White man’s burden

Suffering has had at least one benefit for white Zimbabweans, says the writer Peter Godwin – it has brought them closer to the rest of the population

When Robert Mugabe dies — when the blood transfusions, the vitamin jabs, Botox and hate-filled rants come to an end — few Zimbabweans will miss him. Yet while reading Peter Godwin’s new book, The Fear, it strikes me that one group will have a reason not entirely to curse him: Zimbabwe’s whites.

An unintended consequence of Mugabe’s persecution of his Caucasian citizens — a revelation in Godwin’s book that might hasten the 86-year-old despot’s death in one last carpet-chewing frenzy — is that he has massively improved their reputation. I ask Godwin, himself a white ‘Zimbo’, about this: ‘You clearly depict them as being cleansed of their past.’

‘It involves whites coming to terms with not being the bosses,’ he replies. ‘The whites have lived for nearly 30 years under black rule, and it has been pretty militant rule. In the last ten of those years they have had fairly constant race-baiting from Mugabe.’

They have made an extraordinary journey. Even among whites in Kenya, we used to regard Rhodesians — ‘Rhodies’ — as being over the top in their racial bigotry. Rhodesians were depicted as oafs with ball-breaker shorts and mullet haircuts. There were liberals among them — people like Godwin’s family — but it didn’t matter. Their clipped accents marked them out for a hard time whenever they ventured overseas. A decade after Mugabe’s invasions of white farms kicked off, their population has sunk to 20,000, less than a tenth of what it was.

‘In Zimbabwe I’ve been struck at how the whites have lost critical social mass in many communities, where there are just a few left,’ Godwin tells me. ‘The white population has been decimated.