Citizens told ‘go back where you came from’

It’s that gorgeous time of year when the colours of winter are stunning in Zimbabwe. Bright orange flowers on creepers and aloes attracting sunbirds with emerald green, crimson, blue and bright yellow plumage.

Under the deep blue sky sunbirds are feasting on nectar, sipping and flicking from one long thin flower to another, hanging upside down with wings that apparently beat 50 or more times a second.

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The Msasa trees are covered in pods this year, more than we’ve had for a few years, the pods thick and leathery, olive green and light brown, waiting to shed their bounty at the end of winter while termites climb high up into the trees, leaving their red soil pathways all the way up.

This early winter in Zimbabwe it’s gone quiet in residential neighbourhoods.

Until a couple of weeks ago people were bent over and chattering, busy harvesting their maize on self-apportioned roadside plots, snapping cobs off brown stalks and throwing them into piles, later filling bags and carrying their precious food home.

Wasted food

Where yesterday the maize plants were tall and golden, now the remnants lie in heaps waiting to be burnt before the next planting season comes. Wasted food, I think, as I remember what a vital resource maize residue, called mashanga, was when I was farming.

Memories come flooding back of reaping the maize and carrying it back to dry on the racks on the farm.

We never burnt the crop residue, always collecting and storing it to feed to sheep and cattle through winter and the dry season – a precious resource until the green grass came back.

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There was always lots left on the fields though.

There was nothing nicer than watching the cattle crowding at the gate in the mornings after harvesting, shoving and pushing, wanting to be first in the field.

Their breath would rise in a white mist as they crowded at the gate, mooing and bellowing, drooling and dribbling. When the big gate swung open on those cold winter mornings you had to get out the way of the big push – and after the stampede the only view was of heads down everywhere, munching, crunching, satisfied.

Empty promises and cycles of evictions

These memories were particularly poignant this week when I heard that local authorities have now started selling the land on my farm to individuals.

They are evicting the people who were resettled there by the government after they evicted me.

“Go back where you came from,” the settlers are being told.

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Selling contested land, telling people who they resettled there that they must go, it’s all just unthinkable, unbelievable.

Hurt after hurt after hurt, worthless contracts, documents and deeds, empty promises and repeated cycles of evictions.

Bumper harvest and food aid

While this is going on the UN World Food Programme (WFP) said it urgently requires US$36.5 million to sustain food assistance programmes in Zimbabwe over the next six months.

The WFP said it assisted 161 000 people in April, distributing 2 890 tonnes of food and providing US$67 400 in cash transfers to vulnerable households.

Meanwhile the South African press said Zimbabwe was the major buyer of South African maize during the 2025/26 season, purchasing 780 770 tonnes.

But we are confused because Zimbabwe boasted about a bumper harvest in the 2025/26 season.

Now we just try and make sense of it all – the World Food Programme feeding Zimbabweans, a bumper harvest, and authorities selling contested land and evicting resettled farmers.

This is the face of farming in Zimbabwe in 2026.

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Meeting a friend this week we talked about what’s happening on farms, then reminisced about those winter mornings when we stood at the farm gate together watching the cows when they had just been let out into a newly harvested field.

Guinea fowl and francolins running in the stubble finding dropped maize pips, cows lifting their heads with their mouths full of brown maize leaves, saliva hanging from their lips, bellies fat and round, coats shiny and glistening.

“There will never be farming there again now,” my friend said, and I had to turn my head away.

Copyright © Cathy Buckle