Reinvent Yourself for Survival. Scuffle on the Sea Lion.

Sunset and our new guest in the garden, a Fame Lilly. Let's hope it returns next year.

I will write my blog from now on when I can on the Sunday prior to posting the following Friday. It gives me less to worry about during the rest of the week. Any latest events I can add, like the outcome of my meeting with my stomach cancer surgeon later this week, following the usual round of scans and tests. I have chosen Sundays, as we generally try to stay at home here at Casa de Eira (House of the Threshing Floor), which is the name given to our house by the original owner who commissioned it to be built. Why Casa de Eira, I do not know? Eiras are certainly not a unique feature, in the rural areas of central Portugal, with most old homesteads having a threshing area which consists of a raised stone-walled area used for threshing cereals and legumes in Autumn and often for storing wood in winter. I will post a picture of the one in our garden. Many are centuries old.

The eira in our garden

We had an old friend, in fact, an ex-girlfriend of mine, Beth Bedford, staying with us this week. This caused great consternation to my Portuguese neighbours when Rozanne mentioned it while installing their new TV prior to the visit. 

“Having had a mutual relationship should not preclude people from maintaining a long term friendship.” - Peter McSporran

Beth has returned to her maiden name, Tindle, not out of choice, but out of convenience in obtaining her Argentinian passport, as her father was born in that country. Beth has had it pretty tough following her husband Mike’s murder, he having been shot two days before Christmas in 1995 by poachers on their farm in the remote part of Wedza near what is known as the ‘Dutchman’s Hook.’ Despite this isolation, Beth decided to continue farming and did so very successfully, having been under Mike’s tuition for many years. Mike was a renowned cattleman, and Beth proved to be equally as good at running a beef herd. Through sheer will power, she went back to teaching after some forty years after losing the farm, having spent many months alone prior to this, living in fear for her life or at best an assault by the farm invaders. She spent two years in Singapore, where she became a foreign language tutor before obtaining the necessary documentation to allow her to recover the nationality of her father. Like many Brits, her dad, although British, was born abroad; in her father’s case, in Argentina, and therefore she could not obtain a British passport. This was typical of the British, denying passports to subsequent generations of servicemen and civil servants from the colonial era, including those born in the country of their posting. One of Rozanne’s grandfathers was one such person; her great-grandfather was born in Nova Scotia while his father served in the armed forces, and with records lost in the UK, they said, he and his descendents were unable to get a British passport. Rozanne got hers before marrying me by going through the nationalisation process in the eighties. This took ten years of working in the UK. 

Beth on our front verandah

 “You’re one of the few people who really understands what I lost and how tough it is to reinvent oneself.” - Beth Bedford

Anyway, getting back to Beth’s endeavours and her above quote, it struck me that so many of us ex-Zimbabwean farmers had to reinvent ourselves. After years of being self-employed, running a large farming operation, we had our farms forcibly taken from us and had to leave Zimbabwe to make a living. In many instances, we took on the role of farm managers, often for large corporations, or completely changed careers. Both are not easy. Furthermore, as family farms are mostly owner-managed, the management jobs available were generally with corporations, which often involve complex structures and rules. 

“It is very hard to take orders after a lifetime of giving them. Even worse when your line boss is a corporate bean counter or, worse still, an MBA holder without your skill set, yet in his mind, he thinks he knows best. An unhappy place, for an ex-farm owner for sure.” - Peter McSporran

A lucky few, very few indeed, had the resources to start farming elsewhere, while some, many of whom I assisted, moved to neighbouring countries, especially Zambia. The majority of us, like Beth, had to change careers, learn new skills or resurrect old ones and work for large agricultural organisations, often unhappily. So yes, Beth, I have watched you reinvent yourself and the courage it took to do so in a foreign land, like many Zimbabweans. By the way, this includes those farmers who decided to make a new life despite remaining in Zimbabwe. The most common choice was trading, buying and selling, commonly known as ‘wheeling and dealing’, which has a whole new set of skills and rules to enable one’s survival. But survive some do. Even the few that retained their land or a piece of their land or leased from a benefactor of the regime had to reinvent themselves from good citizens into someone willing to compromise, pay or support those that destroyed us.

