I’ve belatedly watched the 2009 documentary Mugabe and the White African, a harrowing perspective on the campaign of terror that Zimbabwe’s president, Robert Mugabe, has unleashed upon his people. The film tells the story of a white family, led by its patriarch Mike Campbell and his son-in-law Ben Freeth, fighting to keep their farm from the clutches of Mugabe’s land redistribution policy. Enacted in 2000, the scheme has resulted in astronomical inflation, the utter collapse of the country’s once-prosperous commercial agriculture sector (which has made most Zimbabweans dependent on international food aid), and the creation of some 2 million refugees. Early on, Freeth asks whether it is possible for a white man to be considered an African, and it is this question, among others, that fuel the film.

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Mugabe and the White African’s narrative arc concerns the Campbell and Freeth’s legal battle against the Mugabe regime. They have decided to take the Southern African Development Community (SADC) charter — which states that citizens of the regional bloc’s constituent nations cannot be discriminated against on the basis of their skin color — at its word. While the racial disparities in Zimbabwe have long merited some form of land redistribution policy aimed at alleviating the economic status of the country’s black majority, this was not the sort of plan that Mugabe had in mind. Even if one could justify his violent, forced evictions of white farmers on such grounds, the vast majority of these properties were handed to political hacks, not the destitute. What makes Campbell’s legal case airtight is that he purchased his farm years after authoritarian, white-ruled Rhodesia became black-ruled Zimbabwe.

While the filmmakers chose two white men as their protagonists, Mugabe and the White African comes across strongest in its depiction of the ruinous effects that Mugabe’s agricultural policies and vicious racism have had upon his fellow black Zimbabweans. Campbell employed about 500 black workers on his farm; with their families, this meant that Campbell was responsible for the livelihood of several thousand black people. Hundreds of thousands of such black farm workers and their families’ lives were wrecked by Mugabe’s land seizure policies, putting the lie to the claim, balefully endorsed by most of his fellow African leaders, that he has been fighting for the interests of blacks all along. Throughout their struggle, Campbell and Freeth work with black comrades in resisting the depredations, both political and racial, of Mugabe-ism. “If we had more Mike Campbells in Zimbabwe, we’d have a better Zimbabwe,” his black, female lawyer says.

From the airy, languid courtroom of the SADC tribunal in Windhoek, Namibia, to the rolling valleys of Campbell’s Mt. Carmel farm, Mugabe and the White African offers a rare, firsthand glimpse into a country whose trauma has been difficult to capture on film due to the onerous burdens imposed on foreign media (the movie was filmed largely in secret). The most riveting scene involves a surprise visit to Campbell’s farm by the son of the government minister to whom Campbell’s land has been promised by the regime. “We don’t want you here anymore,” he spits, pacing back and forth, wild-eyed and with the demeanor of an untamed beast. In the face of such open hostility, the question posed at the outset of the film by Ben Freeth on the subject of the white man’s place in Africa clearly remains an open one. What’s inspiring about Mugabe and the White African is its conveyance of the fact that there are so many ordinary Africans, white and black, willing to resist the curse of racial prejudice.