To Live in Paradise
By Cindi McVey
Homebound Publications (2014)
ISBN: 978-1-938846-25-0

TO understand the story of Zimbabwe, one has to be aware of its history.
It is a history that highlights the plight of a black people from the time when the whiteman set his foot in Zimbabwe.
That history also highlights the events which saw black people being chased away to infertile lands while the whiteman enjoyed the benefits of living in spacious fertile land.
In her memoir To Live in Paradise, Alaska-born writer, Cindi McVey writes about her ‘adventure’ in Zimbabwe.
She stayed in the country for 10 years.
Leaving Alaska for Zimbabwe, McVey does not only find herself a husband, but is able to enjoy the beautiful nature of the country and to start a business.
It is through her journey to different places in Zimbabwe that she is able to describe the beauty of a country that she calls ‘paradise’.
For McVey, that paradise is destroyed by the turn of events that saw her white friends losing ‘their land’ to war veterans.
She blames not only the ‘war vets’, but the leader of Zimbabwe, President Robert Mugabe for destroying a paradise that had been maintained ‘beautiful’ by white people.
She fails to appreciate that President Mugabe was addressing land imbalances in the country because prior the Land Reform Programme in year 2000, about 4 000 white farmers occupied the country’s prime land, but after the land redistribution programme, over 400 000 black households acquired land.
“Throughout the late 1960s and 70s these communist backed militants waged brutal guerrilla warfare, often aimed at civilians,” writes McVey.
The above statement shows that McVey does not understand the reasons why the black people in the then Rhodesia decided to join forces in fighting the whitemen.
The writer shows a high degree of negligence as she fails to trace the critical information that shapes Zimbabwe’s history.
Writing from the whiteman’s point of view, she does not care to listen to the Zimbabwean story from the point of view of that war veteran whom she describes as ‘ZANU PF thugs’.
Typical of the majority of white people, McVey presents a black person as someone unable to come up with anything constructive.
Her tone highlights that only the whites are capable of coming up with the beautiful and good things in life such that it is they (whites) who made Zimbabwe a paradise.
In her pessimistic tone towards the peasant farmers, McVey writes, “Goats and stunted cattle grazed everywhere, searching out any bit of green that had managed to hide itself.”
It’s a pity that the writer ignores the fact that black people were in that predicament because her kith and kin displaced blacks from their fertile lands and put them in reserves where the land was infertile.
In some instances, black people were put in tsetse-infested areas, while others were put in ‘Keeps’ as the liberation war progressed.
McVey and her white friends totally disregard the connection between black people and their land.
The Land Reform Programme was therefore a justified move by President Mugabe.
After all, if to be democratic is fulfilling the wishes of the majority, then there was nothing wrong with land reform as over 400 000 black households got land that was previously owned by 4 000 white farmers.
In her memoir, McVey ignores that part when the whiteman forcefully grabbed the country’s resources, especially land, a move that resulted in the First, Second and Third Chimurenga.
She ‘forgets’ to tell the world about how pioneers of the First Chimurenga, Sekuru Kaguvi were cruelly hanged after being baptised by the very same whiteman.
They were killed because they wanted land to be returned to its rightful owners, the black majority.
McVey’s memory betrayed her by not reminding her that in the paradise she talks about, the blacks were the majority and disadvantaged while the white minority had it all.
It is not surprising that the writer alludes to her friends who are owners of farms, conservancies and ranches.
Her memoir presents a black man suffering living as either a household worker or farm labourer of the whiteman.
“Twelve million Zimbabweans called her home, seventy percent hailing from the Shona tribe, and the Ndebele making up the rest. As far as Indians, whites and Asians, when I arrived in the country they numbered no more than eighty thousand,” she writes.
Throughout her narration, McVey presents to the reader a gloomy situation in which her white friends were chased away from the land that belonged to the black majority.
She does not care to talk about the thousands of innocent people that died at Chimoio and Nyadzonia, Tembwe and other camps during the liberation struggle.
They were killed simply because they wanted to be free in their own motherland, their paradise Zimbabwe, but to McVey, this is not an issue worth writing about in her memoir.