‘The First White Farmer Had Been Murdered’
15th April 2010
“I was five thousand miles away, drunk and happily unaware at a friend’s birthday party in Berlin, when I learned that the first white farmer had been murdered.” So begins the book The Last Resort, by Douglas Rogers. Rogers grew up in Zimbabwe on a chicken farm and vineyard; his parents presently own a small resort called Drifters, hence the title. “Own” is used here very loosely, since the concept of ownership in President Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe is only tangentially related to the concept of ownership as we know it. The book chronicles the life of Rogers’s parents since that first farmer died in the Zimbabwe land invasions that began in 2000.