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Alistair Coulson, his wife and a handful of frightened workers had been surrounded by war vets for three days when I arrived on their Esigodini farm, near Bulawayo. The vets had been brought in and re-supplied with government vehicles and though the police agreed that the invasion was illegal they admitted that they were powerless. “We’ve been given three days to take everything we can and get off,” the 51 year-old farmer said. “We’ll move to a neighbouring plot that’s not been ‘designated,’ build another house and try to get things going again.

“This is nothing new. What’s happening to us has happened to hundreds of others…and will happen to many more before this is over.” In fact The World Food Program estimates that 800,000 black workers on the white-owned farms could lose their jobs through land occupation and, while the regime claims to have successfully resettled 350,000 people, the opposition says that fewer than 40,000 are actually battling the drought in ill-prepared and unsanitary squatter communities.

The ideals of social reform and equality that once gave birth to the land-redistribution programmes have now been swallowed up by a hunger for racial vengeance and have cost the country more than 40% of its agricultural production within the last year alone. In what was once considered ‘the bread-basket of Southern Africa’ millions of people now face starvation, and this is just the centre of a web of misery that the Mugabe regime has spawned throughout all sectors of the economy. You don’t have to look far beyond Zimbabwe’s borders to see what affect a hungry population can have on wildlife.

The walls of Guy Hilton-Barber’s office are covered with painstakingly accurate wildlife paintings by his artist son. They are the sort of portraits that could only have been done by someone with a profound love and understanding for Africa’s animals. But many of the animals in the paintings are now rare sightings at Barberton Lodge and within a short time their kind could become almost extinct throughout the entire 160,000 hectare Bubiana Conservancy area in Southern Zimbabwe.

In stark contrast to the noble heads and alert postures in the paintings were the heart-breaking photos that Mr Hilton-Barber had fanned out across his desk: a zebra carcass left to rot with just one miserable shoulder steak removed; a black rhino that died of thirst with its leg mangled by a wire snare; a baby rhino incinerated in deliberately-set bushfires. The figures on Barberton’s yearly ‘death list’ (inconceivable even when backed up by the vivid snapshots) only represent carcasses discovered by rangers who are finding it increasingly dangerous to patrol due to encroaching ‘war vet’ settlements. The Wildlife Producers Association doggedly mails out monthly updates of these figures to people who it considers are ‘in a position to influence the situation’…to little avail.

Within the course of the last dramatic year I had visited Zimbabwe three times and, arriving just after the farcical elections (which might have spawned a revolution in many more volatile countries) I was struck anew by the unbelievable tolerance of the majority of Zimbabweans, of all races. The very fact that things had deteriorated so quickly through the increasingly desperate tactics of the Mugabe regime had bred a sort of fatalistic optimism all of its own: “Let it rain down,” Zimbabweans seemed to say, “this can only last so long.”

As one lodge owner pointed out: “It’s a sure sign of how rich the country is when you look around after a prolonged period of such frantic plundering and realise that, despite the best efforts of our corrupt politicians, there is still so much here.”

One day I drove out of Bulawayo with David Waddy, whose family has lived in Matabeleland longer than anyone can remember and started one of the area’s first tourism operations at Big Cave Camp. As we approached Matobo Hills we drove into an un-seasonal drizzle – the first rain in four months of drought – and saw a cyclist pedalling stoically towards us with an umbrella over his shoulder. The cyclist’s smile widened as he saw who was driving the bakkie and he clamped the umbrella tentatively into his neck in order to make a salutary wave. “That’s my old builder from Big Cave,” said Dave, “– he’s now the leader of the war vets in this area.”

Having fuelled my anticipation for this trip on a diet of increasingly sensational press-reports describing Mugabe’s misguided hate-campaign against whites, I was not prepared for this cheerful greeting. The Minister of Information, Jonathon Moyo, had recently stated that independent journalists ‘would take a long, long time to go back to their countries’ and Mugabe himself had condoned the torture of journalists who reported ‘falsehoods.’ As I travelled ‘as a backpacker’ across much of the country – usually on local transport, staying often in downtown hostels and visiting areas that were not usually frequented by tourists - I never once encountered even the slightest sign of hostility.

It seems that the average Zimbabwean had apparently not read those press reports. Or perhaps it is simply that the famous Zimbabwean friendliness is too deeply rooted to be wrenched out by power-crazed propaganda.

I met with several lodge owners in western Zimbabwe and it was typical of the unpredictability of the situation that each was convinced that his was the only sensible way of outlasting the threats: “Stay politically neutral but step up community works,” said one; “Batten hatches and wait out the storm”; “Get the hell out and come back when it’s over”; one, from Lake Kariba, had actually made a conscious decision to step-up their marketing drive. “Now’s the time to push,” he said. “Anyone who sticks it out will be sitting-pretty when this is over.”

And the only thing that they all agree on is that the nightmare will be over one day and that Zimbabwe will work its way back to the celebrated position that it once had when people were lining up to get in, rather than scouting for a way out. There are some who say that tourists should boycott Zimbabwe because visitors are lining the pockets of the Mugabe regime but many others (especially from the Southern African region) are deliberately returning in a conscious effort to do what they can to ease the country through.

While there are still a few clients to go around there is still a possibility of riding out the storm, and the tourists I met shared the same opinion on the current benefits of holidaying in Zimbabwe. One man, who had spent three weeks visiting a chain of lodges down the western border with his family, summed it up: “If I hadn’t picked up the newspapers or listened to the radio I might never have realised that there’s a problem in Zimbabwe. Prices are highly competitive now and we’ve had lodges and often even game reserves almost to ourselves. It’s tough for the owners but, in effect, exclusivity has become affordable here.”

There are signs that even the ruling party has began to realise that it needs to get the tourists back, but the announcement that they budgeted £1.4 million for advertising (while millions face starvation because of un-harvested crops) serves only to illustrate how far out of touch they are. Tourists already want to come to Zimbabwe; they don’t need to be convinced of its attractions but they do require reassurance that the plundering, poaching and hatred is under control.

In the meantime the MDC preach non-violence and wait as Zanu PF dig their own grave: “Let it rain down…this can only go on for so long.”

Esigodini farmer Alistair Coulson’s final words - as we stood beside the family home from which he was being evicted – seemed to symbolise the unshakeable Zimbabwean faith in the country. “Though I’m leaving under protest, I’m a farmer and I’ve offered to act as an adviser when the new owner arrives. This is good, rich land. It can feed people.” They are words that are being echoed with growing frustration all over Zimbabwe.

Note: At the time of writing – three months after the eviction – Alistair Coulson’s farm remains unoccupied and the crops have died.

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