Graham Hatty in Nigeria

About four years ago I published a story of a white Rhodesian farmer, son of post- WW11 immigrant friends of my mother. Graham Hatty was driven off his hugely successful wheat farm in Norton, near Harare. A British newspaper (the Times) published a photograph and article, showing Graham Hatty to be successfully farming in Nigeria. Here is the story I wrote and I want to know what happend next....

"He stands in a wide, dark brown ploughed field. The sky is lit up with a radiant burst of rain clouds, silver white and heavily black, fanning out from the far horizon. In the near distance a crowd of black farmhands are dotted across the field, their faces turned solemnly towards him. He is smiling, really smiling. A sun bronzed, leathery face with fine-chiselled bone structure is shaded by a floppy hat. The man has the distinctive features, the rimless spectacles and relaxed stance of a prosperous businessman farmer. I see a white, Zimbabwean commercial farmer who is organizing the production of a seasonal crop of maize. I am seeing a ghost. I think I am looking at Sir Cyril Hatty.

But Cyril is dead. He was a highly successful farmer in Norton, near Lake Chivero some twenty five miles from Zimbabwe’s capital. Harare. He was ninety three when I saw him shortly before he died in the same year that we fled the country where I was born. For me, opening the World News section of the Times on July 23, 2005 to find Chris Harris’s brilliant photograph of Cyril’s apparent re-incarnation was quite shock. Then the ghost vanished as I read the caption: `Graham Hatty with some of the Nigerian subsistence farmers whom he hopes to train: “I would not have missed this for the world. I am very optimistic,” he is quoted as saying. Graham Hatty’s most enduring inheritance, the quality of purposeful enthusiasm is surely his best legacy from his illustrious father.

Sir Cyril Hatty was knighted for his service as Finance Minister in the Central African Federal parliament. He and Graham’s late mother, the statuesque Doris were my parents’ friends. Doris was big, built like an Amazon. With her booming voice, she was in great demand, singing and acting the Pearly Queen in the Bulawayo Theatre Club which my mother ran. The British colony needed all the theatrical talent it could get. The club and its members provided welcoming meeting grounds and embraced new English immigrants arriving in Southern Rhodesia after the war (WW2). Cyril was an accountant then – the country was carefully recruiting skilled settlers many of whom had been trainee RAF pilots in the sunny, peaceful environment of a British colony. Cyril made a great success of his business and political career. His two sons were African-born.

I thought I could call upon the family friendship after Ian Smith declared UDI. I was one of a little band of Rhodesians opposed to this foolhardy move. We were trying to recruit successful (and wealthy) individuals to join our nacent opposition group, the Centre Party. I drove out of Salisbury, as it was then, to see Cyril in Norton and found him taking a morning break, working on his sketch book. My mission was a failure. He was friendly but firm. “Sorry, Diana, it’s no good going against this Rhodesian Front lot”. He avoided my accusing gaze, as he continued drawing his favourite baobab tree. “The only thing to do when you have a cowboy government is to become a cowboy”. I got the message.

Cyril Hatty was no mean cowboy: probably the biggest and best cereal farmer in the country, The red soil of his flat, wide lands, lay in the shadow of a range of low hills around the man made lake, formerly known as McIlwaine. He turned the fields into a sea of lush green wheat. Graham, the `cowboy’ farmer’s son had a great heritage. There was overhead irrigation equipment and huge combined harvesters with their gigantic wheels. The tyres, Cyril once told me, had cost more than a modest family house. Zimbabwe inherited a commercial farming success which had delivered self-sufficiency in wheat – there were no bread shortages and the millers flourished. Built up after long, painful experience, commercial farming was hugely profitable if you knew what you were doing..

I am glad that Cyril and Doris did not live to see their work trashed. It must have been a terrible shock for Graham to find himself, in his middle years, thrown off the land which had been his whole life. But I had noticed, soon after I heard that his farm, like many others, had been grabbed by Robert Mugabe’s minions, that Nigeria’s President Olusegun Obasanjo had `embraced’ him and a group of the outcasts – yes! quite literally, embraced him as he welcomed them to his country as immigrant farmers.

Those farmers have planted maize in the `magnificent soil’ of Nigeria’s western Kwara state and Graham Hatty, for one, says he would not return to Zimbabwe even if he got his farm back. I should add, his `stolen’ farm, but this is meant to be a happy ending. The restored, happy Hatty tells reporters that he never thought he would be so happy again. He is proud to boast that the incomes of the subsistence farmers that he has begun to train have trebled. The state governor acknowledged that `these people (the white farmers) see themselves as African” and he intends to give the ex-Zimbabweans every encouragement to stay and prosper. His delight in introducing the prospect of successful commercial farming appears to be boundless. He wants more of Zimbabwe’s dispossessed farmers to take out long leases, paying minimal rents so that eventually his people may be able to export agricultural produce".

I wrote that I wished the senior Hatty's had lived to see this great start for their son, dispossed of a farm of industrial proportions, which had been the life's work of the late Sir Cyril Hatty.