Dir. Andrew Thompson/Lucy Bailey ,UK, 2009, 90 mins - documentary
Cast: Michael Campbell, Ben Freeth
Review by Carol Allen
This powerful documentary tells the story of 74 year old Michael Campbell, one of the few white farmers left in Zimbabwe, since President Robert Mugabe began his violent "Land Reform" programme in 2000 of evicting white farmers forcibly from their land - a policy which has plunged the country into economic chaos and left the majority of its people starving.
With the support of his son-in-law Ben Freeth, Campbell, who purchased his land legally from the independent Zimbabwe government over twenty years ago, decided in 2007 to fight Mugabe in the international court of the Southern African Development Community in Namibia. The proceedings themselves raise a number of important legal as well a moral points, mainly that the Mugabe's policy is both a violation of human rights and blatantly racist, as is pointed out by Campbell's largely black legal team. But while the legal niceties of how Mugabe's team delay the verdict of the court over many months are not always totally clear, the heart of the story is the strong human drama of the family fighting not only to save their home and their own livelihood but that of the 500 or so black people on the farm, the workers and their family members, who are loyally backing Campbell in what is also a fight for their own survival, while risking beatings, torture and worse in a society where law and order has become a non existent concept.
Much of the film, we're told right at the beginning, was shot covertly and to have been caught filming would have meant imprisonment. Yet under those difficult conditions the film makers have still managed to get together a largely well shot and coherent piece of film making, which includes some very disturbing and moving footage. It is openly partisan but with moral justification and it gives us not only a rare opportunity to see the realities of life in today's Zimbabwe, but also disproves the outdated idea some people still have of the white former Rhodesians - the white Africans of the title - as racist oppressors getting their comeback.
In the course of the film Campbell and Freeth observe a neighbouring family being forcibly evicted from the land they have farmed for over a hundred years. One of Campbell's workers describes to the camera the beating he has just endured from Mugabe's bully boys, while the police stood by and watched, all for the "crime" of guarding the farm. There's a particularly interesting confrontation between Campbell and the son of one of Mugabe's ministers, who arrives in an expensive car from his comfortable house in Harare to claim the farm, blatantly admitting that there is no place for white Africans such as Campbell - they must all leave their homeland - and causing Campbell to point out ironically that the beneficiaries of land reform appear to be the sons of ministers rather than the black poor majority that was in theory intended to benefit.
Just before returning to Namibia for the final verdict, Campbell, his elderly wife and Freeth, who all display a stoic courage throughout, were brutally beaten within an inch of their lives. Campbell was too ill to travel, so it was left to Freeth, recovering from a brain haemorrhage and now in a wheelchair, to go into court alone to hear the final verdict. Like Sir Thomas More in his legal battle with Henry VIII, Campbell believed, or at least hoped, that the law would be his protection. Both men were proved wrong. More lost his head. Campbell, despite a verdict in his favour, lost his farm. But he has the satisfaction of having made a stand. As is pointed out in the film, "If good men do nothing, evil will prevail."
|
