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By Root 1328 0

that large areas are not being used. But a recent UN Report has said that on the whole the Commercial Farms are properly used. Here is hidden something else, seldom spoken of openly. It is a Grey Area. Everyone knows the bush of Zimbabwe is disappearing, erosion threatens, soil is overused. But it is in the overcrowded communal areas that the bush is going. You can tell when you pass from a Commercial Farm to a Communal Area not only because the soil often changes from red or chocolate to pale colour but because at once the bush is only a ghost of itself. The comparatively undamaged bush on the Commercial Farms is an asset for the whole country. Yet a thousand polemical articles demand that the Commercial Farms should be expropriated. The government says improperly used farms will be compulsorily bought. But improperly used farms are often owned by rich blacks–Mugabe’s supporters.

Recently very large areas of the country have been freed from tsetse fly, and this means that beasts can now live there and the land distributed to the landless. The conservationists are saying: That means a lot more of Zimbabwe will become semi-desert.

On the walls of the farm office are two aerial photographs, one taken when the farm was bought, in the 1950s, and one last year. The early map shows large areas of uncultivated land, now very little is left unused. Any committee, commission, or government inspector coming to assess the situation on this farm will at once be shown these maps.

When this farmer said, ‘I’ll show you around,’ it was with the anxious pride that is the note of now. First, to the tobacco barns, whose design does away with the old technology that kept young farm assistants or struggling farmers awake half the night to check barn temperatures. The leaves are strung on movable racks, the furnace uses a minimum of fuel, the whole operation needs little supervision. What has also changed is the number of workers needed to run these barns: just like everywhere else in the world technology has thrown people desperate for work out of a job. The farmer is proud of his barns. ‘We developed this technology,’ says he, and the we means, here, ‘we, the white farmers of Southern Rhodesia’ and not, as it usually does these days, ‘we, Zimbabwe’. The design of these barns has been copied in other countries, and so have devices invented by this same farmer. ‘I invented this…’ ‘I invented that…’

We are driven around the fields. It is midday, hot, hot. The farm is still growing maize, which more and more is being grown by the small black farmers, it grows tobacco, and, a new venture, granadillas, or passion fruit. There are fields of these, the vines strung along wires. The plants are being attacked by some new disease but the farmer is not worried, for he has confidence that whatever Nature comes up with will get short shrift from science. In the middle of a field are grazing some duiker and a couple of bush buck. Surely these animals lie up in hidden shady places in the daytime and graze at night? To see them here in the blaze of midday upsets my idea of the proper order of things, like the rains coming in November instead of October. ‘My chaps are forbidden to kill game on this farm,’ says the farmer. ‘Of course they do, when I’m not looking. Not that there’s much left. Do you remember when…’

He talks all the way around the farm, and, as we sit in the shady living-room, waiting for lunch, he cannot stop talking about his accomplishments, the new techniques, new crops, new ideas–full of a restless energy that keeps him on the move: when he sits down he is up almost at once to reach for a pamphlet, an article, a book.

Lunch is served by the black servant, and is the meal that will survive in these British outposts long after it is forgotten in Britain. We eat roast beef. Roast potatoes. Badly cooked vegetables. A heavy pudding. That this should all go on with the temperature at nearly a hundred is certainly an invitation to remember commonplaces about national characteristics.

Through lunch we talk about the unemployed youngsters in