ongoing

"The war veterans tried to smoke them out," she says.

Eleven more white farmers are under siege in southern Matabeleland provinces, officials from the Commercial Farmers' Union (CFU) say. In the eastern Rusape area, the purge continues. This isn't about land reform, an MDC spokesman says: it's about ZANU-PF "looting and stealing," 11 months after a power-sharing deal that was supposed to bring stability -- and desperately-needed foreign investors -- back to Zimbabwe.

My son's new teacher tells me of the trauma one white family lived through last weekend.

"They were neighbours. We used to play with the Smit boys when we were little."

"They've got this a huge Italian-style mansion, three storeys high. It's stunning. The slaves (she means Italian POWs) built it during the war. It's got this system of underground passages.

"We used to tie rope round us and fix one end to the entrance so we could find our way back. Then we'd spend hours exploring. It was like Famous Five. That's until the day the floor caved in in one room."

The war veterans found the entrance to the underground passageways under the Nyazura farmhouse last Sunday. They got inside and tried to set the wooden floors alight to smoke out the family.

"The boys were roughed up," the teacher says. "Slapped around a bit."