Arrival in Johannesburg and dinner with friends - A Short Safari Adventure Among Africa's Thorny Bushveld Wildlife - page 182

the farmers driven out during the Mau Mau uprising by the Kikuyu, as was well written about
by Robert Ruark in his bestselling topics about that era: Something of value and Uhuru. In
Kenya whites have found that it is better to rent and lease the farms from the locals and now
prosper through that method. The largest problem however with leasing and not holding title is
that farmers cannot raise capital by borrowing against their land for expensive farm equipment
and improvements, like irrigation, and leasing also leads to insecurity over undertaking capital
improvement projects. To some extent, leasing has also started to happen in Zimbabwe where
white farmers lease land, sometimes even their own old farms, and now run the farms again. In
Namibia, land is offered also with limited leases. Of interest, one of my friends who had
farmed his in-laws farm in Zimbabwe had to leave it and moved to Zambia where he runs a
large commercial farm. Ironically, on a recent visit by President Zuma of South Africa to
Zambia, President Zuma was shown around the farm that was being run by a white South
African kicked out of Zimbabwe.
This would appear will become an increasingly frequent model in Africa. Ex-farmers from
South Africa are also farming in Mozambique and Angola, although when I visited
Mozambique in Samora Machel's home town in 2006 to see a clinic construction we had
supported the rural areas farming was still primitive compared to the previous large
Portuguese sugar farm in the area.
Oxen drawn Cart