It's impossible to interpret
what has occurred in Zimbabwe without looking at the whole conflagration as the
combined actions of opposing aggregates of ethnically aligned groups (Shona,
Ndebele & White Rhodesians) which takes us well beyond the inference that a
solitary individual, even one as powerful as Mugabe, could have consistently
shaped policy in any deeply pre-meditative fashion.
Post-independence, there has only been one major issue in Zimbabwe for both the Ndebele (black minority Russian-backed ZAPU fighters in the Bush War) and the Shona (black majority Chinese-backed ZANU fighters) - and that was to receive compensation and/or land entitlements pursuant to the agreements laid down under the Lancaster provisions at independence.
The "willing-seller-willing buyer" clause was always considered a momentary stopgap to placate reluctant white commercial farmers, 4,500 of whom still controlled 70% of the country's most productive arable land while six million blacks eked out an increasingly precarious living, surviving on an average of 3 hectares a piece. Conditions in these former Tribal Trusts Lands, the most useless soils in the country, and into which the indigenous population were trundled at gun-point, first by Rhodes opportunistic brigands and secondarily in the 1920's by the apartheid regime, had been the subject of several concerned WHO and FAO reports during the 80's, all of which pointed to the need for mobilisation on land reform, lest the burning fuse in the countryside should find a suitably volatile powder-keg.
Already, in 1982 the Ndebele faction (ZAPU) of the post-independence leadership made a de facto split with ZANU over agrarian outrages committed on white farmers which brought a temporary alliance of sorts by Mugabe with "Old Rhodesia" as the Gukuruhundi campaign to expel these "terrorists" (essentially disaffected land-hungry Ndebele) was mobilised in the Matebeland and the Midlands. The fall-out of this well documented ruthless suppression (a vigorous shop-clearing exercise fully supported at the time by a broad spectrum of white Rhodesians) is interesting to reflect on - there was none.
Mugabe, as he upheld 'the rights of property' in defence of minority white commercial rule was shortly received into the Queen's honours list and regularly appeared on the BBC passing learned commentary on sundry African-related issues (Mugabe accumulated seven degrees most of which came from spending ten years in Smith's jails during the independence struggle). What's more, he fully subscribed to the IMF/World Bank led neo-liberal "structural adjustment' programmes and enacted placatory policies to ensure white Rhodesians received a goodly portion of high-ranking advisory government positions, receiving in this instance the advice of Samora Machel, the neighbouring Mozambique president who confessed to Mugabe that "turfing out white expertise" from key sectors was a prodigious mistake.
So Mugabe waited patiently and played ball with the British Government and the international institutions for the ten year expiration date on the Lancaster House provisions which would insure him against the burgeoning expectations of his land-hungry Shona rural base, rolling out in the meantime extensive health and literacy programmes. The usual raft of neoliberal "re-trenchment" policies however exerted a squeeze on all sectors birthing a new political party (Movement for Democratic Change) under the leadership of trade unionist Morgan Tsvingarai (a Ndebele who now became head of a de facto new ZAPU party) who disingenuously attributed the economic downturn to specific policies pursued by the ZANU leadership - they weren't, they were macro-economic measures dictated to ZANU by the IMF/World Bank.
After the Fast-Track Land Reform initiative was rolled out (c.1992) by ZANU, the MDC were feted in the internationalist press as a type of spontaneous grass-roots indigenous black Zimbabwean opposition party pining for democracy with widespread public support which simply opposed the increasingly "dictatorial policies of Mugabe" when in actual fact it was being bank-rolled and directed behind the scenes by key white Rhodesians themselves fronting for a white commercial sector panicking at the prospect of compulsory purchase - the Gukuruhundi alliance had split and reversed. Now the War Veteran's Association (WVA) took matters into their own hands forcibly settling themselves on farms just as Mugabe had warned a Donor's Conference in Harare they would do - if the terms and condition of Lancaster were not met.
