By Peta Thornycroft
Harare - "David didn't want to be a hero. We often talked about leaving because he would never have put us in danger.
"He talked about going to Australia, but I am a European... I cannot get used to the term widow."
These are the mostly coherent and often angry thoughts of Swede Maria Stevens, 39, the widow of David Stevens, 50.
David was born and educated in South Africa and completed his agricultural degree at the University of Natal. He has now become a statistic of the ongoing land war in Zimbabwe, the first white to die, unarmed and unprepared for the sudden violent turn of events on his farm 120km south-east of Harare.
Continues Below ↓
"David was a greenie, he believed in sustainable agriculture. The workers shared in the profits, and we had such a good season this year. If it isn't destroyed we were all going to do so well," Maria Stevens said. And she remembered the "we" she talked about was no more.
And as tears sprung into eyes bright with grief, she said she wanted to hide while she spoke out about land and her love for her adopted country, Zimbabwe.
As a mother of four, with her home under siege, Maria is a statistic of a war she believes is not about land but about political mileage. She believes Zimbabwe is a dictatorship, that opposition views will never be tolerated, that white farmers are just pawns in the bigger political game.
She has made no plans, but many are going through her head about her bleak future with four kids, the twins only two, and her elder children now in high school.
David, who owned 400ha like most commercial farmers, was massively in debt to the bank for this season. But this season will not come to an end. Maria will not be able to sell the crops - most of them are in the farm's sheds, which were torched after her husband was shot.
Maria Stevens came to the newly independent Zimbabwe as a Swedish aid worker, and fell in love with a South African farmer she met during her trip.
She could not understand why David had to be the first to die. His neighbours say he had legendary relationships with people in the neighbouring communal lands. He had about the best village for his 250 workers in the climatically tough district he farmed.
He was a supporter of a non-racial Zimbabwe, and critical of some of the older farmers who put profit before the welfare of their workers.
"Some of the farmers didn't have good relationships with black people but not David, he stood out. The people who came on the farm to invade were fine at first. We had no trouble. It wasn't war veterans, mostly unemployed people, it was okay. They pegged out their plots, they didn't disturb us. David talked to them a lot, there was no trouble."
No one knows why the mood among those occupying his farm suddenly turned nasty, leading to his brutal death. Maria is not sure whether some of the workforce tried to chase the squatters away, or whether the squatters had been attacked.
But at some point David went to mediate and was abducted. She believes his attacker overpowered a police officer in the local station and that her husband was shot with a police revolver.
"I can't be silent over David's death. I must speak out. I think he was targeted because he drove my car one day with a Vote No sticker on it."
David voted no in the February referendum over a new constitution and had become active in the Movement for Democratic Change.
Maria doesn't know where the farmworkers are. Her children are with some friends in Harare and she is with other friends.
The reality for her is that it will be almost impossible for her to go back to the farm. David Stevens grew 40ha of tobacco, and half the 300 cattle on the farm belonged to his workers.
The tension is so bad in the farming area that many commercial farmers believe life will never return to normal, that the area of Macheke/Virginia is now, in liberation war terms, a liberated zone.
|
StumbleUpon
Reddit
Digg
Delicious
Newsvine
Facebook
muti
Twitter
