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Land seizures, the background

In recent months, more than 23 years after gaining independence and majority
rule, the government of Zimbabwe finally expropriated the remaining
approximately 4,000 surplus[1] commercial farms owned by white people - the whites
having had up until now a virtual monopoly over commercial farming in Zimbabwe.
According to Stephen Chan[2], "In 1992, 4,500 mostly white farmers owned 11.5
million hectares. This was one third of the entire country. 7 million peasants
lived on 16.4 million hectares of 'communal' farmland." Since Independence, "the
government had purchased 3.3 million hectares" (for the resettlement of
dispossessed black farmers).

It is obvious that this situation was iniquitous. Moreover it was one which
was always at the heart of the liberation movement. In fact it is fair to say
that the millions of Zimbabwean peasants supported and fought in the war of
liberation against settler colonialism precisely because they were cut off from
the land and their livelihoods. It is not always realised that for them their
expropriation at the hands of white settlers was not a matter of the dim and
distant past. As David Blair explains in Degrees in Violence,[3] after 1945
"thousands of new white settlers were flocking to Rhodesia and many had been
promised farms by the British government. Demobilized soldiers were offered the
chance to farm in Africa as a reward for service in the Second World War, and
Rhodesia opened up new tracts to provide for them … "Quietly, with no fanfare,
vast numbers of blacks were moved to make way for the new settlers. … No fewer
than 85,000 black families were evicted between 1945 and 1955, totalling
perhaps 425,000 people. Considering that the black population in 1945 barely
exceeded 1.5 million, something approaching 30 per cent of all 'natives' were moved
from their homes. …

"[A] burning sense of grievance certainly existed. Land had been stolen, with
blacks herded into 'Native Reserves' while their white rulers took possession
of the most fertile fields."

At the height of the liberation struggle, members of ZANU, the organisation
which was most representative of the demands of the peasants and which
therefore became and has remained, the leading party in the Zimbabwean people's
struggle for emancipation, would frequently stress the importance of solving the
land question. The reason the peasants could never be satisfied by simply seeing
a few black faces sitting in government positions was that for them the war
was all about land, and without gaining land, the war would have been fought in
vain.

Perfidious Albion

Robert Mugabe, ZANU's leader, was always at pains to point out that he wanted
the transfer of land to the majority population to be done consensually, with
the white farmers, on the one hand, receiving compensation (to be provided by
the British government who had been behind the 19th century expropriation of
Zimabwe's soil by British settlers) and on the other being able to retain
modest-sized holdings that would enable them to sustain their livelihoods. He duly
undertook during the Independence negotiations at Lancaster House in London
in 1978 that there would be no land expropriation without compensation, since
at the time he did not believe forcible expropriation would be necessary.
Stephen Chan[4] explains: "Mugabe was certain that John Major had reassured him
that Britain would indeed assist with funds for compensation. Blair [i.e., the
present prime minister, Tony Blair] … thought that Britain was not committed to
such previous understandings. It had been an understanding in principle;
figures had been loosely suggested, but there was never any formal document of
binding agreement. To that extent, Blair was within his rights. However, from the
very first great push to resolve the Rhodesian issue in the mid-1970s, under
Henry Kissinger, the matter of compensation - subscribed to in hefty sums by
the international community - was always an accepted principle. It was implicit
in the Lancaster House talks, but Carrington ensured that, although he
recognised that a future government (of Zimbabwe) would want to widen the ownership
of land, it found no formal enunciation in the final agreement. Mugabe was
asked why he had given way, at Lancaster House, on the land issue. 'We had to.
That is the 'giving way' that I talked of, having to compromise on certain
fundamental principles, but only because there was a chance, in the future, to amend
the position' [5] Stephen Chan, who is certainly no friend of Mugabe's,
nevertheless considers he was a victim of perfidious Albion, i.e., British
imperialist treachery.

Once it finally became clear that Britain was not going to honour its
obligations, then Mugabe made it extremely clear that expropriation would proceed
without compensation. As early as 1996 he was already saying:

"We are going to take the land and we are not going to pay for the soil. This
is our set policy. Our land was never bought (by the colonialists) and there
is no way we could buy back the land. However, if Britain wants compensation
they should give us money and we will pass it on to their children".

Imperialist hysteria

Even at this point, the hope was that Britain would fulfil its obligations
once it was made clear to them that expropriation would go ahead. But of course,
Britain responded not. The final order to white farmers to surrender their
surplus farms was not made until August last year, 2002, after giving "the
international community" more than enough time to do the decent thing. Since "the
international community", however, is nothing other than the hyenas of
imperialism, it was only too happy to see Mugabe, the leader of the Zimbabwean
liberation struggle to whom they had had to concede defeat, discomfited. And although
he was only doing what was logical and necessary and in accordance with the
demands of his people, he was depicted in the western media as a power-crazed
despot.

