and forced to chant ZANU-PF slogans and songs through the night. During these pungwes, lists of people said to be MDC supporters would be read out and those individuals beaten and whipped.
Claire was particularly shaken when one day on the radio she heard the cries of her friend Joanna Faber who had been surrounded by war vets as she drove into the yard of workshops and barns in her farm. They surrounded her and she was trapped inside for two or three hours while the guys were rocking the car back and forth, all broadcast over the airwaves.
I sat glued to the radio following everything. Men from the area went there but couldn't get to her because of the war vets. Then the army had come and formed a cordon around the farmers. It seemed like a set-up so that the farmers would shoot and then the army could move in on them. It always seemed like a set-up but amazingly it never ignited.
In May 2000, a month after David Stevens's murder, Sidney Sekeremayi, the much-feared Security Minister, held a rally in his constituency of Marondera. That morning the entire town was closed down by ZANU-PF youths. Buses were prevented from leaving and youth militia went from door to door ordering people to attend. Some of Nigel's workers were among the 10,000-strong crowd. Once there, they were not allowed to leave.
Those present were left in little doubt about what might happen to anyone daring to vote against the ruling party in the June elections. With a flourish, Comrade Sekeremayi produced fifty MDC T-shirts, some heavily stained with blood. ‘If we eventually find that you are lying to us, we shall meet each other,’ he thundered. ‘Like we say in the Shona proverb, you can't hide from the truth for ever. After the votes we will see who has been fooling who and we shall deal with each other.’
A few days later, on 24 May 2000, Mugabe signed a decree empowering the government to seize farms without paying compensation. These, he said, would be distributed after the elections.
A list of 805 farms to be seized was published in the Herald on Friday 2 June:
‘NOTICE is hereby given in terms of subsection (1) of section 5 of the Land Acquisition Act [Chapter 20:10] that the President intends to acquire compulsorily the land described in the Schedule for resettlement purposes …’
The announcement was followed by seven pages of farms – ‘The List’, as it became known. Like farmers all over the country, Nigel flicked through, hands shaking as he scanned the names. There seemed no pattern. Among those included were tobacco farms, cattle ranches, dairy farms, flower exporters, safari parks and producers of mini-vegetables for British supermarkets. Some were more than 30,000 hectares, others fewer than 50. Many of them were in Marondera and belonged to people they knew. As Claire waited anxiously, Nigel scanned back and forth over the pages, then breathed a sigh of relief. Kendor Farm was not on the list.