PBS POV - Mugabe and the White African (2009)

In 1980, Robert Mugabe was democratically elected in the former British colony of Rhodesia. During the first 20 years of his increasingly dictatorial regime, he largely left the white minority alone. In 2000, however, he introduced his land reform policy aimed at dispossessing white farmers and dividing their land up among the black population. Michael Campbell is one of the few hundred white farmers left in Zimbabwe since President Robert Mugabe began his violent land seizure program, kicking out whites and redistributing their property to his ministers, cronies and relatives. Increasingly cut off from the world, Zimbabwe – which had an official inflation rate of 231 million percent in 2008 – has moved from being Africa's breadbasket to the continent’s basket case. After 2000, formerly thriving farms that employed thousands, now sit derelict while poverty and hunger are rife amongst the majority of the country's citizens. Since then the country has descended into chaos, the economy brought to its knees by the reallocation of formerly white-owned farms to ZANU-PF friends and officials with no knowledge, experience or interest in farming. Mike, like hundreds of white farmers before him, has suffered years of multiple land invasions and violence at his farm. In 2008, Mike, 75 years old and a grandfather - unable to call upon the protection of any Zimbabwean authorities and unable to even rely on the support of his fellow white farmers, all facing the same brutal intimidation - took the unprecedented step of challenging Robert Mugabe before the SADC (South African Development Community) international court, charging him and his government with racial discrimination and of violations of Human Rights. This film is an intimate account of one family's astonishing bravery in the face of brutality, in a fight to protect their property, their livelihood and their country. The outcome of the court case potentially determining not just the future that lies ahead for Mike and his family, but the future of millions of ordinary Zimbabweans who continue to suffer at the hands of a dictator who, in setting his own countrymen against each other, has demonstrated that he cares only for power. On the brink of losing everything, Mike and his family (wife Angela, daughter Laura and her husband Ben Freeth) stand united by their courage, their faith and their hope. Mike knows the personal risk to himself and his family that this case brings. Whatever the verdict by the court, this audacious and unprecedented stand may yet cost them their lives. This is the only documentary feature film to have come out of Zimbabwe in recent years, where a total press ban still exists. Much of the footage was shot covertly. To have been caught filming would have lead to imprisonment. Mugabe and the White African is perhaps the outside world's only real glimpse of what it is like to live inside Mugabe's Zimbabwe.

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