The Sunday News
Literature rethink with Richard Runyararo Mahomva
Last week’s article delved into the subject of belonging to the farm(e)r and how the land reform programme shaped the advent of the regime change popularised “crisis-nationalism”. The two chapters highlighted the extent to which the post-colonial
experience in its less pragmatic context was imbibed and impeded by the colonial heritage and its fraternity of knowledge making.
It is for that reason that the transition from being ruled/owned to self-rule and actualisation still goes criminalised in the face of contemporary academic framings seeking to channel regime change through the land reform programme as a think-tank.
As highlighted from the inception, this analytical crusade of rethinking literature in Zimbabwe starts with issues emerging from the land reform. The fundamental framing of the “missed racial factor” in post-land reform literature was to expose publicly disseminated assertions on continuing colonial bias demonising the land reform. Well, this week marks the end to this analysis through this particular instalment focusing on the last two chapters of the book, Zimbabwe’s Unfinished Business: Rethinking Land, State, and Nation in the Context of Crisis (Hammar, Raftopolous & Jensen; 2003).
First attention is given to Mandivamba Rukuni and Stig Jensen’s chapter; “Land, Growth and Governance: Tenure Reform and Visions of progress in Zimbabwe”. The chapter attributes the radical land reform procedures to defunct if not absent tenure institutions in Zimbabwe. The chapter proclaims that tenure policies safeguard food security, human development. Moreover, promoting democracy, peace and stability in any given society. The chapter makes valuable contributions in justifying the land reform process as an outgrowth of the African land ownership hunger grounded on the founding values of the country’s liberation and Afrocentric envisages of Zimbabwe’s post-coloniality. With a brief historical breakdown of the road towards the land reform, Mandivamba and Jensen (2003) outline how immediate post-independence was characterised by market-based land purchases of the first decade of independence anchored on the voluntary seller and buyer principle extracted from the terms of the Lancaster Agreement. One aspect of the missed racial factor that emerges from this analysis is that;
The period was also characterised by other broad investments in social development, especially for health and education through the establishment of schools and clinics with the goal of achieving free and open access to the education and health systems. Investments were also made in the development of physical infrastructure, in the form of road systems, safe drinking water and sanitation facilities and the establishment of rural centres (Mandivamba & Jensen 2003: 249).
The above observation is candid because the British were funding the early land indemnities. However, this observation is loaded with semblances of the “missed racial factor” as it is a caricature of Western definitions of “development”. As suggested by this perspective which gives a limited definition of development on the basis of sub-standard infrastructural servicing and supply of public goods guaranteeing social-security through the neo-colonial model. On that note, it is logical to also posit that the investment in public infrastructure was to service the farm workers’ belonging to the farm(e)r. Above all, the peasants had no huge use of the road networks which are part of the mentioned development seeing that they had no cars themselves. Therefore, this development was for the service of the white supremist farm(e)r guised as rural development. The emphasised development is guided by Western institutional yardsticks such as those prescribed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB). The same institutions which contributed to the infamous Esap characterised by political-economic structural amendments which increased land hunger, which resulted in the quest for land by the black majority which they later condemned as posited by Mandivamba and Jensen (2003: 243-262).
The applied measurements of development in the chapter are drawn from the same neo-colonial institutional benchmarks which normatively interpreted the situation in the context of Zimbabwe.
These comparative measurements are even an iota of the Eurocentric realities of defining public welfare culminating to what is here termed “development”. The missed racial factor here is exposed by the fact that what the two scholars term development was way below the expectations of the people whom this development was imposed upon by donor funding to the land distribution trajectory of the willing seller and willing buyer approach to tenure security.
It is also myopic to argue that this era serviced development of the rural populace since the indigenes were outcasts of this process which is said to have constituted an imperative development paradigm targeting them. This reminds me of an observation by a veteran artiste, Memory Kumbota in a discussion we had this past week; Amakhiwa adla imali endala yase Africa (White extravagance is a result of ancient looting from the African continent). Kumbota’s analysis somehow castigates the narrow thinking that the land reform programme was a sabotage of the “development” ushered by Britain funding of tenure security.
