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05/07/2005:
"Zimbabwe's Fight For Justice"
by Gregory ElichTwenty-five years ago, Zimbabwe’s liberation movement came to power after years of struggle. Hopes soared that independence would bring an end to the legacy of colonial rule and apartheid power and give birth to a more equitable and just social order. But in many ways, those expectations had to be put on hold due to British and U.S. pressure, and for years Zimbabwe was compelled to maintain the inequitable land ownership patterns inherited from apartheid Rhodesia. The process of land reform is at root a struggle for justice and a challenge to the Western neoliberal model. The refusal to serve Western interests is what motivates U.S. and British hostility.
It is impossible to understand the nature of land reform in Zimbabwe without first examining the history of land allocation in Rhodesia. In 1893, invading British troops and volunteers conquered Matabeleland. Under terms of the Victoria Agreement, every British soldier and volunteer was allowed 6,000 acres of land, and within a year 10,000 square miles of the most fertile land was seized. White settlers confiscated cattle and dragooned the Ndebele people into serving as forced laborers on the land they once owned. Colonial Administrator Starr Jameson felt that by depriving the Ndebele of their cattle, he could secure their "submission and future tranquility." The Shona people also saw their cattle taken by settlers and in 1896, resentments had accumulated to the point where an uprising resulted. It took more than a year, but the British crushed the rebellion at the cost of 8,000 African lives.
In 1899, Rhodesia established reserves on the most arid land onto which the indigenous inhabitants were to be herded, where in just six years half of the indigenous population was confined. Passage of the Land Apportionment Act of 1930 forbade Africans from owning land outside of the barren reserves. During a twenty-year period beginning in 1935, the Rhodesian regime expelled a further 67,000 African families from their homes and transported them to the reserves. Dispossessed Africans were beaten and herded onto trucks at gunpoint, while bulldozers levelled their homes. As more and more people were forced from their homes, the reserves became increasingly overcrowded with people and cattle. To "solve" that problem, in 1944 the colonial government decreed that many of the reserves were overstocked and would have to be thinned out. Over the course of the next thirty-some years, more than a million cattle were either killed or confiscated by white settlers. In the ten years following the Second World War, another 100,000 people were expelled from their homes and dumped onto the reserves.
The liberation movement’s successes eventually brought it to the verge of taking power and it was clear that the apartheid government of Rhodesia would not survive much longer. Although Rhodesia had declared its independence from the colonial system in 1965, Great Britain intervened to protect white privilege. Under British tutelage, the Lancaster House Conference was convened in 1979. The core issue for the liberation struggle was land, but British and American negotiators made the granting of independence to the liberation movement conditional. The agreement that resulted from the conference imposed a number of limitations on the new government. One provision stipulated that for a period of ten years, land ownership in Zimbabwe could only be transferred on a "willing seller, willing buyer" basis, a formula that effectively stymied any meaningful attempt at land reform. Whites were also allotted a quota of 20 out of 100 seats in Parliament, far exceeding their actual percentage in the population, and the measure had the effect of making constitutional change nearly impossible.
Passage of the Land Acquisition Act in 1992 finally established a more flexible approach to land reform, but the process continued to be constrained by outside pressures. Progress was slow and by the time fast track land reform was launched in 2002, 70 percent of the richest and most productive land still remained in the hands of just 4,500 white commercial farm owners. At the same time, six million African peasants eked out a precarious existence on small farms in the "communal areas," the land encompassing the former native reserves. Because of historically imposed overcrowding in the communal areas, the already barren land was depleted long before by deforestation and over-grazing, thus making it even more unsuitable for agriculture. More than a million landless blacks were engaged as hired labor on white commercial farms, laboring for abysmally low wages to make the few commercial landowners even wealthier. A team sent by the United Nations Development Program in 2001 reported, "Given the rapidly rising population growth rates and the decreasing opportunities for non-farm employment over the years, many rural dwellers were thrown into increasing poverty as a result of inadequate and poor-quality land for subsistence farming and unemployment. These inequities, the team said, were "the motivation for the Government’s determination to correct the past injustices caused by dispossessing the indigenous people of their land."
Full:globalresearch.ca
