Online Reporter
Elliot Ziwira , Deputy Features Editor
AS the nation commemorates the gallant men and women, fallen and living, who dared fate so that Zimbabwe might live, it is fitting to revisit the long and bitter contest for our heritage
This struggle, stretching well over a century, found one of its defining yet treacherous chapters at the Lancaster House Conference of 1979.
In memory of our heroes, we must also remember the land for which they fought.
The blood of the sons and daughters of the soil did not soak the earth in vain. It was shed for dignity, sovereignty, and the restoration of what had been stolen since that fateful day in September 1890 when imperial ambition first planted its flag on our hills.
Hoisting the flag of dispossession
On September 12, 1890, the Pioneer Column hoisted the Union Jack atop Harare Hill in Salisbury “in the name of Queen Victoria,” claiming Mashonaland, and by extension “all other unpossessed land in South-Central Africa”, for the British Empire.
The phrase “unpossessed” was not an innocent oversight, for it was a calculated insult. The land was home to thriving communities, with their own systems of governance, spiritual order, agriculture and trade.
To declare it “unpossessed” because it was not owned in European legal terms was to deny the humanity and sovereignty of its people.
This was the cornerstone of colonialism: the supremacist ideology of “othering”; a belief that some races were naturally superior, and therefore, entitled to dominate others. Without this poison in the bloodstream of the empire, colonialism could not have existed.
Without understanding this, the challenges that have weighed heavily on post-colonial Zimbabwe cannot be fully grasped.
When it comes to our stolen heritage, it has to be put straight what it entails. Heritage is not merely the tangible — land, minerals and cattle — but also the intangible: spiritual traditions, psychological well-being and moral authority.
Curiously, colonial dispossession attacked both. The land seizures, forced removals and cattle culls were accompanied by humiliation, cultural erasure and the breaking of the African will to self-determine.
In our literature, from the pages of “Waiting for the Rain” (1975) to “The Chimurenga Protocol” (2008), the psychic scars of dispossession are replayed.
In the political realm, the unresolved land question has been festering since the Land Apportionment Act of 1930, and erupted once more during the post-2000 Fast Track Land Reform Programme.
George Orwell is probably right as he writes in “Nineteen Eighty-Four”: “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”
The past is stubborn, for it lives in records, in memory, and in the soil itself. Although it can be distorted, it cannot be erased.
This is why, before we move forward as a people, we must revisit the past. However, we must not do it to nurse wounds for their own sake, but to understand the terrain we walk on, to know why it was soaked with blood, and to ensure that our heroes’ sacrifices are not squandered through forgetfulness or manipulation.
Lancaster House: A theatre of treachery
It has to be recalled that the Lancaster House Conference of 1979 was far from a neutral negotiation.
It was, as historian Aeneas Chigwedere observed, a disputation of heritage disguised as modern diplomacy; a bid to legitimise robbery and justify murder in the polite language of constitutional compromise.
After a protracted liberation struggle, the talks in London brought together the Patriotic Front (Zanu and Zapu) and the Zimbabwe-Rhodesia delegation. For over three weeks, they argued, chiefly over land — the very heart of the war.
Lord Carrington, Britain’s Foreign Secretary, was not an honest broker.
Sir Shridath Ramphal, the Commonwealth Secretary-General (1975-1990) and advisor to Cde Robert Mugabe and Dr Joshua
Nkomo, later revealed that Carrington was “playing both hands,” negotiating with the Patriotic Front on one side and Ian Smith with General Peter Walls on the other (New African magazine, 2007/2008:5).
“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,” reported
The Zambia Daily Mail (Lusaka) on October 18, 1979.
“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.”
The Daily News, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania observed on October 17, 1979: “Lord Carrington insists on pleading poverty on an issue his country handled so well when decolonising Kenya.”
From the outset, therefore, Lord Carrington pressed for constitutional clauses protecting individual property rights, which in Rhodesian reality meant preserving white ownership of African land.
The Patriotic Front, mindful of the sacrifices made in the bush and in exile, wanted to entirely dismantle the unjust land tenure system.
But Lord Carrington, an enemy of social justice, had already made up his mind that the land would remain in white hands, at least for a time.
