By Gayne C. Young
April 18, 2000
0400 Hours
A group of 150 men gather across the street from the Ambulance Centre located on Robert Mugabe Way in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. Although they will later be called “veterans,” “squatters,” and “trespassers,” they are military personnel from the North Korean-trained 5th Brigade. They are a hit squad sent by the Zimbabwe African National Union—Patriotic Front (ZANU–PF). They are heavily armed, with most carrying AK-47s loaded with armor-piercing ammunition. They climb into 14 vehicles and make their way toward Martin Olds’ farmstead. Martin needs to be dealt with. He hasn’t been supportive of the government’s policy of Land Reform.
The convoy passes the Nyamandlovu Police Station where officers not only wave at them but place a roadblock upon the road after they pass. The hit squad reaches the farm just before dawn. They cut through the fence surrounding the farm and quickly round up all the employees and place them under armed guards before setting up seven firing positions around the main house.
0550 Hours
Martin Olds sees men cutting his fence. The 42-year-old combat veteran of the Bush War knows who the men are, who they represent, and why they have come to his farm. It is for these reasons that he sent his family away. Martin phones the Commercial Farmers Union which represents white farmers and tells them: “They’re cutting through my fence.” Then he adds that things do not look good. Martin then walks out of his house in the hope of diffusing the situation. The hit squad doesn’t wait to see what Martin wants.
They open fire.
Martin is hit in the leg. The bone shatters. He crawls back to the house and immediately splints his leg. Knowing his phone line will soon be cut, he calls a neighbor informing him that he has been shot and asks him to call an ambulance. The neighbor agrees. The ambulance is called but stopped and held by the police at the roadblock at Nyamandlovu Police Station.
Martin then calls his mother Gloria Olds. He tells her that he is under attack and asks her to call the police. Gloria calls the police four times, each time asking them to aid her son. They never do.
Martin hobbles from room to room, firing out the window at his attackers. The hit squad takes losses yet continues forward. They unleash a non-stop barrage of gunfire upon the house before setting it ablaze with Molotov cocktails. Martin takes all his rifles to the bathroom. He fills his tub with water and fights from there.
Five hours after the attack began, Martin is all but burned out. He climbs from the tub and pulls his nearly destroyed leg behind him and through the flames in a last-ditch effort to escape. But he is captured. The hit squad take to his body with axes and metal bars before shooting him twice in the face at point blank range. Then the squad drops Martin’s remains, collects their dead and wounded, and leaves the farm.
The Aftermath
According to those not involved with Zimbabwe’s corrupt government, Martin Olds was a true hero. He held out against the famed 5th Brigade for more than five hours and is believed to have killed 18 and wounded countless others. Martin is thought to have done all this with only hunting weapons and no more than 120 rounds of ammunition, the amount he was legally allowed to have at the time.
A fellow farmer flew his plane over Martin’s farm during the attack to get a better idea of what was really going on. His plane was shot at by the 5th Brigade. They wanted no witnesses.
Martin’s farm was taken over by peasant subsistence farmers who built and then lived in mud and wattle huts on the property. Unable to produce crops, they killed and ate Martin’s herd of sable antelope and more than 1,000 pedigree cattle before moving on to the next piece of land.
Officially, Zimbabwe has a different story. They state that it was Martin who fired first, and that the 5th Brigade was merely defending themselves. They also state that the siege lasted less than three hours and Martin only wounded a few veterans. No one was killed.
Those outside of the Zimbabwe government know the truth: Martin Olds was a hero who made his last stand on April 18, 2000.
