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In his memoir “Jambanja” (2006), Eric Harrison makes a curious observation that in 2000 “the President of Zimbabwe changed the Constitution”, opining that it was “at a stroke of a pen”, declaring that “the people of Zimbabwe have been unjustifiably dispossessed of their land”.
He accuses the late revolutionary and former President of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, of “claiming” that the land “had been stolen”, and demonises him for reducing everything the whites had put “into developing the land” to “nothing”.
Harrison seems to forget that it was at the “stroke of a pen” that the indigenous people lost their heritage through the Rudd Concession of 1888 and the Lippert Concession of 1891, with the British government going against their own constitution and tenets of justice.
He carries the burden of proof that the land had not been stolen (Chigwedere, 2001). He “bought” stolen land, if the borrowed $5 000 he “paid” to get 187 hectares of prime land under Lot One of Mkwasine Estate could translate to buying. Harry’s gripe is not even against the post-2000 Fast Track Land Reform Programme, which he makes the subject of his story, he has always been against the disruption of the status quo.
In Harrison’s view, “farmers were expanding and the economy of the country was going well”, so to him it was “out of the blue” that in the mid-1990s “talk of Land Reform was first aired”.
He considers it to be “out of the blue”, yet he admits that farmers were expanding, meaning white farmers were prospering, and blacks were wallowing in poverty as “neighbours”.
Persistent questions arise from such assumptions: Did he make an effort at raising his neighbours to the same bar as his? If talk of land reform was “first aired” in the 90s, why then does it become “a stroke of a pen” in 2000?
The historical imbalances in land ownership were bound to be corrected. It was only a matter of time, and he knew it.
Harrison spins the same old and overplayed story thrown about every time the issue of African heritage — the land, stolen and abused over many eons of subjugation and oppression under colonialism, is raised.
It is the story that there was nothing to talk about — it was just underutilised bush. It is such careless talk that smacks of Hegelian supremacism, and goes against the grain of the African philosophy of human worth and spiritual connectedness as embodied in the land, which complicates land reforms in independent Zimbabwe.
This way of thinking is symbiotic of the Eurocentric individualistic tenets that feed on capitalism; the commodification of everything, land included. In the African context, land is not a “commodity to be bought owned, sold and used as one pleases” (Lan, 1985) as opposed to the Eurocentric view where land can “be owned by individuals and companies, fenced, and gated as private property” (Bakare, 1993:50).
Colin Saunders projects the rationale of “discovery” of “empty space” and “remote region” (Giddens, 1991), in the foreword to “Jambanja” when he ferrets “unjust eviction” from a heritage fashioned out of “untamed bush”, yet that same bush was a whole people’s source of livelihood. One then wonders what justice means if it can only be administered by the same people, playing complainant, witness, prosecutor, judge and God; all at the same time.
The view of land as an empty space whose verdant allure can be claimed by simply shouting “eureka” (I have found it), can be probed using African lens, and not a European one. Africans could let their land fallow, because they cared for it, not that they had no use for it.
It was their land, communally-owned, and could be passed from generation to generation through families, with each individual having equal claim. The idea of collectivity and oneness, which shaped Africans and permeated their everyday life did not in any way reduce the value of their land, which in the first place was the pivot of their livelihoods.
To Africans loss of spiritual connectedness equates to forfeiture of life, because anything that angers the spirits is detrimental to them. Land has an intrinsic value to Africans, yet when colonial bigots came they claimed to have “discovered” “unpossessed land” in uninhabited spaces in “Dark Africa”.
In “The Autobiography of Kingsley Fairbridge” (1927), Fairbridge wonders why there are “no farms” and “no people” on his arrival in Manicaland at the age of 13.
From an early age, the colonial supremacist DNA of pillage and destruction is already visible in Fairbridge, as it is in Harry in “Jambanja”, when he embarks on a historical journey to Bulawayo; where colonial deceit started, and the first war cry of struggle was uttered.
On his excursions in Mazowe, Fairbridge writes: “we fished with dynamite, blasting the big pools and raising many a good meal thereby”. Blasting and destroying is the colonial way. One who fishes with dynamite neither cares for the fish nor the water that sustains life; human and animal life.
Harrison informs us that when Harry leaves for the “beautiful” yet “primitive” country of Angola, it is not for its “many natural resources such as oil and diamonds,” but for “the agricultural scene”. He also informs the reader that “he introduced to them the very latest methods used in his home country”, meaning to him Rhodesia is no longer part of “darkest” and “primitive” Africa because it now “belonged” to whites.
Close reading of the essence of heritage reveals that it was for the land, in its broader sense.
The natural resources “such as oil and diamonds” constitute the land. It is, thus, an individual attempt at colonialism driven on by Hegelian supremacist ideas of grandeur.
Harry fancies himself Cecil John Rhodes’ disciple, on a mission to contribute to the empire, in the same way that Fairbridge does, as illustrated in the following: “A lad of 13, dressed in knickers and shirt sleeves, I walked on the outskirts of the Empire, where the shouting of men, the ring of hammers on stone, and the thud of picks in the baked earth were always in my ears . . . The stone faces of sleepy kopjes rent with dynamite that the bridges of the British people might be established in security” (Fairbridge, 1927: 40-41).