Sir Ramphal recalled the “sleight of hand” that followed. When Cde Mugabe and Dr Nkomo threatened to walk out unless land redistribution was guaranteed, the fudge was to promise “assistance” in paying compensation, a vague assurance with no figure attached and no binding commitment from either Britain or the United States.
Lord Carrington’s message was: If you do not agree, the talks will continue without you. In other words, the independence settlement could be signed with Bishop Abel Muzorewa, Ian Smith and Peter Walls — men more aligned with maintaining the colonial status quo.
Concept of ‘good African’ and ‘bad African’
In the colonial worldview, there were always “good” Africans; those who co-operated, accepted subordination and rubber-stamped the empire’s will and “bad” Africans, who resisted foreign rule.
In Lancaster’s script, Bishop Muzorewa played the “good” African, while Cde Mugabe and Dr Nkomo were the “bad” ones.
The Declaration of Rights, frozen for 10 years, along with clauses on dual citizenship and property protection, were designed to entrench white hegemony under the thin veil of democracy.
One might ask: were rights only for Europeans? Could Rhodesians claim European identity when it suited them, African residency when it benefitted them, and dual citizenship in a new Zimbabwe, while the original owners of the land were left dispossessed?
These questions were left unanswered at Lancaster House, and they remain central to Zimbabwe’s land debate even today.
The Americans, via Ambassador Kingman Brewster, pledged to support an agricultural development fund to help pay compensation, provided Britain matched the funds and other donors came on board.
Yet, without a set figure or legal enforcement, the promise was a mirage.
In Olley Maruma’s “Coming Home” (2007), the conditions for land acquisition were laid bare. White farmers were to be paid full and fair compensation, in a currency of their choice, deposited wherever they wanted.
The Patriotic Front never agreed to bear the cost of compensation; it was to be Britain’s responsibility.
The truth was that Britain, America, and the Rhodesian establishment did not expect a Patriotic Front victory in the 1980 elections. They were counting on Bishop Muzorewa to safeguard their interests.
When Independence came on April 18, 1980, Zimbabwe was born under a constitution that protected the colonial land structure. For a decade, the hands of the new Government were tied.
By the late 1990s, as land reform became urgent, the old colonial agenda re-emerged in full force. Britain’s Secretary of State for International Development, Claire Short, wrote to the Zimbabwean Government disclaiming any obligation to fund land reform, stating she was “Irish” and that they had also been colonised.
As columnist Nathaniel Manheru noted, this was “an inimitable mixture of shamelessness and sanctimony.”
The repudiation was more than an insult. It was the spark that accelerated the post-2000 Fast Track Land Reform Programme — a move condemned abroad but supported at home by those who understood that our heroes did not die for a Zimbabwe where the best land remained in settler hands.
Heroes, land, and the meaning of sovereignty
Every Heroes Day, celebrated on the second Monday of August, we lay wreaths at the National Heroes Acre in Harare as we remember the freedom fighters who fell in Chimoio, Nyadzonya and Mkushi Freedom Camp. We remember the rural villagers who fed and sheltered them under the threat of death.
We remember also the political leaders who endured detention, exile and constant harassment.
But remembrance must go beyond ceremony. To honour our heroes is to defend the ideals for which they fought; sovereignty, dignity, and control over our own resources. The land question was not a side issue in the liberation war; it was the issue.
Calculatedly, Lancaster House sought to delay its resolution, to create a Zimbabwe politically free but economically chained. It is to the credit of our heroes, and to the enduring will of the people, that, decades later, the chains were challenged.
Our past continues to speak, for it is stubborn; and the land is patient.
The past will not be silenced. It whispers from the graves of our heroes, from the ruins of razed villages, from the stumps of poisoned cattle, from the unmarked mass graves in foreign soil. It jolts collective memory to the fact that freedom is not a gift bestowed by imperial benevolence but a prize wrested from its clenched fist.
As we celebrate our heroes, we must remember that the Lancaster House Agreement was not the end of the struggle but merely a chapter in it.
The treachery of that agreement proves that sovereignty must be defended daily, in our laws, in our economy, in our education, and in the way we guard the land — the very body of the nation.
Our heroes, both living and departed, did not give us Zimbabwe so we could sell it piece by piece. They gave it so that we could walk it freely, plant it, build on it and pass it on, undiminished, to generations yet unborn.
For, the land remembers and so must we!
