War vets followed British model: US author

The book “Zimbabwe Takes Back Its Land” (Kumarian Press, Virginia USA) is written by US-born Hanlon and two co-authors, his wife Teresa Smart and Jeanette Manjengwa. Hanlon is a well-respected authority on Mozambique who was asked by an unknown “friend” in Zimbabwe to travel around the country and write a book about the controversial fast-track land reform programme.

In a two-hour interview at his London home prior to the book’s launch, he told me: “The point is that most of the land and most of the farms have gone to 145,000 small farmers. They’re not Mugabe cronies. Most of them have never met Mugabe and they are the people who occupied the land. Many would have been supporters of the MDC. They occupied the land because they wanted to farm.”

Agreeing that the invasion of 1,000 white-owned farms in 2000 started against the backdrop of great violence against farmers and their workers, he said: “I think the occupations in 2000 were simply following the colonial model and the Cecil Rhodes model and I think that the war veterans learned their lessons very well, a lesson that we taught them –the British.”

A year ago, Ian Scoones, an academic at Brighton University’s Institute of Development Studies, published a book on land reform in Masvingo. Before the launch of Hanlon’s book, a debate on land reform was held at the London School of Economics and the President of the Commercial Farmers Union, Charles Taffs, flew in from Harare to make the voice of his 400 members heard.

“With an election expected in Zimbabwe later this year, the books by Hanlon and Scoones will be music to the ears of Robert Mugabe,” he said.

Taffs told a large audience at the LSE: “For 13 years, we’ve been net food importers. Right now, we have 1.7 million people facing starvation. We are again appealing to the international community for donor support against the backdrop of the country being totally broke by this land reform programme. We’ve had the fastest imploding economy outside of a war zone in the history of the world.”

At a time when the British Government is taking steps to come to terms with the Mugabe government – partly because it feels the land reform controversy is now on the backburner but more so because of Zimbabwe’s new found mineral wealth, the launch of a book praising radical reform at one of the citadels of the British establishment – Chatham House – has surprised many Zimbabweans.

A small group of protestors associated with the Zimbabwe Vigil stood outside Chatham House on the day of the launch. They were not allowed inside. Malcolm Rifkind attended because he wrote a thesis on land when he was a lecturer at the University of Rhodesia in the early 1960s.

Hanlon told me that initially Mugabe did not want land reform and ordered his ministers to go round the country telling war veterans that they must not touch white-owned land.

“It was,” he said, “the veterans of the liberation war who were really getting very fed up. They felt that Mugabe was not sympathetic to land reform and what they saw (after 1980) was the number of farms that were being acquired under willing buyer/willing seller were simply going to the Zanu (PF) elite. They said: ‘We’ve come to Independence 20 years ago and we’ve gained nothing. We’re poorer than we were before.’

“I think that eventually Mugabe realized that there were a lot of votes at risk here and if he was going to oppose the land reform he would lose the next election and so, good politician that he is, he reversed his position and then took credit for it. I think the only thing that Mugabe and the British Government agree on is the myth that Mugabe is responsible for land reform.”