FACTS do not lie nor do they sensationalise nor romanticise.
To go forward without stumbling or falling into pits we have to constantly look back where we are coming from.
In our beloved country, it starts and ends with the land — with many foreigners interested and coveting what’s on and under the land.
Facts are that the British colonialists began stealing land from us in 1889 and they continued to do that for 50 years.
At independence in 1980, six thousand white farmers owned 15,5 million hectares of good fertile prime land, 39 percent of the land in the country, while 4,5 million black farmers living in the communal areas were forced to subsist on 16,4 million hectares of the most arid, dry and infertile land formerly known as the Tribal Trust Lands.
Truth and facts about our country.
The negative images found in the international media are not the real Zimbabwean story.
Colonisation was a brutal process of disempowerment.
We lost our land.
We lost our culture.
We lost our freedom.
We lost our identity.
There is nothing empowering about receiving aid, approbation or approval from the West.
On the contrary, the West continues to disempower the so-called developing parts of the world.
Let us revisit Chairman Herbert Wiltshire Pfumaindini Chitepo’s words when he quoted European historians saying: “When we Europeans call people natives, we take away anything from them that suggests they are human beings. They are to us like the forest which the Western man fells down. Or, the big game that he shoots down. They have no tenure of land. Their tenure of land is as precaurious as that of the animals ….”
For Chairman Chitepo, the tragic consequence for black Zimbabweans was that when the British occupied Zimbabwe, “… a (black) man who had lived on a piece of land, cultivated, built his home and reared his cattle, goats and sheep in the same piece of land suddenly woke up to be told by a European who had come from afar: ‘No, you are a tenant now. You are a squatter. You must now pay rent to me. If you don’t pay rent to me, you must work for me as a kind of payment for continued residence in my plot. You are nothing. You are now in effect my chattel.’”
And, when Rhodesians boast how they created jobs for black people, that is what they mean; we were the whiteman’s chattel.
And did you know that the hippopotamus hide whip, the sjambok was the most important tool of mobilising labour.
Black people were force-marched into reserves with arid soils that were not suitable for agricultural activities.
These places were deliberately chosen to make black people unproductive and survive as employees of whites.
The African was consigned to slavery, to a life of drudgery. He/she was forced into a life where he/she was semi-alive and semi-dead, always at the beck and call of the colonial State, colonial Church, colonial propaganda and whipped and jailed by the white settlers just for him/her to remember all the time that he/she belonged to a defeated race of ‘barbarians and pagans’.
White farmers, white mine owners, the British South Africa Company (BSAC) and other white syndicates thrived on cheap black labour.
It was a deliberate policy that the land in any African Reserve was not good enough for an independent livelihood by the African.
Yet blacks still remained essentially a class of self-employed rural cultivators.
But the land that they were forced into was never good enough for them to live on without seeking employment offered by the whites.
Hence the African Reserves were an unending source of cheap black labour.
The creation of the African Reserves in Zimbabwe was done along the same lines as the creation of African Reserves in South Africa by Rhodes through the Glen Grey Act of 1894 when he (Rhodes) was the Prime Minister of the Cape.
Rhodes sponsored this Act.
By this law, blacks were to be kept in reserves as a pool of labour.
This meant that the living conditions of the black person were to be tied up with the labour needs of the whiteman.
The classical European peasant of the Middle Ages of Europe had no right to land, but he lived by working partly for himself, and partly for the landowner, the landlord, while staying on the farm.
What Rhodes and his hordes of looters did, therefore, when they colonised the country was to change, by force, the black population so that it became something like the European peasantry of the Middle Ages Europe, but with characteristics of the 19th Century European wage workers as well as characteristics of black slavery in the US.
Blacks provided free labour to whites in the form of those blacks who were charged for committing crimes and were forced to work for whites as convicted criminals straight from prison, or working for whites as directed by the magistrates or by native commissioners, or as tenant farmers.
Black labour was cheap because only the employers or the State determined how much to pay the worker; the black worker had no say whatsoever in determining the price for his labour.
It was an offence for the black provider of labour to complain.
A complaint by a black person was regarded as a sign of arrogance and rebellion against colonialism and white racism.
The wages were, therefore, nothing but what was enough to keep the slaves alive.
The whole system was nothing, but slavery. Indeed, large numbers of blacks used to be captured to go and work for white people under what came to be known as chibharo (forced labour).
The sjambok was the most infamous means of mobilising labour.
And the white churches prayed for the success of what the BSAC and the white settlers and companies were doing on blacks; exactly the same way the same churches behaved during the slave days in the US, Jamaica, Brazil, Haiti and Barbados.
Today’s Zimbabwe cannot, in any way, be compared to the colonial era.
Vision 2030 will be achieved much faster if we all have a full appreciation of where we are coming from.