The Sunday Mail
There is no doubt that the Land Apportionment Act of 1931 and the Land Husbandry Act of 1952 which condemned Africans to barren lands and legalised the destocking of the then Tribal Trust Lands respectively were some of the major grievances of the nationalists of the Second Chimurenga. Africans had been driven off productive land and now their livestock was being taken away to stock stolen farms now occupied by the whites.
The late national hero Herbert Chitepo would later describe these criminal actions as “genocidal” in the way blacks were stripped of their sources of livelihood in cattle and land and virtually shorn of their nationhood. Chitepo lamented that because of the demands for survival, the displaced and disposed Africans were forced to “sell themselves in slavery to capitalists and imperialists”.
Even as late as 1969 Chief Rekayi Tangwena was still fighting these predators trying to drive him and his people out of Gairesi.
Blacks managed to mobilise themselves in the 1950s to challenge the colonial system, leading to the emergence of people like Joshua Nkomo. But it was in the mid 1970s that calls for armed resistance gathered momentum that would see thousands of young Zimbabweans leaving schools, colleges and universities to train outside the country to fight the system.
President Mugabe and Edgar Tekere were released from detention in 1974 after serving 10 years in prison for resisting racially-discriminatory white minority rule. They crossed into Mozambique the following year to fight for a better life for marginalised Africans.
Enter Tsvangirai
Irony of ironies, that is the same year our hallucinating would-be president Morgan Tsvangirai claimed recently that by then he was earning a princely salary of $450. He boasted that the Rhodesian dollar was equivalent to the British pound.
It tells a story. He had the good life despite his lack of education. At least Rhodesia was good to him. He probably did not have the brains for books, but he certainly had the resources at his disposal to do better, which fate was different from the majority who felt the pain of colonial deprivation and decided they would rather die fighting than kneeling at the feet of the white oppressor.
I was reminded of Tsvangirai’s good fortune by what have become standard comments by the MDC-T leadership and the private media when it comes to the challenges the country is facing today. Everywhere and at all times, they have a fantasy about what life was like prior to majority rule. That nostalgia contrasts sharply with the dark melancholy associated with Zimbabwe’s Independence.
Last week the MDC-T leader called a Press conference to announce his party’s epiphany: they had suddenly found a way out of Zimbabwe’s economic doldrums. They were organising a National Convergence Conference of all stakeholders where the solution to the country’s challenges would reveal itself to the interlocutors.
Zanu-PF was specifically invited as the authors of the current catastrophe to have the truth revealed to them. He then gave the media his infallible insights into Zanu-PF or President Mugabe’s duplicity in his choice of the two Vice-Presidents Emmerson Mnangagwa and Phelekezela Mphoko, themselves war veterans in their own right.
He said the two represented “cosmetic change without a substantial impact on the direction of the country”. (I suspect only Tsvangirai and his party had been informed that President Mugabe was appointing ‘reformists’. We don’t know what needs to be reformed which the President had to delegate to his appointees.)
Good and Bad
This was his conclusion about the two VPs: “The newly appointed vice- presidents have their work cut out but predictably they cannot extricate themselves from Mugabe’s ruinous and disastrous legacy. They are entrapped in the same policy failure that has characterised Zanu-PF governance culture in the past 35 years.”
(Again one can’t miss the hint that Tsvangirai sees one of the two as a potential successor to Mugabe who must be discredited way before elections, hence when the elections come none of these two should be ‘‘extricated from Mugabe’s ruinous and disastrous legacy’’.)
Readers would be aware that 35 years take us back to Independence in 1980. It is the cut-off date between white minority rule and black majority rule, between the good and the bad, between prosperity and unmitigated poverty. Even while Zanu-PF nursed him to the point of leading the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions in the 1980s, Tsvangirai apparently rued the change of government.
Even as the Government embarked on policies such as free education for all primary schools pupils, the building of more primary and secondary schools and colleges and the expansion of opportunities for blacks at the University of Zimbabwe, there was for Tsvangirai something always ominous about black majority rule.
The good history of prosperity ends with the death of Rhodesia in 1980. The black, dark ugly history of Zimbabwe was the author of all misery for black people. The land reform programme which sought to reclaim land which had been stolen under the racist Land Apportionment Act of 1931 must have spelt doom for his good old days when he could, with his limited education and working in a mine, earn the equivalent of 450 British pounds.
This is a serious indictment for someone with pretences to the presidency. To him the whole independence period has been a disaster and only the white man brought light to this country because of the colour of his skin. He is still viewed as our saviour up to now. Without the white man and his magic skills we are doomed. Which is why Tsvangirai wants power; he will invite back whites to weave their magic with our economy and we shall be back to 1975, drinking beer until we vomit!
Welcome Gutu
Tsvangirai’s end of good history comments and his obsession with the white saviour are not an aberration. It is the position of the party although one can’t fail to observe some dissonance in pronouncements. The party spokesperson, Obert Gutu, is my witness. Following what was reported as a policy volte face by Zanu-PF to allow newly resettled farmers to enter joint farming ventures with commercial white farmers last week, Gutu issued a lengthy statement. He said the policy change was a damage control measure by Zanu-PF for its failed land reform.
“The MDC views the Zanu-PF decision to allow contract farming and joint farming ventures as a very insincere and ill-timed gesture particularly as it comes a little too late when the entire Zimbabwean population has suffered the consequences of the demise of the agricultural sector,” said Gutu in a statement.
Astonishingly, Gutu claimed his party always supported the land reform. Then he must explain how some 5 000 white commercial farmers produced more than one million votes to defeat the draft constitution of 2000 whose most important clause was to take without compensation land occupied by whites. Why would white commercial farmers commit mass suicide by signing cheques to fund the MDC when they knew it was in support of the land reform?
The party’s white constituency will be very disappointed that they were fooled all along to believe that the MDC-T was fighting in their corner.
But a major contradiction is that according to Gutu manufacturing and industry were casualties of Zanu-PF’s land reform, a programme only launched in earnest in 2000.
For his boss the calamity is the face of the black man who took over political power in 1980. That’s the meaning of his 35 years. Zimbabwe’s miseries are a direct product of political independence.
It is of course a lie that white farmers were denied land. They were asked to apply just like everyone else. Many refused, preferring instead to challenge the land reform programme in the courts, going all the way to the Sadc Tribunal.
But that won’t be consolation for Tsvangirai still pining for the good life of 1975.
