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DURATION: 56 min.

White farmers are under persecution in Zimbabwe. In June 2009 there were only 100 of them left. Is it all about land redistribution, in order for the injustices of the colonization era to be rectified, when white farmers owned the best pieces of land, as president Mugabe claims? Or is it about the wiping out of the white population, a reverse racism, a political game so that he can remain in power?

This is a documentary where there are ‘no good guys’ apart from the tortured people of Zimbabwe. It’s the image of Africa’s ex-granary that became synonymous with poverty, inflation, corruption, electoral fraud, violence and oppression.

MAIN CREDITS

Written & Directed by Yorgos Avgeropoulos / Produced by Nina Maria Pashalidou / Director of Photography & Sound: Hopewell Chin’ono / Production Manager: Anastasia Skoubri / Research Coordinator: Aggelos Athanasopoulos / Original Music by Yiannis Paxevanis / Editing: Yiannis Biliris, Anna Prokou / Website Editor: Achilleas Kouremenos / A Small Planet production for Greek Public Television ERT © 2009 – 2010

TECHNICAL DATA

Original shooting format: SD 576 / Aspect Ratio:1.78 (16/9) / Languages: Greek, Shona, English / Subtitles: Greek, English / Available Versions: Greek, English, International

Chegutu, Zimbabwe, 100 km outside the capital Harare.

Ben Freeth is one of the remaining white farmers in the area. He is reading a fairy tale to his children in front of the lit fireplace. His farm slumbers in the stillness of the night.

It is hard to imagine that behind this peaceful family moment fear is lurking. Mr. Freeth listens intensely to any sound that reaches his house from the darkness outside. «They might come tonight» he says, «and cause total chaos. No one can tell what may happen to us».

The people who are laying claim to the farm – about 3000 acres – have already come. It’s a high ranking official from president Mugabe’s party who is supported by the unemployed youths of the region. The Freeths and their two children are withdrawn to their house and its close surroundings. Their 150 workers are hiding in fear in their sheds and no one dares go to work. They are considered traitors because they work for white people. They might be beaten or even killed.

On another quiet night in June 2008 similar to this one the phone rang. Freeth picked it up to hear with growing terror his father-in-law, who lived a little further away on the farm, crying for help. He was under attack. Ben got in his car and run to his assistance. But as he approached an armed group of black men stopped him.

‘They dragged me out my vehicle, pulled off my T-shirt, tied me with ropes and started beating me on my back and on my head; then they dragged me to where my parents-in-law were’, remembers Mr. Freeth. ‘They had been tied up and they were bleeding, their condition was horrendous. I watched all their possessions been removed from their house. We were accused of been white farmers and were told that we have no place in Zimbabwe because our skin isn’t black’.

After beating them savagely, the attackers left their victims semi-conscious in a deserted area. Even though he was bleeding Ben managed to reach a house and ask for help. Since then armed men have threatened the Freeth family four more times. They entered their yard and burnt tyres, ploughed their entrance with tractors and shouted that they must evacuate by dawn. The Freeths however believe that God is on their side and refuse to abandon their farm.

The white people occupied the biggest and best land back when present-day Zimbabwe was still known as Rhodesia. It was named after diamond tycoon Cecil John Rhodes, who in 1890 declared it a colony of the United Kingdom. He made his beliefs clear straight from the outset, ‘We must treat the natives as we would treat a child and deny them any rights or privileges. We must establish an authoritarian system in our dealings with the South African barbarians’.

It took about a century to break the chains of colonialism. Even just before the regime collapsed in 1980 Ian Smith, then prime minister of Rhodesia, used to say, ‘We have total control of Rhodesia today. We, Europeans are all powert. The power is in our hands and we can more or less do whatever we want’.

Robert Mugabe, a leading figure of the guerrillas rose to power immediately after. He has been in power since 1980. He has been ruling for 29 years and he succeeded in transforming Zimbabwe to an paradigm for all Africa only to plunge it further into poverty.

The decline began in 2000 when President Mugabe, two decades after independence, decided to start land redistribution – something he had promised to do many years before. Instead however of doing it by the law he encouraged his followers to use violent means to get back the land that once belonged to them. The land that had been stolen from them in the 19th century by the British.

‘The people here could take over any land they wanted, and this was called revolution by the government back then’, points out Lovemore Maduku member of the opposition parliament party MDC. ‘If you are a member of the ruling party and have power you simply decide which piece of land you want. You take a gang, go to a farm, grab it and it’s yours. And the government approves of this illegal land ownership’.

Beatriz Mtetwa, a human rights lawyer and ex-president of the Harare Bar Association, provides the missing pieces of the puzzle: ‘The media never highlighted the fact that also many black citizens of Zimbabwe who had bought farms have been forced out of their farms’.

‘They seized the farm from an associate of mine at the law firm and gave it to a member of the parliament of that region who was totally clueless when it came to farming’, she says. ‘It has been presented as a racial issue but in essence it is a mater of who wants your estate. And if you watch who is getting the farms… it’s not the people who are in need. And that’s a fact. […] Let’s see how much land is in the hands of a mere handful of powerful black men? Because in my opinion the idea was supposed to be, ‘You seize the land from the few white men and then redistribute it to many black men’. But what happened was that the land was seized from a few white men and ended in the hands of a few black men. You do not substitute a white landowner with a black landowner when the villagers remain in the same condition year after year’.

The way in which the land redistribution took place was the final blow to the country’s economy as major farm industries stopped operating. Zimbabwe plunged into poverty with inflation rising to a sad record of 231.000.000% in July 2008.

All opposing voices were violently suppressed, and the authorities along with the president’s followers made it clear that no one is in position to challenge him. As Mr. Chinotimba, an ex war veteran and ex member of Mugabe’s party said, ‘We are the children of this land. There is money in this earth! If that wasn’t the case why are the white people so insistent? They come here and eat what we produce. And when we try to go to Europe they deny us entry. So we stay in our country since we don’t have visas, and yet we are still the bad guys?’