Land and Freedom

A traditional homestead in Matabeleland

When I arrived in Zimbabwe my understanding of the political situation there, mostly based on UK media reports, but also from talking to a number of Zimbabwean refugees, went like this:

Robert Mugabe had started out 'good' but was gradually corrupted by power, turning into a classic African tyrant.

The land seizures which forcibly removed land from White farmers have been an unmitigated disaster, as land was given to ZANU-PF supporters who were incapable of farming it productively, destroying the economy and pushing Zimbabwe into starvation.

The vast majority of Zimbabweans support the opposition MDC, and Mugabe is only holding onto power through vote-rigging and widespread violence.

The people of Zimbabwe are living in desperate poverty, while a few ZANU-PF cronies and military leaders get rich from massive corruption and looting of the country's diamond wealth.

Living at Hlekweni, I gradually came to think that the reality is considerably more complex and ambiguous than this, and increasingly started to question the way our media represents Zimbabwe and other non-Western nations (especially those that are usually represented as outside the 'international community' of US allies).

There is certainly plenty of evidence for the view of Zimbabwe as a tyranny and economic disaster. My overwhelming impression of the Zimbabweans I met in Matabeleland was a sense of hopelessness. One woman said to me just before we left, when we were discussing possible elections this year “I won't even bother voting. What's the point? We know who is going to win. And we can't fight them – just look what they did to us before.” For most people the only chance of improvement they can see for themselves is to leave the country, as millions have already done; although a good friend of ours had the chance of a job in South Africa, and eventually decided not to go, saying “It probably sounds stupid, but I just don't want him to have won.”

There is also a real sense of having to be cautious when speaking about politics in public. It is a criminal offence in Zimbabwe to 'insult the President', a charge which is regularly used to harass dissidents, including the artist Owen Maseko, who is still awaiting trial at the Supreme Court for his exhibition of paintings at the Bulawayo National Art Gallery. There is also a very active secret police, the 'CIO', which is rumoured to employ large numbers of informers to eavesdrop on conversations in public places. When we were out in town and wanted to refer to Mugabe, we resorted to the children's enthusiasm for Harry Potter, calling him 'He Who Must Not Be Named'. The CIO also take a lively interest in the activities of NGOs, especially overseas-funded ones, and they came to Hlekweni to interview me shortly after my arrival.

I have met very courageous Zimbabweans who are opposition activists, including one friend who is an openly gay man and also a MDC-M candidate, who maintains his outspoken political activity despite suffering repeated harassment and violence. But I have also met people of integrity whom I respect and admire who are ZANU-PF members and supporters. At first I was incredulous that anyone could support the current Zimbabwean regime in good faith. But I was exposed to a number of experiences that gave me reason for reflection.

Rob Sacco is the Director of the Nyahode Union Learning Centre in the Chimanimani district of the Eastern Highlands. When I visited him in August last year he explained his view of Zimbabwe as 'the most advanced country in the world', because it has taken the land away from the colonialist and capitalist class and redistributed it to the landless indigenous people. In the Nyahode Valley, Rob is helping local landless people to claim their allotted 2.5 hectares of land to support their families. Entitlement to the land is free, although it comes with certain conditions, including being resident and using it productively. I met many smallholder farmers in Nyahode who have acquired land in this way, and Rob claims that their intensive subsistence farming is enormously more productive than the previous pattern of land use by White farmers growing cash crops for export.

I also visited a community-based NGO in Masvingo Province called the Association of Zimbabwean Traditional Environmental Conservationists (AZTREC). AZTREC has a training centre on resettlement land (formerly owned by a foreign corporation) which is practising and promoting sustainable agriculture based on traditional African knowledge systems. Staff at AZTREC have also been involved with a University of Sussex research project to measure the impact of the land reform on local people's livelihoods in the region. 

The results of the research so far are perhaps surprising, showing that much of the resettlement land which has been seized from White farmers in the province is being worked productively to provide livelihoods for smallholder farmers, who are also re-investing significant capital to develop their farming operations. There is an interesting series of video interviews with some of these small farmers (made by Pamela Ngwenya who also filmed our Hlekweni video) here:

The biggest problem identified by the research is the continual monocropping of maize by smallholder farmers, without crop rotation or other practices to conserve and rebuild soil fertility. This is where appropriate training in sustainable agriculture such as AZTREC and Hlekweni are doing with rural farmers is so vital for the future of Zimbabwe's people and land. (One young agriculture trainee at Hlekweni told me 'I had never heard of crop rotation before I came here'). Rob Sacco is very critical of the foreign donors (including the UK's Department for International Development) who have withdrawn funding from any organisations that are supporting communities in resettlement areas, even including schools. 

