WASteland.(Zimbabwe)

Fifteen years ago, Richard Pascall, a professional hunter and safari guide, bought a fifty-two-thousand-acre farm near the village of Turk Mine, in Matabeleland, the western region of Zimbabwe, and began raising a herd of African black rhinoceroses. He went about this in the usual way: fencing in a large patch of bush (eighty per cent of his land), releasing some rhinos onto it, and leaving them to their own devices. That's about all there is to rhino-culture: if water is scarce, as it is in Matabeleland, you pump some of it for the animals, and if poachers are to be feared, as they are wherever rhinos range, you establish patrols to keep them at bay. Beyond that, you stay out of the way and hope the rhinos will be fruitful and multiply, because they are among the most endangered animals on earth. Since 1970, when seventy thousand black rhinos roamed the continent, poachers and habitat destruction have depleted their numbers by ninety-six per cent, and today just twenty-seven hundred survive. By contrast, Pascall started out with eleven rhinos, and by the turn of the century he had thirty. His farm, Gourlays Ranch, where he lived with his wife, Carol, and two daughters, was considered one of the most successful rhino-salvage efforts in Africa--subsidized by foreign investors and contributors, valued at thirty million dollars, and protected under Zimbabwean law as a wildlife conservancy. But two years ago, when a man who called himself Hitler Hunzvi turned up at the gate, leading a gang of more than a hundred armed vigilantes, the Pascalls suddenly found themselves as endangered as their mammoth wards.

Hunzvi claimed the Pascalls' land in the name of the Zimbabwean people, and advised Pascall to surrender if he didn't want worse things to happen to him. Pascall stood his ground. There was a scuffle. Pascall wore a pistol in a shoulder holster, and, as Hunzvi's men grappled to disarm him, the gun discharged twice. Nobody was hit, but the shots heightened the tension. Hunzvi's men entered Pascall's house, where the walls are heavily hung with the trophy heads of big game. They made him open a safe in which he kept his hunting rifles, and helped themselves to a dozen. "I'm a born-again Christian," Pascall told me recently, "and I sincerely believe that day I had angels all round me, because they should have killed me."

Hunzvi's raid on Gourlays was filmed by a cameraman from Zimbabwe's state-controlled television, and in pictures the crux of the confrontation was plain to see: the Pascalls are white, and their attackers were black. Hunzvi was the head of the national association of liberation war veterans, who in the nineteen-seventies had fought for black-majority rule against the white-supremacist regime of Rhodesia, as the country--a British colony--was then known. Independence had come in 1980, but twenty years later, although whites counted for less than one per cent of the country's twelve million citizens, they still controlled most of its wealth, and just forty-five hundred white farmers held title to seventy per cent of the prime agricultural land. In seeking to "liberate" the Pascalls' property by force, Hunzvi purported to be fulfilling the revolution he had fought for--and, as the presence of the state television made clear, he was doing so with the blessing of President Robert Mugabe.

Hunzvi, however, was not a veteran of any combat. He had spent much of the war in Poland, where he trained as a doctor and married a local woman who later left him and wrote a memoir, "White Slave," in which she remembered her husband as a wife-beating, "unfaithful, vain sadist." Back in Zimbabwe, Hunzvi managed in the early nineties to insinuate himself into the state bureaucracy, and, as an assessor for the War Victims Compensation Fund, doled out subsidies to injured veterans. Within a few years, he had bankrupted the fund by awarding huge sums for scurrilous complaints to a veritable Who's Who of President Mugabe's ruling clique. (Mugabe's brother-in-law, for example, received seventy thousand dollars for ulcers and a scar on his left knee.) At the same time, Hunzvi began mobilizing mobs to stage street demonstrations in Harare, the nation's capital, demanding pensions and a host of other benefits for veterans. Many of Hunzvi's followers were plainly too young to have fought in the seventies, but the spectacle of rebellious liberation fighters embarrassed Mugabe, who had come to power at independence as a liberation hero. When the scandal of the war victims' fund was made public, and Mugabe realized how deeply the rot reached into his court, he cut a deal with Hunzvi which has defined Zimbabwean history ever since: every war veteran would get a hefty onetime disbursement, followed by a lifetime monthly check, as well as free medical care and free access to education--and, above all, land.

The demand for land had been Hunzvi's final coup: he threatened to lead his men into the bush to wage war and seize white-owned farms if Mugabe did not capitulate. After all, Mugabe had promised during the independence struggle to grant every black Zimbabwean some acreage as a reward for victory. Over time, however, he had proved less interested in resolving the land issue than in exploiting it as a bully pulpit from which to deflect attention from the predatory corruption of his ruling party, ZANU-P.F. (Zimbabwe African National Union--Patriotic Front). His schemes for redistributing farms had been consistently reckless, illegal, and destructive, each bringing greater suffering than the last to the rural poor it purported to serve. Much of the best land seized by the government wound up in the hands of Mugabe's cronies; farm laborers were left unemployed and homeless; productive farms were laid to waste; and impoverished Zimbabweans who were given plots were not given legal title but were simply allowed to subsist as squatters. Under the circumstances, Mugabe regarded Hunzvi not as a menace but as an ally, and announced plans to nationalize roughly half of the remaining white farmland in the country, without compensation.

The combined effects of the government's payout to the war veterans and the devastating blow to commercial agriculture--which accounted for half the country's foreign-exchange income and more than a quarter of its jobs--plunged Zimbabwe's already beleaguered economy into chaos. The currency lost nearly half its value overnight; international investors and aid donors bolted; and many whites who had been sufficiently content with their privilege that they had stayed out of politics since independence began making common cause with reform-minded black activists. In February of 2000, when Mugabe unleashed Hunzvi's "war veterans" to occupy white-owned farms by force, the action was clearly understood as punishment for white support of the nascent opposition party, the M.D.C. (Movement for Democratic Change), which had just led a successful campaign to defeat a new constitution that would have expanded Mugabe's already extraordinary powers. It was the first time Mugabe had been rejected by voters, and, with parliamentary elections looming in June of 2000, the assault on whites was accompanied by a less publicized but often more brutal campaign of violence against black oppositionists and sympathizers.

Zimbabweans who thought that Mugabe had paid off Hunzvi to keep him quiet found themselves wondering who had ultimately coopted whom. Richard Pascall had no doubt about it. He was an active M.D.C. supporter, and his farm was among the first in Matabeleland to be invaded. After surrendering his rifles, he had watched Hunzvi's ...