On 25 August, the Zimbabwean executive of President Emmerson Mnangagwa received a stamped letter from US law firm Steptoe & Johnson, a legal salvo which opened a new round in a legal battle which since 2010 has set Harare against the von Pezold family.
Landowners in Zimbabwe since the end of the 1980s, the von Pezold family, who are descended from old Germanic nobility and hold German, Swiss and Austrian nationality, were, twenty years ago, one of the prime targets of the so-called "fast-track" land