plantpots

"The police raided the place three or four times," says a B-and-B owner in the eastern city of Mutare. "They never found a thing."

She had diamond dealers staying with her at the height of the rush in 2008.

"The police looked in all the obvious places: toilet cistern, under the mattress. They turned the place upside down."

Two or three hours after the police had gone, the dealers' colleagues (shamwaris, she calls them, friends in the local Shona language) would knock at the door.

"We've just come to pick up something," they'd say.

She watched. The dealers went straight to the plant pots outside the B and B rooms -- the sort every white Zimbabwean keeps, with geraniums and pansies and roses in -- and began to dig with their hands. The diamonds had been hidden in the soil.

"Of course, if they were staying at number 22, they'd hide the stones in the pots outside number 24. Just to be on the safe side. But the police never guessed," she says.

We wonder -- all of us gathered round the table in this plush eatery, a day after Mugabe's government announced it'll take over white-owned businesses -- if there are any diamonds still left in her flowerpots, any stones the shamwaris missed.

Who knows when we'll need them.