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.
Continues...
|
StumbleUpon
Reddit
Digg
Delicious
Newsvine
Facebook
muti
Twitter
