IT WAS THE PHONE CALL Nigel had been dreading. He had been worried about leaving the farm to go to Harare but he had an important meeting arranged.
A week earlier a woman called Netsai had arrived at the farm gate with a group of eight war vets including her boyfriend Shasha and the one who called himself General Tongogara. ‘I want to move into my house today,’ she demanded, gesturing at the farmhouse. ‘This farm has not been sectioned,’ replied Nigel. Under the law when farms had been listed to be taken over, farmers first received a Section 5 notice declaring that the government wished to compulsorily acquire the property. They would then be issued with a Section 8, which meant the owner must leave within 90 days. Nigel had received neither.
Netsai laughed unpleasantly and pulled out a typed piece of paper stating that Kendor Farm was now hers. ‘This is my farm,’ she said. ‘These are my ostriches. And this is my house.’
After some argument, Nigel had managed to get rid of them but they had clearly just gone off to marshal more forces. His meeting in Harare was finishing when Henry, his farm manager, telephoned to tell him that Netsai had now come back with a much larger group and they were refusing to leave. Aqui had apparently let them in the gate so they could shelter because it had started to rain. Nigel's first concern was for his family and he was relieved to hear that the two elder children, Jess and Emma, were at school and Claire had left the house to take their son Christian to nursery. Only the youngest, baby Megan, was at home with Aqui. To the Houghs' relief, Aqui had shown the presence of mind to take Megan to their friend Roseanne Percival who was on the farm running the factory and tell her to leave quickly out the back gate. Thank God for Aqui, thought Nigel, not for the first time.
By a stroke of luck, his old university friend Pete Moore was visiting. Back in the war days, he had been a member of the Rhodesian SAS. He was cool and calculating, a great guy to have in a crisis. We drove like mad back to Marondera, and when I got home there was a fire in my driveway and these guys had all settled around the house and taken chairs and tables from the veranda and plonked themselves down as if they owned the place.
Nigel was furious and barged his way through, shouting at them, ‘You can't take my house!’
‘This is not Rhodesia,’ roared General Tongogara as he swayed around, clearly drunk. ‘There is no space for you in this country!’
‘Whites out! Whites out!’ chorused the others.
Somehow Nigel and Pete managed to get through and inside the house and bolt the door. Pete ran round locking all the windows. Nigel was shaking as he called the police. He knew the local inspector who answered, but the man told him it was ‘a political matter’ so they could not help. He then tried the local Lands Committee, which was in charge of redistributing the farms, only to be told, ‘You're not on the list so we can't do anything.’
Outside Netsai was snarling at him and to his alarm he saw that General Tongogara was waving a pistol. Then it went quiet. They went off and got all these guys, plied them with beer and mbanje so they were rabid, then came back and started doing all their song and dance, banging a large drum, waving sticks and shouting ‘Hondo [war]. By that time there were more than 50 of them.
That's when he saw Aqui. To my horror I realized that Aqui had joined the group and seemed to be its leader. I couldn't believe it. Not Aqui. I don't think I had ever felt so betrayed.
The war vets began rattling the windows. There was a sound like a shot and Nigel and Pete looked at each other in horror. It was hard not to think of Dave Stevens and Martin Olds and all those other guys who had been killed in their houses. Then he realized it was the sound of breaking glass. They were trying to get in. Desperately, he called his friend Barry Percival, headmaster of nearby Langley Park School, begging him to get the police. Claire, who was staying with the Percivals, came on the line. While I was on the phone they started breaking down the door. We had a grille so they couldn't get through. Claire could hear the noise in the background and was really worried so I tried to be cool and joke, ‘I don't think we need TV any more, we've got enough entertainment! But I could tell she was terrified.
As darkness fell, the group surrounding the house swelled to more than a hundred and the drumming became more persistent. ‘Whites out! Blacks in! Whites out! Blacks in!’ came the chant.
There were still no signs of police. Nigel took out candles and torches in case they managed to cut off the power.
‘Let's see what weapons you have because we might need to start shooting and we need a strategy,’ said Pete.
‘Pete, I don't think that's the right way to go,’ replied Nigel.
‘Listen, I don't care what happens, if those characters break down this door, I'll start shooting,’ replied his friend.
Reluctantly Nigel unlocked his gun cabinet.
‘How many guns do you have?’ asked Pete.
‘Two.’
‘How many bullets do you have?’
‘About 150.’
Nigel remembered his school lessons about Allan Wilson and the Shangani patrol killed by the Ndebele as they sang the national anthem.
I didn't want to die like a hero. I didn't want to die.
