Mugabe’s sister and the white farmer

Zimbabwe's beleaguered President Robert Mugabe has not only recalcitrant voters to cope with. He also has to deal with a personal tragedy. His elder sister, Sabina Mugabe, died in hospital on Sunday, after a long illness.

Sabina served her brother's Zanu-PF party for 20 years as an MP. But she is best remembered for the manner by which she acquired a previously white-owned farm in Mugabe's controversial land redistribution programme.

She was known to tour farming areas in her black Mercedes, looking for choice properties, and in 2002 she visited the 400-acre Gowrie Farm of Terry Ford, in Norton, 40 kilometres west of Harare. Sabina told Ford that she wanted his farm. Ford refused to hand it over.

Later that year a gang of so-called war veterans began to threaten Ford, but the farmer, described by friends as a 'gentle giant', still refused to go. After a night of further threats, his body was found by neighbours in the morning. He had been badly beaten, then shot in the head.

Ford was, by most counts, the tenth white farmer to lose his life in the cause of land reform in Zimbabwe. It was claimed at the time that Sabina was in no way connected.