Harare, Zimbabwe Felicity Wood, a beacon in our contemporary history, has died after a long and fearful battle with cancer....
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Felicity Wood: Another legend gone
Harare, Zimbabwe
Felicity Wood, a beacon in our contemporary history, has died after a long and fearful battle with cancer. She was 84.
For 60 years she ploughed through the winds of change – often in gale force storms – sweeping through her beloved Africa. In weakening strength amid the tumultuous ups and downs Zimbabwe’s economy, and the perennial health care crisis, she had moved to rural England where she said she missed home enormously every day.
It wasn’t only about Britain’s weather, of course. Africa was in her blood, as it is felt by so many whose circumstances eventually make them leave the brooding beauty and uncertainties of home.
She had worked for the governments of the former Rhodesia and then Zimbabwe, as it became, in 1980.
Media and information was her speciality before and after independence. She was a popular and well-liked ministry of information official assigned to the minority cabinet of Ian Smith, the last white prime minister. Then she became private secretary to the first black health minister, the extrovert and witty jokester Herbert Ushewokunzwe, a psychiatrist and n’anga (traditional healer) who always spoke fondly of her skills and sense of humour in more glowing terms than Smith had.
‘Ushe,’ as he was known, referred to her as his “right hand man” in the early years of transition.
I remember the two of them lightening the atmosphere at official functions in cheerful banter with us reporters. (She was greatly amused when a postage stamp was dedicated to him, worth a handful of real US dollars in hyper inflation a decade after he died.)
But the good times couldn’t last – and didn’t. The optimism of the first decade under Robert Mugabe dissolved. Felicity moved to Agritex, farming ‘extension’ and training under the agriculture ministry, and moved on to be editor of The Farmer magazine, the official organ of the mainly white Commercial Farmers Union.
Suddenly it all began to go horribly wrong as Mugabe ordered the violent seizures of white-owned farms. Bitter acrimony followed in the farming world and continues 25 years later.
The land grab, called the land redistribution programme, had disastrous effects on the one time ‘breadbasket of the southern Africa.’
Felicity Wood stepped back and took up editing, consultancy and charity work.
Throughout the years, she had been a mentor to many colleagues and kept her gaze on the way things were going with mischievous delight and sometimes a waspish tongue.
In her home in Milton Park suburb, she entertained media friends, politicians, lesser officials and hangers-on. But she didn’t suffer fools lightly.
Before her painful, horrendous and discombobulated last months she loved and contributed to the news, the bizarre aspects of it and the peculiarities our history. Here is one of our classic collaborations. Please click on this link below. You won’t regret reading it. It’s farcically tragic.