A few miles away at the Percivals' house, Claire and the Percivals had been repeatedly calling the police with no success. There was no way they were going to intervene in a farm seizure. In the end Barry drove to Marondera to plead with the police and tricked them into accompanying him by telling them it was a domestic situation with a man about to kill his wife. A policeman and four reservists went with him to the farm.
The police went to the back door and Barry telephoned Nigel to let them in. Outside the crowd surged forth, yelling ‘Hondo! Hondo! [War! War!]’ and trying to push their way through. It was awful to see my own workers among the war vets. I went to talk to two guys among the group whom I'd helped a lot, my own farm-worker Wonedzi and another guy Norman, who worked for my neighbour.
‘Wonedzi, how could you do this after all we've done for you?’ he asked. ‘And Norman, I got you that job, how could you do this?’
The men said nothing.
The police managed to calm the crowd down, but were clearly not pleased to have been tricked into coming out.
‘This farm has not been sectioned,’ said Nigel. ‘Can't you get rid of these guys?’
The policeman smiled. ‘We have not had a directive,’ he said.
After the police had left, the war vets began singing and dancing again, rattling the windows all around. As Nigel peered out, he could see Aqui there in the thick of it, shouting, ‘Blacks in! Whites Out!’ and ‘Down with whites!’
To me it looked like she was leading the lot. I said, ‘I don't want to ever talk to her again. I've trusted her as a member of the family and can't believe she is doing this!
He thought about all they had done for her, the medical insurance, the school fees for her children, the uniforms, even sending her second daughter Valerie on a secretarial course. Aqui herself they had just sent for some cookery lessons.
It was not just the money but the utter sense of betrayal. You have these people as part of your life, they are exposed to all your private stuffy you trust your children to them, then that day you suddenly see her transformed into this rabid character leading the pack of war vets shouting ‘Get out, whites!’ and ‘Death to whites!’ I wanted to kill her.
The two men stayed awake all night, terrified of what might happen. Nigel opened a bottle of whisky but they drank little, wanting to keep their wits about them. The war vets had lit several fires all around. At times the sound seemed to swell and they were sure the group were going to burst in. Then there would be a brief lull and he could hear the strange cries of the ostriches in the distance. He hoped the birds were all right. At about 5.30 a.m. the first streaks of pink lightened the sky and the group started singing again. But this time they seemed a little subdued. They were clearly tired and hung-over and you could sense a lot of tension building up. One of Nigel's must trusted workers, Bennett, phoned to tell him that both the workers he had spoken to had died in the night. Wonedzi had had a heart attack about two hours later and Norman had gone home and hanged himself in his room.
I knew these guys have a hang of a lot of superstition about these things. I could see they were all full of fear and subdued.
There had been a lot of talk that ZANU-PF was haunted after three of the main driving forces behind the land invasions had died over the last year. First Hitler Hunzvi, then Border Gezi, the man behind the Green-bombers, and Moven Mahachi, the Defence Minister, both apparently in car crashes.
To wind them up, Nigel opened the kitchen window and deliberately asked Shasha about the two missing men.
‘No, they are dead,’ replied the war vet, clearly irritated.
‘What, and you guys are still carrying on with this thing, despite that?’ asked Nigel. Aqui had disappeared and he could see some of the crowd looked distinctly uncomfortable though they still waved their sticks at him, menacingly.
But the intimidation continued. Someone started up a new chant, clearly remembered from the presidential elections.
‘Down with whites!’
‘Down with colonialism!’
‘Down with Britain!’
‘Down with Blair!’
‘Down with the cup he drinks his tea from!’
For two days we were locked in that house, being moved further and further in. We were really scared, not sleeping, and thought in the end we'd have to turn our weapons on them. It was quite clear that Aqui was on the other side and I couldn't bear to think about that.
‘It was like a game where everyone knew that the final outcome would be Nigel losing his farm,’ said Pete Moore. ‘The question was just how long it would take. Although it was terrifying I never really thought we would die.’
Finally, more policemen came, led by Inspector Julius Chikunda whom Nigel knew as a ZANU-PF henchman. The two white men were told they were under arrest and should follow in Nigel's pick-up to the office of the Member in charge of lands in Marondera. Netsai, Shasha and about eight others all piled into the back of his vehicle. It was surreal, driving all these characters who were stealing my farm to the place where I knew the war vets had tortured people.
On the way through town, they passed a number of boarded-up shops and businesses. As the centre of one of the country's biggest agricultural districts, Marondera had been full of small businesses dependent on farmers, from spare parts suppliers to cheese shops. Now even Marondera Egg Mart had a sign declaring ‘No Eggs’. Nigel resisted the temptation to point out to his companions the effects of the government's ill-planned land reform.
