By Dr Tafataona Mahoso
ON September 4 2023, The Telegraph (UK) published a story titled: ‘Hundreds of white farmers return to Zimbabwe in boost for agriculture’.
The Mail and Guardian (South Africa) on April 20 2018 published a much earlier version of the same story called: ‘The return of white farmers’.
The stories are contradictory in that, on one hand, they are at pains to state the right of the whites to come back to Zimbabwe just like Africans coming back from the Diaspora; yet, on the other hand, the same author in the very same story claims the return of a former white farmer as extraordinary and therefore a lot more beneficial to the country than the return of larger numbers of Africans from abroad.
And according to statements made by Eddie Cross here about a year-or-two ago, there should be about 2 000 such white farmers throughout Zimbabwe who have come back and are farming under various arrangements. In 2018, Cross then estimated there were already more than 600 white farmers who had come back.
The Telegraph story, however, deliberately chose to understate the numbers, saying there are altogether, in 2023, just about 900 white farmers who have come back and are farming.
The discrepancy between figures cited by Cross two years ago and those in the September 4 2023 story means that it is really not the numbers that matter but the consistent reactionary message disparaging the African land revolution and associating the former white settler-farmers with restoration of farming skills as well as revival of the white-sponsored myth of Zimbabwe as ‘the breadbasket of Southern Africa’, which breadbasket the late former President Robert Mugabe and the Third Chimurenga are supposed to have criminally destroyed.
Significantly, the only two examples of the sudden ‘boost for agriculture’ claimed by The Telegraph are increasing tobacco production and a horticulture market in Borrowdale, Harare.
How those two examples represent revival of a regional breadbasket is not explained.
Nor is it proven that the two indicators are the result of an influx of former white settler-farmers coming back to Zimbabwe.
Overall, the propaganda against the Third Chimurenga is conveyed through a variety of ways.
First is the blanket assumption that all the displaced white farmers improved the land they monopolised against the African majority under colonialism. Therefore, they are entitled to compensation for such improvements under the Global Compensation Agreement (GCA).
Second is the most unfortunate equation of race with skill, whereby 99-year leases are promised and dangled in front of white farmers wishing to come back to Zimbabwe as a means of luring them back rather than as an end-reward for productivity and commitment on the land.
This creates an awkward situation, where the once landless and now resettled Africans are required to prove themselves first before they can get credit and a 99-year lease while returning whites are promised the same apparently just for coming back and on account of their presumed expertise.
The Mail and Guardian article, already cited, quoted an African farmer in Zimbabwe as saying: “The fact is white farmers are more experienced and if they get 99-year leases it will build (their) confidence and they will start investing in permanent sheds.”
Third is the implied message that the returning white farmer may be entitled both to compensation under the GCA and to resettlement under a 99-year lease if he or she wants a farm.
Fourth is the routine tendency to discuss the dire need for investment, credit and confidence building while omitting to link these to continuing economic sanctions meant to prevent resettled African peasants and workers from becoming farmers.
Even more disturbing are stories of Zimbabweans coming from the same Diaspora who would like to obtain land to invest their savings but are being frustrated by officials who seem to believe that the return of one former white farmer is more beneficial to the country than that of many more Africans.
Fifth is the tendency, in the articles and even policy pronouncements, to reduce the purpose of the land revolution to the revival and growth of colonial and neo-colonial agribusiness.
This is a dangerous reduction because the Third Chimurenga arose from a set of African cultural and philosophical values quite separate from, if not contrary to, the values driving neo-liberal reform and agribusiness.
Profitable agribusiness and its values
In late 1985, Food First Books published a well-researched pamphlet titled South Africa: Hunger in a Land of Plenty.
Just two paragraphs from that pamphlet will demonstrate my point about values, the land and agriculture:
“The white minority government boasts that South Africa is among the top seven food exporting nations in the world.
South Africa (in the mid-1980s) exports over (US) $1 billion dollars worth of agricultural products, including grain, beef, vegetables and fruits.
Yet an average of 136 black children die every day from the effects of malnutrition.
The extent of hunger is so incriminating that since 1966 the government has prohibited public agencies from publishing or even collecting data on malnutrition among blacks.
South Africa has a good climate and ample farmland. The hunger that plagues millions of South Africans is caused by a human-made tragedy – apartheid.”
The points we can learn from this story should not be lost on the reader.
First, agribusiness was booming and surplus food products being exported from South Africa (and from Zimbabwe before the land revolution) when Africans in both countries sought to overturn the existing land tenure system.
Zimbabweans went much further than South Africans but there are still remaining hurdles which explain why a certain privileged class is still determined to distort and tarnish the land revolution here.
Second, agribusiness values in South Africa and Rhodesia tolerated and co-existed with apartheid conditions of oppression and inequality.
Therefore, establishing lucrative agribusinesses cannot have been the main purpose of the African land revolutions attempted in the two countries.
The aggregated growth and profitability of a class of big farmers, therefore, should not be the main yardstick for the success or failure of a land revolution which was prosecuted in spite of there being growth and profitability in agribusiness in the first place.
African values in the struggle for land and water: Views of Professor Mandivamba Rukuni
Here it may be important to cite the professor’s own testimony on page 38 of his 2007 book, Being Afrikan: Rediscovering the Traditional Unhu-Ubuntu-Botho Pathways of Being Human.
He wrote, thus: “After being a lecturer at the University of Zimbabwe since 1980, I had been promoted to full professor in 1992.
Then, the following year, in 1993, I was appointed by Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe to chair the Commission of Inquiry into Land Tenure Systems in that country.
I started off in this temporary assignment, which I did for about 14 months, believing that the Afrikan tenure systems are the problem, because my formal Western education was telling me this.
I firmly was of the opinion that we had to convert all the traditional land tenure systems into Western-style tenure systems, namely into leases and title deeds.
I also believed that the traditional African land tenure system was dysfunctional.”
The professor then added that he had started out believing that African values were now irrelevant to the contemporary problems of land tenure in Zimbabwe. But after the Commission’s visits to 44 districts of the country out of 56, he abandoned his pre-suppositions and appreciated the vibrancy and relevance of African living philosophy to contemporary challenges, including those of land tenure and agricultural productivity.
Therefore, in his 2007 book, Professor Rukuni made the following suggestions on the land issue in Zimbabwe.
First, there must be established a system which would allow all land in the country to have similar economic potential.
In the current situation, some lands fall under bilateral agreements called bilateral investment protection and promotion agreements (BIPPAS), most resettled farms belonging to resettled peasants and workers are referred to by credit institutions as ‘contested land’ where farmers are precarious tenants of the State, while still as all class of other farmers enjoy 99-year leases.
Such a situation invites trouble and fosters a silent form of apartheid.
Second, local African community leadership should be empowered by law to exercise the administrative role to grant the various land rights usually accorded to commercial land in the rest of the country.
Third, four tenure rights should be recognised and secured according to law throughout the country, namely:
- The right to use land;
- The right to transfer land;
- The right to exclude or include others; and
- The right to secure and enforce such provisions against abuse.
