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The Pioneer Spirit 14th March 2004 CHISAMBA, 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. Watt left the county of his birth almost a year ago after what has become a common encounter there: the husband of a worker in President Robert Mugabe's office politely told him that he was taking over his farm and that Watt had 90 days to get out. He is one of as many as 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. Both 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 attempt to redistribute colonial-era landholdings, Zambian officials, if a trifle warily, have rolled out the welcome mat. They are hoping that farmers like Watt will breathe new life into the nation's moribund farming sector, which has been mired at the rake-and-hoe level since the mid-1970s. For their part, some of the transplanted farmers say Zimbabwe has taught them that they need to integrate, not just prosper. Watt drove around Zambia for three weeks before he found 650 hectares, or 1,600 acres, to lease near this one-street village, with a post office, police station and food market north of Zambia's capital, Lusaka. Pasture and brush just 11 months ago, the gently rolling land is now about a meter and a half, or about 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. Watt has sunk $900,000 into his new farm, most of it borrowed from a bank and from Universal Leaf Tobacco, based in Richmond, Virginia. "I have put every cent I have into this," 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." Watt's move continues a long pattern of whites, increasingly uncertain of their welcome, who have hopscotched around the southern end of the continent over the past four decades. His shift reverses that of his parents, 40 years ago. Back when this country was still called Northern Rhodesia and chafed under colonial rule, Roy and Ria Watt comfortably raised tobacco and corn on 1,600 lush hectares. 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, moderate and desperate for investment after disastrous post-independence economic policies reduced the nation to a beggar for foreign handouts and loans. Critics say Mugabe's policies are accomplishing much the same in Zimbabwe 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." For Zambia, the money and know-how of white farmers could help the nation climb out of the hole it fell into with the decline of its copper mines and nationalization of land after independence. Aided by open government policies on leasing and investment - and by America's tobacco industry, which is underwriting much of the farm-building - farmers like Watt are already creating a more modest version of Zimbabwe's once mighty tobacco industry, which has been left in ruins after three years of land seizures. One of the world's leading exporters of tobacco in the 1990s, Zimbabwe's output has fallen by three-fourths. Only about 500 of its 4,500 white commercial farmers are still in operation. Most of the rest are waiting out Mugabe's reign in Zimbabwe's cities; perhaps a third have fled to neighboring countries like Zambia or Mozambique or have left the continent altogether. Zambia is taking up some of the slack, doubling its tobacco production this year alone. By 2008, analysts predict it will produce 37.2 million kilograms, or 82 million pounds, of flue-cured tobacco a year. That is twice the yield than in the mid-1970s, before farmland was nationalized - although still far less than Zimbabwe and Malawi each produce now. Government officials see a new revenue stream of fees and taxes, plus the potential for fertilizer stores, irrigation equipment and even a tobacco processing plant like the one now operating at a quarter of its capacity in Zimbabwe. "We think we have benefited from the farmers who have come in," said Kabaghe, the deputy minister for agriculture. "We are very proud of them. Our tobacco industry is now booming." At the same time, no official here wants the success of white farmers to be too visible, lest it irritate Mugabe, whom Zambia's leaders have publicly supported. Even more importantly, they do not want to engender the sort of racial backlash here that has helped spur Zimbabwe's land takeovers and that is building in both South Africa and Namibia. Nor do the tobacco companies want to be seen as the benefactors of only whites. Universal Leaf says it wants to develop 40 to 50 smaller, black-owned commercial farms near the white-owned farms. Sharon LaFraniere - The
New York Times |