Lament for Zimbabwe

Confused about events in Zimbabwe? Veteran international journalist, diplomat, and Africa correspondent Clyde Sanger explains the history behind the unfolding chaos

By: Clyde Sanger

  So many miserable and ominous stories have come out of Zimbabwe in recent weeks that anyone who has lived in that beautiful country of normally gentle people must be deeply saddened. I worked there for two years in the old days, when it was Rhodesia and part of the Central African Federation, and again after independence at the invitation of the then Information Minister, Nathan Shamuyarira.
  Horrendous mistakes have been made over the years and on all sides. But, on the eve of independence in April 1980 Robert Mugabe made a remarkable broadcast calling for national reconciliation, aiming at worried white Rhodesians. "If yesterday I fought you as an enemy, today you have become a friend and ally. The wrongs of the past must now stand forgotten and forgiven."
 

I believe that the debauchery we are witnessing of this fine country could have been avoided if the British government of Margaret Thatcher had worked sincerely with Mugabe's men in the first decade of independence

  Yet neither side enlarged this opening, and the British stood aside. The issue of land reform festered. President Mugabe became embittered, his wise wife Sally died of cancer, and finally he lashes out at the commercial farmers, the mainstay of his country's economy. He is desperate to win rural votes in the coming parliamentary elections, and is destroying so much in the process.
  I believe that the debauchery we are witnessing of this fine country could have been avoided if the British government of Margaret Thatcher had worked sincerely with Mugabe's men in the first decade of independence. A comparison with Kenya, and how Jomo Kenyatta and an earlier British government tackled the issue of land transfer there in 1963, will make my point.
  There are early similarities. In both countries white settlers took much of the best farmland. In Kenya white farmers claimed the Rift Valley had been deserted because of rinderpest cattle disease. In Rhodesia, by the time the 1896 uprising had been quelled, settlers had grabbed some 15 million acres along the spine of the country without compensation. The independence struggle in both countries was fought over land-ownership, Kikuyu forest fighters in Kenya and Mugabe's ZANU forces operating from Mozambique in a seven-year bush war.
  The stories diverge there. Under emergency regulations in Kenya the British colonial administration pushed through the Swynnerton Plan of land titles and farm planning in the fertile Kikuyu districts, which relieved political pressure. When independence neared in 1963, the government of Harold Macmillan took responsibility for buying out the white farmers in the Rift Valley and handed over £18 million for that purpose. Jomo Kenyatta, a farmer at heart himself, spoke to an extraordinary meeting of white farmers in Nakuru and so dispelled their suspicions that they ended by jumping from their seats and shouting his slogan "Harambee!" (Pull together).
 

The predictable consequence of Thatcher's land transfer policy: individual farms were offered that were scattered and unsuitable for intensive development for small-scale farming with irrigation and other services.

  Of course, there were squatters. Lorry-loads of forest fighters came over the Aberdare range and occupied the pyrethrum land of the Kinangop plateau above the Rift Valley. Agricultural officers of the departing colonial government moved quickly in, and gave the squatters land title and working plans for their new acres.
  By contrast, Mrs Thatcher placed strict rules on land transfer when her government negotiated Zimbabwe s independence constitution in 1979. For ten years the basis of transfer was to be "willing buyer, willing seller". The predictable consequence: individual farms were offered that were scattered and unsuitable for intensive development for small-scale farming with irrigation and other services, or else they were mostly baboon land bush country with a small part cleared for farming.
  The Thatcher government offered £20 million for resettlement hardly generous, considering there were many more Rhodesian white farmers than Kenyan. It also attached tight strings. The money would only be paid against invoices from the Mugabe government after it had spent its own foreign exchange funds in buying out white farms. Also, Britain would not help finance settlements of co-operatives.
  Despite this discouragement, the Mugabe government in 1982 set a target of resettling within three years 162,000 families on commercial land. It was quite unrealistic. By 1993 the program had placed only 55,000 families on former white farms. Nor had the Rhodesian government of Ian Smith brought in during the 1970s anything resembling the Swynnerton Plan, to organize the Tribal Trust Lands with individual land title that can attract bank loans. The peasant population on these communal lands was already then bursting at the seams.
  I was in Zimbabwe at independence on April 18, 1980, and I gave Nathan Shamuyarira a paper suggesting government officials should study the Kenya land transfer story for lessons and good practices. (I had lived in Kenya for five years, and Nathan had been a stringer for my paper The Guardian.) He was a close colleague of Mugabe s and became Foreign Minister but, as far as I know, the suggestion was not followed up. The British government, for its part, stood back. Rhodesia, after all, had not been a full-blown British colony like Kenya: it was the private property of Cecil Rhodes Chartered Company until 1923, and then became a self-governing colony only answerable to Britain for legislation on native affairs.
  In 1993 the Mugabe government brought in the Land Acquisition Act, with the object of acquiring 5.5 million hectares. Originally, some 1,500 white farms (or one-third of the total) were to be on the list, mostly adjacent to communal land. But numbers shrank as farmers exercised their right to complain to the Land Board. Six years have gone by, with Mugabe making increasingly impatient, then inflammatory, speeches. Outsiders dismissed them as election rhetoric, but signs were clear on the ground. Last year some 4,000 squatters trekked onto commercial farms from Marondera district, and were forcefully persuaded to go home. Heavy rains that year made their situation worse, with land waterlogged.
  Now Robert Mugabe is riding the wave of their despair, defying the courts and inciting violence. You can say and I agree that he has lost his bearings as a political leader. But others too - Margaret Thatcher, are you listening? - have failed to demonstrate leadership, and failed to match the generosity he once showed. My tears flow for Zimbabwe.

Clyde Sanger was editor of the Central African Examiner 1957-9, Africa correspondent of The Guardian 1960-5 and director of information at the Commonwealth Secretariat 1977-9. He is Canada correspondent of The Economist. This article originally appeared in the Globe & Mail.

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