There is of course also large-scale corruption in the allocation of farms to people with Zanu-PF and military connections, and a small elite within Zimbabwean society has grown extremely rich from diamond and mineral revenues. It is interesting though to travel on the Beitbridge road through Matabeleland South and to make the crossing into South Africa. While the landscape throughout Zimbabwe is studded with traditional homesteads, as soon as you cross the border into South Africa the roads are full of luxury cars but the countryside is largely empty of people. In South Africa, which is firmly integrated into the capitalist world, the land is owned by large companies and big farmers (just as in the UK) and is worked for profit using capital intensive methods. It is also striking to see the stark contrast between luxury mansions and sprawling shanty towns of makeshift shacks. In Zimbabwe it is rare to see a metal shack of the kind that provide a bare shelter for millions of the poorest South Africans. When one of the staff at Hlekweni built herself a chicken shed  Kate and I joked that if we were in South Africa there'd be a family living in it...

Of course South Africa is vastly richer overall than Zimbabwe, and probably given the choice most Zimbabweans would rather their country was more like South Africa (and millions of them have already voted with their feet by moving there). Still the downside of all that capitalist wealth accumulation is very visible in the townships and squatter camps of every South African city, and in the appalling level of violent crime that afflicts the country (again something that is very rare in Zimbabwe).

The forcible seizures of White-owned farms that started in 2000 (and are still continuing) are accompanied by threats and often physical violence, including against many of the Black farm workers. They are largely initiated by local War Veterans and other unofficial groups, rather than planned or orchestrated by the State, but the police do not intervene to protect landowners. This has inevitably led to a general atmosphere of lawlessness and insecurity, and encouraged the most aggressive or acquisitive people to target property that they will just take for themselves by force, confident that the authorities will do nothing to stop them. This can also include land belonging to Black Zimbabweans and local companies. The farm at Hlekweni was occupied in this way in 2008, by a group of residents from the nearby township, despite the fact that Hlekweni is a local Zimbabwean NGO. The police refused to intervene at the time (shortly before the elections), saying 'we can't touch politics', although after the elections they did eventually agree to move the squatters off the land.

Clearly this situation doesn't help to establish a climate of security and economic stability. From the perspective of a revolutionary Marxist like Rob Sacco of course, this is what revolution looks like, and the force involved in expropriating White farmers is certainly no greater than that originally used to seize the land from its indigenous inhabitants.

It is certainly instructive that the huge international condemnation of Mugabe, including trade sanctions and a credit freeze that helped to collapse the Zimbabwean economy, were prompted by the regime's support for the re-distribution of property. By contrast, the truly massive crimes of Mugabe's regime were carried out in the mid-1980s, when approximately 20,000 people in Matabeleland were massacred by the Zimbabwean military. This campaign of State terror, known as the 'Gukurahundi', was successfully aimed at the destruction of ZANU's political rivals after Liberation. It is still a source of unresolved trauma for the people of Matabeleland. My friend the MDC-M candidate told me that his father had been killed and his body thrown with hundreds of others down a mineshaft. Whole villages were destroyed and horrific abuses and tortures inflicted on the population. Robert Mugabe has publicly dismissed these events as 'a moment of madness', and no justice or reparations have ever been made. Despite this, throughout the 80s and 90s, Mugabe was portrayed by the Western media as a legitimate ruler, and people on the Left generally regarded him as a hero of the Liberation struggle. It was not until the property of White farmers and overseas companies was targeted that Mugabe suddenly became a dictator and Zimbabwe a pariah State, which is perhaps a revealing commentary on our own society's scale of values.

Personally, I cannot accept any justification for the continued rule of any leader who has been responsible for the wholesale murder of his country's citizens. The continuing intimidation and harassment of the Zimbabwean population certainly suggests a regime is determined to remain in power at almost any cost, whatever the wishes of the people. I can see good reasons, however, why some Zimbabweans might want to defend the outcomes of the fast-track resettlement programme, resisting the return to previous grossly unequal patterns of land ownership, and the incorporation of Zimbabwe's resources into the capitalist world.

Very few of the Zimbabweans I met in Matabeleland have expressed any hope of improvement for their country, even following Mugabe's eventual death. The legacy of violence and oppression has crushed people's sense of hope and possibility. As Quakers, I hope we will hold all Zimbabweans in the Light, and look for opportunities to work alongside them for healing and rebuilding.