THE myth of Rhodesia as the ‘Grain Basket of Africa’ was born out of the 1931 Land Apportionment Act and the 1952 Land Husbandry Act scandals and, it is consistent with the establishment of Rhodesia as ‘a commercial enterprise’, in the words of ZANU National Chairman Herbert Wiltshire Pfumaindini Chitepo.

The 1931 Land Apportionment Act cast ‘in stone’ the settlement of the majority ‘native’ Zimbabweans on barren lands while the minority white settlers arrogated themselves prime agricultural land. And the informing Satanism was to withdraw food security from the natives and weaponise it to force the victims to: “…sell themselves in slavery to white capitalists and imperialists. The ones who (had) designed (the) law for the very purpose of making sure they (could) drain the African labour into their own industries, into their own farms, into their own mines. Exploit them! Pay them next to nothing, because they (had) no alternative. They (had to) try to live.” (Chitepo 1973) Rhodesia, as the ‘Grain Basket of Africa’, became regime-change currency in the wake of land redistribution to landless blacks.

Since then, it has been flaunted as fact (by those opposed to the exercise) so many times that it has become a seemingly unassailable truth. And it may remain so until those who take political solace in it are forced to interrogate its capacity to hold water in the historical context in which it is applied. It is the aim of this article to do just that. According to Chitepo, the establishment of Rhodesia as a ‘commercial enterprise’ meant that “…if you went there (the whitemen) to settle, your intention was to exploit, not only the natural resources of the country, but the people (as well)”. The primary resource to be exploited was the land and, it was “…the thing on which (the victims) live(d). (You) built your house(s) on it; (you got your) food from it. Life (was) sustained on the land, and without it they were really facing death”. (Chitepo 1973) Incidentally, it is irrefutable that when Rhodes’s 1 000-strong Pioneer Column invaded Zimbabwe, they did not have enough food stocks to sustain themselves.

They were confident that they would live off the grain basket they knew was already in existence. These were facts men like Robert Moffat, David Livingstone, Thomas Baines and Frederick Selous had already established when they scouted Zimbabwe for colonisation. In simple terms, this means that the regional grain basket status of Zimbabwe pre-dated the 1890 occupation by those whose “… intention was to exploit, not only the natural resources of the country, but the people (as well)”. The choice of Mashonaland and not Lobengula’s Matabeleland as their landing pad also inadvertently confirmed the regional grain basket status, especially the pretext that they were protecting the Shona from Ndebele raids. Time would prove that the pretext was just that — a pretext. Ndebele forays into Mashonaland were themselves very real and they were not only for cattle but grain women and manpower, too.

Matabeleland was, and still is, cattle and not grain territory. This literally confirms that Mashonaland produced both cattle and grain in enough quantities to survive the triple threat. Violent reaction to occupation was an inevitability only time could stall but not stop. Chitepo talked about it in his 1973 speech in Australia: “The reverse reaction of our forefathers back in 1893 when they suddenly realised that the man who had come in; the white-faced man who had come in . . . whom they had not even immediately resisted because they didn’t think he was coming to do anything so terribly evil — was actually trying to rob them of their land . . . They rose up in rebellion. It was called the war of Chimurenga.” History written by members of the occupation force downplays land appropriation as the actual cause of war.

Instead, it amplifies the blame of drought, rinderpest and locusts on the white invaders. (Rinderpest was a cattle disease that decimated the indigenous herds. The foreign settlers had apparently brought it with their draught oxen from South Africa.) The history narrative was intended to also cast the native as a superstitious savage and, in so doing, justify the invasion as a civilising mission but which now turns out to be a double-edged sword that had the unintended consequence of also confirming the regional grain basket status of Mashonaland. In Matabeleland, the war lasted exactly five months from March 20 to August 20 1896. In Mashonaland, it lasted almost two years.

What this meant was that if the years of war were also the same years of drought, rinderpest and locusts, the logical consequence should have been severe starvation. And yet, none of those who wrote on the war reported any deaths due to starvation in Mashonaland. Instead, ‘The Reports on the Native Disturbances in Rhodesia 1896-97’, co-authored by Albert Grey, who was BSAC administrator during the years of war, actually logs wagonloads of grain loot. One report is that on June 29 1896, Captain Nesbitt of the Mashonaland Mounted Police attacked CAnother report is that, on July 1 1896, Captain Taylor of the Natal Troop raided Chirimba Village and looted four wagonloads of grain. Yet another report is that, between July 22-28 1896, Ruoko’s Kraal in Chishawasha was raided by Lt-Col Beal of the Rhodesia Horse and grain amounting to 200 bags was looted. The looting was routine and institutionalised to the extent of forming a ‘Loot Committee’ of which Thomas Meikles was among the major beneficiaries.

