Rhodesians Worldwide is a Web site through which old Rhodies communicate, and wonder about the lives they might have lived if Robert Mugabe had not won the war to liberate from white minority rule the country that became Zimbabwe. These dispa-tches are inevitably nostalgic and Rhodesia is remembered as a kind of Arcadia, when these reluctant exiles were enjoying the time of their lives, unburdened, it seems, by any sense of racial or liberal political conscience. The contributions to the site can be read as an exercise in willed denial; what is missing is any curiosity about the lives of the black Africans among whom they once lived, what they thought, believed or wanted.
Denial is the subject of Chris-tina Lamb's book, which tells the story of a white farmer called Nigel Hough and his black maid, Aquinata, and how they were brought together and changed by the farm invasions that began in 2000 and have since led to the ruin of the agricultural infrastructure of one of the most fertile countries in Africa and to the misery and poverty of its people.
Nigel's father, an Englishman, settled in Rhodesia in the late 1940s, attracted there by the ease of the lifestyle, the climate, the landscape, and by the privileges of being white in this part of colonial Africa. What is often
forgotten about Rhodesia is how resolutely suburban it was. To visit the capital, Salisbury, was like finding yourself in any provincial English town on a Sunday afternoon; the polite hush and the prejudices were certainly the same. How can this be Africa, you thought?
Nigel grew up certain of his superiority over the black majority: the "munts," the "kaffirs." Later, they would become the "terrs" -- terrorists -- as the whites, led by the ferociously stubborn Ian Smith, fought a long, futile and, above all, murderous civil war to prevent the inevitability of black majority rule. He went to one of the best schools in the country, where he excelled at sports and, as war intensified out in the bush, dreamed of becoming a commando, even of serving in the elite Selous Scouts. The Scouts were an SAS-style unit who, operating behind enemy lines, committed some of the worst atrocities of the war.
Growing up in a village, Aqui had her own dreams and aspirations. She wanted to be educated, and she wanted to be a nurse. She believed in the war to liberate her people and she was sure that once the whites were defeated and the blacks controlled their own destiny, there would be equality and the country would flourish.
For a brief period following the free election of Robert Mugabe as president in 1980, there was hope that reconcil-iation between the black majority and the remaining whites was possible. In his post-election address to the nation, Mugabe spoke of forgiveness and urged whites to stay on to build the new country. The white farmers, despite faltering attempts at reform, were allowed to continue very much as before, working the richest and most fertile land.
Nigel was encouraged; Africa was his home, he was a white African; he wanted to believe, as Aqui did, in the possibility of a harmonious future. He stayed on and, in time, married a local white woman and settled on a farm in the tobacco-growing district of Marondera. It was there that Aqui came to work for him, her life before then, even in liberated Zimbabwe, amounting to a convoy of sorrows: raped as a child by a schoolmaster, a drunken, abusive husband, absolute poverty.
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