The once-fertile fields, fat cattle and giant tobacco barns — with their bountiful harvest of hard currency — are now history. Africa nodded in approval as an African repossessed African land. That was the preferred excuse in sub-Saharan Africa, but it ignored the truth.
President Robert Mugabe’s revenge has been wreaked upon rich, white commercial farmers. But Mugabe made his move when white farmers openly supported an African-led political opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change. Led by Morgan Tsvangirai, a relatively young former Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions official, the MDC was growing in popularity. Mugabe’s Zanu-PF was not.
Before 2000, Zimbabwe was a demi-paradise — if you owned thousands of hectares of prime agricultural land and had the know-how to exploit it. The downstream benefits from this are more evident now that thousands of white farmers have been evicted: the few hundred who remain are there only at the behest of the government.
Commercial farming was the bedrock of the nation’s prosperity for about three decades before the white settler government was forcibly removed from power, and for two decades following the birth of a new African independent nation.
One must ask if the country’s white farmers deserved their fate. And did their workers, so well manipulated by political deceit, deserve to be left homeless and suffering?
The answers are both yes and no. Land-hungry peasants have been used as instruments of a gigantic kleptocracy led by Mugabe and his cronies. Commercial farmers have been driven off the land, dispossessed, and some even killed.
As for the workers, who could blame unskilled labourers who had been falsely promised fat rewards of prime land and financial help by their own government if they connived at their employer’s ousting? Many had themselves fought for repossession of their lands in the guerrilla war.
To my own question of the blameworthiness of white farmers for their terrible fate, I submit a qualified yes. A part of this tragedy has its roots in the arrogance, or ignorance, of the majority of privileged Rhodesian whites. Commercial farmers voted slavishly for Ian Douglas Smith, whose Rhodesian Front Party promised that Smithy would keep it good for them.
They were scornful of our warnings: we white liberals and our few black supporters who actively opposed his shortsighted politics. We beat our opposition drum, to little effect. We insisted that land hunger was real and that this, together with racial segregation, would be the country’s undoing.
Backed up by ”royal game” (as the protected white farmers were described), Smith’s Rhodesian Front government imprisoned and restricted black political leaders: Ndabaningi Sithole, Joshua Nkomo, Mugabe and hundreds of others.
Foreign intervention freed them, but the Rhodesian Front opted too late for an ”internal settlement” with moderate black leadership. Scores of lives were sacrificed in a fruitless attempt to counter a militant black nationalism’s guerilla fighters, armed by ”friends” in the communist bloc of the Cold War era.
Smithy’s largely collaborative media ensured that his followers — the enfranchised few — were kept wilfully blinkered. His opposition, the despised little minority within a minority, were members of our multi-racial Centre Party. We were branded as traitors and communist ”fellow travellers”. We were letting the side down in the struggle to preserve what the Rhodesian Front called Christian Western civilisation.
A white-led, gung-ho, conventional military machine, which included black Rhodesians, could not defeat the guerrilla insurrection crossing the borders from newly independent Mozambique and other frontline states. Their only ally, white-ruled South Africa, wisely threw in the towel as its own day of reckoning approached.
White farmers clung tenaciously and bravely to their farms, in the front line of guerilla attacks. Their refusal to abandon a brilliant agricultural economy was acknowledged when Mugabe’s government initially gave the job of minister of agriculture to a white farmer, Dennis Norman. His name was submitted to the ruling party’s leadership by our Centre Party’s president, ”Pat” Bashford, a Karoi farmer.
These farmers who stayed on after independence were fooled by Mugabe’s promises of reconciliation. But, by the time the land grab was seriously underway, 75% of white farms had already changed hands. White farmers bought and sold them with the consent of Mugabe’s government.
So the answer to my question — a qualified yes — becomes a no. They did not deserve wholesale eviction.
Farmers, and ultimately all Zimbabweans, have paid a terrible price for a collective failure by white farmers to redress the century-long resentment of the landless black majority. Still arrogant, many still racist, they failed to recognise that the end of the war of liberation was not the end of land hunger. They needed proactive land-sharing policies.
Mugabe’s land appropriations have also been wrong. White farmers paid this terrible price for the errors of political leadership. Smith’s minority government took the country — via a unilateral declaration of independence — into an unwinnable war against its own majority black inhabitants.
In May 2002, New African magazine published a 17-page interview with Mugabe by Bafour Ankomah. Zimbabwe’s president boasts that, in 1979, at the Lancaster House talks in London, Western negotiators seeking an end to Zimbabwe’s liberation war offered to pay ample compensation for the repossession of white-owned land. Mugabe did not explain what became of this offer, or whether he chose to ignore it.
Diana Mitchell was the press and publicity executive officer for the multi-racial Centre Party and its successor, the National Unifying Force from August 1968 to 1984. She is the author of a series of three African nationalist biographies