Liberation by --Extermination of White Settlers-- Reconciliation: Eviction of Zimbabwe's Last White Farmers

The end of an era for Zimbabwe's last white farmers?

Despite the introduction of a power-sharing government two years ago, state-backed farm seizures have continued. Colin Freeman meets one of the last white farmers still at work in Zimbabwe.

By Colin Freeman, Chegutu, Daily Telegraph
7:00AM BST 26 Jun 2011

Driving through land his family have tended for half a century, Colin Cloete stops to inspect a harvested tobacco field, rows of green stumps sprouting from a terracotta soil.

As a seasoned professional farmer, he knows the field needs to be reploughed before pests infest the weedy growths left behind. As a tired political campaigner, however, he knows it is no longer worth his while.

"We should be replanting these fields now, but I don't know who is going to benefit from the next harvest," he says, shaking his head. "I will probably do it anyway, but I do wonder whether it's worth it."

The Great Betrayal: The Memoirs of Ian Douglas Smith; By Ian Douglas Smith [*Amazon*]

After an 11-year struggle in which their ranks have been murdered, beaten, jailed and bankrupted, the last of Zimbabwe's white farmers are finally facing defeat in their efforts to resist President Robert Mugabe's land-grab programme.

Despite the introduction of a power-sharing government two years ago, state-backed farm seizures have continued, and earlier this month, Mr Cloete lost a final appeal at Zimbabwe's Supreme Court to keep his one remaining property.

Next Monday, he will appear before a local magistrate to answer a charge of trespass, for which the only way to avoid jail will be to pack up and start looking for a new house in Harare, an hour's drive away.

With his departure will also go the hopes of some 300 other white farmers - all that remains of a community that was once 4,000 strong - for whom similar legal challenges had offered some last chance of protection, or at least a stay of execution.

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