dyton mupawaenda
Gibson Nyikadzino-Correspondent
Before 1980, the land question always provided the lifeblood of Rhodesian politics. Back then, the land issue was also a major factor that determined black-white relations. The colonialists and their settler administration used their control of land to secure for themselves a position of economic and political dominance which the black majority in the late 1950s began to challenge seriously.
According to the British Institute of Race Relations in 1969: “The loss of land means losing the graves of one’s fathers and the home of one’s childhood; sense of community, of the ordered pattern of nature, of the continuity and meaning of life. Without land these are destroyed. When people lose their land, there can only be deep and bitter resentment.”
Land was a major issue of contention both around the conference table at the Lancaster House and also a determinant in the rapid escalation of the armed struggle towards independence.
Colonial brutality led to widespread discontent and deep-seated resentment on the part of many natives, whereas the settler government, to maintain its presence, needed to obtain some African support in order to contain the guerrilla advances.
Because land was the common denominator for both sides, to substitute blacks, increased racial animosity was used by Europeans who were feared competition from black Zimbabweans.
Zimbabwe’s attractiveness
Zimbabwe has always been an attractive landlocked yet land-linked territory. That the country possesses enormous potential is not in doubt, such potential can be determined through harnessing honest hard work, skills and competent problem solving techniques by its citizens.
To prove Zimbabwe’s undoubted attractiveness, the Pioneer Column itself comprised some 196 pioneers who were accompanied by 500 police in 1890. By 1896 there were approximately 5 000 Europeans in the country, and by 1901 the number had grown to 11 000 compared to 850 Europeans in Northern Rhodesia in 1904 and 314 in Nyasaland in 1901.
The Agrarian Reform programme by Government in 2000 and the reclamation of the land leading to white resentment also shows how attached and attracted former white commercial farmers where to Zimbabwe’s land. This is so because land is power. Human beings thrive on quests for power and one is certainly in possession of power when they command the use of a critical factor of existence, land!
Thwarting black competition
Among other reasons, the essential reason behind the wholesale expropriation of land in Zimbabwe was “to prevent the African peasant from becoming a competitor to the European farmer and to impoverish the African peasantry to such an extent that the majority of adult males would be compelled to work for Europeans in the mines and on the farms.”
Using laws that gave Europeans access to both political and economic power, black Zimbabweans where denied the right to fair competition, barred from growing crops at a commercial level and stopped from purchasing land as the white minority regarded all the land as theirs.
Potential white colonial farmers who had committed to settle in Zimbabwe were offered training on arrival, they had access to Land Bank loans to help establish themselves and had a wide range of extension facilities placed at their disposal. Heavy subsidisation and access to and use of political power formed the basis of that grand disenfranchisement of the black majority.
While empowered with provisions of the Land Apportionment Act, by the end of the 1930s, the agricultural economies of the black majority had been destroyed as the colonial farmers sought to reduce the African to a proletarian.
On the other hand, during this time the black majority farmers were seeking to retain their maximum amount of economic independence that had been taken away from them by Europeans.
Resisting elimination
The history of colonialism and the subjugation of locals or native speakers was premised on the desire by the colonising power to drive the other, seemingly powerless group, into extinction.
Of the many groups that European merchants of colonialism wanted extinct, from Latin America to North America and Australia, only the blacks in Africa resisted and fought for their existence.
In Mexico, the Aztecs, a group of Native Americans who had a vast and powerful empire were attacked, colonised and subjugated by the Spanish conquest. The Spanish were brutal with Aztecs, as colonialism has been, such that today the descendants of the Aztecs are only a small minority people in rural Mexico.
The Apache Indians in the USA, whose presence as natives of that land has been relegated, today they are no longer considered the rightful owners of land in that territory.
Similarly, the Inca in Peru and the Aborigines in Australia were victims of the same desire to make them extinct.
But this was different with the natives in Africa who stood and fought for their independence. Zimbabweans were alive to the belief that had they not resisted the colonialist establishment, the continued cruelty, unkindness and nastiness of the colonialist establishment would have derailed the idea of independence.
Nationalist, peasant awakening
It was Niccolo Machiavelli who said a man is quicker to forget the death of his father than the loss of his patrimony.
The colonial settler’s rapaciousness did much to provoke the spectacular desire for liberty and liberation on the part of Zimbabweans in order to repossess their land.
This much needed nationalist and peasant awakening by the black majority was a response to both the chronic maladministration of the colonial establishment hence the majority’s anger drew attention to these misdeeds.
Such misdeeds, in many parts of Zimbabwe, included a quasi-feudal system of labour relations that made farm workers totally dependent on their colonial employer for social welfare, including health and educational facilities that were rarely provided.
During the 2000 Agrarian Reform programme, reclaiming of the national inheritance through land redistribution was one way to right colonial and historical wrongs. It was a way to align the national conscience to the identity of the majority blacks.
Nearly a quarter of a century into Zimbabwe’s land reform programme, the pride that such an exercise bestowed upon Zimbabweans is immense and should not be reversed.
Zimbabwe’s independence was influenced by the desire for self-rule through land accessibility. Without this land and had Zimbabweans not repossessed the land, our people would have been mere citizens waiting to glorify the historical ‘strides’ of the white man as the great land tiller while we would be living in neo-colonial squalor.
Online Reporter