Mugabe and the White African

“What I like about Mike is that he doesn’t try to be a black African,” says Elize Angula. “He is a white African who will talk about things that have happened in his experiences as a white African. That’s what is nice about him.” The Instructing Lawyer in the case that Mike Campbell is bringing against the Zimbabwean government, Angula observes him and his son-in-law Ben Freeth from across the courtroom in Windhoek, Namibia courtroom. Her assessment seems right: Mike seems nice.

At once professional and passionate, Angula’s seems a voice of reason and legitimacy in Mugabe and the White African. Her legal perspective on her clients, two white farmers trying to keep their land in the face of Robert Mugabe’s land reform program, helps viewers not only to empathize with their personal plight, but also to consider a broader context, to think about what national and raced identities have to do with one another in a postcolonial world. (It’s worth noting that the focus on these terms omits class and gender, among other aspects of identity.)

“It’s a dictatorial system that we’re living under,” says Freeth when the film cuts from the courtroom to the Mount Carmel farm belonging to his father-in-law. Under the Lancaster House Agreement, signed into law in 1979, land was to be redistributed among the disenfranchised black population and the whites who ruled the nation for 100 years, from 1890 until Robert Mugabe’s election in 1980. While other African nations (Ethiopia, Kenya, Namibia, and South Africa) have initiated land reform, Mugabe’s government shifted in the 1990s from a typical “willing seller, willing buyer” model to a more aggressive strategy that, the film notes, has evicted some 4,000 white farmers. The “popular seizure” of property by armed gang affiliated with the government has increased (or exposed) ongoing racial tensions. As Freeth puts it, “This is very much a racial issue, sparked by a very racist black man running this country.”

Lucy Bailey and Andrew Thompson’s documentary’s alignment with the farmers is underscored in its imagery, sometimes as hectic and harrowing as the story it presents. “Much of this film was shot covertly,” an early title announces, as the crew risked arrest and imprisonment. At night, Ben and Mike, along with their wives Laura and Angela, anxiously listen for the sounds of approaching vehicles, deep shadows and tight frames exemplifying their fears.

At the time, in 2008, Mike’s family remains on the farm under an order of protection issued by the Southern African Development Community (SADC) tribunal in Namibia, though this hardly guarantees their safety. They visit neighbors, Billy and Ruth, whose farms have been invaded, the camera recording their belongings strewn over the front lawn, then following Ruth’s gaze as she narrates, first noting the black men who have parked themselves at the end of the driveway, “all giving us evil eyes,” and then her black employee, inside, his faced turned away and framed in a doorway. Ruth observes, tearfully, “His whole family, they’re all buried here.”

This connection of black workers with white-owned land complicates the story told by Mugabe and the White African. For even as the white farmers confront hardships, these are recent developments. Mike describes his commitment to the “community” at Mount Carmel: “We’ve got 500 people that live on this farm,” he says, “Workers, their wives, and children.” The film doesn’t detail the workers’ hard place, which has to do with historical disenfranchisement and continued oppressions, currently targeted by Mugabe enforcers because they work for whites.

Indeed, Mike and Ben point out that the land reform program is not designed to support farms per se, but is instead a corrupt political process. Describing the black “elites” to whom land is distributed, their lawyer Jeremy Gauntlett asserts, “Not one of them could be typified as a trained farmer or a potentially good farmer.” Back in Kent, England, Ben’s parents Claire and Zach provide more support for his moral position. Much as they worry for his safety, Claire says, “You’re going to fight for what’s right and what’s good when you go through that situation, and it’s very difficult to understand, for people who aren’t there and who aren’t part of it.” Ben underlines, “If we win the case, the whole land reform program in Zimbabwe becomes illegal. Then every farmer that’s been kicked off his land has the right to come back.”

And so the case returns to definitions of national identity. While Ben observes that you can be white and America or white and Australian, in Zimbabwe, at least, it is impossible to be white and African. The film illustrates his case vividly when Mike confronts the man whom the government has been given Mount Carmel farm, Peter Chamada, son of the Information Minister. Wielding his own camera, Chamada insists on his right to the property: “We realize without land, you’ve got nothing,” he says. “The land belongs to the black peasants, the government took it from you people to redistribute it to the black poor majority.” Mike directs his camera crew to pan over the “peasant’s” expensive new car, while Chamada keeps his camera pointed at the documentary camera. “My father is not even allowed to go to your country,” he says of the British crewmembers. “You bring sanctions, in the end you want to cripple us so you can take over. It will never be a colony again.” As the scene fades out, scary soundtrack music emphasizes the threat embodied by Chamada and, of course, Mugabe.

Mugabe’s brutality and dishonesty are well-known, and made especially painful here when Campbell and Freeth, along with Angela, are assaulted by invaders. This occurs off screen, as the camera instead focuses on the reception of the news by Ben’s parents in Kent, but follow-up images of the victims in hospital ensure your sympathy and outrage. As the legal case goes forward, the film makes increasingly dramatic music and formal choices, reinforcing the righteous position of this “white African” and omitting the past colonial context that continues to confuse and confound today’s efforts to set records and rights “straight.” Mike Campbell’s legal purchase of his land in 1974 — as well as his and other farmers’ employment of men who lived on such land before then — is complicated by this history, as this history is also complicated by Mugabe’s villainy. And so the questions of national and raced identities remain unresolved.