Do we want our children to grow up with hatred?

Sir,

I must reply to Mr Michael Panayi’s letter (‘Let’s just be frank’, Sunday Mail May 29). We left our farm in Africa after the country in which we lived got independence. My father had spent much of his life building a farm from scrubland (a cattle boma). Some of our neighbours who stayed on after independence had their farms taken over, without compensation, much as has happened in Zimbabwe. All they had worked for was lost, not just the land, but the houses and their cars were taken. As a nation we are not alone in losing in land, I can understand the sorrow and the anger. When looking to a divided island we can see what hatred has done to Ireland, where sane rational thinking people place bombs to kill women and children, all because five generations ago there were the different religions and they have grown up with hatred. Is this the future we want for our children? Hatred breeds hatred, breeds hatred. Recently I went back to our old farm to see it as it is today. I met the people who now live in our old house. They were human just like us. What I saw was upsetting, gone were the herds of cows, the goats, the pigs and chickens. All that was left was three cows and one bull and the empty cattle sheds. Mr Panayi now lives in Texas, the scene of one of the biggest land grabs from the local Indian populace in history. Whose land does Mr Panayi live on today?

Peter Davis, Droushia