Cathy Buckle – Eating stolen fruit

Posted by on Monday, February 13, 2012 in Featured, Letter from Zimbabwe | 4 comments

Dear Family and Friends.

It’s mango time in Zimbabwe. Small, sweet, sticky orange mangoes
whose string gets caught in your teeth; these are the mangoes we used
to play with as kids, washing them when the pulp was finished, combing
the string into hair and then drawing a face on the hard oval pip.
Then there are the big kidney shaped mangoes which you really need to
eat outside or sitting in a bath because it’s impossible not to end
up with juice running down your chin and dripping all over your shirt.
In recent years the big red ball mangoes have been added to the juicy
tropical extravaganza. Weighing almost a kilogram each they are
stringless with very sweet, firm, orange flesh. The problem is you
know they are stolen.

Buying these huge ball mangoes on the side of the road at one US
dollar apiece, it’s hard to put out of your mind the knowledge that
they have come from a farm that was violently seized two years ago
from its owners and for which no compensation was paid. You know you
are eating stolen fruit and by doing so it’s a bit like being an
accomplice to a crime. This is one of the thousands of things that sit
on our consciences every day and weigh the country down with a huge
burden of guilt, like a sin that needs to be confessed and absolution
given.

The ball mangoes will inevitably follow the same route as the apples,
plums, pears, litchis, peaches and nuts before them. Every year the
harvest will get less and less as the men who grabbed the farm and
reaped what they did not sow, will be unwilling or unable to water,
prune, fertilize and control diseases on the vast orchards they
seized.

Nowhere is there a more graphic demonstration of the national shame we
carry around than in our supermarkets. Going shopping in Zimbabwe with
a notebook tells the most shocking story of where we are in terms of
producing our own food eleven years after Zanu PF’s land seizures.

In the cereals aisle of my local supermarket there were fifteen
varieties, only two were made in Zimbabwe and both were more expensive
than their imported South African counterparts sitting on the shelves
alongside them. There were eight different makes of jam on display,
two were Zimbabwean, four South African, one made in Spain and one
from Cyprus. There were ten makes of pasta on sale, all but one were
from South Africa. Of the eight different brands of coffee on the
shelf not a single one was Zimbabwean. There were thirty two varieties
of sweet biscuits on sale, four were Zimbabwean, twenty five South
African and three from Greece. There was no fresh Zimbabwean milk or
cream to buy. Flour and maize meal was all in local packaging but if
anyone is any doubt about where the vast majority of the contents
originated they need look no further than the ceaseless stream trains
and trucks coming over our borders.

In the last few weeks more and more alarming statistics have been
released about this year’s expected national harvest. Plantings of
all the major crops are down by between thirty and fifty percent. The
President of the ZCFU, Donald Khumalo said we could expect to see a
deficit of one and a half million tonnes of maize this harvest.
Shamefully Zimbabwe is expected to have only produced enough food for
one quarter of the population. Mr Khumalo said “we have basically
lost direction as a country.” His counterpart in the CFU, Charles
Taffs said the country should brace for a big disaster.

Already we are preparing for the propaganda and the blame game,
despite the fact that since November the farming unions and experts
have been warning that there just wasn’t enough planting and farming
being done on all those millions of seized hectares. This is the new
Zimbabwean disease: sitting waiting for free ploughing, fuel, seed,
fertilizer, tractors, boreholes, irrigation equipment and even
harvesters.

Eleven years after land was forcibly seized from white Zimbabweans
without compensation and given to black Zimbabweans but without Title
Deeds, the result is sitting on our supermarket shelves. Until next
time, thanks for reading, love cathy 11th February 2012. Copyright
Cathy Buckle. www.cathybuckle.com

For information on my new book “IMIRE”, about Norman Travers and
Imire Game Park, or my other books about Zimbabwe: “Innocent
Victims,” African Tears,” “Beyond Tears;” and “History of
the Mukuvisi Woodlands 1910-2010”, or to subscribe/unsubscribe to
this letter, please visit my website or contact cbuckle@zol.co.zw

  • Chimbido Warvet

    In my Shona language there is a saying which says, ‘demo kana ratema miti rinehanganwa, asi miti yatemwa haikanganwi’ or literally ‘it is the axe that forgets that it has cut the trees, but the trees will never forget their tribulation. Blacks of this great country have learnt to forgive for the past misdeed of those who treated them as second class citizens in the country of their birth but they will not forget their misfortunes. Blacks were treated as slaves in their country for hundreds of years.
    This woman talks from a very high moral ground and I would like to pose these questions to her. Does this woman know the history of her ancestors and if so can she tell the readership whether our ancestors were compensated for their land that was stolen from them at gunpoint? Did her ancestors have conscience when they forced my ancestors to live in mountains where they could barely farm for their own subsistence? Cathy Buckle is an educated woman who simply does not have a conscience. In her opinion, she would have preferred all prime land in the country to have remained in the hands of the white farmers for donkey years because blacks can not learn to be good farmers. Of course, this is hogwash and should be treated with the contempt it deserves. Cathy Buckle should come down to earth and smell the coffee. Rome was not built in a day and black commercial farmers are still on the learning curve which they were denied for hundreds of years. They deserved to be treated with love, dignity and respect. Ndapedza zvangu.

  • Sister

    Cathy those mangoes were tended by black labourers while their white bosses looked on, harassing, belittling and hurling verbal abuse to the poor workers. We will never forget dear sister Cathy.Life is never fair

  • Ntumbe

    On a prominent black bankers farm, workers have not been paid for three months.
    Drinking water runs out and there are no toilets. This resulted in a friends child becoming extremely sick. Where are the farmers clinics? Where are the farmer’s schools? Don’t try to say that conditions have improved for workers….

    • Chimbido Warvet

      Nobody minimizes the problems black farmers are facing in the country. They are found lacking in almost everything but as I said Rome was not build in a day. They will certainly become accomplished farmers one day. Nobody is born a farmer but it is a skill that one learns with time. Of course, I am aware that some white commercial farmers were not happy with the manner with which ‘their land’ was taken to resettle the blacks in my country. You may even be one of the white commercial farmers whose land was grabbed by government to resettle the previously disadvantaged members of our society. If you are one of them I can assure you that you are not alone, because as a black commercial farmer, my land was also taken for the same cause, but I still believe the principle was morally right. There was no justification for all prime land in my country to be controlled by the white commercial farmers. It would have been ridiculous to maintain white privileges which they had illegally given themselves in a country that regarded itself as an independent sovereign state.