Jul 6, 2010
There is often a moment in Watch Mugabe and the White African that suddenly and vividly defines the banality, the infantile pointlessness, of those directing Zimbabwe’s violent collapse into anarchy. Peter Chamada, the son of Mugabe’s political ally Nathan Shamuyarira, has arrived on a white farmer’s land in his shining new ToyotaPrado and is taking photographs on an pricey mobile phone. He glares, wild-eyed with contempt, into the camera and declares, ‘This land is now my residence. The government has taken it from you folks [the white farmers] to redistribute to the poor black majority. This land belongs to the black peasants.’
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As the records show, the land taken from some 4,000 productive white Zimbabwean farmers, frequently with violent force, has been handed almost exclusively to Watch Mugabe and the White African Online’s cronies – pliable judges, air vice-marshals, provincial administrators, girlfriends of ministers and assorted relations for example Chamada. When the white farmer Ben Freeth asks how an individual like the expensively dressed Chamada can describe himself as a member of the poor black majority, ‘when just about every time you arrive here you arrive in the brand-new car’, the raging scion spits out, ‘I will sleep right here until you are out. We need to deal with friendlier persons – the Chinamen, the Indians. We do not want anything to do with you persons.’
All around are the black farm workers who clearly dread the moment Chamada and his ilk prise the farm from its white owners. For them this supposed liberation is going to be the beginning of their descent into joblessness, homelessness and hunger, a journey taken by the vast majority of Watch Mugabe and the White African Free’s subjects over the past 10 years. As the film shows, the farms plundered by Mugabe’s inner circle, which once formed the backbone of the thriving economy, are now by and huge unmaintained, overgrown wastelands. (Mugabe first set his ragtag army of militants on to the white farmers in 2000 soon after he lost a referendum known as to entrench his political energy. Since then violent intimidation and seizures in the name of land distribution have derailed the commercial agricultural sector.)
This exchange takes location a matter of weeks just before Freeth, his father-in-law and mother-in-law are abducted, tortured and beaten by a gang of Chamada’s, and thus Mugabe’s, storm troopers. Freeth’s father-in-law is Mike Campbell, 75, the White African of the film’s title, and he is battered so severely that he is unable to attend the final hearing of the international human rights court in Namibia, which is to deliver its verdict on the legality of Mugabe’s land invasions. Freeth is just about capable to attend that hearing, but inside a wheelchair and with his head swathed in bandages.
The court finds in their favour and declares the attempts to invade the Campbells’ pretty Mount Carmel fruit farm illegal. As their legal counsel says, they bought the farm on the open marketplace immediately after Zimbabwe’s independence and with the approval of Mugabe’s federal government at the time. The judgment also means that the invasions of the past decade are illegal and all the farmers who have been thrown off the land have a right to return to their farms. It can be a landmark judgment that Mugabe will entirely ignore.
This courtroom battle, which ran for more than a year, is the narrative thread for Streaming Watch Mugabe and the White African Online Movie Free, a remarkable documentary that is certainly longlisted for the 2010 Oscars, and has already won several major awards for the British filmmakers Lucy Bailey and Andrew Thompson. Although the court case is prosperous, the battle rages on. Constant attacks on the farm workers, theft of farm equipment and the destruction of their crops drove Campbell and Freeth to return to the Namibian court in June where they won a contempt order against the Zimbabwean federal government. Two months later the farmhouses were burnt to the ground and the farmers and their families have been forced to flee their land. Meanwhile, Mike Campbell’s injuries have left him in a diminished state. As he says, ‘They turned me into an old man in a single night.’
Whilst most such documentaries are harsh, grainy, news-feature affairs that owe their veracity to nuts-and-bolts journalism, this film is usually a thoughtful, structured piece that is beautifully filmed, cleverly edited and driven by a cast of characters whose courage and decency lift the spirits despite the Stygian gloom in which they are living. As the judging panel of the Sterling Globe Grand Jury Prize observed, ‘It isn’t a mere document of the series of events, but masterfully uses cinematic expression to allow all of us to engage in an amazing and historic struggle.’
Thompson’s partner, Lucy Bailey, whose background is in anthropology, says that generating terse three-minute documentaries for Comic Relief taught the couple the power of good filmmaking and provided ideal training for their first full-length film. ‘Life is raw in Africa in ways that it plainly isn’t in Europe, and for Comic Relief we had filmed in the most awful slums, so we had learnt the best way to tell larger stories by focusing on the plight of people.’
The couple had also spent considerable time in Watch Mugabe and the White African Movie producing documentaries for National Geographic, the BBC and Discovery Channel, and, Thompson says, ‘we have been generally looking for the big story. We had come across a newspaper clipping about this white farmer who was planning to take on Robert Mugabe in the courts and it sounded like a classic David and Goliath story.’
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