Through exploitation of Africans, whose “virgin velds”, they stole, colonialists established “bridges of the British people” on “the outskirts of the Empire”; a heritage they seek to protect through chicanery and tyranny disguised as aid and democracy.
Harrison’s quest to project whites as born farmers and animal lovers ignores or rather downplays the fact that Africans have always relied on farming for sustenance, and had systems to protect and live in harmony with their wildlife.
Harry constantly asks the question: “Be honest with me — is there really a shortage of land? . . . Is there a shortage of land or is it the system that’s wrong?”
Maintaining that, “There was absolutely no shortage of land, everyone knew that, but no, they wanted everything for nothing”, Harrison forgets two crucial issues; that it has always been about the soil; good soils, and that his settler ancestors got “everything for nothing.”
The selective amnesia he expresses about colonial history makes him a bad storyteller, as he calls himself; one who participates in his own story, concentrating only on his own exploits and telling himself what he wants to hear.
For a white audience, which is his target anyway, he may have grit, but for those whose story of toil intertwines with his, he is as chauvinistic as they come. Harry claims to be a “Matabele” because he grew up in Bulawayo, yet he is lost to the Ndebele history of displacement at the hands of settlers. The Ndebele lost their land and cattle; their heritage.
He appears lost to the significance of his train ride to Llewellyn Barracks, where the Matabele he feigns to be fond of set the fire of the First Chimurenga alight in an effort to reclaim their land, having been confined to arid reserves at Gwai and Shangani.
As Chiwome (1996) notes, these reserves, like all the others after them, were largely located in the regions of the country that Africans seldom settled in before the arrival of settlers. Yet, Harrison claims that there was no shortage of land. Africans had not settled in the areas because they knew that they were not suitable for the sustenance of livelihoods.
Collective memory articulates the extent to which blacks lost, and how in less than six years of settler occupation the Ndebele had lost more than 21 million hectares of land, and were confined to reserves which were “unsuitable” for human habitation because they were “hot, dry and tsetse-fly ridden” (Chigwedere, 2001:27).
It was part of this stolen land that Harry “bought” from the Mkwasine Estate through a colonial government that got the same land for nothing. He had nothing when he took “ownership” of Maioio Farm in 1971, yet by 1976 he had acquired a Cessna-180 private plane for $20 000, which he affectionately describes as “a grand plane”.
He could also send his three children to good boarding schools in Marandellas. It was not through his own efforts that he accumulated wealth for himself. It was because he had everything on a platter; he was a white Rhodesian.
Chigwedere (2001: 33) maintains that between 1893 and March 1896, the Ndebele lost “anything from 100 000 to 200 000 cattle” to settlers, which were administered by “The Loot Committee” (ibid.29). Cattle stolen from the Shona and the Ndebele were used to start the Cold Storage Commission, and “these were the cattle borrowed by commercial farmers to start their own herds” (Chigwedere, 2001:32).
The colonial government supports white farmers like Harry. He has all the support he needs; banks support him; markets are availed to him and he has access to cheap African labour; his “labour” as he calls them; “labourers” as his wife Joan aptly refers to them.
Yes, farming “is never an easy life”, and to Africans living without land is equally not an easy life. As for him, he can still acquire the tangibles and intangibles of heritage because he has the land, which he can use to secure loans as he says, but Africans had lost their heritage for over a 100 years. Instead of being the ones to be compensated, they are expected to compensate usurpers of their heritage.
Harrison harangues that Harry “could not understand how they (indigenous people) lived with the knowledge that the farm that they had acquired, the equipment and the crops on it — had all been stolen.” One wonders then, how settlers achieved that feat in close to a century of plunder.
Their claims, like Harry’s were based on mere pieces of “paper called Title Deed(s)”, based on Eurocentric concepts of ownership, through which land can be sold, bought or owned. Using the same concept to turn land into a commodity, white supremacists fenced off vast expanses of the same said bush into conservancies, thus, taking ownership of African wildlife, a crucial part of their heritage as well. The African has to pay to hunt or view his own wildlife, otherwise he would be arrested.
As Harrison makes reference to, conservancies, owned by whites, like, “Gerry the rancher, who had created a hunters’ paradise, which brought in much-needed foreign currency to the country”, are way out of reach for Africans. They are priced out of the colonial laager; yet it is their heritage.
Through the same “bush” settlers built tangible wealth for their progeny, and a legacy they defended in what they termed “the bush war” which indigenous owners of the land referred to and still refer to as the liberation struggle or Chimurenga.
The Rhodesian nationalistic values that Harrison seeks to preserve are premised on the “bush”. To them it was a kind of safari meant to defend individual wealth created through a system that rewarded white Rhodesians, as they “fought back with more vigour and cunning”, against “more insurgents” coming back “into the country”. No wonder why they are able to sacrifice their planes and all other material gains, as Harrison depicts.
So, when Harrison speaks of right and wrong, he has to understand that legality does not determine social justice. It is possible to be right without being just, or to be ‘wrong’ and be just depending on ideological astuteness.
Online Reporter