Free When a Crocodile Eats the Sun by Peter Godwin

agricultural land, even though they made up barely 1 percent of the population, and this land disparity was seen as one of the main causes of the country’s civil war. But at independence in 1980, when white-dominated Rhodesia became black-ruled Zimbabwe, the new president, Robert Mugabe, at the urging of his ally, President Samora Machel of Mozambique, made racial reconciliation the centerpiece of his policy. Machel rued the economic chaos wrought at his own country’s independence when his policy of wholesale nationalization triggered a swift exodus of a quarter of a million Portuguese, after five hundred years of settlement. People like my parents, who had feared that Mugabe, an avowed Marxist, would bustle all whites out of the country, were hugely relieved to find instead that he welcomed them to remain in a tolerant, multiracial Zimbabwe. He appointed a white minister of agriculture and toured the country with him, appealing to white farmers to stay on and contribute to the new country.
    And they did. Their produce, in particular tobacco, brought in 40 percent of the country’s export earnings; their food crops fed the cities; they employed a quarter of the country’s workforce. Zimbabwe became the fastest-growing economy in Africa, and it was the continent’s breadbasket, frequently exporting food to neighbors in need.
    Robert Mugabe did begin a program of voluntary land redistribution, funded mostly by the British government, and nearly 40 percent of the land held by whites at independence was purchased — at market prices — and transferred into black hands by 2000. But Mugabe’s interest in land resettlement waned, and in the past decade his government had allocated an average of only 0.16 percent of his annual budget to land acquisition; the military got over thirty times that amount. And when the British realized that many of the newly acquired farms were being given not to landless peasants, as had been agreed, but as bonbons to Mugabe’s political cronies, they froze the remains of the fund. Even then, some 740,000 acres of land acquired for resettlement remained empty and idle.
    But Mugabe’s neglect of the land question failed to raise any spontaneous clamor from his people, by now the best educated in Africa. Most of them, especially the young, had aspirations to salaried jobs in towns rather than to a life of toiling in the fields. A poll conducted by the Helen Suzman Foundation in early 2000 found that only 9 percent of Zimbabweans saw land redistribution as a priority. By then, according to the Commercial Farmers Union (CFU), 78 percent of white farmers were on property they had purchased
after
independence, only when that land had first been offered to — and turned down by — the government, as was required by law.
    Opposition to Mugabe’s new constitution came from an eclectic congregation drawn from all points of the political, racial, tribal, and social compass, and it was especially strong in the urban areas, among the black middle class and the trade unions and people like my parents, who had been part of the old white liberal establishment. It also came from white farmers who realized that their land was to be seized. Many joined a new political party, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). Its leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, was a former trade union head. The MDC didn’t disagree with the idea of land reform — no one did really, not even the white farmers themselves — but Tsvangirai said it had to be done in a planned and orderly way, so that the golden goose of commercial agriculture would not be cooked. Campaigning for the February 2000 constitutional referendum was lively, but the opposition was denied access to the government-controlled radio and TV, and no one thought Mugabe would actually lose. He had never lost at the polls before. So when he did, we were all shocked. I found myself taking a deep breath and thinking,
Now there’s really going to be trouble.
    President Mugabe