TANDI, ZIMBABWE: A white Zimbabwean farmer evicted by gun-wielding police and a mob associated with the ruling party has returned to a hero’s welcome, in a sign that the new president is charting a path away from predecessor Robert Mugabe on an issue that had hastened the country’s international isolation.
With a military escort, Robert Smart made his way into Lesbury farm about 200 kilometers (124 miles) east of the capital, Harare, on Thursday to cheers and song by dozens of workers and community members.
Such scenes were once unthinkable in a country where land ownership is an emotional issue with political and racial overtones.
“We have come to reclaim our farm,” sang black women and men, rushing into the compound.
Two decades ago, their arrival would have meant that Smart and his family would have to leave. Ruling ZANU-PF party supporters, led by veterans of the 1970s war against white minority rule, evicted many of Zimbabwe’s white farmers under an often violent land reform program led by Mugabe.
Whites make up less than 1 percent of the southern African country’s population, but they owned huge tracts of land while blacks remained in largely unproductive areas.
The evictions were meant to address colonial land ownership imbalances skewed against blacks, Mugabe said. Some in the international community responded with outrage and sanctions.
Of the roughly 4,500 white farmers before the land reforms began in 2000, only a few hundred are left.
But Mugabe is gone, resigning last month after the military and ruling party turned against him amid fears that his wife was positioning herself to take power. New President Emmerson Mnangagwa, a longtime Mugabe ally but stung by his firing as vice president, has promised to undo some land reforms as he seeks to revive the once-prosperous economy.
On Thursday, some war veterans and local traditional leaders joined farm workers and villagers in song to welcome Smart’s family home.
“Oh, Darryn,” one woman cried, dashing to embrace Smart’s son.
In a flash, dozens followed her. Some ululated, and others waved triumphant fists in the air.
“I am ecstatic. Words cannot describe the feeling,” Darryn told The Associated Press.
Smart’s return to the farm, facilitated by Mnangagwa’s government, could mark a new turn in the politics of land ownership. During his inauguration last month, Mnangagwa described the land reform as “inevitable,” calling land ownership and management key to economic recovery.
Months before an election scheduled for August 2018 at the latest, the new president is desperate to bring back foreign investors and resolve a severe currency shortage, mass unemployment and dramatic price increases for food and household items.
Zimbabwe is mainly agricultural, with 80 percent of the population depending on it for their livelihoods, according to government figures.
Earlier this month, deputy finance minister Terrence Mukupe traveled to neighboring Zambia to engage former white Zimbabwean farmers who have settled there.
The Commercial Farmers Union, which represents mainly white farmers, said it plans to meet the lands minister.
“I am advising our members to be patient and give it time. But I do see many of them going back into farming,” said Peter Steyl, the union’s vice president. “The government seems serious about getting agriculture on track but how it is going to achieve this, I don’t know.”
The firmness with which the government ensured Smart’s return signaled resolve.
At the farm, a soldier sat quietly in a van that acted as an escort for the family. His services were not needed. The people gathered at the farm share deep social bonds with the family, away from the politics of race and elections.
“I have known this boy since day one,” said 55 year-old Sevilla Madembo. “He was born here. I took care of him when he was young. He is back to take care of me now that I am old.”
She was born at the farm, which also was home to her parents and grandparents.
“We are part of one family. We belong to the Tandi people. That’s why we are going to perform a traditional African ceremony before we start on production,” Darryn said, going through the farmhouse.
Locks to some rooms had been changed by the “new owner,” a cleric with close ties to Mugabe’s family. Other rooms had been ransacked and most property was missing.
Left untouched on the walls were a portrait of former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and a photo of Zimbabwe’s last colonial leader, Ian Smith, officiating at an agricultural fair.
Peter Tandi, the local chief, led efforts to lobby Mnangagwa’s administration to allow Robert Smart to return to the farm. “He voluntarily gave up his estates to the community when the land reform program started. He continued helping us with technical knowledge, equipment and other inputs,” Tandi said.
“That man supported the guerrillas during the war. ... He gave us a place to hide from colonial government soldiers,” said Gift Maramba, a war veteran and local ZANU-PF official.
Smart and his son held back tears while greeting familiar faces. Others were keen to get on with business.
“Hey Darryn, I want us to talk about my beans I stored in your warehouse,” one villager said.