Of course, what really turned him in the eyes of imperialism from what
Margaret Thatcher called the "perfect African gentleman" into a major hate figure
was his intervention in sending troops to the Democratic Republic of Congo in
support of the latter's nationalist government against imperialist determination
to seize control of its vast mineral wealth through the encouragement of
secessionist movements and proxy aggression by Rwanda and Uganda. This was an act
of tremendous self-sacrifice on the part of Zimbabwe in support of a just
anti-imperialist cause. Financially there was no way Zimbabwe could afford to do
it. Morally there was no way she could afford not to. The cost of military
intervention was tremendous, and could only be to some extent at the expense of
ordinary Zimbabweans. Imperialism saw an opportunity to create a rift between
ZANU and the Zimbabwean people and lost no time trying to exploit it by mounting
a scurrilous media blitz to demonise Robert Mugabe.

Typical of this media blitz, which has been going on for two or three years
now, as if endless repetition could turn lies into truth, is The Guardian, the
oh so liberal Guardian, of 25 June 2003 uncritically reviewing the South
African press, and citing such gems as "Thabo Mbeki knows very well that Mr Mugabe
is an unscrupulous dictator" and referring to Mugabe's government as "a rogue
government".

Yet we know that Robert Mugabe's only sin is in consistently standing up to
imperialism in the interests of his people. This is the reason why when, as a
result of the successes of the liberation war of the Zimbabwean people, the
second Chimurenga, as it was called, imperialism decided it would be
counter-productive to continue supporting white minority rule in Rhodesia, it struggled in
a determined manner to prevent Mugabe from coming to power. "One of the few
points of agreement between white Rhodesians and the British government was
that victory for Mugabe was a terrifying prospect. In the words of Lord
Carrington: 'I viewed it with the greatest possible horror. One felt he was a Marxist
and one wondered how awful he was going to be'.[6] Another tactic was to
proclaim that ZANU intended to abolish Christmas! The details of the serious
struggle to keep Mugabe out were documented at the time by a ZANU support
organisation in London called the Zimbabwe Solidarity Front, and relevant articles from
its journal will later this year be published in book form by Lalkar
Publications. Suffice it to say at this stage, that every effort was made to sideline
ZANU by forcing it, for instance, into alliance with 'moderates' in an effort to
palm off on the people of Zimbabwe a government that could be guaranteed to
put the interests of imperialism above the interests of the people. Then more
'flexible' black leaders - Bishop Abel Muzorewa and the Reverend Ndabaningi
Sithole - were taken on board by the settler government into a government of
'national unity', in the hope that this would satisfy the masses and undermine the
liberation war. All that happened, however, was that these reverend gentlemen
lost what little support they had left. Elections were held, and these were
won by an overwhelming majority by the ZANU-PF party, which had taken 57 seats.
ZAPU, the other party that supported the armed liberation struggle, took 20
seats, ie., all but one of the seats in the Ndebele heartlands of Matabeleland,
while "Muzorewa was reduced to the holder of three seats. All the South
African money that had clandestinely helped to finance his campaign came to nothing
in the face of a genuine desire for change".[7] Nothing imperialism or the
South African white supremacists could do could prevent the anti-imperialist
Mugabe from taking power from Independence.

Civil war

Neither imperialism nor white supremacist South Africa reconciled themselves
to defeat, and they immediately set about, in their different ways, trying to
destabilise the Zimbabwean government. Obviously reactionaries exploit every
weakness they can to try and cause difficulties to their enemies. The obvious
fault line in Zimbabwe was the traditional tribal rivalries between the
majority Shona tribe (70% of the population) and the minority Ndebele tribe (16% of
the population). The Ndebele were many years ago the rulers of Zimbabwe, and
some cherished dreams of becoming so again. Allegedly the ZAPU leader, Joshua
Nkomo, was at least to some extent affected by this culture:

"The two large provinces that constitute the west of Zimbabwe are
Matabeleland North and Matabeleland South. The majority population there are Ndebele, of
Zulu ancestry. … Near the provincial capital, Bulawayo, … lie the Matopos
Hills, an area of great spiritual significance and sweeping beauty. Here, there
are natural columns of great boulders sitting on top of one another …
Lobengula, the last great king of the Ndebele, was deceived and defeated by Rhodes,
despite his ambassadors being kindly received by Queen Victoria. Once a
generation, a female shaman is meant to appear at Matopos to anoint the spiritual heir
of Lobengula, the one who would restore his reign and extend it over all
Zimbabwe. Every year Nkomo would go to the great rock columns, hoping to be greeted
by the shaman - who never came to him." [8]

These are just the kind of chauvinistic dregs that reactionaries love to
exploit to cause their enemies to fight each other, and in the early days of ZANU
rule in Zimbabwe, it was by incitement of the Ndebele to rebellion that South
Africa, itself still a white supremacist state at that time, was hoping to be
able to teach a salutary racist lesson to its own black majority population,
i.e., that black majority rule is a recipe for disaster.

