The Sunday News
Literature rethink with Richard Runyararo Mahomva
Land is a think-tank of Zimbabwe’s contemporary imagination of the state, citizenship and at wide the emergency of crisis-nationalism. The post-land reform era gave birth to a plethora of discourse one of which is the “missed racial factor” under vigorous analysis here. As a collective term of the emerging post-land reform literature underpinned by race and citizenship, the “missed racial factor” conceived combative debates not only in the halls of the academia, but among varying sections of the populace in Zimbabwe and the international community. The “missed racial factor” as explained last week, vindicates the historical crimes of commercial farm ownership yet emphasising on human-rights violations faced by the whites during the state-led land re-annexation in the early millennium.
The “missed racial factor” offers not only awash literary polarisation of the whims of change which led to the fast-track land reform. It further informs public opinion on the legitimacy of white land ownership which stood guilty before the values of the liberation struggle of this country. War veterans and Zanu-PF are the chief antagonists of this change as such the “missed racial factor” ignores the two parties’ rationale in spearheading the land reinvasion process. In its pseudo race-blind approach of advancing Eurocentric modernity, the “missed racial factor” castigates pro-black economic de-marginalisation and ignores the historical pro-white economic inequalities that shaped coloniality. Therefore, in real terms the “missed racial factor” exploits the discourse of human-rights and democracy to rationalise white land ownership which in the interest of Zimbabwean post-coloniality represents anachronistic capitalism which has no place in indigenous modern thinking.
Against this background, we continue to disentangle the “missed racial factor” this week in the book, Zimbabwe’s Unfinished Business: Rethinking Land, State, and Nation in the Context of Crisis (Hammar, Raftopolous & Jensen; 2003). The first point of analysis is based on Blair Rutherford’s chapter: “Belonging to the Farm(er): Farm Workers and the Shifting Politics of Citizenship”. The chapter dissects nationalist discourses of farm invasions by Zanu-PF and democratic liberalist anchored perspectives of MDC. The chapter locates the binary interest of Zanu-PF and MDC in their divergent interests to promote welfare of the farm workers. MDC represents a redemptive human-rights entity against Zanu-PF’s nationalist based farm invasion process facilitated by war-veterans:
Anti-colonial nationalists tend to understand farm workers as oppressed by white farmers and strive to “liberate” them from the bondage. Human rights liberal democrats tend to reproduce the assumption that farm workers are benevolently supported by and united with the farmer in the face of invaders and a corrupt state (Rutherford 2003: 192).
What is of interest is that beyond the ideological wrangles of the land reform, Rutherford explains the idea of “belonging” within the farm and not necessarily how political parties genuinely prioritised the plight of the farmer’s workers. Rutherford asserts that the workers were “owned” by the farmers and this was a historically embedded in reality of class marginalities of black inherited poverty and cross generational belonging of some families to the murungu (the white farmer) and his farm. The farms were home to foreigners from other neighbouring countries who had sought employment in colonial Southern Rhodesia. “In other words the farm represents a place of support and care for farm workers; a place which is taken away by war vets and the haphazard ‘fast-track’ resettlement exercise” (ibid 195).
This substantiates how much it is logic deficient to applaud human-rights liberal democrats’ stand when it comes to the land reform programme. Their understanding of “belonging” to the farm as a replication of benign relations between the farmer and the workers is misinforming and promotes the “missed racial factor” in the public sphere on the land issue in general. This misplaced conceptual understanding of the land reform banks on false and exploitative solidarity of the farmers and the workers in varying spaces.
It is a fact that the unionisation of the two actors, the farmers and the workers was for exploitative convenience and structured exculpation of the farmer from Black invaders since the issue of land disgruntlement was a revolution about to happen soon after independence (Sam Moyo 1998; 2001). Rutherford further substantiates this by explaining how some farmers threatened to leave the farms in the face of the invasions highlighting that they had nothing to lose. Ironically such blank threats were part of a hypocrisy grand plan to mobilise the workers to resist farm occupations led by war veterans.
Therefore, if the terms of the farmer-worker union were genuine why would one actor denounce the partnership; especially the Whites who openly declared that they “had nothing to lose” if the farms were invaded? The farmers’ standpoint in threatening to break away from this union reflected the farmers’ conscious acknowledgement of the workers’ land desperation and belonging to the farm. Probably it is justified to state that belonging to the farm implied bondage to defend coloniality.
This is why in some farms war vets and the workers had violent confrontations both representing divergent interests namely the nationalist economic liberation model undertaken by the war veterans and white private property protection from war veterans and the land hungry invaders. Both the farm workers and the war veterans represent a walking testimony of the “missed racial factor” as they were both active in decapitating each other instead of fighting one common enemy. This reflects the extent to which belonging to the farm psychologically alienated the farm workers from the plight of their other Black counterparts.
However, the illusive thought of literally belonging to the White farmers made some farm workers not to see the relevance of decolonising land ownership. The same character of this “missed racial factor” is synonymous with the thinking pattern of many of our people who viewed the white farmers as God-given agrarian redeemers of the Africans divinely ordained subsistence farmers in the land of their of their birth right.
This “missed racial factor” centred inferiority complex of the African can be also captured in Thomas Mapfumo’s musical critic of the land reform programme The Chimurenga music legend’s submission is challenged by Vambe (2004: 179)
In “Marima Nzara (You Have Caused Poverty)” (2001), the singer criticises the Mugabe government for attempting to introduce equity in land redistribution. He takes the process of removing excess land from a white minority as an “invasion”; he sees white settlers as a silent and persecuted group, endowed with a natural capacity to farm.
In the song, Mapfumo claims the Mugabe government is misguided in taking away land from those with the capacity to farm: “baba mairasa kudzinga vanorima…baba muchaona, …baba makaura kudzinga vasevenzi (Father, you have missed the point sending away white farmers and sending away the labour force).” Instead of exploring the democratising potential of land redistribution, Mapfumo in this song claims that Africans exist to be, and are only validated when they are, “vasevenzi,” or manual labourers.
While Vambe (2004) views the land reform as “removing excess land from a white minority”, other scholars viewed this as a political crisis. In the book under review, Brian Raftopolous’s chapter treats the land reform as a representation of: “The State in Crisis Authoritarian Nationalism, Selective Citizenship and Distortions of Democracy in Zimbabwe”. The chapter is a blunt depiction of the “missed racial factor” since it presents restitution of what belongs to a people, a crisis conceiving process. Raftopolous’ analysis is detached from the view that the people’s land hunger since the time of the ambitious Cecil John Rhodes represents a real state crisis of the time. Therefore, the return of the land to the natives is the opposite of a crisis that the black citizens had lived with for numerous jubilees prior to the land invasions. Raftopolous only acknowledges the land reform racial essentialism and says less if not anything pertinent about the African centred race particularism and that exposes how his observation is a product of the missed racial factor.
n Richard Runyararo Mahomva is an independent academic researcher, Founder of Leaders for Africa Network-LAN. Convener of the Back to Pan-Africanism Conference and the Reading Pan-Africa Symposium (REPS) and can be contacted on [email protected].