“We can discuss that later, man. Come on, for now let’s just be happy to be with each other again,” Darryn replied.
1st white farmer gets land back under Zimbabwe’s new leader
1st white farmer gets land back under Zimbabwe’s new leader
Isolated Kremlin critics lament lost future at Nemtsov memorial
- Hundreds used to flock to the makeshift memorial on the anniversary of his death
- Since Russia ordered troops into Ukraine it has intensified a crackdown on dissent, with almost no opposition to the Kremlin visible on the street
MOSCOW: On a bridge next to the Kremlin on a drizzly Friday morning, a lone Russian police officer stood looking at the half-dozen bunches of flowers laying in memory of slain opposition figure Boris Nemtsov.
The symbolism was almost too much.
Four years into Moscow’s full-scale offensive on Ukraine, which has seen President Vladimir Putin eradicate all forms of dissent and usher in strict military censorship laws that have silenced his critics, few Russians dared, or wanted, to pay tribute.
Nemtsov, a longtime Putin opponent, was shot and killed on February 27 2015, meters from the Kremlin’s red walls. He was 55.
Hundreds used to flock to the makeshift memorial on the anniversary of his death, which came on Friday.
This year, there was barely a trickle. Those who turned up were visibly nervous.
“So few people, they’ve all forgotten,” lamented one elderly man, who refused to give his name.
“Everybody is afraid,” a woman standing nearby added.
Since Russia ordered troops into Ukraine it has intensified a crackdown on dissent, with almost no opposition to the Kremlin visible on the street.
AFP reporters on Friday morning saw only around a dozen mourners alongside Western ambassadors laying red carnations.
“Keep moving, don’t gather in a crowd, don’t block the way for other citizens,” a police officer said through a megaphone.
Three days after Russia launched its offensive on Ukraine in 2022, protesters had staged an impromptu rally against the war at the memorial on the anniversary of Nemtsov’s death.
Nemtsov’s supporters have always accused Chechen leader and key Putin ally Ramzan Kadyrov of ordering his killing.
Kadyrov has rejected the claims.
Five Chechens were convicted of a contract killing but investigators never said who it was ordered by.
- ‘Everything is persecuted’ -
For his followers, Nemtsov is a totemic figure in Russian political life — seen as a once-future leader who might have taken the country on a different path.
“I come here every year,” said 79-year-old scientist Sergei at the bridge on Friday.
“Russia should have had — though unfortunately it didn’t work out — a leader exactly like Nemtsov,” he told AFP, declining to give his surname.
“Right now everything here is suppressed, everything is persecuted, people are sitting in prisons.”
A physicist by education, Nemtsov rose to fame in the 1990s as a young, liberal provincial governor, and was widely tipped to take over from Boris Yeltsin.
He gave his hesitant backing to Putin when the ex-KGB spy was tapped to enter the Kremlin instead, but became an early — and fierce — opponent of what he cast as the Russian leader’s creeping authoritarianism.
He had largely lost popularity and was only a marginal figure in Russian politics when he was killed in 2015. Still, his murder shocked the country and the world.
“The hopes of the whole country were pinned on him — of all the people who wanted it to be free here,” said Olga Vinogradova, a 66-year-old volunteer who tends to the pop-up memorial to Nemtsov on the bridge.
“When this man was killed, naturally, all of us were, we were all just executed at that moment. Because our hopes were destroyed,” she said.
“With this memorial, we remind people that there was a different path for Russia. And that there was a real person who could have led us down this path.”
- ‘Forced out’ -
Nemtsov had strongly opposed Putin’s 2014 annexation of Crimea from Ukraine and Moscow’s military backing for pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine.
He was also a close and early ally of Alexei Navalny, who died in 2024 in an Arctic prison in what his supports say was a poisoning.
Open opposition to the Kremlin is unheard of inside Russia since the first days of the Ukraine offensive — when riot police cracked down hard on the thousands that took to the streets to protest.
All major critics of the Kremlin are in exile, prison or dead.
Those that remain have been silenced.
“Many have been forced out of the country, some have been killed,” said Gleb, a 23-year-old photographer.
A movement or person like Nemtsov was “impossible” to imagine right now, he said.
Still, he held on to a slither of hope.
“But everything can change at any moment.”
