Prologue

      THE WAR VETERANS had been living at the bottom of the garden for months. Every afternoon the family would take tea on the terrace and stare beyond the swimming pool and children's tree house to the plumes of smoke rising from the round thatched huts that the squatters had built. Every night the family tossed and turned to their drumming and chanting. The next morning the farmer would find the carcasses of the cattle that the intruders had slaughtered.

      Kendor Farm was in Wenimbi Valley in the rich tobacco-growing district of Marondera. Tobacco was Zimbabwe's main export, and for the previous two and a half years neighbouring farms all around them had endured similar invasions. The first murder of a white farmer had happened only a few miles away on 15 April 2000. Since then many farmers had been badly beaten; some had been hacked to death. Most had been either kicked off or fled. By August 2002 the morning roll call over the radio, started to check on the safety of local farmers, had stopped because Kendor was the only white farm left in the valley.

      The Hough family had thought about leaving. But the 1,400-acre ostrich and tobacco farm and eight-bedroom house with its sweeping view over the balancing rocks and floaty canopy of msasa trees was their dream. They had worked hard for the farm and sunk all their money into it. They wanted their children to grow up as they had and could not imagine starting all over again. Other white farmers who had moved abroad to England or Australia had ended up driving minicabs and living in poky council flats. Besides, it was not only them. On the land they had a factory producing bags and shoes from ostrich leather and they employed 300 people as well as running an orphanage for children whose parents had died in the AIDS pandemic.

      One morning, Claire Hough had gone to take the children to school and her husband Nigel had left for a meeting in town when their manager called in a panic. A crowd of people had arrived at the gate waving a letter demanding the farm. Nigel grabbed a friend and rushed back in his pick-up. By the time they got there, the mob had started a fire in his driveway, taunting him and barring their way with sticks and shamboks. ‘Hondo, hondo’ they chanted, Shona for ‘war’. He could see that some of his furniture had been taken out of the house and piled up in front of the terrace.

      Nigel telephoned the police but they refused to come, saying they did