 |
Al-Ahram Weekly 27 April - 3 May 2000 Issue No. 479 
|
||
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
| ||
|
Al-Ahram Weekly 27 April - 3 May 2000 Issue No. 479
|
||
| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
| ||
Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Special Features Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters The demon within
By Gamal Nkrumah
Why is the skull and crossbones of rhetorical anti-imperialist populism -- which invariably wins unfailing electoral victories in Africa -- the most unforgivable sin an African leader can commit in Western eyes? The spectacle of white farmers being subjected to the humiliation of being beaten up by their subordinates and summarily condemned in kangaroo courts -- not to mention two incidents of white farmers being killed -- is making headlines around the world.
The viciousness of Zimbabwe's land grab, which the West sneers at as typically barbaric, underscores the fact that the indigenous black African people of Zimbabwe are desperately poor -- so desperate that they believe seizing white farms is their only resort. It was not so long ago that these same white farmers shot black intruders with impunity and treated their labourers like slaves, fabulously enriching themselves in the process.
Why is it so difficult to comprehend that Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe is using the land grab issue as a platform from which to campaign for reelection? Let's face it, Mugabe is no plodder in the art of public presentation. He is an astute and seasoned politician, and he wants to win votes. He knows that land is a particularly emotive issue, and so far as I can make out, this is not much different from most southern African leaders touting the same platform.
Surely such manoeuvring is not criminal, but a legitimate political ploy and hardly unique to the Mugabe regime. Is it a plausible or sufficient excuse to demonise him above all others? Mugabe is still alive and bounding around the ring after two decades of political independence and uninterrupted rule. However, he still hasn't dealt the white land-owners a serious blow, let alone a climactic knockout.
How's this for mischief-making? The white farmers of Zimbabwe are not innocent victims. Since independence their attitude has been extraordinarily mean-spirited. They have never sought a genuine dialogue with the black African majority or pursued a commitment to the shared institutions of genuine democracy.
What maddens Africans is the injustice of it all. People cannot survive on democracy alone. White farmers still control 70 per cent of the choicest agricultural land in the country. What is most telling is how the veterans are ritually torching the entire tobacco crops of white farms near the Zimbabwean capital of Harare. The message is clear: "We cannot eat tobacco and flowers."
The land grab is the logical conclusion of the politics of resentment fuelled by gross inequalities in the distribution of land -- the main source of income and wealth in Zimbabwe's largely agrarian economy. The crisis of hunger, malnutrition and rural poverty has been aggravated since tobacco replaced maize as Zimbabwe's chief commercial crop. To make matters worse, horticulture -- particularly the cultivation of exotic flowers -- is on the rise and more and more of Zimbabwe's most fertile land has been given over to inedible crops destined for Western markets.
Over 1,000 white-owned farms are now occupied by war veterans and their families. It is not so much that Mugabe's government has become complacent about the rule of law, but events tend to take on a momentum of their own. The whole point of the "rule of law," argue British and Zimbabwean opposition leaders, is precisely to stop vigilantes or lynch mobs from taking the law into their own hands. This, however, is a moot point. The problem is that the indigenous Africans of Zimbabwe, and much of southern Africa, no longer have faith in their nascent nations' justice systems.
There is popular fury that the system is failing to deal with a great historic injustice. The system is widely perceived among black Africans as being more concerned with protecting the interests of the haves than the have-nots, which in turn leaves people feeling bitterly powerless and disfranchised.
"We are fighting an economic war of liberation," warned the veterans' leader Chenjerai Hunzvi -- "Dr Hitler," as he has been dubbed by white farmers. "All revolutions require violence ... No one can stop the revolution we have started," Hunzvi stressed. "They want my head because I fought successfully for the betterment of the ex-combatants," he added.
