Behind the partying that will be the inevitable accompaniment of Prince William and Prince Harry’s visit to South Africa this week lies a much more sombre purpose.

For Harry will be joined by his girlfriend Chelsy Davy as she returns to her homeland to comfort her grandmother following the death of her husband — a victim of Robert Mugabe’s brutal thuggery in Zimbabwe.

George Donald, a landowner in northern Zimbabwe, fell victim to Parkinson’s disease after he watched Mugabe’s men commandeer his farm and raze his house to the ground. He died virtually penniless at the age of 80.

While William and Harry capture the limelight performing their World Cup duties, Chelsy will make a secret visit to Durban where, in the anonymity of a discreet old people’s home, she will be reunited with her grandmother Fay.

Together they will share photographs and memories of the days when Chelsy and her brother Shaun rode bareback and hunted snakes in the endless acres of their grandparents’ family estate north of Harare.

Called Yeadon, it was the perfect children’s playground where lions roared at night and elephants and buffaloes strolled by day.

Now, the sprawling farmland has gone, reduced to a jungle by a brutal regime that sought revenge on the white population.

The school created by Chelsy’s grandparents, and the club built by them for the local farm community, have also gone.

The workers are unemployed, the fields unharvested — indeed, the wreckage and ruin of an entire nation can be summed up in the story of this single family tragedy.

Chelsy’s uncle, Ian Donald (brother of her mother Beverley), has now spoken to the Mail about their ordeal and made an impassioned attack on the Mugabe regime.

Recalling the day his aged parents were thrown off the property, he says: ‘One day the vets (so-called “war veterans” who were exsoldiers employed by the government to plunder white estates) came — they told my parents not to come back, ever.

‘They started shaking the security fence, shaking and shaking. They gave my parents four days to leave.

‘These were old people, remember. They left and went to Harare. After two weeks, they decided to return.

‘It was then that they discovered that their home had been vandalised. The roof was ripped off, every roof-tile had gone, every window had been chiselled out. Not a single thing was left and the farmstead was a shell.

‘My father — a 75-year-old man — had tears in his eyes. My family turned the car round and never went back.’

Mugabe’s scorched-earth policy, inflicted on countless other white farmers in Zimbabwe, did nothing but bring ruin to his own nation.

And, it would seem, deliberately so — in the Donalds’ case.

For, it appears, it was never the vets’ intention to move on to the farm and work it.

‘They simply wanted to chase the white farmers off and take everything they could,’ observes Ian.

The shock of seeing half-acentury’s work turned to ruin had a crippling effect on Chelsy’s grandfather: ‘Dad never said much thereafter,’ Ian recalls.

‘The Parkinson’s came on, and for the past five years of his life he was in a coma.’

A second blow hit the family when crooked government officials indicated to Chelsy’s uncle Mike, who gave up his career as a civil engineer to help George Donald, that he could buy a new farm.

‘He had managed to build up a business and plant crops,’ says Ian.

‘But the government again sent in those trucks and Mike had to vacate it.’

Today, Mike is doubly bitter and reckons Mugabe’s regime is worse than the Nazis.

‘He was broke, he’d put every last cent of his savings into the second farm.’

In the end, both brothers flew to Australia to start a new life. Of the three Donald siblings, the only one now left in southern Africa is Chelsy’s mother, Bev.

‘She and my father were very close,’ says Ian Donald.

‘She felt deeply sorry for my parents and was incredibly supportive. We all had that little hope that maybe our farm would be spared, as some were. But it wasn’t to be.’

The picture he paints of their upbringing during the 1960s at Yeadon is one of a happy but tough rural life where white farmers paid their dues.

‘My father was very active in that way. He served on the local council and on the Zimbabwe tobacco board,’ he explains.

‘He had trained as a pilot and would fly the Zimbabwe police around. He was like most farmers, trying to make things work.

‘Most people wouldn’t have set up a school (with a teacher who lived on the farm), but he did. He built a club for the farm workers, too.’

In all, 42 black families relied on the Donalds for work and wages.

And as the children grew, Chelsy’s mother Bev was marked out as an outstanding beauty.

‘She was very sought-after by boys who were always fighting over her,’ her brother recalls. ‘She was a model and came third in the Miss Rhodesia beauty pageant.

‘She was fun, outgoing, a very clever girl. She was smart, just like her kids — street-smart.’

While growing up at Yeadon, Bev was expected to help out with the tobacco, cattle and maize which filled the hilly farmland terrain which the Donalds had bought in 1958.

Later, Bev married Charles Davy, the controversial South African businessman who has been criticised for his close links to Webster Shamu, one of Robert Mugabe’s ministers.

But her brother says Mr Davy has been hugely misrepresented by people who don’t understand how things work in Africa. ‘Or don’t want to understand,’ he adds.

Not everybody agrees — the power-sharing former opposition party Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) has labelled Mr Davy an undesirable, which prompted him to shift his safari business to Zambia.

Certainly, there can be no doubting Chelsy’s father suffered just as many other white landowners did during the ferocity of Mugabe’s land cull, covering 140,000 acres, and all the cattle on them —– 12,000 head.

‘Charles got involved with some American businessmen who funded one of his projects,’ explains Ian Donald.

‘But his parts of the properties were confiscated. He managed to hold on to some stuff purely because of his foreign investors.

‘Everyone thinks he held on to those farms because of his involvement with the Zimbabwe government — but it was more to do with the government’s decision that it was too risky to take those American-linked assets.

‘His main reason for moving was because he didn’t want to run a business in a country that doesn’t work. There’s nothing there.’

There’s an agreed family silence — ‘my family are not the kind to talk’ — on the question of Ian’s niece Chelsy.

He is happy to tell his own story, but refuses to intrude on her relationship with Prince Harry.

He talks, though, about his mother Fay (Chelsy’s granny), now safe from the threats of Mugabe’s butchers in her Durban nursing home: ‘When she left Yeadon, she cried.

‘All those years, all that backbreaking work, all gone — and for what? It’s not as if the land is occupied or producing crops. The nation is starving, and what was once fruitful land is now useless.’

While Chelsy now lives a very different life — finally officially ‘on the books’ of the Royal Family after being encouraged to attend Prince Harry’s passing- out parade at Middle Wallop last month — Ian Donald and his brother Mike remain in close touch, even from their Australian exile.

‘When the vets took the farm, I was living in South Africa.

‘I stepped out one afternoon and there were two black guys having a go outside this illegal pub — they were at each other and blood was spewing into the gutter.

‘That was the final straw. I called my wife and said: “That’s it” — and we went to Australia.’

Meanwhile, back in South Africa, where the Davy family have two substantial properties, Chelsy will next week host a house party which includes not only Prince Harry and Prince William but, possibly, Kate Middleton, too.

There will be family get-togethers where both Princes will have plenty of opportunity to get to know the extended Davy clan.

The hope, too, that they might find time in their fun-filled agenda during Africa’s first World Cup to visit an old lady left alone with her memories — of a life brutally stolen by the continent’s most evil and destructive regime.

By Daily Mail

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