Aidan Hartley Aidan Hartley

Will Boris Johnson stand up for the white farmers in Zimbabwe?

70-year-old Gary Hensman’s family have been there for a century. Now he and his wife have been driven from their farm

issue 21 December 2019

Laikipia

  After a year of peace and plentiful rain, my farm in Kenya is fantastic. Peace, rain — leave a farmer alone and he can just get on with growing food for Africa. So my thoughts are with my fellow farmers Gary and Jo Hensman, both in their seventies, who last month were chased off their property by thugs in Zimbabwe. Two decades after Mugabe began his disastrous farm invasions this story has gone entirely unnoticed by the world — but November was a busy month for Zim. Police attacked civilians in Harare. Colonial streets were rechristened after heroes such as Leonid Brezhnev, Mao Zedong, Castro — and President Emmerson Mnangagwa himself (ten of them). Hyperinflation zoomed above 350 per cent and more than half of the population were starving. Just as the government allocated the budget for the launch of a space rocket programme, British diplomats arrived to top up the £550 million in aid taxpayers have already splurged on Zimbabwe over the past five years.

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