The Land Office was small and they all crowded in behind Chikanda. He took a seat behind the desk and looked at Nigel and Pete with contempt. ‘The People don't like white farmers gathering together in groups,’ he announced, even though there were only two of them surrounded by ten war vets. He insisted on separating the two white men, placing Pete the other side of a wall. But the wall was only plyboard and did not reach to the ceiling so Pete could hear everything.
‘I want to speak to you farmers,’ he began. ‘We've looked at all the circumstances and you must share your farms.’
As Nigel started to reply, Chikanda shushed him.
‘No speaking, you're just a racist!’ he shouted.
Funnily enough. I'd never been called a racist even though, there were times that I was. Nigel tried to respond but Chikanda lifted his hand and asked him: ‘Don't you know the history of Zimbabwe?’
‘Well, yes, I do,’ replied Nigel.
‘But you only know it from the white side.’
At this, the war vets started chanting, ‘The whites must go! The whites must go!’
I just sat there putting on a show of bravado and trying to act unconcerned in front of this crowd but you could feel this war going on in people's minds because some of them had worked for me and didn't really feel what was happening was right.
When the chants had subsided, Nigel tried a new tack. He put his arm on Chikanda's shoulder and said, ‘What is it you want, my little friend?’
Chikanda was a short, stocky man and bristled at the comment. ‘Am I little?’ he asked.
‘Well, you look little to me, but maybe you're not,’ replied Nigel.
The Inspector changed tack. ‘Why is Netsai not staying in your house?’ he demanded.
‘Well, it's impossible she stays there,’ began Nigel.
‘Aah you see, you are a racist. You whites are all the same.’ He almost spat the words.
Nigel shook his head and smiled. Inside I was feeling very tense for there was this angry crowd and I felt anything could happen any time. I knew the stories of things that had happened in that office. I thought there is no point getting in a rage like they expect from white farmers whose farms had been taken over. The only way I could survive was to wrong-foot them.
‘No, I'm very happy with Netsai moving in, very happy with that,’ he said. ‘The thing is you don't know my wife, she's got ma jealous like you can't believe but I'm not saying I'm not attracted to Netsai.’
He had spoken very seriously. There was a stunned silence.
This Netsai had snarled at me for two days and she was a really ugly lady, small and fat with yellow teeth all over the place, and when she snarled she looked even more ugly. She had been a prostitute with the soldiers so wasn't the most morally upright of ladies. So when I said that, she put on this coy look and said, ‘Oh, Mr Hough,’ as if flirting with me. At this there was a loud guffaw from behind the ply-board wall, then Pete, who's not the most diplomatic guy, just dissolved into laughter. It was like a release button. Then all the group started laughing and saying, ‘Hough and Netsai, Hough is marrying Netsai,’ then repeating the story to each other like a biblical tale.
The whole impetus of the meeting collapsed and in the confusion Pete and Nigel just left and got into the car and drove back to the farm.
Back at Kendor, they found the wrought-iron gates closed and barricaded. There was no way they were going to get back in. Through the fence they could see that the squatters were already looting the farm. Nigel imagined Aqui queening it over his house. But there was nothing he could do. He knew that they had been lucky to escape with their lives. Time had run out. Now there were no white farmers left in Wenimbi Valley.
* * *
Inside the farm, Aqui was in a quandary. I didn't know them, the war vets that came to the farm that morning when Boss Nigel had gone to Harare. They wanted to intimidate me and get me out so I told them, ‘I'm also black and Zimbabwean and also a war vet. I have all my rights. Why are you trying to intimidate me? If I want to stay here I can. I participated a lot in the war and even after the war I carried on and did a lot of work for the party. If I decide to work for the white people that's my choice.’
When she refused to let them in the gate, they called her a traitor. I said, ‘Don't waste your words, then the rain started so I let them in to shelter.
First she had been angry. I knew our people needed land and thought it was quite right that the government take these farms and land but it should have been properly worked out, not like this. I saw the way these war vets intimidated people, made them scared and wanted everything, even my things. So from the beginning I said, I'm not going to let you do anything to the property’ I told them, ‘If you start grabbing things from inside the house, that's stealing, that's not land resettlement’ I told them this white person is God's being the same as you and God doesn't want you to do these things, so call off your dogs.
I don't know how I did it but I was very firm. I felt I was a Zimbabwean too. I even said, ‘Some of you here weren't even war vets. Some of you were sell-outs during the war.’
