"No," he said. "I don’t. We now grow flowers that we export to Europe. Eeh, how did you know that farm?"
I did not know you are now growing flowers on that farm, I said
without bothering to answer his question. It was startling. Why
flowers?
My friend, they can't eat flowers. The labourers are thieves. If I
grow groundnuts and other edible crops like maize, the labourers will
steal the crops to feed their families. Listen, he said as he realized
that I had been stunned speechless, I am running a business not a
charity.
I knew the farm. The black farmer bought the farm from the commercial
farmer with assistance from a government minister. One of my great
grandmothers, an immigrant from Malawi, and my great grandfather, a
Shona from Murehwa, met while working on a farm adjacent to the farm
Mugabe's black farmer now owned. Inevitably we had a lot of relatives
who worked as farm labourers and my grandmother used to take me along
whenever she visited our relatives. The visits were memorable. We had
beans, salted and dried bakayawo fish, cultured milk, sugar, you name
it. The white farmer was not an angel but he was kind enough to give
his labourers food.
Contrast that with his black successor who now grows flowers while
his labourers starve. Since the labourers' children cannot eat flowers,
the poor kids have to hunt for crickets and wild fruits to survive.
That is Mugabe's land policy right there. It is a failure and people,
the inordinate majority of them black, are going to starve. Just like
the heartless flower grower put it, they can't eat flowers. Children
digging up crickets and gathering wild fruits is what passes for black
empowerment in ZANU-PF. It is this revolution that has to be guarded,
says Robert Mugabe.
Inevitably, I wanted to know if most of the farm workers were still under the employment of the new farmer.
Manyasarande aye takaatandanisa! – We got rid of all the
Nyasalanders! he chortled as he congratulated himself for dismissing
the labourers he had inherited from the white farmer. Mugabe's black
farmer had deeply seated contempt for the black workers. To him, they
were Malawian interlopers hence the use of the profoundly derogatory
Manyasarande colonial-era epithet.Munyasarande is a loaded noun. It
captures a terrible stereotype of someone who is a permanent alien, a
person incapable of assimilation into a new cultural environment and,
therefore, irredeemably and hopelessly uncultured. The original
immigrants are all dead and all their descendants are Zimbabwean, any
which way you look at it. However, to this ignoramus Mugabe farmer, the
"Nyasarande" traits are heritable like Adam's sin.
I was furious. I have relatives of Malawian extraction who are some of
the most patriotic, honest, God-loving and ethically enterprising
Zimbabweans. They have never been to Malawi and yet Mugabe's goofball
was dismissing them as gypsies. For all of Mugabe's endless
incantations aboutAfrican Solutions for African Problems, the attitude
of this beneficiary of the ZANU-PF's catastrophic land program had no
iota of sympathy for a fellow black African. Some will say I should
have known that Mugabe's cronies are as insincere as the man himself.
You will have to excuse my French, folks, I was pissed off big time!
The black farmer's supremacist attitude encapsulates the mentality of
the circle of lunatics that surrounds Mugabe. They are shameless
bearers of false witness and will blatantly lie if it gives them
political and material mileage. The ZANU-PF farmer’s xenophobic
characterization of the farm labourers fits the ZANU-PF modus operandi.
Like Munyaradzi Wasosa put it, when a leopard wants to eat its children
it starts by accusing them of smelling like goats. If anyone stands in
the way of the Mugabe crime syndicate, nothing will keep the supposed
offender from a torrent of invective and, increasingly, abductions,
torture and gruesome death. That is how the Stalinist-Maoists in
ZANU-PF operate. It comes straight from the playbook of Joe Stalin
whereby you dehumanize and demonize your victims first and then rob
them of their property and lives thereafter.
When ZANU-PF wants to give commercial farms as gifts or bribes to
placate disgruntled party followers, Zimbabwean commercial farmers are
attacked as white farmers, a charge which is equivalent to calling the
farmers unrepentant racists. How can all the farmers who used to
produce enough food to feed the entire region be racists? Incredibly,
the same land is now owned by Mugabe's cronies, most of whom had never
even cultivated a backyard garden of vegetables before receiving the
farms as payment for loyalty to Mugabe's revolution. It is widely
believed that some of these new farmers keep the farms so they can get
subsidized fuel, seeds and fertilizer that are then sold on the black
market. Farming requires constant and monomaniacal attention. I have to
wonder where someone like Samuel Mumbengegwi gets the time to be both a
viable commercial farmer and a minister, even in a completely
dysfunctional government.
The truth of the matter is that it is not just the commercial farmers that have been demonized by the ZANU-PF Mafia.
Puppets and prostitutes! shouts Mugabe when blacks object to his disasterous policies;
When Justin Mukoko decided to go and catalogue acts of terrorism and
theft of food aid perpetrated by ZANU-PF, she got charged with
terrorism with the possibility of get hanged if convicted in Mugabe's
kangaroo court. What the colonialists did to Nehanda Nyakasikana, the
ZANU-PF nationalists want to do to Justina Mukoko.
People born and bred in Zimbabwe are quickly labelled foreigners /
Manyasarande they pointed out refuse to vote for the continuance of
Mugabe's ineptitude running of the country. The irony of it all is that
there are some rumours, which are silly in my opinion, to the effect
that Mugabe himself has Malawian / Nyasarande blood flowing in his
veins. What we know is that one of his nephews, Patrick Zhuwao,
definitely has a Chikunda name. Zhuwao is an indigenized Portuguese
name Joao.
Comrade Mugabe may profess to hate the British but he seems to like
aping them at every opportunity. He tries to speak English like a
Britisher. When it comes to dividing and conquering, the man learnt a
lot from his colonial masters.
Criminals in ZANU-PF may have arrogated to themselves the right to
determine who is and who is not Zimbabwean but we do not have to ape
them. We need to renounce ZANU-PF's xenophobic lexicon once and for
all. There are no white farmers, there are no Manyasarande, there are
no Mandevere and there are no Maindiya. Their forebears might have come
to present-day Zimbabwe from different parts of the world and at
different times but that must not be the defining character to their
citizenship. These are Zimbabweans, pure and simple. Anyone who insists
otherwise must be considered a criminal.