Zimbabwe’s white farmers are promised a speck of compensation

TWO DECADES after President Robert Mugabe began to steal most of the 5,000-odd farms owned by whites in Zimbabwe, an agreement to give them a morsel of compensation has been struck—on paper. Whether it will add up to a sheaf of tobacco leaves or go up in a puff of smoke is too soon to say. “If we got something, that would be wonderful,” says Miki Marffy, who, after being dispossessed of his farm, took as much of his staff and machinery as he could, resettled in Zambia to the north, and started up all over again. “And if we don’t, or they try to do a currency-conversion trick, then we will just continue to hang on to our title deeds: nothing ventured, nothing gained.”Twenty years ago Zimbabwe was a breadbasket of the region, with the most sophisticated farm-based economy in Africa, bar South Africa. This was thanks mainly to a clutch of efficient white farmers who still owned most of the best land. Three-quarters of their farms had been bought after independence in 1980, with Mugabe’s government issuing “certificates of no present interest” to signify that at that stage it had no desire to buy more than token chunks of farms for landless black Zimbabweans. The commercial farmers kept the economy ticking over nicely, kept themselves out of politics, and paid the bulk of the country’s taxes.