Following the victory of the liberation struggle, ZANU, ever with an eye to
maintaining the unity of the Zimbabwean people as they fought to better life
for themselves in the teeth of opposition from imperialism and white supremacist
South Africa, offered Nkomo the post of president of Zimbabwe. He, however,
turned that down. He wanted nothing less than to be, so to speak, "king",
although his own forces were not only smaller but had also contributed far less
overall to the liberation struggle. He refused to be "a china ornament sitting in
the showcase". Instead he became Home Affairs Minister, responsible for law
and order. His sense of grievance meant that within a year of Zimbabwe's
independence, disgruntled ZAPU members were working to plunge the country into civil
war, and in November 1980 fighting in fact broke out between former guerrilla
fighters from the two organisations. Clearly this was not a situation that
could be tolerated. Having failed to maintain law and order, Nkomo was in
January 1981 demoted to the position of Minister without portfolio. In February
1981, there were further confrontations between the ex-guerrillas from both
parties in Entumbane, in which 300 people were killed. After a security forces raid
on four farms occupied by former Zipra (i.e., ZAPU guerrilla army) fighters,
where "Enough rifles, machine guns, mortars, rocket-propelled grenades and
cases of ammunition to fill 50 railway carriages were found" [9], Nkomo was
finally sacked from the government in February 1982, as were all of his ZAPU allies.

South African involvement

In the meantime, white supremacist South Africa was also intervening in
several ways. In July 1982, South Africa took it upon itself to destroy Zimbabwe's
airforce in an act of cowardly banditry that Chan calls "a superbly planned
and executed commando raid"! Chan continues: "At the end of 1982, South Africa
began organising, training and recruiting a several-hundred-strong dissident
group, comprised mostly of former ZIPRA fighters. These called themselves
Super-ZAPU, believing their political leaders in ZAPU proper could not longer help
their people" (p. 29).

Is it any wonder, then, that Mugabe and his government took swift and
decisive action to put an end to this rebellion. When you have reached power through
the waging of guerrilla warfare, you do not pussyfoot around in the face of
organised movements designed to deprive you of your gains. The rebellion was
crushed, much to the chagrin of white supremacist South Africa which was left
trying to muster what support for its nefarious cause that it could by denouncing
the 'atrocities' and 'brutality' of the military campaign through which the
rebellion was defeated. This kind of thing impresses bourgeois liberal
ideologues such as David Blair and Stephen Chan, but does not cut much ice with those
who have been subjected to imperialism's real brutality.

What, however, has always characterised Mugabe is his willingness to embrace
those he has defeated and welcome them into the fold, on the strict
understanding, of course, that henceforth their destructive behaviour will cease. The
same conciliatory attitude that had been shown towards whites who had formerly
been enthusiastically committed to white supremacy was extended to Ndebele
dissidents, and in particular to Joshua Nkomo. Agreement was reached in 1987 that
ZANU and ZAPU should merge, and that Joshua Nkomo should become the country's
joint vice president, thus putting an end to South Africa's attempts to use
the Ndebele to destabilise Zimbabwe.

The Matabeleland rebellion was inspired primarily by white supremacist South
Africa, whose interests at that time were to some extent in contradiction with
those of imperialism which, as its acceptance of black majority rule in
Zimbabwe shows, was happy to accept black majority rule in the larger interests of
hoping better to promote imperialist exploitation. The liberation struggle of
the Zimbabwean people against white settler fascism was not in the interests
of imperialism, so it had decided - albeit with bad grace - to accept black
majority rule. Not so South Africa. Nevertheless, imperialism was never, as we
have seen, comfortable with ZANU because of the latter's commitment to the
welfare of the masses of ordinary people, a project which in the view of
imperialism could only make Zimbabwe an unattractive proposition as far as imperialist
investment was concerned as the profits to be extracted would be seriously
reduced by such wanton and, in their view, unnecessary expenditure. Although the
imperialist media at the time did not go into overdrive in support of South
Africa's efforts to destabilise the ZANU regime, nor did they get particularly
hysterical about the means used to suppress rebellion - unlike the situation
today - nevertheless they were happy that the Zimbabwe government was being
forced to spend a great deal of money and effort dealing with the problems that
South Africa had engendered. This was forcing Zimbabwe to apply to imperialism
for loans, which imperialism intended to use as leverage against Zimbabwe to
bend it to imperialism's will.