In 1997, Hunzvi led a group of war veterans in a violent campaign to secure pensions from Mugabe's government. At first Mugabe wavered, but eventually relented and a deal was struck between Mugabe and Hunzvi. Under the deal, Mugabe agreed to grant one-off payments of $2,500 to each of the organisation's 50,000 members -- an unprecedented sum that caused quite a stir in Zimbabwe. Moreover, members were each given a monthly pension of $100, which again provoked an uproar in a country where the minimum wage is less than $30 a month.
In turn, Mugabe was declared the patron of the War Veterans Association. Braggadocio perhaps, but are his people really back-pedaling away from him, as the Western media would have us believe? Mugabe's supporters, such as they are, do not particularly help his image in the West, but the confident swagger belies an awkward truth: the anachronism of landed aristocracy in today's Zimbabwe. Mugabe knows this all too well and he is willing to exploit it.
Mugabe's critics conveniently forget that punishment is an important element of justice. Nicholas van Hoogstraaten, probably the biggest individual foreign investor in Zimbabwe today, recently described Mugabe as the "most important leader in Africa." Speaking on the BBC's Radio 4 programme Today, Van Hoogstraaten claimed that white farmers who have had their farms seized were "asking for trouble." The white farmers are the financial force behind the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), the main political challenge to Mugabe's ruling party, ZANU-PF. Two black African MDC activists have been killed in the violence sweeping the country.
"We, the people of this country, waged an armed struggle to regain and repossess what the British dispossessed us of," Hunzvi said. "It is our land, it is not British land, it is not the white man's land."
Small wonder so many members of Zimbabwe's white minority are applying for immigration visas to Australia. Many of them are queuing at the gates of the British High Commission in Harare to get their British certificate of entitlement, which gives them the right to resettle in Britain. Some 20,000 white Zimbabweans are entitled to receive the certificate on demand.
If Britain has a moral obligation to rescue those who have benefited from British colonialism, it likewise has a duty to recompense the victims of colonialisation. Southern African heads of state gathering at the Zimbabwean resort Victoria Falls last Friday rallied around Mugabe on the issue of land redistribution. Britain, they agreed, must come up with the funding to compensate white farmers. After all, Britain is the former colonial master that created the problem in the first place.
Mugabe has been called all sorts of names in British papers, from Machiavellian to megalomaniac and much worse. Faced with this welter of Western criticism, Mugabe accused Britain of reneging on a promise to fund a land reform programme for Zimbabwe. There is, I am afraid, a consensus in Africa that this generation of Britishers do have a responsibility to pay for the sins of their fathers and grandfathers. There are precedents. The Germans are still paying the Israelis for the Holocaust.
The Western opprobrium heaped on Mugabe for his failure to come to white farmers' defense only strengthens Mugabe politically. Why does the British media feign astonishment that African leaders at Victoria Falls failed to condemn Mugabe?
"You must live in a country with land problems to fully understand the injustice when one person owns 67,000 acres," explained Namibian Prime Minister Hage Geingob recently. "I went into one such farm and walked out. I never visit white people's farms in my country. One expatriate man has 67,000 acres and people who were been born there have nothing," Geingob said.
The Zimbawean crisis threatens to spill over the borders of the country and envelope southern Africa. The apartheid regime allocated a mere 13 per cent of the total land area of South Africa to the indigenous black African population. There are currently a total of 63,455 land restitution claims in South Africa today, the vast majority in the Eastern Cape Province. According to government figures 3,915 of these have been settled and 59,540 are still outstanding.
"It has been six years and we have seen nothing. We are angry and we are tired," warned Henry Rhode, a mixed-race member of the Restitution Forum of the South Cape and Karoo region of South Africa. "We are grouping together with other provinces and we will take action if our grievances are not addressed."
In Zimbabwe, too, people are fed up with the status quo. It has become a country where political factions and racial groupings, have become so polarised and consumed with hatred that they will not let the law constrain their behaviour. The sense of urgency is palpable, and there is a growing conviction that social justice may be more easily achieved outside the cosy confines of the Lancaster House Agreement that ended colonial rule.
Once the land issue that so enrages Africans is settled, the politics of resentment will atrophy. So let's get on with it and settle the land question.
