The Sunday News
Saul Gwakuba Ndlovu
Yesterday, 18 October 2014, the independent state of Zimbabwe was 34 years and six months old.
People who were born at the time the country attained sovereignty are now mature parents some of whose children are eight or nine years old.
Many of those parents were about 20 years old when the national fast track land resettlement campaign was launched in 2000.
Quite a number of them have since that time been living on what were formerly white owned farms. The land is now owned and occupied by them, the indigenous black people of this land.
Some people have expressed deep concerns, and so have successive British and United States governments, about the manner the fast track land resettlement campaign was carried out.
That is understandable but not at all acceptable to all self-respecting Zimbabweans because none of those governments said anything whatsoever when the Southern Rhodesian regime ruthlessly alienated land from the black people from the 1890s to 1965, a period of 75 years.
We must remember that first and foremost this country belongs to us, the black people, just as England belongs to the English, Scotland to the Scottish people, and India to the Indians.
But when Cecil John Rhodes organised his British South Africa Company (BSAC) and invaded Mashonaland in 1890, he literally grabbed land from the indigenous people there in order to give his BSAC fellow-freebooter’s large tracts of it as payment for their role in the enterprise.
Each person was also allowed to peg several mining claims in addition to the land. It is clear that all this was, in fact, the BSAC brigands’ part of the loot, the greater part of which was the rest of the country which was seized by Rhodes himself in the name of the BSAC which had been duly sanctioned by the British government through a charter signed by that country’s sovereign of the time, Queen Victoria.
The 1893 BSAC invasion of Matabeleland was a continuation of Rhodes’ 1890 BSAC armed seizure of Mashonaland. It is important to understand this part of Zimbabwe’s history correctly, that is to say, that white colonists with the full support of the British government forcibly occupied and grabbed our land in the very first place.
To consolidate their hold on it, they later formed all-white parliaments which passed a number of laws one of which was called the Land Apportionment Act (1930) dividing the country into two parts: one for the white and the other for the black people.
The law allocated slightly more than 50 percent of the country, and in the most fertile and healthiest regions, to the white settlers who comprised hardly one percent of the entire country’s population.
The black majority were shifted to the hot, humid, malarial low veld, far away from major communication infrastructure and urban markets. The removal of the black people from the fertile and healthy areas to make room for the whites was carried out ruthlessly not by individuals but by Southern Rhodesian government employees accompanied in many cases by armed security forces.
That was the experience of the black communities of Fort Rixon, Figtree, the upper Shangana River, Matopo Hills, the Marula and other areas where we now find what are called Al farms.
While forcibly shifting the black communities, the white minority settler regime’s employees would wantonly destroy the helpless people’s granaries, confiscate some of their property and either leave the traumatised people stranded without shelter or food, or ferry them, especially elderly women, by lorry and dump them in the remote mosquito-infested areas with ferocious wild animals in the lowveld.
That was the case with Meshack Velaphi (Ncube’s) grandmother who was ferried by lorry from her destroyed home in the Matobo District (Kezi) and dumped in the Jambezi area where she was immediately eaten by lions.
The only part of her body that her grand-children found some six or seven days later was her head. Meshack Velaphi (Ncube) became one of the first people to join the Joshua Nkomo-led nationalist movement and later the armed struggle.
While all this dispossession and displacement of the black people was being violently carried out by white people, the British, the American governments and other Western countries raised neither a voice nor a finger.
At the height of the harassment and terrorisation of the black people of Zimbabwe by Britain’s kith and kin, some courageous black people of Zimbabwe publicly protested but were either ignored or occasionally locked up.
That was the case with the immortal Benjamin Burombo who formed and led an organisation named the British African National Voice Association (BANVA). Burombo tried on many occasions to stop land alienation from the black people by appealing to the country’s law courts.
He repeatedly failed because he was trying to sue an incorrigibly racialist regime by using its own racialistically biased laws in its racialist courts. However, the great Burombo was a hero, particularly to the suffering people of Insiza and Fort Rixon as well as the black workers of Bulawayo.
A Bulawayo admirer of Burombo composed a song appreciating his great efforts to protect the socio-economic interests of the black people.
The ditty, belonging to the genre of what is generally referred to as township jazz, went: “Kudala kwakukhona kulumuzi, kwakukhona izigangi, ezibizwa otsotsi, zihlala koBulawayo, kodwa kwakukhona indoda igama layo — Bee Bee Burombo, eyayizama ngamandla wonke, ukusiza abensundu, mhla efayo sokhala sonke, sokhala sonke, mhla efayo sokhala sonke.”
This song featured prominently in the late 1940s and early 1950s when the land alienation campaign was being mercilessly carried out.
Incidentally, other songs, but expressing anger and self-pity, about the same campaign were also sung. They were to the black community of Zimbabwe what Negro spirituals were to the Afro-Americans. One of them was composed and sung by a Bulawayo-based quartet, called the Merry Makers, led by the late Remington Mazabane.
Expressing individual anger, the piece said: “Inhliziyo yami ibuhlungu, uma ngikhumbula abazali ekhaya, abathathelwa zona izifuyo zabo, betshiselwa nayo imizi . . .”
There was yet another piece, but that one expressed only self-pity about the cruel removal of black people from the healthy high veld to the infertile low veld.
Emphasising misery caused by poor harvest in the low veld, the song pointed out: “Nantu usizi bakithi, sophela sonke yindlala, basixotshela phansi emaguswini, uzokhala, uzokhala, uzokhala bhudi wami, uzokhala, uzokhala sisi wami . . .”
There was indeed a lot of wailing but not a single government in Western Europe gave us a sympathetic ear. Christian missionaries, particularly those of the London Missionary Society (the LMS), now the United Congregational Church of Southern Africa (UCCSA), had to close down their stations in the badly affected regions and open new ones in those where the black people were compelled to go.
It is utterly immoral for Britain and all those European nations that once had colonies in Africa, Australasia, America, Asia, and elsewhere to talk about justice in land distribution, ownership and settlement in their former colonies.
Their records in these nations, all of which are now independent and sovereign States are abominable.
Saul Gwakuba Ndlovu is a Bulawayo-based retired journalist and a former freedom fighter. He can be contacted on cell 0734328136 or through [email protected]
