Rory’s Story – Courage Under Fire

My then girlfriend and I had our own business. It included a large safari lodge and farm next to a lake and rhino sanctuary close to Harare in Zimbabwe. We leased the properties and were doing well enough to have made an offer to purchase them.

That all came to an end when the “war vets” turned up.

“War vets” were actually nothing of the sort. Originally, veteran guerrilla fighters of the Rhodesian bush war that had run for fifteen years and ended in the 1970s had begun protesting that they had not been properly rewarded for their services.

Initially Robert Mugabe tried to appease them by awarding them all hundreds of millions of dollars. That wasn’t enough.

At the same time as this was going on there was another drama developing. At the end of the war an agreement had been signed between the United Kingdom, the Nationalist organizations including its (para)military wings and the then Rhodesian government.

This agreement, called the Lancaster House Agreement, agreed to majority rule and one-man-one-vote. Amongst other things, the British government promised to fund the purchase of commercial land for redistribution to indigenous farmers.

However, right at the time of the war vets’ demands, Mo Mowlam, the then-UK Minister, decided to announce that in spite have having promised to do so twenty years earlier they would not fund the redistribution of land.

The result of this disgraceful decision was that President Robert Mugabe saw a way to solve the problem of appeasing his war vets and also of teaching the British a lesson. He let the war vets and everyone else vaguely associated with them or just wanting a patch of dirt loose on the white Zimbabwean farmers.

At first everyone believed it was just a protest and a political move by the ruling party to appease its supporters.

It wasn’t. It turned extremely nasty. Farms were destroyed, farmers and farm workers started being attacked and even being killed.

There was no way the farmers and their workers could fight back. They were all massively outnumbered and the police and army had been ordered to stay out of it. In fact they were assisting by collecting thugs off the streets and trucking them out to the farms.

We were caught in the middle of this. A crowd of “war vets” turned up.

The lodge was abandoned. We found ourselves suddenly alone. Then some stoned maniac turned up with notes ostensibly written by the workers accusing us of all sorts of nonsense, telling us that they were going to take over and that we would be killed if we tried to leave.

This last, the letters informed us, was because we had to produce “all the money” first. This was extremely serious as there was no way we could make money appear from nowhere and they would get nasty if we didn’t.

We heard singing as they walked out of the lodge. There was a mob at the front gate. It was the only exit.

I don’t like mobs.

I told my girlfriend to stay in the lodge and began to approach them. The closer I got the more aggressively they behaved. They did not enter but if I went up to them I knew they would kill me. They were completely out of control.

We were really trapped and it was only a matter of time before they came inside and began smashing and burning.

We had no options. I was armed. I had a handgun under my shirt and my rifle was on the back seat of my car. The problem was that the gate was at the end of a road. If we made a run for it we would have to knock the gate down and then turn through the crowd. Although I had only seen the machetes, knives and clubs, I was certain there would be guns amongst them as well. If we tried it, it would be easy to kill us.

I thought about farmer Terry Norton who had tried to make a break for it after getting into a shootout with a mob of war vets. He just made it out the gate before being gunned down.

I couldn’t start a shootout if I wasn’t sure it would mean me getting my girlfriend out safely. On the other hand, I might not be given the choice.

I decided to explain to my girlfriend that if they attacked us and we had no choice that she would have to drive while I shot.

I looked around. She was gone.

I ran out of the conference room we had been standing in. She was walking to the gate.

The war vets had gone silent.

I was horrified. I couldn’t approach. If I did they might go mad. I gripped the handgun and waited to start using it.

She calmly and quietly walked up to them and then she began talking to them softly.

Here and there men began to sit down. I had no idea what she was saying but it was doing the impossible.

Eventually nearly everyone was sitting listening to her talk. After a while she stopped and then a discussion began amongst them.

She talked some more with them and then began walking back. I was almost crying with relief.

When she reached me she said, “They said we can go”.

We drove out of the gate and never went back.

Oh and yes, I married her. She’s sitting on the couch next to me as I write this.

Edit:
It is not so important what she said as how she said it. She approached them bravely, calmly, peacefully and without any malice.
When she spoke to them, she talked about us and the hardships we had endured and how everything we had was invested in that place and that I had not inherited a farm or anything else. We understood that it was now all gone. She talked about the friendship that had grown between ourselves and the workers and the mutual respect we had always had for each other.

I handed over my company with cash in the bank to a politician/war vet a few days later who was connected with their leadership. At least that way the workers still had a job. After signing over, the politician informed us that the owner of the property had been aware that the warvets were coming and did not let us know. He did a deal with the same politician to partner with him before we even knew we were in trouble. Two weeks later we arrived in Holland without a cent.

I got the girl though!

-Rory Young