slow-talking. He had a genius for improvisation. During the War, with machinery and spare parts hard to get, he had attended every farm sale, bought up the machines, and rehabilitated them. His farm was a museum of farm, machinery: I recognized ploughs and harrows and planters from the 1920s and ’30s. There were a couple of acres full of these machines, and every one was in working order. He had taught a couple of farm workers all he knew, and these men looked after their machines like–well, like mombies. This joke was made by the farmer to the men, and returned to us by the men, laughing. ‘Nearly as good as mombies,’ they said, showing off wagons, planters, reapers. The place was almost self-sufficient, with storerooms full of preserves, jams, honey, cheeses, pickles, and bins full of grain. Supper was a feast, and breakfast another, and nothing on the table had been bought. The farmer’s wife was as remarkable as her husband. When her husband went off for months at a time to fight, it was she who ran the farm. She did not find it easy to take a back seat again–like all the wives who managed farms while the men went to war, and who tended to exchange resigned looks when their husbands said things like, ‘So and so came to look after my wife when I was away fighting.’ Now, with peace restored, as well as being a farmer’s wife of the old kind who could turn their hands to anything, she was running what amounted to a training school for house servants. These were all female, not male, but the decision to employ women had not been made by her. ‘Oh, I do what I’m told,’ she said, and then, ‘Come and see the Princess: Yes, I have a Princess working in my kitchen.’ This was not said unpleasantly, as it certainly would have been in the old days, for she was trying to come to terms with the new Zimbabwe. In the kitchen a pretty black girl was learning to cook elaborate cakes and puddings. ‘They come up to me from the village every day, they beg me to teach them, they cry and if I say no, they just go on coming back till I give in. Please teach me, please teach me and so I have five girls working for me, whatever next, my husband tells me I’m silly, but I say, I’m doing my bit for Zimbabwe, aren’t I? There isn’t any work for these poor girls, you see. They know I give them a good training, and they try to get work somewhere in the towns in a hotel or one of the embassies. They all want to work in a hotel. I show them everything, how to cook and serve and make beds and keep the verandah plants nice. I teach them how to answer the telephone and take messages.’ Before I went to bed they warned me that if I went for a walk before breakfast then I must be careful. ‘There are all kinds of skellums about you know, because of the War. And if you hear a lorry, get into the bush. If it’s just our soldiers, then it’s all right, but if it’s the North Koreans…’
Comrade Mugabe accepted an offer by the North Koreans to supply soldiers to train a regiment especially to guard him and act as exemplars of military efficiency to the rest of the citizens. They were thugs, bullies and, more than once, murderers, for it was they who were blamed for the recent murder of two tourists not very far from this farm. Everyone feared them. In 1982 only one issue united blacks and whites: loathing of the Koreans, the infamous Fifth Brigade. ‘They’d kill you as soon as look at you,’ said my host. Said too, the five girls who were off to their villages through the dark bush, together for safety, with a man from the farm as escort. When I went walking early, about six, it was through fields full of coffee bushes that were dusty and limp from lack of rain. I was listening for the birds, even hoping to see an animal or two. There were some birds, not very many, but no animals. Suddenly appeared a lorry full of men in uniform, jolting past in clouds of dust. They were a local regiment, not the Koreans. I stood in the dust at the side of the road, ready to run if necessary. They did not look friendly, but then, why should they?
Soon after I returned to London, I heard