He would go on to launder his share into hotels and chain stores. TM, now trading as Pick & Pay is a prominent example. In essence, records of wagonloads of grain loot from a war zone under the severe grip of drought say a lot more than the authors intended to become public knowledge. They are not simply a spelling of surplus from years of plenty but the high definition of a regional grain basket.

Such wagonloads of grain speak of consciousness of food security and a capacity to plan ahead. Wagonloads of grain loot from a war zone under the severe grip of drought do not add up to the narrative of hopeless natives waiting to be saved by invading farmers from Europe. Looking at the whole thing from another point of view, one who takes time to study war-time photographs proffered by the invaders in their narratives as a capture of the prevailing context will notice that ‘virtually’ all of the photographs taken of prisoners of war do not show their subjects as famished. The photographs speak of fighters well-fed even in the difficult conditions of war and drought. An iconic example is the photograph of the mediums of Nehanda and Kaguvi standing against the brick wall of a Salisbury prison.

Neither looks famished, notwithstanding that they were the prisoners of racists who had no reason to keep them healthy! Another iconic photograph actually shows the native police as the ones who were famished. And they were the ones actually supposed to be getting rations from the supposed creators of the Rhodesian ‘Breadbasket of Africa’. Other photographs are those of natives hung from trees with the killers looking on from horseback. Others are those of fighters in chains. Indeed, photographs that captured the context of war during the Second Chimurenga also testify to the same. They show healthy villagers, rural prisoners of war and guerrillas not sustained by the Rhodesian Grain Marketing Board or Rhodesian grain millers but by resilience on barren lands; a resilience that must now be used to show the potential realisable from equitable redistribution of prime agricultural land back to the victims of colonial dispossession. What this means is that, even after the population had been forced from the fertile land onto the barren lands, they continued to feed themselves not from the Rhodesian basket but their own! The majority population was rural then as it is now.

More so then than now because then, there were stringent rules to keep them so. And no rural folks relied on the Rhodesian Grain Marketing Board for their grain supplies. None relied on the Rhodesian millers for mealie-meal. What this reading of the ground and not prescriptive settler history means is that the regional grain basket status of Zimbabwe predates the coming of the Rhodesians. And what the Land Apportionment Act did was to simply empty that grain basket into the ‘commercial enterprise’ the homosexual Rhodes established to exploit not only the natural resources of Zimbabwe but the people as well.

The Land Apportionment Act was the principal of the ‘armoury’ of laws the Rhodesians designed not only to empty the existing regional grain basket into the ‘commercial enterprise’ of Rhodesia but for the very purpose of making sure they (could) drain the African labour into their own industries, into their own farms, into their own mines. Exploit them! Pay them next to nothing, because they (had) no alternative. They must try to live. That is what the invaders, sponsored by the homosexual Rhodes, did to us. And when one stops to think of it, the idea was very homosexual in its conception. How so? This is because, while heterosexuality is an act of sexuality that reproduces life in order to sustain humanity, homosexuality essentially does not lead to or sustain life. And, the obscenity of it all is in the sense that in spite of the homosexual being, himself, a product of heterosexuality, he does not want to pass on the free gift of life. He chooses, instead, to become the terminal beneficiary of the same free gift that is meant for own ‘reproduction’ as a human being.

The insecurities one would raise with homosexuality, which, incidentally, those who enslaved and colonised Africans are now forcing the erstwhile victims to accept are precisely the same insecurities (in paradigm) which Chitepo raised with the Land Apportionment Act. His challenge was: “How can 12 million . . . 24 million people live on that small amount of land? They can’t! They can’t survive. Because they can’t survive, what must they do? They must sell themselves in slavery to white capitalists and imperialists. The ones who have designed this law for the very purpose of making sure they can drain the African labour into their own industries, into their own farms, into their own mines. Exploit them! Pay them next to nothing, because they have no alternative. What does this mean? This means a process of almost the equivalent of homicidal or genocidal extermination of a people.”

The depravity becomes disturbingly obscene when you consider that before the Western Industrial Revolution, the very same nations were breeding African slaves for profit and labour in the UK and the US. And, after the same slaves had been made redundant by the machines of the Industrial Revolution, it is only then that they started prescribing homosexuality as a human right. And Africans have not asked how a practice that contests nature and leads to human extinction can be given the label of a human right! Looking forward after everything has been said, the issue at stake seems to lie in making struggling beneficiaries of land redistribution recognise kuti the touted status of Rhodes’s commercial enterprise as having been the grain basket of Africa does not hold water in the context in which it is applied.

It was a subversion or re-invention of a grain basket already in existence; a grain basket re-invented to feed people who had always fed themselves. The beneficiaries of land redistribution simply have to accept their responsibility not to buy from the Rhodesian basket what their forebears once grew for themselves.harra’s Kraal and looted grain totaling 40 bags and burnt down the remaining food provisions.