“To survive in any given regime's environment, unless you openly challenge that regime, you have to adapt to the environment they have created.” - Peter McSporran

Some wild piglets visiting our village this week

I always try to read Cathy Buckle's ‘Letter from Zimbabwe.’ She is a very skilled writer, and over the years, she has certainly honed this skill. When she describes places, people or events, they are so vividly described you can almost see them. She often focuses on the hardships faced by the Zimbabwean people, as well as the mismanagement of the country and its consequences for the people, the country's infrastructure, and its services. No different this week when she touched on having to help out a friend who had a family member requiring medical treatment. It appears that not only are the hospitals in a state of decay, but those still willing to work there also lack basic necessities, such as medicine, water, and power. If you want treatment, first you or a family member must go and procure the drugs, dressings, even needles and syringes, before they can administer treatment. The fact is that the vast majority of the population cannot afford to do so, let alone pay for private treatment. There seems to be little likelihood of a change in Government in the near to medium future. The lucky few will either leave and reinvent themselves or stay and adapt to the dreadful circumstances they find themselves in. It must be extremely hard for them to watch the chefs and those well-connected to them flaunt their huge ill-gotten gains, but the day will come when they will say, “Enough is enough.”

“The trouble with living in toxic societies is that the longer you accept it in your daily life, the more it is considered normal and therefore acceptable. Just a challenge, not something to rectify.” - Peter McSporran

Towards the end of 1998, a number of us farmers and townies headed off for Micky Tanner’s organised annual fishing trip on the Sea Lion ferry on Kariba. I have mentioned these trips before, and this one was to be proven as the penultimate one. Micky, a partner in the agricultural crop chemical company Crop Serve, was probably known to every crop-growing farmer in Zimbabwe. I am sure that at one time or another, he would have bought a round for the whole bar in your local country club. Country clubs in Zimbabwe were more social clubs for farming families than what is typically known as a country club in the UK or America, which is often characterised by a membership of the wealthy, especially the nouveau riche. Despite this, all had sports, be it tennis, cricket or even rugby, with the larger ones boasting a golf course. Micky was a keen golfer, so he was often in the districts, not just selling crop chemicals but sponsoring golf tournaments. His wife, Ingrid, was a loyal employee of the Commercial Oilseeds Association at the Commercial Farmers Union, and my secretary when I was chairman of that Association. Through our love of fishing, certainly not golf in my case, Micky, Ingrid and I enjoyed many fishing trips on Kariba together. The ferry trip was boys only.

Our 1998 'Ferry' fishing trip. Barry Keates on guitar on the left, unrecognised next to the organiser, the late Micky Tanner and the venerable Neville Baker on the right. The waiter was probably the only sober one.

On this particular trip, the rains decided to come early in mid-November, which made fishing difficult as the rivers pushed muddy water far out into the lake. Despite this, we would go fishing every day, with fierce competition to catch the largest bream or tiger. Vundu and barbel did not feature on the prize list. We always went to the far end of the lake beyond Chete Gorge, some 180 km from Kariba, two-thirds up the lake. Here we would fish in the False Ruzi, the Senkwi River mouth and between Chete Island and the Zimbabwean mainland. That year, as was our usual habit, two days before the end of the trip, we set off for Kariba, stopping in the Sengwa River about halfway up the lake for the last night, bar one, the final night we always sailed overnight to harbour. The rain was still coming down heavily but despite this I wanted to go fishing and said there were places available on my boat, The Lark, for those that wished to join me. Peter Dearlove, Louis and Pete Steyl joined. Up the river we went, dodging the floating logs and reed banks being washed down into the lake. The river was totally opaque, more like a flowing mud bath, but despite that we had a couple of tiger fish strikes, our target species. Then suddenly to all our surprises not least Peter’s his line set off, his reel screaming, he had obviously hooked a big one. Not easy to land with all the floating debris but land it he did. We immediately weighed it and it came to 9.1 kilograms, a twenty pound fish which was a very large fish for Kariba in those days. We all started celebrating in the normal way by speeding up our consumption of beer with the fish lying in the bilge of the boat drying in the little sun that had now appeared. On arrival back on the mothership, that is the ferry, the fish was reweighed and the scale now disappointingly showed 9 kilograms, so the arguments started. We claimed a twenty pound fish, some agreed and others disagreed. There is serious jealousy in the angling fraternity. As most had not gone out fishing, all had been partaking throughout the afternoon on their favourite tipple. For some reason the arguments went well into the evening until Micky Tanner and Peter Dearlove found themselves wrestling on the floor. Proof of how serious we took the fishing. A punch from any one of the two would have been more like a damp sock than a fist. Anyway, the next day everyone was friends, and to this day the argument about that fish’s weight continues. If you are wondering what happened to the fish, we smoked it and ate it for dinner. In retrospect, we had a great deal of fun in those days.

Postscript: The medical results were good, so I shall relax again until the next round. How lucky I have been? I have been offered private surgery to try and address my incontinence following my review, but I may stick with the health service. I am being offered private surgery due to the delay in the health service. So it is free. I will let you know my decision next week.

Disclaimer: Copyright Peter McSporran. The content in this blog represents my personal views and does not reflect corporate entities.