Zimbabweans deserve justice where land is concerned


Dambudzo Mapuranga (05/10/09)

“Now, like all of you, my responsibility is to act in the interest of my nation and my people, and I will never apologize for defending those interests”. This was what US President Baraka Obama told fellow Heads of State in his inaugural speech at the United Nations general Assembly on 24 September 2009.

Interestingly when this shoe of national responsibility is on President Mugabe’s foot it is not meant to fit. The Land Reform Program is entrenched in the foundations of Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe is land, land that was taken from its people about a century ago. The land Reform is the fulfillment of promises made by Mbuya Nehanda, by the men and women who died fighting for their stolen property, and by our leaders at the turn of the century to restore honor and dignity to the children of Zimbabwe who became cheap labor in their country.

Incessant propaganda based on distortions and lies has given white commercial farmers respectability that they do not deserve. By romanticizing white farmers in Rhodesia and Zimbabwe the voices of the real victims in the Land Issue are drowned out and all that remains it a diet of lies and misconceptions. This is worsened by house niggers who have been trained to sit, fetch, and bark at the flash of the green back and the promise of an award or two.

The Land Issue has been oversimplified by the West and its media through the help of certain groups in Zimbabwe who benefited from an imbalanced agrarian system and those who see benefit in siding with those that can finance their political ambitions.

White settlers came to dispossess and amass wealth. They systematically enriched themselves while making sure that blacks had no say in the economy and politics of the time all with the support of their Queen and government. It is that same political hierarchy in Britain that has refused to clean up the mess her children left in Zimbabwe and instead chosen to punish the blacks for wanting to have tea and crumpets like their “betters”.

The Lancaster house Constitution that Zimbabwe was settled with at independence sought to maintain this imbalance system while giving a façade of gradual land redistribution through the willing buyer willing seller clause. What good is it to buy a piece of land that has been tilled for many decades and has lost all its nutrients and with tufts of grass growing here and there?

The willing buyer willing seller concept was good on paper but very bad in practice, Promises of gradual agrarian reform defused emotions of the black majority and held them back from going around killing white farmers in order to get their land back. It is unfortunate that Britain and her children thought that their plan had worked and put together with the hand of reconciliation offered to them by the black government it was business as usual.

Instead of looking ahead white farmers used the prevailing reconciliation mood to continue with their misguided systems of unbalance economic activities in the agricultural sector.

Today the white farmer has been given the undeserving status of victim while the real victims are suffering under a harsh sanctions regime. Fairy tales of white settlers are recounted as news and many of these clamor around seeking compensation for what was never theirs in the first place. White farmers never transported any livestock from Britain, they instead stole and confiscated livestock from Africans, they burnt their homes and forced them to inhabitable parts of Zimbabwe while forcing them to work on their former lands as cheap labor.

 How many blacks died defending their lands? How many children died from hunger and suffered from malnutrition because white settlers burnt crops in fields and food granaries? Who should pay compensation for all those cattle, goats, and other livestock that was confiscated by the white settlers?   Who should pay for the desecration of shrines and graves of the black majority?

The white farmer in Zimbabwe continued where his forefathers’ left off, nothing was done to improve the lives of their workers most who lived in huts strewn around compounds on farms with no decent sanitary facilities. It is these farm workers who worked hard to produce the best tobacco in the world and yet they served in the most humiliating conditions. Many a person witnessed white farmers in their pick up trucks with their dogs as passengers while the farm worker was relegated to the trunk of the truck facing the harsh elements. Today CFU has the nerve to say that white farmers are concerned about the welfare of their former workers. It might come as a surprise to them but many of their former farm workers now own the their own pieces of land and are now farmers and not farm workers.

The song that Zimbabwe used to be the breadbasket of Southern Africa should be banned because it continues to reinforce negative stereotypes about black farmers. Stealing land and making Zimbabwe a breadbasket does not legalize the act of grabbing native land. It took white farmers over a hundred years to achieve agricultural success and yet they have already condemned the new black farmer of five years as a failure.   The new black farmer unlike the white farmer has no cheap labor; he has been faced with one problem after another as all sources of outside funding has been shut off from him.   Trying to farm under this harsh sanctions regime has been an uphill struggle for the black farmer but as evidenced this past season he has survived.