Zimbabwe's White Farmers Start Anew in Zambia
By SHARON LaFRANIERE
Published: March 21, 2004
HISAMBA, Zambia — Douglas Watt is part of a most curious diaspora in Southern Africa: prosperous white farmers, vilified as greedy racists and driven out of Zimbabwe, looking for a home.
Mr. Watt left the country of his birth about a year ago after what has become a common sort of encounter there. The husband of a worker in the office of President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe politely told Mr. Watt that he was taking over his farm and that Mr. Watt had 90 days to get out.
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Today Mr. Watt is one of about 140 white Zimbabwean farmers who have relocated to neighboring Zambia hoping, many say, for a mix of racial harmony and political stability that will enable them to prosper and contribute to black Africa.
For the farmers and for the Zambian government, the migration amounts to a new experiment on an issue central to the whole region: how do whites fit in?
While Zimbabwe has been uprooting its white farmers in an aggressive effort to redistribute colonial era landholdings, Zambian officials, if a trifle warily, have rolled out the welcome mat. They are hoping that farmers like Mr. Watt will breathe new life into the nation's moribund farming economy, which has been mired at the rake-and-hoe level since the mid-1970's.
For their part, some transplanted farmers say they have learned from their experience in Zimbabwe that they need to integrate, not just prosper, if they want to be accepted.
Mr. Watt drove around Zambia for three weeks before he found 1,600 acres to lease near this one-street village with a post office, police station and food market north of Lusaka, the capital. Pasture and brush a year ago, the gently rolling land is now five feet high in green tobacco plants tended by 240 workers. Huge yellow sheaves of tobacco are hung to cure in 15 shiny sheds by a new blocklong warehouse.
Mr. Watt has sunk $900,000 into his new farm, most of it borrowed from a bank and from the Universal Leaf Tobacco Company, based in Richmond, Va. "I have put every cent I have into this," Mr. Watt, 38, said, sitting in the dining room of his new ranch-style house. "I've got more invested here than I ever did in Zimbabwe. We will be an asset to the country."
Mr. Watt's move continues a long pattern of whites, increasingly uncertain of their welcome, who have hopscotched around the southern end of Africa in the last four decades.
His shift reverses that of his parents, 40 years ago. Back when this Texas-size nation was still called Northern Rhodesia and chafed under colonial rule, Roy and Ria Watt grew tobacco and corn on 4,000 lush acres. In 1964, when white minority rule crumbled and the country became Zambia, the Watts, fearful of their future under a new black-led government, fled to Zimbabwe. Today their son is convinced that his parents bet on the wrong country.
Douglas Watt describes Zambia as everything that Zimbabwe is no longer: racially tolerant, law-abiding and moderate. It had been desperate for investment after disastrous postindependence economic policies reduced the nation to a beggar for foreign handouts and loans. Critics say President Mugabe's policies in Zimbabwe are creating the same conditions for disaster there today.
Also unlike Zimbabwe, or South Africa for that matter, Zambia has good land in abundance: about 60 percent of the countryside is arable, but less than 10 percent is actively farmed. In a country of 10 million, there are no more than 450 commercial farmers, including the Zimbabweans.
"We think there is a large vacuum to fill," said Chance Kabaghe, deputy minister for agriculture, in an interview in a dilapidated office building in Lusaka. "That's why we have been so open."
Still, he added: "We are encouraging them to respect our norms and mix with the local people. We are watching the situation very closely."
For Zambia, the white farmers' money and knowledge may help the nation climb out of the hole it fell into with the decline of its copper mines and nationalization of land after independence. |
