“If you come back this way, please come and stay” were Hazel’s parting words as we got into the pickup. She was clearly lonely.
Hazel has been farming by herself for the last 14 years since her husband died. It’s a dairy farm some five km south of the small farming town of Chipinge in the south-east of Zimbabwe and the warm, wet climate is ideal for growing horticultural crops such as macadamia nuts and avocados. We had driven the six hours from Harare, stopping overnight in Mutare, so that I could take part in an avocado field day on a large horticultural estate organized by my business partner. Once the field day was over, I drove back through the town to where I’d left Marianne at Hazel’s farm where we’d booked in overnight.
After a delicious dinner we poured more wine and got down to serious chatting. Hazel and her husband had moved onto the farm in the mid 1970s, newly married and not much to their name. They braved out the Rhodesian (as Zimbabwe was known then) bush war, surviving a rocket attack on the farmhouse. A rocket burst in the room where Hazel was sheltering and the shrapnel peppered everything around her but left her unscathed. Gradually the house grew with a young family. Hazel’s husband, “Duff”, insisted that his children learn the local Ndau language and encouraged his son to explore the local bush with his black friend Johan, who is now Hazel’s senior foreman. “They were given free reign” Hazel said “with the express understanding that whatever they shot they had to eat”.
“Duff never really told me what he did during the war years” Hazel said, “just that they made use of his knowledge of local customs and the language”. Duff had known that they were on a list of targets though, and after independence in 1980 he got a call from the local police station and was informed that they’d arrested someone who had admitted being behind the attack on Duff and Hazel’s house. Duff spoke to the captive and asked him why they were attacked and the reply was just “Hey, it was war, let’s go and have a beer together sometime”.
I asked Hazel if dairy farming was profitable. “No, not really” she replied. The area where she farms does not have a lot of surface water so irrigated pastures are not feasible which requires her to supplement grazing with stock feed which is expensive. The milk she produces goes to a nearby factory as industrial milk. The factory also tests for fat content on which the price is based and she was more than a little suspicious of price manipulation as a result.
Noticing that Hazel’s farm was close to a safari area and the Mozambique border I asked if she saw much game. “Yes, we are on a migration route” she replied. “Just two weeks ago a local woman was gored by a buffalo. I don’t know if she survived”. Just prior to that two lions were seen, and fearing they’d start preying on local livestock the National Parks authorities decided to have them shot. Hazel asked why they couldn’t be darted and taken back to the Save Conservancy. She was told that unfortunately once they’d learnt a route they’d continue to use it. “It was so sad, they were beautiful young males with just a beginning of a mane” she said.
The next day we left after breakfast. The town of Chipinge has little to recommend it – there are three traffic lights of which only one works and that is mostly ignored, but it did have a fuel station with a brand name we recognized so took the opportunity to fill up with diesel. Then it was onto the winding road on the escarpment that joins up with the road to Chimanimani – a village to the north – and back on the busy road to Harare. We hope Hazel will look us up on her occasional visits to Harare.
Passing on the knowledge
9 10 2015Every year at about this time in October the local University of Zimbabwe 2nd year agriculture students come on a tour of my nursery. Every year I give them what is by now a well-rehearsed talk. Sometimes it’s an interactive visit that I enjoy with a lot of pertinent questions. Sometimes I could be talking to a herd of mombes (cattle in the vernacular). Last Monday I was starting to despair; I just could not get more than single sentence answers and discussion was just not going to happen. Then somebody did it.
We were standing at the tobacco ponds where tobacco seedlings are grown in polystyrene trays floating on a shallow pond containing fertilizer. Did I take notice of the regulations concerning planting dates of the seedlings? For a moment I was incensed but I very quickly realised that it was a serious question. So after a “I cannot believe you asked that” response (that the lecturer chaperoning the students found very funny) I told them why the regulations existed and why flouting them was a very bad idea no just from the legal consequences point of view. It’s all about pest carry over for the non-scientific; separating sequential crops with a fallow period breaks the pest/disease cycle. Tobacco crops in Zimbabwe must be destroyed by the first of May, new plantings can only be sown from the 1st of June and seedlings planted out from the 1st of September. There are numerous examples of how pests have been introduced into the country by people ignoring phytosanitary requirements. But why was the question asked in the first place?
Sadly corruption is pervasive in Zimbabwe. Earlier this week the Swedish Ambassador expressed frustration with the level of corruption in the NGO sector. Now that is something coming from the Swedes who have a history of being very helpful to Zimbabwe. We are in the current financial mess in no small part due to financial mismanagement and corruption and when the people see the top echelons misbehaving they must assume that it is OK to do the same; Zimbabwe is very much a patriarchal society. Why would my nursery not also be cutting corners? Yes, I have seen these corners cut by farmers who should know much better.
Towards the end of the tour I pre-empted a question that I was hoping to be asked; do we take students on attachment? We do but few are enthusiastic once I tell them that we don’t pay them. Once in a while I am pleasantly surprised and for those I make an exception and at least pay their transport as they are genuinely useful. Moses is one. A student in last year’s batch he worked for at least 6 weeks going around all three nurseries on the premises. He even came back in his vacation.
One morning soon after starting his attachment he approached me as I was taking measurements from the tobacco ponds.
“Morning sir” he said.
“Morning Noah” I replied, genuinely having forgotten his name.
“Actually it’s Moses, sir” came the reply.
I liked that. Not so much in awe of me that he cannot express an opinion. He is also very ambitious and hopes one day to become a member of the Royal Horticultural Society. So he almost certainly will not stay in Zimbabwe along with so many others who are fed up with the mismanagement and corruption. Our loss.
“I knew it was something biblical” I replied, and he laughed..
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Tags: corruption, horticulture, nursery, phytosanitary, seedlings, students, Swedish Ambassador, tobacco, University of Zimbabwe
Categories : Agriculture, Social commentary