adminLiterature rethink with Richard Runyararo Mahomva
This week we continue to review the publication, Zimbabwe’s Unfinished Business: Rethinking Land, State, and Nation in the Context of Crisis (Hammar, Raftopolous & Jensen; 2003). The instalment’s focus this week is to extensively harness the “missed racial factor” which widely surfaces in the book. Before hastening into this week’s business it is imperative for me to ground the definition of the “missed racial factor” concept as the untruthful, anecdotal, biased narrative constructions of Zimbabwe’s political situation after the land reform programme.
The “missed racial factor” further represents residues of colonial knowledge making continually subjecting African emancipatory discourses to White ridicule. The “missed racial factor” has also manifested in the form of academic licensed ignorance which was an epochal follow-up on the land reform programme and subsequently the imposition of economic sanctions to Zimbabwe.
This is not to invalidate other pioneering critical contributions of scholars like Ibbo Mandaza (1986, 1991), Lloyd Sachikonye (1995), John Makumbe (1995) and Jonathan Moyo (1993, 1998) in their heroic texts as can be arguably stated. The newly emerging academic polarisation of the country’s crisis has since its inception been premised on irrational criticism of the Government of Zimbabwe. As a result, this is leading to a situation whereby academic credibility is determined by how much one can demonise the current Government.
This has produced pedestrian discrediting of valuable academic works by scholars such as Professor Claude Mararike, Doctor Tafataona Mahoso and the late Professor Sam Moyo who are synonymous of pro-establishment opinions. The “missed racial factor” represents neo-coloniality and globalising knowledge to counter African essentialism largely from the lenses of the land reform political developments which are defined as “narrow” in the reviewed book.
The “missed racial factor” emphasises on race-blindness which most submissions in the book articulate. This is part of the smoke-screen globalisation agenda of promoting values of economic modernity over race yet in reality being racist. This is challenged by Nazneen Kane (2007: 354) whose study is influenced by a like-thinker Bonilla-Silva (2003):
Despite a wide range of perspectives, underlying these debates is the shared assumption that globalisation is fundamentally determined by the economic aspirations of global and national institutions (transnational corporations, nation-states, NGOs, etc). Consequently, the canonical works of this relatively nascent interdisciplinary field of study fail to investigate how race and racism constitute organising principles of globalisation processes.
Nazneen Kane (2007: 354) further summarises the concept of the “missed racial factor” in equal resonance with the current crisis-nationalism thinking patterns of Zimbabwe’s academia:
This systematic omission of the racialisation of economic and socio-political processes places serious limitations on globalisation theory’s ability to remain critical and to foster human emancipation in the 21st Century. If globalisation theories co-opt the “post-race” assumptions of the status quo, they risk reproducing colour-blind ideologies, that is, the notion that race no longer matters and that racism is not structural but merely a problem of a few individuals.
The deconstruction of race in the land revolt, resulting in the “post-race” politics in writing, is a dangerous misrepresentation of the political situation in Zimbabwe. This is because race played a role in organising violent placing of the black people in societal politico structures and their rebellion. In light of that, in an informal conversation Professor Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni posited that:
“. . . deimperialisation must not be predicated on illusions but on serious understanding of the global matrices of power. It’s important to build a social base of cadres who deeply understand the enormity of the task at hand. A good revolutionary is one who is not propelled by illusions of the situation but concrete and objective understanding of the enemy and its capacity. Global coloniality is predicated on three key power structures: power, knowledge and being.
The abstractness of the submission tends to meander on mostly ambiguity of the nationalist praise texts “illusions”. I subsumably conclude that the illusions denoted by the Professor are in reference to mis-targeted confrontations by the Government in response to pre-independence nationalist manifestos, that promulgated land re-acquisition ensued by global political super structure vengeance. Well, this is a debate I am yet to unravel and triggering for you.
The global matrix of framing knowledge and ontology prompts one to analyse why war veterans’ contribution has been intensely vilified. Apart from mass mobilisation for the land reform, they (war vets) have been accused of constructing historical falsehoods to legitimise the ruling Government through an era described by Terence Ranger (2004: 220) as the emergence of patriotic history:
The history instructors in the youth militia camps are war veterans and it has been suggested that “patriotic history”, with its focus on violent resistance, is the result of the re-emergence of the ex-guerrillas at the centre of Zimbabwean politics.
