Newswise — In 2000, the world watched in shock as Zimbabwe's government implemented a "Fast Track" land reform policy that encouraged the country's black peasantry to seize land from white farmers. While the events may have been hard for outsiders to fathom, a new study from a University of Alberta historian suggests the events, examined in a historical context, may not be so hard to understand, after all.
In a paper to be published in the July edition of the academic journal African Studies, Dr. Guy Thompson does not express support for Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe's land reform policies, but he does presents historical evidence to help explain them.
"The complexity of the land issue is the heart of the political chaos that exists in Zimbabwe today, and it's the result of discontent that has been inherited from many generations," Thompson said. The 2000 uprising in Zimbabwe is the latest link in a chain of events that began in 1890, when state-sponsored colonialists claimed much of Zimbabwe's prime farming land. In 1930, the Land Apportionment Act, which was partly modeled after the Canadian native reserve system, officially partitioned land according to race, with the ruling whites getting the most and best real estate.
In 1951, the colonial government tried to redress the land inequities between races with the Native Land Husbandry Act (NLHA). The liberal creators of the ambitious social engineering plan wanted to "modernize" the country by offering black peasants the right to farm—but not own—designated land plots, if they agreed to a number of imposed measures, such as farming the land using government-approved methods.
However, the NLHA also served to further racial segregation by increasing population capacity on the reserves, allowing the government to move Africans off designated white land to make room for the booming European immigration after the Second World War, Thompson said.
In his paper, Thompson outlines a number of reasons why the peasants were reluctant to embrace the NLHA, which ended in 1962. He noted that the failure of the NLHA "highlighted the contradiction of using the authoritarian structures of colonial rule to try and create docile self-disciplining modern subjects." The NLHA left Zimbabwe with a spotted national map, with most of Zimbabwe's black peasantry, who constitute 80 per cent of Zimbabwe's 13 million people, living in designated "communal areas".
After Zimbabwe defeated colonial rule and achieved self-government in 1980, the country remained relatively peaceful for almost two decades. However, the peace could not withstand the build-up of a century of racial discrimination and failed policies, and the ill-conceived, state-sanctioned 2000 farm invasions tore the country apart once again.
Initially, the black peasantry claimed much of the choicest land in the invasions, but the ruling government's cabinet ministers and wealthy allies have since seized the vast majority of it, with many of the country's black peasants now serving on this land as labourers.
Thompson, who lived and conducted research in Zimbabwe for six years in the 1990s, is agonized that the Zimbabwean peasants continue to live in poverty and under the oppression of Mugabe's Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) government, which is infamous for committing human rights violations. Earlier this year, state police beat and nearly killed a group of protestors who were trying to stage a secret meeting, Thompson said.
However, Thompson added that applying political and social pressure on South Africa, Zimbabwe's wealthy neighbor, is the key to improving conditions in Mugabe's land-locked nation.
"The South African government and many privately held South African corporations have tremendous investments in Zimbabwe, but they have been, to this point, reluctant to push Mugabe to change."
"If there's one thing Canadians can do to help people in Zimbabwe, it's pressure South Africa to make it clear to Mugabe government's that torture and preventing the right of assembly is unacceptable, and business with Zimbabwe will stop unless things change."
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