But it was clear that she, alone in her polka-dot apron, could not hold off this gang of squatters with sticks and axes, many of whom were drunk. It was very dangerous because they were using youths, giving them dagga to smoke to make them crazy. I was very aware that they could turn on me. To her dismay, apart from Henry, none of Nigel's other workers stood firm. Some fled and others even joined the war vets.
Then I thought, if I joined them, perhaps I could protect the Houghs so the war vets didn't kill them and also save some of their things. I felt bad for Boss Nigel because I could see what he thought of me when I was shouting ‘Death to whites’ and all those things. But I had to be more enthusiastic than the other war vets so they wouldn't suspect me. I was used to motivating people from my days in the war so I ended up leading the chants.
Once Nigel had gone from the house and she was left alone with the squatters, Aqui began to wonder about seizing the farm for herself. As she had suspected, most of the invaders were not real war vets and some of them were starting to look up to her as a leader. Why shouldn't I have it rather than Netsai? I had worked for the party all those years whereas these people had come from nowhere. I had signed the list requesting a farm.
The farm was clearly going to be taken over anyway, which meant she would be left without a job again. She knew the Houghs were thinking about moving to Australia and had already applied for visas so they would probably leave and forget all about her, just as the Looses had done. With all the whites leaving, there would be no more jobs for her despite her new cordon bleu cooking qualification. Her children would have to leave school without completing their education. It was nobody's fault; that was just how things were. Whites might lose their farms but they got on a plane and left to start a new life some other place, while blacks lay down and tried to survive on wild fruit.
Aqui thought about her son Wayne, almost 15 and at boarding school in Harare, paid for by the Houghs. He was a bright boy and she had big plans for him to go to college and perhaps become a doctor or an accountant. Her eldest, Heather, had left school and longed to go to London and study nursing. Then there was Vanessa who dreamt of being a top-flight secretary but needed money to learn shorthand and typing and computer skills. She did not want them to end up like her. My dreams hadn't come true. Maybe this was a way my children's could.
So she stayed inside the house with Netsai and the war vets, watching and waiting for her opportunity. She did not think it would be hard. They were not clever people. For example, some ofthem took the big pump that pumped the water for the animals and the house and sold it. How will you farm now? I asked them. They also kept fighting with each other, particularly General Tongogara, Shasha and Netsai who all thought they were in charge. But I cooked them meat from the deep freeze and milk for their tea and mealie meal the Boss had given me so they ended up loving me. In the meantime I managed to lock some of the Houghs' things in the workers' rondavels while I figured out what to do.
For the first few days after the farm had been taken over, Nigel lived in the hope that he could go back in and chase the war vets off because they did not have the right papers. I also wanted to see what Aqui was doing. I was still more shocked about that than anything. But in the end his friends Barry Percival and Pete Moore convinced him that to return would be suicidal.
The Houghs had left the farm with literally nothing but the clothes they were wearing and were desperate to retrieve some of their property. The police were unsympathetic to Nigel but Barry's status as a headteacher carried a lot of respect and eventually they agreed to give them two hours in the farmhouse to collect their belongings. However, they would only allow Claire and Barry to go, not Nigel.
Two hours is very little time to pack up a room, let alone a large house of two adults and four children, so they tried to make a list of the most important and needed items. This included family photographs, personal documents, Claire's jewellery, the children's medical records, blankets and the microwave. ‘You work out very quickly what's important to you,’ said Claire. ‘What I really regret is I didn't take things that were of personal value to the children, their toys and little stuffed animals. Even today Emma talks about her little zebra that got left behind. It was their history too and I didn't think about that.’
They arrived at the house to find Netsai lying on a sun-lounger with her feet up, admiring her new farm. Aqui and some of the others were having a braai on the lawn with meat from the freezer and the men had drunk all the beer. Netsai's children were already wearing clothes belonging to the Hough children and playing with their toys. Claire was furious.
By then they had been living in the house for a few days and also the population had come in and looted everything. They'd taken some of our curtains, the meat from the freezer, many things were gone.
It was not easy finding the items they wanted, particularly with the policeman and a group of around ten squatters following Claire around closely. Each time she focused on something and said, ‘Those are mine, those are my crystal glasses, my dinner plates, they were wedding presents,’ Netsai would claim that the items were hers. Then the policeman would say to Claire, ‘Maybe it is yours, maybe it isn't, so you better just leave them here.’ Even the new curtains which Claire had only recently hung, the policeman insisted might belong to Netsai.
All the time Aqui was identifying things and saying, ‘That's mine, that's mine, I'm the most senior war vet here.’
