Zimbabwe's Supreme Court heard a case on behalf of three farmers who claimed the constitution excluded confiscation of their land because they bought their properties after the colonial era ended with independence in 1980. The Supreme Court did not agree and quickly dismissed their application.
One of the farmers, Colin Cloete, a former president of the Commercial Farmers’ Union at the height of often violent land invasions seven years ago, was one of the applicants. He, like many of his colleagues, has been arrested, harassed and appeared in court many times, to try to stay on his farm.
Like most surviving white farmers, the cost of going to court to try to fight his eviction has been unaffordable. Looking back over the long and difficult years, Cloete, now 58, said his struggle to remain on his farm did not make economic sense.
“Economically we should have moved off then, at the beginning, as we would have been 10 years younger and that much more energetic,” said Cloete.
Cloete said he had begun looking looking for a house in Harare, not least so he could move his possessions to safety.
He said the land invasions launched after Mr. Mugabe lost a referendum in 2000 had hurt him and Zimbabwe’s economy, and no one had benefited from this except the elite in the ZANU-PF Party.
“We are treated like second-class citizens, we are treated like we are still just visitors to this place. My father was born in this country, before Mr. Mugabe, but I am still a visitor,” said Cloete. [end excerpt]
....He has already handed over another farm he owns to a group of black settlers who turned up in 2006, since when, he says, he has done his best to be neighbourly.
He helps prepare the land for cultivation and offers advice when they need it, although driving through his estate, it is clear that some of what is now in black hands is being used for little more than subsistence agriculture.
Such goodwill, however, counts for little when groups of club-wielding "war veterans" - ostensibly men who fought in Zimbabwe's war for independence, but in practice often just hired thugs - turn up to demand a farmer's departure...
...What stung more, though, were the "Go back to Britain" slogans they shouted - meaningless to a man who is in fact of French Huguenot stock, has only ever held a Zimbabwean passport, and has nowhere else to go even if he wanted to.
Infuriatingly, the view that he has no longer a citizen of his own country is shared by the black prosecutor who will oversee his trespass case next week, who has described him in previous court appearances as merely a "visitor".
"I have never viewed myself as anything other than Zimbabwean, and that is what hurts me most," he said.
"We are not being looked at as citizens of this country, yet my father was born here before Robert Mugabe. What future do we have when you are fighting people of that mentality?"