Norma Kriger (2005), another “post-race” scholar has written on the anamorphous political mayhem that the war veterans are said to have architectured in the promotion of narrow nationalism. Likewise, other scholars like Wilfred Sadhomba (2011) have also contributed vast literature in that regard.
It is on this background that this week’s instalment focuses on the chapters by Amanda Hammar and Nelson Marongwe with less attention on their depiction of war veterans in the land reform exercise. In transcending the “missed racial factor”, my approach depicts war veterans as a symbol of the disgruntled land hungry population.
Contrary to a plethora of submissions in the book, they are the modern vanguard of the Black ancestral resistance which needed no structural formation in the neo-colonial sense to restore land ownership as an economic birthright of the people of Zimbabwe. In his chapter, Marongwe N (2003), in a book that is haunted by misplaced ghosts of neo-coloniality, exuberated through the authorships of Alexander, Worby and Hammar (2003) the scholar argues that the land reform represented a conflict ensued by aggressive land seizure which in itself is not unique to Zimbabwe instead was a third-world resistance to global economic hegemony (Huizer 1995). Marongwe uses Hildyard (1999)’s explanation of blood and birth phenomenon which emphasises on population growth and ethnicity as the sources of conflict also applicable to Zimbabwe’s land question.
This approach includes the race question which is treated with hostility considering its pro-Black approach. As such, Marongwe provides a refreshing approach in his analysis in the book. His proposition stands out as he portrays war veterans as sources of the much awaited fulfilment of liberation distributionist promises. Moreover, Marongwe highlights that the land redistribution was not cluttered by anarchy as most scholars guided by the “missed racial factor” have made us to believe:
In extreme situations occupiers were arrested, charged with public violence offences . . . and brought before the courts where they were made to pay fines. Those who failed to pay the fines faced jail sentences (Marongwe 2003: 164).
Marongwe (2003: 180) further denounces the demonisation of the land redistribution process as solely a Zanu-PF process:
Some people perceive the farm occupations as being a completely Zanu-PF-orchestrated process. However, it makes simplistic assumptions, that there are no opportunists and that people are completely faithful to political parties and only belong to one political party. What would prevent an MDC supporter from posing as a Zanu-PF supporter in order to be promised free land?
Persuasively confusing, Amanda Hammar’s chapter criminalises the role played by the war veterans and at the same time offers introspection to the pitfalls of the land reform. After all, who is Amanda Hammar? (A Zimbabwean researcher based at the Danish Institute for International Studies, formerly the centre for Development research, Copenhagen).
Probably, her intellectual allegiance is not with Zimbabwe. Worth-noting from her submission is that war veterans became a patronage tool of the state leading to their abusive manipulation of the local Government structures to serve the land capture interests.
This observation equally dismantles her submission in terms of substantiating how certain sections of the population were exploited to serve patronage interests as it does not only apply to war veterans’ inclined support to the state.
However, the same applies to the role played by Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) in propelling the other side of the crisis — nationalism through the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).
Exceptionally attacking war veterans and ignoring the NGO regime change model in Zimbabwe’s contest of split patriotic consciousness following the land grabs is narrow. At the same time, historical omissions of the war veterans’ legitimacy in grappling with the contemporary land hunger which manifested in the form of the land reform programme undervalues research. As they are publicly perceived as the legitimate vanguards of the liberation goals as embodied in the manifesto of the 2nd Chimurenga which constructed the aspirations for a free Zimbabwe. In this light, to out rightly demonise and simplify war veterans’ contribution is misleading. Sidelining their significance in the land struggles because they were the front for majority land interest is shallow especially if the conclusive aim is to sympathise with a racist minority who invented capitalist subjugation of the Blacks in Rhodesia and after independence.
If colonial land allocation was a result of repressive violence, there is no moral grounding that impurifies the model of repossession by the previously disenfranchised lot. Objectivity prescribes allusion to historical processes that ought to be rethought in crafting discourses that shape contemporary politico-economics.
Part 2 will further investigate more issues emerging in chapter 6 and 7 of Zimbabwe’s Unfinished business: Rethinking Land, State and Nation in the Context of Crisis.
Richard Runyararo Mahomva is an independent academic researcher, Founder of Leaders for Africa Network-LAN. Convener of the Back to Pan-Africanism Conference and the Reading Pan-Africa Symposium (REPS) and can be contacted on [email protected].
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