When Mugabe, tired of jumping through hoops to satisfy the brood of vampires collated in the IFI's and harried by MDC and the Commercial Farmworker's Union (CFU), finally gave the green-light to land seizures which were at any rate almost impossible to reign in without destroying for all time his core Shona rural support base in the deteriorating former Tribal Trust territories - he transmogrified almost overnight from "our kind of guy" (i.e. a neo-colonial Mobuto clone) into a universally reviled African despot (shunted on by a shameless internationalist press incapable of contextualising the whole sorry affair) - who simply reduced the whole complex saga of the imbalances of colonial era plundering and inter-ethnic strife into a simplistic "tin-pot dictator" narrative.
All of the suffering which the Zimbabwean people have endured could have been easily avoided had the Lancaster stipulations being met and land reform was somehow funded incrementally - but the gathered collective of IMF mandarins and foreign deputies from the US, Britain etc .. chose to ignore Mugabe and his warnings that the WVA "would settle themselves" if the necessary funds were not forthcoming; and so an unavoidable racial melting pot has been set alight un-necessarily creating at its worst peaks unprecedented inflation, massive cholera outbreaks and a refugee crisis spilling over the borders into South Africa - but the good news is that the worst of it is over - and while there has been some eye-brow raising large allotments among party cadres (inevitably) the fundamental goals of provisioning realistic and socially just land opportunities for a previously ignored colonially displaced indigenous population has been successfully met - and, by all informed accounts they seem now to be at last thriving.
Good luck to them.
"Land redistribution (the so-called Third Chimurenga) has only benefitted Mugabe and his cronies. One privileged elite has merely replaced another .. "
This is the most widely peddled myth about Zimbabwean land reform and completely mischaracterises what has actually happened in the country. You can call them "land grabs" if you want and there's been no shortage of brutality deployed but over a quarter of a million new farming households have been created in the prime agricultural regions amounting to the re-location of over a million people. The vast bulk of them are the land-poor drawn from the communal areas; re: former Tribal Trusts Lands where farming conditions have been long deteriorating - and what's probably more pertinent, resentments festering. This is quite simply classic land redistribution, and on an epic scale.
The widespread perception among indigenous blacks (irrespective of what spin on the matter is being put forward by the international press) is that the land is theirs by birth-right, that it was stolen from their ancestors at gunpoint and that they themselves are the descendants of the original victims of this policy. You and I may disagree over this construction and you may point to what use the land was put once forcibly appropriated and how this benefitted "Rhodesia" as a whole, but the reality is that argument has never washed with them as by and large they've seen very little of the wealth that has been created in the country - the "trickle-down effect" has been illusory; if it wasn't you wouldn't have had an agrarian revolution on the scale of what has occurred in the first place. They didn't rise up because Mugabe clicked his fingers and de-coupled from the IFI system, they rose up because their conditions were intolerable; as was forewarned (and ignored) - "they will re-settle themselves".
At independence, Zimbabwe inherited grossly unequal, skewered patterns of land ownership and the only thought since that day among the restless and impoverished in the degraded communal areas has been how and when they are to receive "back" the lands of their ancestors. This isn't my construction or Mugabe's or ZANU's or anyone else's - this is their construction of their history - and via the War Veteran's Association - and the political manoeuvrings of ZANU they have succeeded in converting their wishes into reality; while the agonised death throes of the creaking economy are the paroxysms of dis-engagement from an outmoded feudalism reminiscent of "Roots" or Tsarist Russia. The real wealth of Zimbabwe lies in its land and that wealth has been monopolised by a tiny proportion - its 4,500 mainly white commercial farmers and the associated business networks caught up in the chain of supply and demand. This whole commerce has been up-ended - hence the hyper-inflation, shortages, plummeting GDP and refugee-ism.
Such is the epic scale of this transformation that the whole economy of necessity has to be re-orientated to accommodate the sheer bulk of beneficiaries and the different farming practices being introduced while the so-called "Fast-Track Initiative" is here to stay irrespective of SADC court rulings to the contrary. The large-scale commercial farming sector has been almost completely dismantled and in its place stands an entirely new agricultural landscape based on non-subsistence small-scale market farming. While the West whines about 'Mugabe the dictator' Zimbabwe's government with far more sober heads are actually attempting to micro and macro-manage all the complexities associated with this epic transition - as I say, I wish them luck.
