…. I learned later what had happened to Mike and Angela. After having Sunday lunch with us, they’d gone to find a calf that had been separated from its mother. They’d managed to catch it and had got it onto the back of the Land Cruiser. Mike wasn’t happy with the look of its mother’s teats, so Angela was just driving off with some milk in a bottle to feed the calf when (Gilbert) Moyo and his (farm invader) gang had torn up the driveway in a lightning attack.

Jonah Zindoga, the squatter from the neighbouring farm who had been poaching our wildlife and had beaten up Mike six months earlier, breaking several of his ribs, had been bicycling up and down the road. He was obviously keeping a look-out. His brother, Simberashe, was one of the leaders of Moyo’s gang.

The gang arrived just as Mike was trying to call (his son) Bruce on his cell. When he heard the vehicles, Mike came out to see who it was. He was attacked immediately. They grabbed him and started beating him brutally with sticks and rifle butts.

Angela, who was in the Land Cruiser, saw what was happening and leaped out, running straight toward the thugs, shouting, “Stop!”

They had about fourteen guns between them at that stage but Angela charged them single-handedly, with no weapon herself.  They grabbed her violently, breaking her left arm in several

places and beating her with sticks. They tore big chunks of her hair out and beat the bare patches on her scalp. One of the thugs urinated on her head.

Then they tied her to Mike with with a thick blue nylon rope, which they took from the workshop. Just after I’d left the house, Kelly, one of Mike and Angela’s dogs, had arrived, panting and in distress. Kelly had never come to our house of her own accord before and Laura immediately realized that she’d come to ask for help. So she called Bruce.

Bruce arrived on the main road while we were all lying tied up and injured on the driveway. He realized that something was dramatically wrong when he saw my vehicle skewed across the

driveway, with all its wheels shot out.

Bruce didn’t know what to do – he was all by himself. He parked on the driveway and came into the garden on foot to try to assess whether or not we were still alive. He kept the phone line to Laura

open. “Shall I shoot into the air?” he asked her.

“Yes!” she said. He fired some shots into the garden and this panicked the thugs, who fired volleys of shots back. I believe they thought that he had several people with him. Bruce retreated to his car to try to make some phone calls and get the police (who are never prepared to intervene) to do something.

The gang finished taking all the weapons and valuables from Mike’s safe, then picked up Mike and me and dumped us on the floor of Mike’s station wagon. Angela was put on the back seat, flanked by two men with rifles sticking out of the windows. They drove out, straight past Bruce’s vehicle, as though they didn’t see it. Bruce was lying concealed in the grass a few metres away.

They eventually saw him and started running towards him. He fired some shots in the air and with that all hell broke loose. He got into his car while they fired several volleys of shots at him but he managed to drive past Mike and Angela’s house. He looped round back to our house where Laura and the children were. Grace, who was soon to become Bruce’s fiancée, had arrived there too with

Megan, Bruce’s daughter. Bruce advised them not to go onto the main road where the shooting was still going on. They must get out through the northern boundary.

Meanwhile Mike, Angela, and I were taken to the Bronkhorsts’ farm just down the road. All I could see from where I was lying were telegraph poles and the tops of trees. I desperately tried to see

where they were taking us but it was impossible to really know.

It was painful bumping along the rough roads. My head was bouncing on the floor and I couldn’t do anything about it because I was tied up. Mike and I were like two bags of maize bouncing around as the truck careered along at high speed. I didn’t know it then, but I had a twelve-centimetre skull fracture as well as broken ribs. Mike’s injuries were worse, though, and all I could hear from him was constant groaning.

Bruce had come back out onto the main road to try to tail us. Our captors started chasing him, travelling at speeds up to 150 kilometres an hour, Bruce said later. The thugs had more than twenty guns between them, and they kept firing them out of the windows as they screamed along, peppering Bruce’s vehicle with bullet holes. They even shot at passing traffic.

At one point they set off down the old strip road near Stockdale farm. Bruce stopped to try to make some phone calls. He was on the phone to Bruce Rogers, who was telling him to watch out for an ambush, when a bullet whistled through his open side window, missing his head by inches. A second bullet was deflected off the perspex. The gang had stopped around the corner and had come

back on foot with their rifles. Bruce drove off.

A number of people from the community went to the police station to try to get help, informing them that we’d been beaten and abducted and that Mike and Angela’s house had been looted. Even

though the (violence-ridden 2008)election was now over, the police didn’t respond. We even drove past a police vehicle, which was crawling along the road in the opposite direction. The guns were bristling out of the windows of our vehicle but the police did nothing. It’s a quiet stretch of road with no more than five or ten cars an hour. It was obvious that the police were monitoring and directing the whole show.

Laura and the children heard the shooting and after Bruce told them to get out of our house, she loaded the dogs and a few possessions into the Ford Laser while Grace drove her car with the children in it. The Laser, at over twenty years old, is low to the ground. It was never designed for dirt tracks in the bush, but it was evident from all the shooting that Laura had to go out through the bush on the northern boundary rather than risk being shot at on the main road.

Megan started crying.  “You mustn’t cry, you must pray,” Grace told her. The children prayed and Megs stopped crying.

When they got to the northern fence, neither Grace nor Laura had wire cutters. It’s a tall game fence that Bruce had put up to try to protect the wildlife before it was all poached away.

Laura said a prayer, and out of the bush walked a man with a dog. “The man had a lovely face,” she told me later, “and the dog looked healthy and well fed.” This was very unusual in a land where even the people are hungry.

Laura had never seen the man before, and has never seen him or his dog since.

Laura briefly explained the situation to him. Without a word, he pulled some wire cutters out of his back pocket and walked over to the fence. He cut through it and opened it out. As she and Grace

drove through he told them which tracks to take.

They got to the police station without further incident. At the police station she explained the situation. “My brother is being shot at. My parents and husband have been badly beaten and they’ve been abducted.” One of the policewomen started laughing at her……

Publishers of “Mugabe and the White African”:

United Kingdom:  Lion Hudson PLC

http://www.lionhudson.com/detail.php?product_id=3963110

South Africa by Random House Struik (Zebra Press imprint).

http://www.randomstruik.co.za/title-page.php?titleID=4366&imprintID=0

The award-winning documentary film:  “Mugabe and the White African”

Directed by Andrew Thompson and Lucy Bailey

http://www.mugabeandthewhiteafrican.com

Since its launch in 2009, “Mugabe and the White African” has won numerous prestigious awards: 

• WINNER: Best Feature Documentary, British Independent Film Awards 2009

• WINNER: Grand Jury Prize - Silverdocs 2009

• WINNER: Grand Jury Prize - The Hamptons' Film Festival 2009

• WINNER: Camera Justitia Prize at Amnesty's 'Movies that Matter Festival' 2010

• WINNER: Best Cinema Documentary, The Grierson Award 2010

• WINNER: Prix Italia Special Signis Prize 2010

• WINNER: UK Screen Conch Sound Awards 2010

• WINNER: Russian Guild of Film Critics and Film Experts "Grand-Prix at IDFF "Flahertiana-2010"

• WINNER: Royal Television Society South West Award 2010 for Best Documentary