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One estate is big enough for its name to appear in giant white letters on the lush hill behind it. At the entrance to the dirt tracks off the road, neat boards display the owners' English names. In many places the paint has faded: The owners have lived here for three generations.

Malcolm Norvall, who manages a 300-cow dairy farm outside Harare, tells me his father was 20 when he moved up from South Africa. Norvall's father bought a chunk of farming land during the 1920's (right around the time that Reuben Gwatidzo's grandparents were thrown off their farm). That land was owned by the concession set up by colonial founder Cecil Rhodes. But Norvall's payment was a forgettable token, since white settlement, not money, was the aim of the company.

"My dad knew nothing about farming, but he got a few cows and began," says Malcolm Norvall, 53. He built a thriving business. Eventually, Malcolm and his two brothers took it over, and expanded further, before selling it after Zimbabwe's independence in 1982.

Drive further down the road from the Norvall land and you reach Porter Farm, named for the white family who have long since cleared out. It is now state-owned land, and the site of the country's largest shantytown.

How Robson Machauda and 7,000 other blacks came to live here with no electricity or running water is a story that demonstrates the complexity of the current conflict. When Queen Elizabeth II came to visit Zimbabwe in 1991, Mugabe ordered a cleanup of the city, which by that stage had become a public-relations disaster. And so hundreds of shanties were dismantled, their residents trucked out of town to a vacant plot of land, miles from any source of employment.

"I just sell some bags of meal to survive here," says Robson, 30, who found himself unable to move back to Harare. He has married and had two children in the squatter camp, and doubts he will ever be able to leave. "Even if there were land for us, we have no money to buy it," he says.

Mugabe's supporters in Porter Farm have been busily organizing invasions of the sprawling white estates which surround the squatter camp. Matthew Chadambuka, 54, runs the local branch of Mugabe's ZANU-PF party, and like Robson, was dumped at Porter Farm the week before the Queen arrived nine years ago. Having finally given up waiting for land, he has grouped together people from the camp to occupy chunks of farm land nearby.

Who should pay the farmers for their land, I ask? "The government has no money to buy farms," says Chadambuka. And anyway, why should they? "The land was grabbed from us free of charge in the first place."

Those of us who were born and raised in Africa will never forget the day exactly 20 years ago, when Mugabe's guerrillas won their independence, and dismantled 90 years of white rule. The euphoria was dizzying. Not only had the Zimbabwean battle been grueling, its end also foretold the inevitable demise of white rule next door, in South Africa.

It took another 14 years for Nelson Mandela to come to power. But the path to that moment began in 1980, here on the streets of Harare.

Twenty years later, land -- the promise for which thousands of black Zimbabweans died fighting -- is still unfulfilled. Mugabe has resettled about 70,000 families, a tiny fraction of those whose land was seized, and well short of his own target of distributing land to 162,000 families by 1985.

Down South, there are growing anxieties in South Africa, whose president Thabo Mbeki flew to Zimbabwe on Easter weekend to try defend Mugabe's actions to a baffled world press.

Indeed, Mbeki faces the prospect that his own voters might finally invade the plush white farmlands of South Africa. Of the millions of blacks who lost land under apartheid, only 13,500 families have so far received restitution from South Africa's land court.

Amazingly, only one copycat invasion has taken place in South Africa since February. But if a similar revolt began in a country immensely more powerful and better-armed than Zimbabwe, the entire region could catapult into chaos.

In both countries, history has entangled blacks and whites in a battle over their future.

In Porter Farm, Chadambuka says they have no intention of leaving the white farms, despite a court order for them to evict, and despite Robin Cook's demand in London on Thursday that Mugabe force them off the farms before Britain lends Zimbabwe money to buy land for its people.

"We'll wait for the whites to finish harvesting their crops, and then we'll begin tilling the land," says Chadambuka. Last week, he began handing out parcels of land on the white farms to his group of invaders.

When I visited Malcolm Norvell last week, he had just watched the squatters, next to his milking shed, as they began to stake out bits of land on the farm for themselves. His brothers have left for South Africa. His daughter has emigrated to Texas.

But Norvell, like most whites, says he's not going anywhere. He fought Mugabe's guerrillas for 12 years before independence, and despite the fact that his side lost, he says: "This is my country. I have nowhere to go."
salon.com | May 1, 2000

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