Post-independence, there has only been one major issue in Zimbabwe for both the Ndebele (black minority Russian-backed ZAPU fighters in the Bush War) and the Shona (black majority Chinese-backed ZANU fighters) - and that was to receive compensation and/or land entitlements pursuant to the agreements laid down under the Lancaster provisions at independence.
The "willing-seller-willing buyer" clause was always considered a momentary stopgap to placate reluctant white commercial farmers, 4,500 of whom still controlled 70% of the country's most productive arable land while six million blacks eked out an increasingly precarious living, surviving on an average of 3 hectares a piece. Conditions in these former Tribal Trusts Lands, the most useless soils in the country, and into which the indigenous population were trundled at gun-point, first by Rhodes opportunistic brigands and secondarily in the 1920's by the apartheid regime, had been the subject of several concerned WHO and FAO reports during the 80's, all of which pointed to the need for mobilisation on land reform, lest the burning fuse in the countryside should find a suitably volatile powder-keg.
Already, in 1982 the Ndebele faction (ZAPU) of the post-independence leadership made a de facto split with ZANU over agrarian outrages committed on white farmers which brought a temporary alliance of sorts by Mugabe with "Old Rhodesia" as the Gukuruhundi campaign to expel these "terrorists" (essentially disaffected land-hungry Ndebele) was mobilised in the Matebeland and the Midlands. The fall-out of this well documented ruthless suppression (a vigorous shop-clearing exercise fully supported at the time by a broad spectrum of white Rhodesians) is interesting to reflect on - there was none.
Mugabe, as he upheld 'the rights of property' in defence of minority white commercial rule was shortly received into the Queen's honours list and regularly appeared on the BBC passing learned commentary on sundry African-related issues (Mugabe accumulated seven degrees most of which came from spending ten years in Smith's jails during the independence struggle). What's more, he fully subscribed to the IMF/World Bank led neo-liberal "structural adjustment' programmes and enacted placatory policies to ensure white Rhodesians received a goodly portion of high-ranking advisory government positions, receiving in this instance the advice of Samora Machel, the neighbouring Mozambique president who confessed to Mugabe that "turfing out white expertise" from key sectors was a prodigious mistake.
So Mugabe waited patiently and played ball with the British Government and the international institutions for the ten year expiration date on the Lancaster House provisions which would insure him against the burgeoning expectations of his land-hungry Shona rural base, rolling out in the meantime extensive health and literacy programmes. The usual raft of neoliberal "re-trenchment" policies however exerted a squeeze on all sectors birthing a new political party (Movement for Democratic Change) under the leadership of trade unionist Morgan Tsvingarai (a Ndebele who now became head of a de facto new ZAPU party) who disingenuously attributed the economic downturn to specific policies pursued by the ZANU leadership - they weren't, they were macro-economic measures dictated to ZANU by the IMF/World Bank.
After the Fast-Track Land Reform initiative was rolled out (c.1992) by ZANU, the MDC were feted in the internationalist press as a type of spontaneous grass-roots indigenous black Zimbabwean opposition party pining for democracy with widespread public support which simply opposed the increasingly "dictatorial policies of Mugabe" when in actual fact it was being bank-rolled and directed behind the scenes by key white Rhodesians themselves fronting for a white commercial sector panicking at the prospect of compulsory purchase - the Gukuruhundi alliance had split and reversed. Now the War Veteran's Association (WVA) took matters into their own hands forcibly settling themselves on farms just as Mugabe had warned a Donor's Conference in Harare they would do - if the terms and condition of Lancaster were not met.
