Old Anger Over Land Is Mugabe's Weapon
Zimbabwean Ruler Feeds Voters' Fears

Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, April 8, 2008

ARCTURUS, Zimbabwe, April 7 -- There was a thriving farm here once, big and lush and bursting with life. It grew potatoes and tomatoes, cut flowers for export, and wheat and corn. Dairy cows were here for milking, chickens for laying eggs. And the black Zimbabweans who did most of the work toiled in the blazing African sun for a pittance, while white owners kept the profits.

Now, all that is gone: the white owners, the animals, the profits and most of the crops. Some former workers now own scrubby, 15-acre plots of their own. But the raw anger left over from that bygone era -- when a poor, dark-skinned majority was subservient to a moneyed, light-skinned minority -- remains as bitter as ever, giving President Robert Mugabe an effective political weapon as he struggles to recover from a historic first-round election loss.

Since the March 29 ballot, Mugabe has warned that opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai will evict black peasants and allow white farmers to return if he wins a second-round vote. Veterans of Zimbabwe's liberation war of the 1970s, meanwhile, have begun invading some of the few white-owned farms still left.

"It's their right to do that, because this land does not belong to any white person," said Mugabe's security minister, Didymus Mutasa. "So they can go ahead."

The threats Mugabe has cited, in a speech Sunday and in state-run media, are fantasies, potent and without supporting evidence. White people supposedly are massing at the borders. Some, government news reports say, have even ventured as far as their old plots, zipping in on motorbikes and threatening to chase away the black Zimbabweans living there.

A political cartoon in the government's Sunday Mail newspaper pictured British Prime Minister Gordon Brown -- current leader of the former colonial power here -- pushing a white farmer toward a signpost leading to Zimbabwe. With a bag of 1 billion British pounds at his feet, the cartoon Brown says, "Don't worry, we will sponsor the re-run."

Analysts are divided on whether the scare tactics will work. Short of simply faking results, Mugabe can't dramatically better his performance without reclaiming the ruling party's traditional strongholds, many of which voted for the opposition in the first round. The date of the second round has not yet been set, nor have the official results been announced, though both sides agree that Tsvangirai got more votes than Mugabe in the first ballot.

"The land issue has exhausted all its energy," said political analyst Eldred Masunungure. "He may resort to that, being a traditional politician, but it's no longer resonating with the people."

But it is resonating here in Arcturus, a Mugabe stronghold about 20 miles east of Harare, the capital. Even those who acknowledge being poorer and hungrier now than they were when whites owned most of Zimbabwe's best land say they are reluctant to embrace a new era if it means losing their farms.

"The government told us that this is our land forever, but we're not sure what the new government will do," said Paulo Paulo, 73, a lean, leather-faced farmer whose feet are dry and cracked from walking his dusty fields barefoot. "We are just waiting. Maybe after the harvest we might be told to leave."

Paulo's experience with the ruling party has not been entirely positive. He was among the hundreds of thousands of Zimbabweans whose houses were destroyed in 2005, when Mugabe's police marauded through the nation's slums, demolishing homes and traders' stalls. The destruction deprived Paulo of both his residence and some rooms from which he earned rental income.

This farm, which Paulo said Mugabe's party gave to his wife as a reward for her fervent singing at political rallies and her role in invading the land, has been little better than a disaster. Although crops grown here once spilled into local shops or were shipped to overseas markets, these days Paulo -- who had virtually no experience as a farmer before getting this plot -- barely manages to feed his large family.

Farmers say many of these new plots have been sliced too small for viable commercial cultivation. Government promises to help, meanwhile, have proved empty. Seed, fertilizer, tractors and subsidized fuel have been delivered late or not at all.

Despite heavy seasonal rains, Paulo's meager corn crop is brown and wilted. Other food sources are so scant that he has already spread the corn kernels on the ground for drying so they can be milled a few weeks early -- an embarrassing sign of poor planning in rural Zimbabwe.

Yet for all its shortcomings, the farm is about all that Paulo has to show for a life of hard work, including decades as a "tea boy" serving refreshments at a company run mainly by whites. His wife and children live on the farm, as do 13 grandchildren. Should the opposition take it away -- as Mugabe alleges they will -- Paulo would be left destitute. It's more than enough, he said, to make him vote for the ruling party again.

"The only reason I voted for them was because I want to protect my land," Paulo said. "Farming is what I want to do now."

Rudo Isa, 31, with seven children to raise, is nervous too. Without her 15 acres, she's afraid her family would starve. It wouldn't take much. The last time she had enough cooking oil to make a proper meal was a month ago, she said. With no money for transport, her six school-age children walk six miles each way to school every day.

Having cast her lot with Mugabe's Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front, she worries things will get worse if the opposition takes power.

"We are just waiting to see what the new leadership and president are planning for us at the moment, but I am afraid because I believe they could tell us to leave," Isa said.

Kuda Kapuya, 31, says that Tsvangirai supporters have threatened to kick his wife and two kids off their land.

"They've been taunting me, telling me that their chance has come," Kapuya said.

Tsvangirai has repeatedly said that he has no such plans. Farms that have been resettled, or ones that are being usefully cultivated, will not be taken away, no matter who the owner was before the land invasions, he said.

The fears in Arcturus are not entirely without foundation. Reviving Zimbabwe's moribund economy -- joblessness tops 80 percent, inflation exceeds 100,000 percent -- will require restoring the nation's once-vibrant agriculture industry. And whites, who traditionally owned and ran the farms, will be unusually well-positioned to benefit from any new agricultural initiative.

Tsvangirai said he will start by selling off the farms of Mugabe cronies who have more than one. After that, he will target those farms cultivated so poorly that the fields are gradually being reclaimed by the vast Zimbabwean bush.

It's a description that, depending on who is making the judgment, might apply to parts of Arcturus. With harvest time just weeks away, some corn plants do not even reach a man's knee. Yet talk of taking any of this land away -- however distant, conditional and abstract -- has already provoked a backlash, here and across rural Zimbabwe.

"If they do that . . . it would be a problem for Zimbabweans," said Joseph Chinotimba, an official with the war veterans' association. "We are trying to protect the gains of liberation, the gains of land reform."

As Mugabe scrambles to hang on to power, it's clear that his signature land initiative has succeeded more as political tool than as policy.

Paulo remains loyal to the president but so poor that his pants are riddled with blue patches. His farm is so devoid of food that hungry rats began nibbling on his feet one recent night, leaving painful sores.

As Paulo waited for the early harvested corn to dry in the sun one recent day, he ventured out with an empty plastic container in search of pumpkin leaves, which Zimbabweans boil as a relish to eat on sadza, the national staple dish made from corn meal. When food is truly short, they will eat boiled pumpkin leaves alone.

On this day, though, when Paulo returned, the container was still empty, and he threw it to the ground in defeat.