daniel chigunweElliot Ziwira
At the Bookstore
As preparations for the motherland’s 44th birthday reach the homestretch, it is only apt to reflect on the over 130-year contest for heritage leading to the Lancaster House Conference of 1979.
Collective memory recalls that contestation for both tangible and intangible heritage in Zimbabwe began on September 12, 1980.
This was marked by the hoisting of the Union Jack by the so-called Pioneer Column on Harare Hill in Salisbury, which, “in the name of Queen Victoria, took possession of Mashonaland, and all other unpossessed land in South-Central Africa that it should be found desirable to add to the Empire”.
The reason for possession and the shameless claim of “unpossessed” land in a country with inhabitants that could simply be appropriated, because it was “desirable” to do so, are interesting moot points at the level of both law and social justice.
This kind of reasoning reprises itself in the supremacist concept of othering on which colonialism hinged. In the absence of the human worth theory in which some beings are considered superior to others because of race, colonialism cannot be fully understood. Arguably, challenges weighing down on the postcolonial nation state of Zimbabwe can be tracked to that aspect.
Concerning heritage, the tangibles relate to the physical and material gains or lack thereof, whereas the intangibles relate to the spiritual, psychological and moral phenomena.
The physical facets of dispossession are reflected in the spiritual and psychological morass permeating both the fictional experiences depicted in Zimbabwean literature, and the ‘crisis’ arising from the post-2000 Fast Track Land Reform Programme.
For this reason, the past has to be revisited to correct the present and seek bearings into the future. In Nineteen Eighty-Four’’ (1949), George Orwell observes, “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”
What this means is that imploring the past to speak to the present is possible, while silencing it can also not be ruled out. What is impossible, however, is blacking out its memory, because the past is stubborn. It is a fact that the past does not forget.
Because the past exists in human memories and records, depending on their clout as informed by prevailing ideologies,
Riding on the past, existing in human memories and records as informed by prevailing ideologies, individuals have a way of selectively recalling from a people’s repository of remembrances whatever speaks to their interests, and deliberately forget what imperils them.
This selective amnesia is used to recall past memories, and temper them even, not to inform the present, but to erroneously pass it on as collective history for future generations.
The past is always a conflation of accomplishments and miscarriages, which can be used as learning slates for both the present and the future.
However, if past hurts, wrongs and travails are always evoked in the hope of deducing meaning in the present, then, the future becomes a battlefield where scars are used to heal fresh wounds. If this happens, then the concept of nationhood suffers.
As Chigwedere (2001) avers, and collective memory concurs, the Lancaster House Conference of 1979 was a disputation of heritage aimed at legitimising robbery and justifying murder in the name of modern negotiation.
The Lippert Concession of 1891 testifies to the same.
Raftopoulos and Mlambo (2009: xxviii) point out that following a protracted struggle, the Lancaster House Agreement gave Zimbabwe a constitution at birth on April 18, 1980, which “embodied a series of compromises over minority rights, in particular on the future of land ownership.”
As a result, white capital was guaranteed glory in the sunshine.
Delegates from the Patriotic Front of ZAPU and ZANU, and the Zimbabwe-Rhodesian government haggled for more than three weeks over the land issue.
Lord Carrington, who was fighting on the side of white Rhodesians, his kith and kin, pressed for a clause that protected individual property rights in the Constitution.
On the other hand, the Patriotic Front wanted to do away with the existing land tenure in Rhodesia after independence. Having built a legacy around the land, white Rhodesians did not want to let go.
From the word go, therefore, the major “stumbling block” was land.
Sir Shridath Ramphal, Second Commonwealth Secretary-General from 1975 to 1990—advisor to Robert Mugabe and Joshua Nkomo at the Conference, told New African magazine (2007/2008:5) that Lord Carrington was playing both hands.
He was negotiating with Mugabe and Nkomo on one hand, and Ian Smith, and General Peter Walls, on the other.
Sir Ramphal maintained that “there was no way he was going to get a constitution that didn’t guarantee the status quo on land.” With Europeans determined to hold on to African land, the Lancaster House Agreement was flawed from the beginning.
Lord Carrington was negotiating in bad faith since he was clear on his viewpoint. He had already allotted himself the lordship to preside over the allocation and ownership of heritage in “backward” Africa, convinced that Europeans had a right to it by virtue of supremacy.
Notably, the ZANU policy statement of August 21, 1963, committed the party to, among other resolutions, “repeal the Land Apportionment Act, the Land Husbandry Act, and to replace them with a new Land Redistribution Law; to create a National Land Board to effect an equitable redistribution of land and abolish the destocking of cattle” (Zvobgo, 2017:11).
