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In “Whose Land is it Anyway” (2016), Benjamin Sibangani Sibanda captures the complexity of race in land ownership in both colonial Rhodesia and independent Zimbabwe through reflection on both legality and social justice.
Peter Lawrence, who is Coloured, is caught up between two nations; the European nation that says he is not white enough, and the African nation which considers him not black enough.
He has “never known his father”, save for the fact that he could probably be Chikwepa, “a white farmer whose land was adjacent to Mhondoro African Reserve” for whom his mother, Rudo, once worked. But Rudo, also known as Loveness is not sure whether Peter’s father is Chikwepa or not, as she says: “Sometimes Chikwepa would ask me to sleep with his friend, whose name I do not know”.
Whatever the circumstances behind his conception, Peter Lawrence is considered “nationless” when it comes to claiming heritage. Unaccepted to the white community, he is now “banking on his black heritage”, hoping that his “uncles” would accept him as “one of their own”. Whites pretend to love him, and tell him that he “deserve(s) better”, because they do not want him to associate with blacks, who are said to be inferior to him. From an early age, he suffers an identity crisis that begins with his surname; Lawrence. Upon arrival at a “better” school for his kind in Plumtree, Peter soon realises that he is “part of a race called Coloureds and they were not supposed to speak Shona”, but “English like their white fathers”.
His mother’s surname, Chimuti, which has become part of his identity is now an abomination. He has to drop it and “find a suitable surname”, thus beginning his journey to “nationless-ness”, for surnames cannot just be picked from nothing and nowhere.
He cannot use his white “father’s” surname because he doesn’t know him, and the said “father”, wherever he could be, doesn’t want to hear anything about him. Yet, he cannot use Chimuti, which he knows to be his uncles and mother’s surname, because it will make him an African, and Coloureds are not “meant” to be “seen to be mixing with Africans”.
When others were translating their Shona or Ndebele surnames to English, and adopt them; or using “the month in which they arrived at the school as their family name”, Peter adopts one of his uncles’ name — Lawrence.
Henceforth, he becomes Peter Lawrence, a crooked identity that neither fits into the European nation, because he is not white enough, nor the African nation, for Lawrence, as an alien surname, cannot claim the indigenous peoples’ heritage, and as a person he is not black enough.
The Rhodesian constitution does not recognise “nationless” people like Peter when it comes to land ownership.
He cannot buy land in areas reserved for whites, because he is not white; he is also ineligible to acquire land in Tribal Trust Lands for the same reason of race; he is not an African.
In terms of heritage, he has no birthright to anything, not even the English language; yet whites insist that he is superior to Africans. The only thing he can inherit is the stereotyping of his kind: “You Coloureds aren’t farmers”, and “We Coloureds are not farmers”.
Chung (2006) confirms the ambiguity of Rhodesia’s racial laws, which were meant to buttress colonial hegemony, and keep Africans, Coloureds and Asiatics off the red soils when she notes: “With a peasant’s attachment to the land, he (grandfather), came to Africa in search of land, but his ambition was thwarted by the racial laws instituted by the colonialists. The laws forbade the sale of the best land to anyone but whites. The worst land was reserved for blacks. Those who were neither black nor white were not catered for by the land laws. Grandfather was never able to buy the farm he yearned for” (Chung, 2006:27). The foregoing citation raises three crucial points pertaining to heritage and colonialism, which Sibanda is privy to. The first point is the confirmation that Africa was considered a land of opportunity with vast open spaces for the taking. Chung’s grandfather, who “had come to Rhodesia in 1904 as a youth of 17” (Chung, 2006:27), wanted to build a heritage for his family through “his peasant’s attachment to the land” (ibid).
As a peasant, he felt attached to the land, the same land that African peasants were robbed of, and were devoted to. It was their heritage, which they also looked up to spiritually and physically to sustain their livelihoods.
Second, by 1904, colonialists had already put systems in place to block out other contenders to African land.
They had to defend the Empire’s heritage of “pillage, plunder and murder” (Wa Thiong’o, 2018). Only white supremacists had the pedigree to steal, own and control African land.
Third, there were two nations in Rhodesia; the European nation and the African nation.
Sibanda captures the complexity of race through reference to the 1969 Land Tenure Act, which states: “The purpose of this Land Tenure Act is to ensure that each race shall have its own area. . . Neither race shall own or occupy land in the area of the other race”.
The Act furthers states: “For the purposes of the Act, an African is defined as ‘any member of the Aboriginal tribes or races in Africa and the islands adjacent thereto, including Madagascar and Zanzibar, or any person who has the blood of such tribes or races and who lives as a member of an Aboriginal native community’. A European is defined as ‘a person who is not an African’.
In its ambiguity, the Act establishes one fact; the existence of two nations; the European nation and the African nation, with the Asiatic being neither a European nor an African, and the Coloured being an African by virtue of having “the blood of such tribes or races” that make up the African nation.
However, the Coloured having already been classified as neither European nor African, remains “nationless” like the Asiatic. This is the situation that Peter Lawrence finds himself in.
The settler constitution is conspicuous in its insistence that white Rhodesians are Europeans, blacks are Africans; Coloureds and Asiatics (not Asians) are “nationless”.
Passionate about farming, and debunking the myth that “Coloureds are not farmers”, Peter decides to buy a farm, but with no nation claiming him, his dreams are momentarily shattered. After two years of wild goose chasing, he finally gets an opportunity at the tangibles of heritage through one Douglas Philips, a Coloured man white enough to pass for a European, who sells him his farm in the Macheke commercial farming area in 1975, much to the chagrin of white farmers who are “put out by the fact that one of their own had sold to a non-white, and Peter found himself completely isolated”.
He is “completely isolated” because he bulldozes into the European nation through “fraud”. What constitutes Rhodesian-ness is whiteness, and he is not white enough. The post-2000 Fast Track Land Reform Programme finds him still “nationless”, despite his success as a commercial farmer.
The tag still hangs on him: “Coloureds are not farmers”; they are “motor mechanics”.
With such a label, and the fact that he neither belongs to the European nation, nor the African nation, the gods of both nations declare Peter unfit to claim heritage on the basis of “fraud” or ‘theft”. Thus, he loses his land.
Feeling betrayed by both legality and social justice, Peter Lawrence maintains that he is “an African and hoped that the term Coloured would be removed in the new dispensation”.
But Peter Lawrence, a colonial name, the gods declare, has no claim to African heritage. It is an identity of whiteness; and to white settlers, he is a shade short of white, regardless of his seemingly English name.
He signifies all that is wrong with forced compatibility between blacks and whites; a kind of “marriage” of convenience premised on supremacist ideals where the one is “lesser” human than the other, and the other is a god determining whiteness, where whiteness determines European-ness, and the good life that comes with it.
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