War Veterans’ Association, led by the aptly named Chenjerai “Hitler” Hunzvi, agreed to hand out massive payouts and pensions to all the association’s fifty thousand members. The Zimbabwean dollar had plummeted in value; inflation had soared, with a loaf of bread leaping in price from seventy cents to more than ten dollars; and the first voices of political opposition had begun to be heard.
“Are you worried?” I asked.
A wind lifted the tobacco and ghosted across us, bringing on it a fragrant scent.
“Not yet,” Pat whispered—but, as he turned back to the farmhouse, I wondered whether he believed it or not.
THE REFERENDUM WAS lost.
The people had spoken. By a large margin, they rebutted Mugabe’s attempts at consolidating his power. They told him, in no uncertain terms, that they did not approve of his attempts to forcibly acquire land that was legally held. They told him they did not approve of him staying in power for endless terms and appointing a natural successor, like any warlord of old. They put their trust, instead, in a newly formed political party, the Movement for Democratic Change, which had been formed in the trade unions and was led by a man named Morgan Tsvangirai. The MDC had been campaigning for a no vote in the referendum, and suddenly the people seemed to be able to voice their opposition to Mugabe.
But in the end, it was to mean nothing.
On the surface the outcome was good for farmers like Pat and me. Questions of government and land reform had simmered, just below the surface, ever since the bush war ended in 1980. We had spent our entire married lives with those unanswered questions lying in wait, just like the crocodiles down at the river, and perhaps Mugabe’s attempt at changing things was just another blip, just another one of those moments in which the crocodile surfaces to study the riverbank with cold, reptilian eyes.
It was only a few days, however, before we heard the first murmurs of discontent. The same War Veterans’ Association that had compelled the government to give unprecedented monetary handouts to its fifty thousand members, crippling the economy, had suddenly been mobilized. We heard stories of its members—some claiming to be veterans of the bush war in which Pat too had fought, even though they could not have been born at the time—amassing on the farms of white landowners, beating drums, chanting slogans, and confronting farmers and their families on the very steps of their homes. Already, some farmers had abandoned their farms out of fear for their children.
Charl and Tertia had always had trouble with itinerant poachers, as they were at the edge of a resettlement area, a former commercial farm that had been bought for redistribution to landless peasants. But after the referendum was lost, they began to see more and more settlers moving through Two Tree. Charl confided in Pat that he had found a note, skewered on a stick outside their farmhouse, instructing him that they would have to leave, that Two Tree and all its neighboring farms would soon revert to their “rightful owners.”
The referendum had been lost, but Mugabe could still exact his will.
It was early in the new millennium, and our oldest, Paul, had returned from studying at college in South Africa to help run the farm. We had been struggling at Crofton, a hangover from the droughts that had plagued us in the 1990s as we fought to open up the farm, and instead of returning here, he and Pat had leased some land at a farm between us and the town of Chinhoyi, a place called Palmerston Estates where we were growing yet more tomatoes. Jay, meanwhile, had taken up a hunting apprenticeship that took him all across the northwest region of Zimbabwe. Only Kate remained with us at Crofton, though often her brothers would return on the weekends to join her and run wild as they had done when they were small.
Soon after the referendum was lost, Jay returned to Crofton to spend the week with us. The whispers of what was happening on Zimbabwe’s farms had reached the hunting areas too, and Jay—who knew every inch of the land, in a way much deeper even than Pat and I did—was keen to know what was happening on our own farm. We told him of the settlers we had seen drifting through, the tension in the air on Two Tree, but it was not until Jay was about to leave us again that we had the first indication that we, as a family, were in the firing line as well.
Jay and Pat had been talking with Charl about the problems he was having with war vets at Two Tree. There was a sudden influx of settlers he had seen on his land from the nearby resettlement areas. Poaching was also getting out of hand as they moved over with their hunting dogs. As the afternoon waned, Charl, Pat, and Jay climbed back into the Land Rover to begin the slow crawl back to Crofton. Dusk was gathering, and the dying light set the bush to brilliant color: crimsons and reds burst through the wooded foliage; the red dirt tracks looked like licks of flames between fields of tall wheat.
Then, a gunshot cleaved the silence.
Pat and Jay immediately recognized the gunshot for what it was. A crack, like concentrated thunder, had split the air. Instinctively, Pat slammed his foot on the gas pedal. The Land Rover slewed wildly in the dust. Pat craned to look through the back windshield—but, all about, the farm seemed still. He wrestled with the wheel, brought the Land Rover back into line, and, with his foot still pressed hard to the floor, thundered back toward Crofton.
In the back, Jay reached instinctively for the shotgun hidden underneath the seat. He ducked at the window, the gun tight to his chest, keen eyes surveying the bushy koppie all around, in case he might see some figure lurking in the brush. Pat was proud to see how Jay reacted, so suddenly and so decisively. His months of training in Zimbabwe’s hunting areas seemed to have given him even more steel.
At the farmhouse, Kate and I were waiting. When the Land Rover appeared, kicking up clods of earth, we knew that something was wrong. Pat wrenched the vehicle around, and he and Jay tumbled out, their faces lined in a strange mixture of bewilderment and fury.
“What happened?” I asked.
Already, Jay was on his hands and knees, running his hands along the doors and rims of the Land Rover, as if searching for a tick in one of the horses’ flanks.
He looked up, eyes screwed shut as he squinted back the way they had come.
“Somebody shot at us,” Jay breathed.
I looked at Pat. “Shot at you?”
“From somewhere, up in the bush.”
I fell silent.
I breathed and said, “They’re already here, aren’t they?”
Without words, Pat nodded. Finally, he said, “There could be war vets”—he said it with a strange lilt, because really they were not war veterans at all, only thugs in Mugabe’s employ—“all over the farm and we just wouldn’t know it.”
“What’s happening here, Mum?” Jay had some of his father’s grit in his voice. It was a shock to understand, in that moment, how grown-up my second son had become.
I didn’t know how to respond, how to explain. There was so much to think about—how our nation had come to this, how we had found ourselves in such a perilous position, how we had walked blindly—even willingly—into such a confrontation. Issues of land reform in Britain’s old colonies were complex and often evoked great passions, as our neighbors in Kenya could testify to only too well. In the 1960s, they had gone through their own process of reform. In Zimbabwe, the interests of landowners had been protected in 1979 by the Lancaster House Agreement, which paved the way for the end of the bush war and Rhodesia’s transition to Zimbabwe. The agreement protected the rights of those who had owned, or been given, lands under the old government for ten years, guaranteeing that their land could be acquired by the government only on a willing seller, willing buyer basis—and that, even in those circumstances, adequate compensation would be paid. On top of this, before any farms were purchased or land bought