San Francisco Cchronicle - December 28, 2004
Debra J. Saunders at dsaunders@sfchronicle.com.

The story brought me back to a 2003 flight from Johannesburg to Atlanta, at the end of a trip in South Africa. A white passenger was acting as the worst bigots do: It wasn't enough that he didn't like black people -- "those people," as he put it -- he had to broadcast his scorn loudly so that the other passengers would be in complicit agreement with him unless they took the uncomfortable step of challenging him. I did.

He then told the story of how he was losing his farm in Zimbabwe, slowly slaughtering livestock he would not replace and laying off workers. He had to grab work with airlines on other continents to earn a living, then return home to fight to hold onto property he was losing bit by bit.

I understand why you would hate Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe for seizing white-owned farms, I said, but why blame all black people? And why not leave a country where you're not wanted?

It was his home, he said.

Hours later, just before landing, a black woman from Zimbabwe challenged the white farmer. Zimbabwe was her home, she reminded him. Across the aisle, my husband sat next to a young black man from Zimbabwe who was coming to teach in Virginia. Mugabe's redistribution apparently hasn't staunched his country's brain drain.

My husband scolded me for being so rough on a man who was losing his home. Later I said something conciliatory. I don't remember what I said, or what he said back, except that he mumbled something resembling an apology. Could he be a decent man driven to indecent thoughts?

When you think of all the injustices in the world, the plight of white folk losing their farms doesn't rate very high. There are harsher fates, harder ways to live.

While in South Africa, we saw men and women carrying huge tins of water on their heads to homes that lacked running water. (The government boasts that 85 percent of South Africans enjoy "access to clean water" -- a phrase, I should note, that doesn't necessarily mean "indoor plumbing.") Crime is out of control; the law-abiding live in fear of armed marauders.

One in 9 South Africans, or 5 million people, live with HIV, according to one frequently cited estimate. Of those, 1 million are children, many orphans, born to live short lives in the brutal clutch of poverty and disease.

In South Africa, there is a stark divide between black and white, haves and have-nots. And yet, there is progress and economic growth.

South Africa is a land of hope and forgiveness. While change progresses more slowly than many would like, the economy is growing, there is more housing and more opportunity. On a tour of Robben Island, South Africa's notorious island prison where Nelson Mandela was incarcerated, our guide, a former inmate who did time with Mandela, urged tourists to return to South Africa, spend money and help spur development.

"Although the world is very full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it," Helen Keller once said. South Africa is working full-time at overcoming it.

Zimbabwe, on the other hand, is a land of despair and retribution. Its economy has eroded. Life expectancy at birth in Zimbabwe was less than 34 years in 2000. It was 40 years in 1990, according to U.N. statistics.

Between one third and one half of Zimbabwe's population goes hungry, according to the New York Times. The Mugabe government has discouraged commerce and driven outsiders away. To tighten his political control, Mugabe told the World Food Program to cease most emergency deliveries of grain. His government won't sell corn to families that don't belong to his party.

The very policies that embittered the white farmer I met on the plane have brought starvation to a country once known for its farms.

Nonetheless, Zimbabwe has a copycat -- Namibia now also has begun to seize white-owned farms, under the pretence of expropriating from whites who are perceived to have fired workers wrongfully.

"If you aren't already a racist, they make you a racist," Andreas Wiese, a fourth-generation white farmer, told the New York Times. He reminds me of my fellow traveler from Africa.

Wiese's mother says of the family farm that once exported 100,000 flowers a year, and employed many Namibians, "Everything will be destroyed. Just give them two years, and everything will be gone."

The Weise family's pain is the least of it. Redistribution is supposed to share the wealth, but in Zimbabwe it spread starvation and poverty -- and no small measure of hate.

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