World on Fire - Brownstein, Michael [55]
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However affable, Zimbabwe’s whites did not come by their wealth legitimately. The original British settlers duped, killed, and expropriated their way to control of the country’s best land, leaving the indigenous majority to scrubby, marginal areas infested with the dreaded tsetse fly. In the 1930s white supremacy was legislated in the form of laws excluding black Africans from ownership of arable farmland, from skilled trades and professions, and from settling in “white areas,” including all towns and cities. The result was that Zimbabwe’s blacks were forced to work on white-owned farms, in white-owned mines, and in white-owned factories.
Although political power finally changed hands in 1980, the hard fact of white market dominance remains. With their vastly superior education, land, technological skills, foreign investment connections, and corporate and horticultural experience, members of Zimbabwe’s tiny white minority have a century-old edge that makes them as market-dominant as the Chinese in Southeast Asia. Throughout the eighties and nineties, forty-five hundred white commercial farmers produced more food than a million black farmers. In Hippo Valley, for example, two large-scale sugar estates, both white-owned, together produced about five hundred thousand tons of sugar annually, half of it for export. As late as 2000, Zimbabwe’s whites, not even 1 percent of the population, essentially owned and ran the country’s modern, immensely productive, commercial-agriculture-based economy, thriving on global markets, employing over two million people, and fueling the country’s high growth rates.
11 Predictably, this enormous racial concentration of wealth and market expertise has produced combustible political conditions, not just in Zimbabwe but in Namibia and South Africa as well.
Kenyan Cowboys and “Capitalistic” Kikuyus
Ever since Hugh Cholmondeley, England’s third baron of Delamare, arrived in 1897 after a two-thousand-mile camel ride from Somalia, Kenya also has had an inordinately prosperous, disproportionately skilled white minority. Today numbering only about five thousand, they live, completely segregated, in the beautiful Nairobi suburbs of Langata and Karen, named after the Danish settler Karen Blixen. They live in large houses with small windows (to keep out the sun) and magnificent, sprawling gardens filled with fuchsias and English roses and avenues of jacaranda and eucalyptus trees.
Back in the days of Happy Valley—Nairobi’s legendary enclave of witty, winsome, morphine-and-orgy-addicted expatriate aristocrats—Kenya’s whites included luminaries like Evelyn Waugh, Edward, Prince of Wales, and the American millionaire Northrop MacMillan. After the dashing Josslyn Hay, earl of Erroll, was found murdered on the floor of his Buick with a bullet in his head—sixty years later the mystery remains unsolved—Happy Valley was never the same again.
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Today these aristocrats are mostly gone. Nowadays the most prominent white Kenyans are probably the Leakeys: a family of paleontologists and conservationists who first arrived in Kenya from Great Britain three generations ago. In the 1990s, Richard Leakey transformed the Kenya Wildlife Service, crucial for the country’s tourist trade, from a shabby, demoralized department into the pride of Kenya’s public sector, with its own efficient paramilitary force. Leakey’s recent foray into electoral politics, however—off-limits to whites