When Mugabe, tired of jumping through hoops to satisfy the brood of vampires collated in the IFI's and harried by MDC and the Commercial Farmworker's Union (CFU), finally gave the green-light to land seizures which were at any rate almost impossible to reign in without destroying for all time his core Shona rural support base in the deteriorating former Tribal Trust territories - he transmogrified almost overnight from "our kind of guy" (i.e. a neo-colonial Mobuto clone) into a universally reviled African despot (shunted on by a shameless internationalist press incapable of contextualising the whole sorry affair) - who simply reduced the whole complex saga of the imbalances of colonial era plundering and inter-ethnic strife into a simplistic "tin-pot dictator" narrative.
All of the suffering which the Zimbabwean people have endured could have been easily avoided had the Lancaster stipulations being met and land reform was somehow funded incrementally - but the gathered collective of IMF mandarins and foreign deputies from the US, Britain etc .. chose to ignore Mugabe and his warnings that the WVA "would settle themselves" if the necessary funds were not forthcoming; and so an unavoidable racial melting pot has been set alight un-necessarily creating at its worst peaks unprecedented inflation, massive cholera outbreaks and a refugee crisis spilling over the borders into South Africa - but the good news is that the worst of it is over - and while there has been some eye-brow raising large allotments among party cadres (inevitably) the fundamental goals of provisioning realistic and socially just land opportunities for a previously ignored colonially displaced indigenous population has been successfully met - and, by all informed accounts they seem now to be at last thriving.
Good luck to them.
"Land redistribution (the so-called Third Chimurenga) has only benefitted Mugabe and his cronies. One privileged elite has merely replaced another .. "
This is the most widely peddled myth about Zimbabwean land reform and completely mischaracterises what has actually happened in the country. You can call them "land grabs" if you want and there's been no shortage of brutality deployed but over a quarter of a million new farming households have been created in the prime agricultural regions amounting to the re-location of over a million people. The vast bulk of them are the land-poor drawn from the communal areas; re: former Tribal Trusts Lands where farming conditions have been long deteriorating - and what's probably more pertinent, resentments festering. This is quite simply classic land redistribution, and on an epic scale.
The widespread perception among indigenous blacks (irrespective of what spin on the matter is being put forward by the international press) is that the land is theirs by birth-right, that it was stolen from their ancestors at gunpoint and that they themselves are the descendants of the original victims of this policy. You and I may disagree over this construction and you may point to what use the land was put once forcibly appropriated and how this benefitted "Rhodesia" as a whole, but the reality is that argument has never washed with them as by and large they've seen very little of the wealth that has been created in the country - the "trickle-down effect" has been illusory; if it wasn't you wouldn't have had an agrarian revolution on the scale of what has occurred in the first place. They didn't rise up because Mugabe clicked his fingers and de-coupled from the IFI system, they rose up because their conditions were intolerable; as was forewarned (and ignored) - "they will re-settle themselves".
At independence, Zimbabwe inherited grossly unequal, skewered patterns of land ownership and the only thought since that day among the restless and impoverished in the degraded communal areas has been how and when they are to receive "back" the lands of their ancestors. This isn't my construction or Mugabe's or ZANU's or anyone else's - this is their construction of their history - and via the War Veteran's Association - and the political manoeuvrings of ZANU they have succeeded in converting their wishes into reality; while the agonised death throes of the creaking economy are the paroxysms of dis-engagement from an outmoded feudalism reminiscent of "Roots" or Tsarist Russia. The real wealth of Zimbabwe lies in its land and that wealth has been monopolised by a tiny proportion - its 4,500 mainly white commercial farmers and the associated business networks caught up in the chain of supply and demand. This whole commerce has been up-ended - hence the hyper-inflation, shortages, plummeting GDP and refugee-ism.
Such is the epic scale of this transformation that the whole economy of necessity has to be re-orientated to accommodate the sheer bulk of beneficiaries and the different farming practices being introduced while the so-called "Fast-Track Initiative" is here to stay irrespective of SADC court rulings to the contrary. The large-scale commercial farming sector has been almost completely dismantled and in its place stands an entirely new agricultural landscape based on non-subsistence small-scale market farming. While the West whines about 'Mugabe the dictator' Zimbabwe's government with far more sober heads are actually attempting to micro and macro-manage all the complexities associated with this epic transition - as I say, I wish them luck.
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