The Big Read: Waiting for scorched earth to bear fruit

There is just birdsong now, birdsong and the sound of the breeze rustling the long, dry grass that surrounds Ben Freeth's ruined home.

It's a little haven of peace," the farmer remarks wryly as he surveys the remains of the house that he and his wife Laura built with their own hands, of local materials, on the fertile plain of central Zimbabwe in 1997.

EVICTED: Zimbabwean farmers Ben Freeth and Mike Campbell on their former land, Mount Carmel Picture: ROBIN HAMMOND

This is where they raised their three children until Robert Mugabe's "war vets" arrived eight years ago to sow not crops, but terror. Freeth and his family watched, appalled, as their home burnt down at midday on August 30 2009. Three days later thugs burnt down the nearby home of Laura's parents, Mike and Angela Campbell.

The family's long, courageous fight to keep their property, Mount Carmel - the most productive mango farm in Zimbabwe - was over. After years of being harassed, terrorised, abducted and beaten, they had finally been evicted.

"It's horrific to see your home in ruins simply because you have the wrong coloured skin," Freeth says. "That, ultimately, was our crime."

Freeth was employed by the Commercial Farmers Union, and witnessed the growth of Zimbabwean agriculture in the 1990s. "Everyone was developing and building dams. They had diversified into everything under the sun. It was extraordinary what people could grow in this country and export to Europe. It was an era of huge successes and we were probably the fastest-growing economy in Africa."

But in 2000 some white farmers made the mistake of backing the newly formed opposition Movement for Democratic Change. Mugabe retaliated by unleashing veterans of the 1970s war of independence.

Across the country, mobs loyal to Mugabe's ruling Zanu-PF party invaded farms. They slaughtered cattle and pets, stole tractors and combine harvesters, destroyed crops, cut down trees and ransacked homes.

In 2004, Nathan Shamuyarira, a former cabinet minister, claimed Mount Carmel.

The Freeths moved to Harare. In 2010, the British government pointedly awarded Freeth an MBE for services to farming. Today, he farms 40ha of rented land while Laura runs a small cake business.

"It's hard to get by," Freeth admits, quickly adding, "But we are much better off than our farmworkers." Mugabe's land seizures did not just destroy the Freeths' livelihood. They destroyed that of their 500 workers and dependants.

Peter Asani, 69, Freeth's old foreman, and Sinos Bois, 58, who helped run the farm's irrigation system, meet us in the ruins of Freeth's house - loyal retainers who were beaten by war vets for supporting their mabhunus (white farmers).

Before the land invasions, both men earned a decent salary. They received food and housing. Their children attended school. A health clinic visited twice a week. Laura ran an embroidery business, which gave the farmworkers' wives an income.

Today they are hungry, emaciated and jobless. They have no electricity, and walk 3.2km for water. They survive on maize porridge. If they and their families eat once a day they can make a bucketful last five days.

We drive across the farm, which is desolate and abandoned. Fences have been torn down. Irrigation pipes are broken. The boreholes are disused. The farm machinery disappeared long ago.

Many of the 40000 trees in the mango and citrus orchards are dead or dying for lack of water. Mount Carmel used to produce 1200 tons of mangoes and oranges a year. Today it produces nothing.

A few squatters have commandeered small plots of land. They show no hostility. They, too, are desperate. "We're growing maize but it's no good," says Tawanda Mapepa, 21. From 6ha he coaxed just 12 bags in 2016 - a 60th of what Campbell would have produced on the same area.

He complains that the government has provided no fertiliser or seeds for the coming season. Oblivious to the irony, he begs Freeth for help.

Zimbabwe once fed much of Southern Africa, but today a third of its roughly 13million people urgently need food aid.

The farm seizures did not only destroy Zimbabwe's agricultural sector. They destroyed the many industries that relied on it. They destroyed the nation's entire economy, leading to hyperinflation, empty shelves and ever-greater repression by a regime desperate to retain power.

"Mugabe can't last for ever," says Freeth. "The time may come when we have a government that says, 'We want people to be employed, producing food, and economic activity to start coming into the country.' The time may come when they come to us and say, 'We need to get this farm up and running again.' We will sit tight and wait and do what we can in our own little way."

- © The Daily Telegraph

Martin Fletcher's visit to Zimbabwe was financed by the Pulitzer Centre on Crisis Reporting