Festa, Dreams, and Tough Times for all the Exiled Farmers.
As with many events, it started out as a small thing discussed between two women in our village: our immediate Portuguese neighbours and our Iranian-German neighbours, who have also lived in Southern Africa for many years. They discussed whether it would not be a good idea for a small party so we neighbours could all meet each other, especially at holiday time, when some of the absentee Portuguese families with homes in the village are back in Portugal for their summer holidays. There are many, many of these people from Portugal; wages are very low in Portugal, and unlike, say, the UK, unemployment benefits are below subsistence levels. Funnily enough, it is also seriously time-restricted; no opportunity to live on the dole. However, the discussion morphed into why not have a party for the whole village and include families and close friends, as many residents are in their old age, a number of the women in their nineties, no men of that age; eighties seem to be their limit. And so a date was chosen; small cash donations were taken to supplement the event, which was fast becoming a mini ‘festa.’ Festas are the life and soul of Portuguese rural life, with every town, village, or sometimes even just a community having one. Our village, Besteiro, never has one, as it is very small, and our community in the past was happy to attend those in villages and towns around us.
In these rural areas, people have brothers, aunts, sisters, second cousins, grandparents, or other relatives, and because family is still very important, there is constant interaction among them. Your home is my home in Portugal. Besteiro has always been marginally too small for festas as it consists of less than forty houses, six unaccompanied and derelict, five with their owners working abroad, mainly in Switzerland and France, three houseowners over ninety, the rest in their sixties or seventies, leaving only two families with children of school age. So yes, we know nearly everyone; we all wave to each other, and bid each other bom dia, for some, that is about all the interaction with the older ones. So this past Saturday was the day, with tables and chairs supplied for a small rental fee from our câmara (council), a bar with free drinks; even beer, gin and vodka were free, while the wine was all home-grown, along with live music, which is obviously what the money was collected for, as the wine and food were supplied by the attendees. Everyone bought a plate or numerous plates in most cases; do not ask me where the meat on the braai came from: pork and chicken. There are no cattle around here, but there was plenty, and I shudder to say this: the cheese, cake and pudding table would have surpassed the most competitive WI group supplying cakes and sandwiches at a Zimbabwean Farmers Meeting. Five of the houses are occupied by ex-pats: one American, one Iranian, two British, and Rozanne and I, Zimbabweans. The long and the short of it: some hundred and thirty-plus people attended, and despite their best efforts, were unable to finish all the food and drink when the party finally ran down in the late evening. What a wonderful day of friendship and great camaraderie, enjoyed by all, including a ninety-sixth birthday for one of the old ladies, who received a giant cake, which, despite everyone having a slice, half remained uneaten along with champagne, topping off the joyous day. Thank goodness we chose Portugal to retire to; it allows me, even in my senior years, to still gather special days for my memory book.
I do not know if it is because I have become a light sleeper or because of what has happened to us over the years, but I find myself dreaming a lot. They are not nightmares as such, but they can often be rather disconcerting. People talk about flashbacks and nightmares about the war. I had some nightmares, very rare during the war, following certain incidents; one was from one of the occasions when we were mortared, which I was reminded of this week by a story on Facebook by someone in 4RR (Rhodesia Regiment) remembering the 50th anniversary, 8th August 1976, when he lost four friends and members of his unit in such an attack in Burma Valley. As was often the case in attacks close to the border, the mortars were fired from Mozambique, and most probably FRELIMO, the Mozambican military. My units never lost anybody in any of the mortar incidents when I was involved, but as I recall, as in my dreams, they do not seem like nightmares; rather, they are recollections. It was not the explosions that were scary; rather, it was the thunk of the mortar being fired and the noise of the incoming mortar in the still night and wondering where it would land. Hearing the explosion was always a relief. Luckily, in my case, never too close. That dream has long faded; in fact, not since the war. While the only other one, even to this day, manifests as me losing my rifle during a night training exercise, which actually happened. However, in my dreams it is not a training exercise, but rather in different circumstances when my weapon was desperately required. There is never a final outcome to this dream, just my panic as I search for the bloody weapon.
My war was easy compared to some regular units, who could see multiple contacts in a day, such as the Rhodesian Light Infantry and the Rhodesian African Rifles. Of these, many were affected, but most still just get on with their life. I often wonder how betrayed they feel by events, despite never having been defeated.
Nowadays, the much more frequent dream I have is about losing the farms. Not so much the violent takeover by the Government-sponsored thugs, the war vets, but rather in many varied forms like due to crop failure, borrowing too much money from the bank, drought, or cattle overgrazing. Never, never the Government's action, why I wonder, following every dream. An amazing number of themes; another theme that often appears includes returning to the farm and wondering where I will get the money to start again. Of course, in the dream I am always about the age I lost the farms, although the one that visited me just last night had a young Alistair Smith and Nick Swanepoel, for some reason querying if I was not a bit old, at seventy seven, to think about putting in new curing systems to replace those destroyed! I know that losing the farms had a major impact on all of us, but at the time and for a few years following, I put any thoughts of it behind me while I focused on starting a new life for me and others in Zambia. As I will relate later, it came back to bite me.
Meanwhile, in 2003, from Mozambique we were hearing that, despite the fanfare of the start-up down there, the United Leaf Association (ULA) sponsored farmers had already run into trouble. I should say one of the major costs we underestimated, both in Zambia and Mozambique, was labour, due very much to it being inefficient, perhaps due to it being untrained or at least inexperienced in growing commercial crops. Their inefficiency in both countries, Zambia and Mozambique, led to labour days per hectare required being more than double in some cases, triple, and in capital costs of building and land clearing being more than double of those we had been exposed to in Zimbabwe; this was in spite of many of the farmers bringing their specialised overseers and foremen up with them. It would take five years to get labour efficiencies close to those we expected in Zimbabwe. In Mozambique, these costs and times completely blew away the idea of cheap minimum costs for clearing land and building barns, sheds, and houses with local materials, as I had warned ULA and even some of the farmers who went there that it would be the case. In Zambia we were getting a foothold, but as yet very tenuous. Was it good fun? No. Was it adventurous and challenging? Yes, because it was giving us a second chance to ply our trade. There it is again, the word chance.
Disclaimer: Copyright Peter McSporran. The content in this blog represents my personal views and does not reflect corporate entities.
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