20 September 2012

“Mugabe and the White African”

By Ben Freeth

Chapter 9 – Extract on the closure of “The Farmer” Magazine

… Other moves were made to stamp out openness and opposition. Colin Cloete, the new Commercial Farmers’ Union (CFU) president, put a stop to the daily situation reports – known as Sit-Reps – we’d been compiling. These were crucial in informing other farmers about what was going on, and in letting the world know about the injustices that were happening.

The problem was that the publicity was embarrassing the government.  The CFU leaders were told that they must hide the truth if they wanted to survive. It was a moral dilemma that was conveniently glossed over as a pragmatic business decision.

Then, one day, The Farmer magazine arrived in the post with a stark black cover. It was the last issue. No one had been consulted and no one knew that the magazine was being closed down.

I couldn’t keep quiet. I brought up the closure at the next CFU council meeting. Colin explained that the magazine wasn’t financially viable.

But if that was the case, why hadn’t they put out an appeal to the readership and the wider public for funds? Why didn’t they downsize it in order to keep it going? What had we got to hide? Why were we suddenly hushing up everything that was going on?

The magazine’s editor, Brian Latham, a former Reuters correspondent, who had always described incidents as they happened, and published pictures of beaten-up farmers and farm workers, wrote in his final leader column, “History will judge critically those who believed, for whatever reason, there was merit in burying the truth. Critics [of the magazine] said we made it difficult for the Commercial Farmers’ Union. Well, for us the Union is its members – the people who are being intimidated, beaten, threatened, extorted, chased from their homes, robbed, and murdered. To us, victims like Terry Ford are far more important than the people in Agriculture House.”

Then there was silence.

We had no forum in which to express our views or publicize the terror that was unfolding around the country. No information was able to get out openly about all the various agricultural issues.

Rumours abounded. Everything was just like that final magazine cover – black darkness.

In essence Colin and the CFU hierarchy had followed orders from their political masters. They had quietly rolled over and capitulated, becoming complicit in the destruction of the country by refusing to stand up against evil. Fear had won, as it so often does in the face of tyranny. The farmers’ leaders felt that if they appeased the evil aggressor, they would be left alone. I can only believe that they didn’t understand the full extent of the problem.

The alternative scenario is that they did understand and were given assurances that they would save their own skins if they followed orders. I don’t want to believe that this was the case. I hold on

to the belief that they followed orders because they thought that maybe government might relent.

It was plain to me that it was naïve to think that government might relent. The problem was that we farmers employed too many people. Approximately 20 per cent of the entire population of the country lived and worked on our farms.

If the government let up on the pressure, the opposition MDC party would be able to come and visit the farms, and the farm workers would be free to vote against Mugabe. But as long as intimidation levels remained high and intense fear was in the air, this couldn’t happen. In his battle for total control, Mugabe had to continue on his course. There was too much blood on his hands already for him to change tack.

Under Colin Cloete’s leadership, the CFU also put a complete stop to any legal actions. Vice President (Joseph) Msika told the Zimbabwe Joint Resettlement Initiative (ZIJIRI) that they couldn’t “dialogue” with each other as long as there were pending court actions. Rather than tell the government that an impartial court was by far the best place to “dialogue”, Colin told the farmers that they were now on their own. If they wished to fight in court, they would have to find their own lawyers and money and take the flak themselves.

We were told that we had to compromise and negotiate for ourselves and that the best way forward was to downsize. We had to feed the crocodile and hope that we would be the last to be eaten. The CFU was bowing out. It was a bitter betrayal of all the people that we represented.

When recourse to the courts was taken away, it was as though the carpet had been ripped from under us. We were in a totally different world, without any idea of how to operate in it. There was no foundation any longer and there was nothing to hold us together. We were like a building in which great gaping cracks had suddenly appeared. Our leaders had allowed our foundations to be undermined.

Our two greatest tools were now closed to us. If justice was to prevail, we needed access to both the courts and the press. The government knew that, and hated them both, bristling and spitting and threatening whenever they were mentioned.

In normal times, people like to think that they would never bury their principles in a time of crisis. But it’s only in those times that a person’s true nature is revealed. During a period of tyranny,

leaders need to be visionaries, with prophetic voices, who are able to rise above the present crisis and take a principled stand. But nobody in the farming leadership dared to draw a line in the sand

and say, “So far and no further!”

rian Latham is currently a journalist with Bloomberg News

Terry Ford was brutally killed on his farm in the Norton district on 18 March 2002.  He was the tenth white farmer to be murdered since the initiation of the farm invasions in 2000.  A photograph of his covered body, with his loyal Jack Russell, Squeak, curled up at his side, was beamed around the world

The Author:  Ben Freeth joined the Commercial Farmers’ Union in 1996 as a regional executive officer.

Publishers:  “Mugabe and the White African” is published by Lion Hudson PLC in the UK and by Random House Struik (Zebra Press) in South Africa.  It is available in English and Afrikaans.