Sir Ramphal reveals that “there was a sleight of hand because when Mugabe and Nkomo threatened to leave Lancaster House unless the land issue was dealt with in a way which would allow for land redistribution, the fudge was: ‘You will be helped to pay the compensation that the constitution requires to be paid.’”
Playing God, Lord Carrington told the Patriotic Front: “If you do not agree to the provision of the draft Constitution, but other delegates do, the Conference will resume without you” (New African, 2007/2008:5).
What he meant was that the British government, Bishop Abel Muzorewa, Ian Smith and General Peter Walls could negotiate for a settlement without the Patriotic Front.
In “The Chimurenga Protocol” (2008), Nyaradzo Mtizira, through Sedgefield and Crawford, notes that Smith and his general, Peter Walls were “close to losing (the) war”.
On October 17, 1979, the Daily News, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, observed in an editorial comment that Lord Carrington insisted on pleading “poverty on an issue his country handled so well when decolonising Kenya”.
Thus, the British lord was an obstacle to social justice.
The Zambia Daily Mail (Lusaka) issue of 18 October 1979 reported: “Things are not going well at Lancaster House.
“And if the talks on the independence of Rhodesia collapse, the man to lynch is Lord Carrington. Lord Carrington has become an obstacle and dynasty at Lancaster House to prove his lordship.”
It added: “His intention is to see that the negotiations fail by frightening away the Patriotic Front delegation. . . The man has no regard for the dignity of the black people.
“His attitude towards the Patriotic Front is openly biased, hostile and nasty, and it is dangerous for the ultimate outcome of the talks” (New African, 2007/2008:13).
The above citation is telling, not only of Lord Carrington’s heavy-handedness, lack of respect for the dignity of blacks, hostility and nastiness towards the Patriotic Front, but it reflects on the Hegelian philosophy of supremacism.
The British lord, and, indeed, his fellow colonists wanted the negotiations to collapse. They were banking on Muzorewa to legitimate their continued stay on Zimbabwean land. This rationale is premised on the concept of the “good” and the “bad” African.
The good African agrees with everything that the coloniser says, while the bad African resists foreign influence.
Muzorewa became the “good African”, whereas Mugabe and Nkomo were regarded as “bad Africans” for resisting “foreign influence.” The proposed Declaration of Rights, which was not to be amended for 10 years, the issue of dual citizenship and property rights were all meant to drive white hegemony.
The persistent argument is whether rights are only for Europeans, whose property was begotten through plunder and not the rule of law?
If the same Rhodesians, who insisted on being European through their own constitution, even though they were in Africa, could clamour for dual citizenship in a new Zimbabwe, a nation unknown to them, what would happen to Zimbabweans, who belong to no other country, if their land remains in the hands of Rhodesians?
These are the questions that remained unanswered at Lancaster House, and these are the same questions that impede land reform in Zimbabwe.
Because “treachery” has always been the white man’s way, Sir Ramphal drives the point home, the idea at Lancaster House was to maintain a semblance of legitimacy.
This led to the concoction of a document by the Americans through Kingman Brewster (the American Ambassador). In the document, the Americans pledged to “support the establishment of an agricultural development fund” to help defray any compensation, provided that it was “matched by the British government and had an international character” (Sir Ramphal in New African (2007/08:6).
Although “solid assurances were recorded in the documents of the Conference and notified to all Commonwealth countries” (ibid), no particular sum was specified, making it difficult to enforce compliance in future.
Another condition that compromised the noble plan of the new nation’s Government set by the Zimbabwe-Rhodesia delegation at the Conference involved compulsory acquisition of land.
Olley Maruma captures this in “Coming Home” (2007): “The white farmers who were dispossessed should be paid full and fair compensation to be deposited wherever they wanted, in a currency of their choice.”
According to Sir Ramphal, there was no mention of any contribution on the part of the Zimbabwean Government. The Patriotic Front never accepted the responsibility to compensate white farmers in future.
Curiously, the British, the Americans and their Rhodesian cousins did not believe the Patriotic Front would win the historic 1980 elections.
They were banking on Muzorewa.
The prevailing argument is that the Lancaster House Agreement was premised on deception. It was simply meant to uphold entrenched European values at the expense of Africans in an attempt to forestall progress on the land question.
Around the late 1990s, the colonial agenda in place since 1890, started rearing its ugly head. Everything to do with upsetting the status quo on land ownership was shot down.
Claire Short’s letter on behalf of the United Kingdom repudiating responsibility to their own historical blunders, claiming that she was “Irish”, and were also “colonised and not colonisers”, was “an inimitable mixture of shamelessness and sanctimony” (Nathaniel Manheru in New African: 2007/2008:27).
Denying responsibility was meant to create fertile grounds for rebuke on the post-2000 Fast Track Land Reform Programme. Nonetheless, against all odds, the Government embarked on the journey to open up opportunities for Zimbabweans through land ownership.
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