Adherent to the “missed racial factor” Mandivamba and Jensen (2003: 250-251) argue that there was a decline in donor-interest to fund the land reform exercise. On the other hand, this led to self-executed invasions of the farms by war veterans with no consent of the State (Moyo 1999; 2001: Chung 2006). This later fast-tracked the land reform programme in question. The analysis in this particular section of the chapter reveals that the anticipated “development” was no longer sustainable. Even the little that Britain had invested into a superficial practical benevolent track record to Africa’s needs through the Zimbabwean situation was withdrawn. The main justification being that Zimbabwe’s government was accused of opaque accountability for the capital which had been availed to the country to fund the “voluntary” land sells.
However, what is of interest is that the Mandivamba and Jensen’s analysis is silent on the broader consequences of the donor funding to Zimbabwe. The donations implied that Zimbabwe was being subjected to the “he who pays the piper calls the tune” model.
Traditionally donor funding subjects the funded to conform to the dictates of the donor. Therefore, the funder may continue or curtail the life of any project as it creates dependence of the recipient party. The consequences of this issue are substantiated in the excerpt extracted from a letter that Clair Short, the former British Secretary of State for International Development wrote to the then Zimbabwean Minister of Agriculture, Kumbirai Kangai on November 5, 1997:
“I should make it clear that we do not accept that Britain has a special responsibility to meet the costs of land purchase in Zimbabwe. We are a new Government from diverse backgrounds without links to former colonial interests. My own origins are Irish and as you know we were colonised not colonisers. “
Mandivamba and Jensen only suggest that the rise of the Western funded opposition was necessary in advancing development amid the emerging land crisis:
Instead of healthy political debate and democratic evolution, developments have gone from bad to worse with extensive political violence and a crude polarisation of society (ibid: 245).
However, the question at hand is that on whose terms would this prescribed development be grounded? Moreover, on what basis will this debate be centred when the only logical route to the land saga was restoration of ownership to the indigenes? Above all, why should the facilitators of the proposed debate emerge at a time only convenient to address the fall of white privilege? Therefore, was the rise of MDC accidental or coincidental with the land reform?
The truth of the matter is that MDC and other CSOs largely the National Constitutional Assembly (NCA) were servicing the interests of the lost White commercial farmers’ historical privilege. They thought they could restore the colonial situation through ahistorical liberal innuendoes:
The MDC and the independent umbrella constitutional reform group, the . . . (NCA) which initiated the debate about the constitution, argue . . . that Zanu-PF is simply using the land issue to forestall major constitutional reforms that will offer democracy and political reform (ibid: 245-246).
The major challenge posited by the above claim is that the democracy being advocated for is inclined to the interest of the minority and not the traditionally disenfranchised African majority of Zimbabwe. Moreover, this development prescribed by the scholars here and MDC with its CSO counterparts is that which encourages conformity to donor dictates on the local political processes when indigenous modernity is reclaiming decoloniality.
The concluding chapter of the book by Ben Cousins, speaks of the “Politics of the Land, Democracy and Development in Southern-Africa”. Cousins argues that the Zimbabwean land issue “has a profoundly regional if not a continental dimension. Negative responses to the crisis include concerns that coercive and authoritarian political practices will prove contagious . . .” (Cousins 2003: 263). This suggests that Africa’s experience in the present global hegemony is one. Therefore, the global village as a modern day slave plantation framed along the global North’s supremacy will forever stay resilient to change especially if it concerns the freedom of the Africans. As such Zimbabwe’s move to decolonise land ownership represents a rebellious slave act which could trigger other slaves to behave in the like manner:
Commercial farmers in South Africa and Namibia fear that they might be next in line in the copycat land invasions (Cousins 2003: 264).
This is because impoverished peasantry were and are still scattered all over Southern Africa. Therefore, real democracy can be achieved if Africans have full ownership of their land as proposed by the dub poet Mzwakhe Mbuli, “indlala izaphela eAfrica uma sizenzela” (Hunger will be defeated in Africa if we do things on our own). Beyond all aspects of the “missed racial factor”, Africans need to develop all facets of their political-economy and social structures. There is strong need for self-dependence for sustainable growth of the peoples of Africa. Mayibuye!
- 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]
