We were given minutes to leave

Twenty two years ago, in the summer of 1980 when I was six years old, I remember piling into my friend's dad's truck and heading to our voting station. Rhodesia had become Zimbabwe and these elections were the end of white-minority rule. The roads were full of black and white families, all caught up in the moment. Everybody knew change was long overdue and was positive about black-majority rule.

In the hopeful years that followed, I'd never have thought it possible that by Christmas 2002, my mother, father, 18-year-old brother and 16-year-old sister and I would have been forced from our home and, instead of living on our farm in a beautiful savannah in the south, I'd be living in a local-authority flat in Southfields in south-west London, our land stolen, our workers tortured and facing starvation, and our animals slaughtered.

My family - originally from Manchester, England - had lived in Zimbabwe for four generations. In the 1960s, after years of working as a copper miner, my grandfather bought our first farm.

Following Robert Mugabe's victory, we moved to a new holding in the Mashonaland East - it was pretty rundown, but my parents built it up until we were one of the biggest tobacco producers in the country.

We knew the land system was unfair (whites, who numbered 70,000 of a population of nine million, owned 70 per cent of the farming land), but our farm made a difference to hundreds of black families. We employed 1,200 people, most of whom lived on the farm. It was like a small community with a store, a bar and a movie hall. We provided good housing, education for the children and gave the workers sections of land so they could grow their own maize, which could then be sold. It was a happy place.

By the mid-1990s, though, Zimbabwe was becoming increasingly unstable. Mugabe sent troops to raid nearby Congo for precious natural resources and, instead of paying the soldiers, pledged them land. The white farmers were blamed for all of Zimbabwe's social ills, opposition parties were outlawed, and, from February 2000, Mugabe's "war veterans" began to seize land.

The accompanying violence was heartbreakingly senseless. On 8 May 2000, my father's best friend became the third white farmer to be murdered. We had grown up together and the news destroyed my family.

He was beaten to death with chains while his wife and three teenaged daughters hid in the house. They heard everything. In June 2001, a band of Mugabe's war veterans invaded our farm, brandishing clubs and axes.

They ranged from welldressed men driving Mercedes to boys in rags. They started pegging out areas of the farm and the game reserve (half of our land wasn't arable so my parents had turned it into a sanctuary). Every day, we'd negotiate how much food and supplies they would take. In August, they banned us from planting tobacco.

Our farm was wanted by General Mujuru, the third most powerful man in Zimbabwe and responsible for the ethnic cleansing in Matabeleland - a small province of Zimbabwe - during the 1980s. From there it got nasty very quickly.

On 18 September 2001 a group of 15 men came onto our veranda; they were all armed with clubs. They ordered us to leave and, when we protested, threatened to kill us. We didn't have a chance to go back in the house, or even to find our dog, Lady. In shock, we drove straight to Harare to stay with friends. That day I knew I would never again see the game animals drinking at the waterhole, dawn breaking over the fields, or even my childhood friends.

After two months, we were told that my mother and my sister, Alice, could return to collect our personal belongings. As they walked onto the farm they were heckled by drunken war veterans brandishing chains. They refused to let my mother and sister take Lady or my horse, Dandy. My mother and Alice knew they couldn't leave them alive - it was a miracle they had survived that long without us; we'd heard of war veterans cutting horses' hooves off while they were still alive, and beating dogs to death with clubs.

There wasn't time to find a vet to put them down humanely. Instead, one of our old workers shot them.

There was nothing we could do for the breeding herds in the game reserve. I've heard that war veterans hold shooting parties there every weekend, massacring giraffe, zebra and antelope from the back of trucks with machine guns.

Of our workers, only about 15 families remained. The rest were forced off the land to join the three million living in camps. Some were taken to "re-education camps" where torture is routine and women are systematically raped.

With the farms in ruin, seven million people are facing starvation. We started court proceedings to try to get our property back, but on the advice of our lawyers, left Zimbabwe for the South African border in December

2001. From there, I left my family behind and headed to Britain with my girlfriend, Katherine.

I needed to tell people what was going on and raise money for Zimbabwean families. Katherine found a job in IT, while I set up the Zimbabwe Agricultural Welfare Trust. We feed around 6,000 to 8,000 pre-school children daily via our bulk feeding programme.

Tragically, though, if their parents are opposition supporters, they are forbidden from getting food.

At Christmas last year we made a decision as a family not to be bitter or angry. Everything we owned is gone, but we count ourselves lucky. We're alive.

Emotionally, I've cut myself off from Zimbabwe because there's just too much pain. I suppress the bad memories. But there were so many good times on the farm and I go back to them often. Memories like this are what sustain and comfort me. And no one can take those away.

The Zimbabwe Agricultural Welfare Trust, PO Box 168, Woodbridge, Suffolk 1P3 8WE, or visit www.zawt.org