As fast as Barry and his workers loaded things onto the truck, others would remove them. Time was starting to run out when Barry had an idea. Claire had kept chickens to sell eggs to the local population, and when she had arrived to reclaim her belongings one of the first things the squatters had done was all grab chickens for themselves, fearing she was going to take them. They had tied them in plastic bags with their heads sticking out as left like that a chicken will just sit. The lawn was covered with literally hundreds of these chickens in plastic bags just sitting there. Barry started kicking some of them over so they would flutter about and try to escape, causing everyone to dash about trying to reclaim their chickens. In the meantime he would run and put some more things on the lorry and Claire would try and retrieve a few more possessions.
All the time things were disappearing-guitars, the instrument panel from Nigel's old microlight plane, his father's watch, clothes-many borne off on the heads of former workers who had changed sides pretty quickly. Occasionally Barry noticed Aqui flitting back and forth, handing round beers and grabbing things for herself.
When Claire unlocked the pantry, the one who called himself General Tongogara followed her in and swooped on a bottle labelled vodka. In fact it was Echinacea herb steeped in alcohol, of which she gave the children a spoonful every morning to boost their immunity against illness. He took a huge swig, then spat it out for it tasted foul. ‘Aah, I have been poisoned,’ he cried, swaggering around, clutching his stomach.
His eyes then lit on the huge deep freeze. ‘That is mine,’ he announced. This sparked off an argument with Netsai who insisted it was hers. But Tongogara and his sidekicks carried it outside and tied it on top of his little Renault 4.
The most important items such as Claire's jewellery were in the master bedroom. When Netsai realized where they were headed, she had locked the door and refused to open it. A drunken crowd followed Barry along the corridor, bearing Nigel's golf clubs and cricket bats as weapons, as he demanded she open it. Eventually he said he would break the door down. Spitting with rage but clearly not wanting a broken door in her new house, she pulled out the keys from between her breasts.
The bedroom was packed with looted items, many of which she had hidden under the bed. Claire pulled out a children's Bible. ‘That's mine!’ shouted Netsai trying to snatch it away. Claire opened it up and read out the inscription to her eldest child, ‘Dear Jessie’.
The mood lightened when Barry lifted up the bed and pulled out a big box. Inside were 100 condoms Nigel had obtained for handing out to farm-workers. Despite the tension, everyone fell about laughing.
The policeman then said it was time to leave. Outside, they were greeted by an astonishing scene. The children had been given an enormous blow-up whale for Christmas, which they used to play with in the pool and ride on. General Tongogara had taken a fancy to this and dragged it out of the pool but could not work out how to deflate it. Instead of letting it down, he tried to squash it into his car and drove off with the deep freeze on top and the tail of the whale out one window and the nose out of the other.
Nigel, who was waiting in a car just along the road in case of trouble, could not believe what he was seeing. The ancient Renault 4 chugged past with the warlord and blow-up whale squeezed in together and the whole thing groaning under the weight of the freezer. That was the last of my farm.
That evening at the Percivals', he began to think about the future for the first time. Claire had recently started working as a teacher at nearby Peterhouse School, so they would have to scrape by on her salary for a while. They had lost almost everything they owned but they would not starve. There was a nationwide shortage of cooking oil and Nigel had discussed buying some land from his nephew to build a factory.
Compared to a lot of people, things could have been much worse. But I did feel that my faith in human nature had been sorely shaken.
Suddenly his mobile phone rang. ‘Mr Hough, Sir,’ came the familiar voice. ‘It's Aqui.’
Aqui had been haunted all week by the look of bitter betrayal that Nigel had given her as he left the farm. Of course I felt it was unfair that the Houghs had this big house and I was just a maid. I wished I had more things for my children. But I am what I am, God made me like this even if it's difficult. And after a while I realized it would be wrong to take the farm for I wouldn't feel comfortable with something I didn't work for. I didn't have a clue how to farm.
Nor did she want the likes of Netsai and General Tongogara to take things to which they had even less right than her. I knew it was wrong what they were doing and I decided to try and save some of the things of the Houghs. I put them in the roundhouses where I had already put some things aside, like a television. While Madam Claire and Barry were trying to get things out, I took other items that I knew were important to them and I had seen where Netsai had hidden. I had to be careful and suddenly all these war vets came to grab everything so I said, ‘No I'm not going to let you, these are my things! But it wasn't working; they said, ‘How do you have all these fancy things?’
So I opened the deep freeze and asked them, ‘Do you want some meat?’ and they said, ‘Yes, then I chucked these big ostrich steaks to the far-away hedge so they all ran for it. I gave them lots of bottles of beer from the house to get them drunk for I knew they would kill me if they realized what I was going to do.
Then she picked up the phone.