Authors explore Britain’s role in land reform

“The war was over and returning veterans who wanted to farm were given land; roads were built to the farms; seed, fertilizer and implements were provided; and 40ha of land were ploughed for the farmers before they arrived. For those without farming experience, two years of training in farming and financial management were available. Much of the land was already occupied, so the existing farmers were forced off – often loaded into lorries and simply dumped far away, while their homes were burned. It was 1945-47 in Rhodesia and the veterans were from the Second World War.”

I asked co-authors Teresa Smart and Joe Hanlon if the land problem in Zimbabwe had been caused by the British, whose politicians knew little and cared less about the country and who had successfully kicked the problem into the long grass and left everyone believing that Ian Smith was responsible by declaring UDI in November 1965.

TS: It’s incredibly important to look at history and understand how the land was taken and developed into white farming land. After the Second World War there was a real move – supported by the British government – to get war veterans from South Africa and Britain across to Rhodesia.

They were given assisted passages, loans, training. They could live on an established farm for a year to learn how to do it and then they were given the land. Because of this, between 1948-1956, something like 100,000 African farmers, they were called squatters, were thrown off their land. This was known. It was documented. They were moved to make way for British and South African settlers and this was all approved by the British government at a time when there was a poor economic position in the UK – long before UDI.

We talked to land reform farmers who were children when this happened. Their fathers and grandfathers were thrown off their own land in the 1950s. They remembered being moved and losing their cattle. One man is still really upset. He can remember losing his dog during a move. Those sad memories stayed with them and when they became teenagers they left the country and joined the liberation struggle. Now they want their land. The Zimbabwean independence struggle was very much about land and war veterans were very upset that they got no land after 1980.

TG: I recall President Robert Mugabe asking at press conferences why there were no whites at national celebrations. Why do you think that was?

TS: Well some white farmers gave their workers an ox and wished them well and made sure they could get to various celebrations. Hardly any went themselves.

TG: Someone should make a study of the way Margaret Thatcher impacted on the Zimbabwean scene at that time. I recall at CFU and ZTA meetings white farmers saying – “Well if good old Maggie can knock the hell out of the unions and get away, with it there’s no reason we can’t knock the hell out of our m – – – s (an insulting word for Africans) and get away with it.” Can you believe that?

TS: I certainly can.

TG: There’s still so much uncertainty about what Britain did and didn’t promise the new government after independence. When talks started between the Mugabe administration and Tony Blair’s New Labour government in 1997 there was a lot of hope things would finally be settled – reconciled. What happened?

TS: Claire Short, Secretary of State for International Development, wrote a letter to Agriculture Minister Kumbirai Kangai saying: “A programme of rapid land acquisition as you now seem to envisage would be impossible for us to support. I should make it clear that we do not accept that Britain has a special responsibility to meet the costs of land purchase in Zimbabwe. We are a new Government from diverse backgrounds without links to former colonial interests. My own origins are Irish and as you know we were colonised not colonisers.”

I think that one letter from a minister gave the impulse for the Zimbabwean government and people to say “We’re on our own now. We have no responsibility to Britain. We’re not going to get anything out of them. Why should we behave in a way they think we should behave?”

TG: Joe, you said that Mugabe thought he’d lose votes if he didn’t sort of tag along behind the militants when it came to land reform, then he took credit for land reforms. That was a pretty cowardly thing to do, wasn’t it?

JH: In 2000, Mugabe was under a lot of pressure. The economy was in crisis. They were printing money. They were making a total mess of the economy. In no sense did Mugabe want to do land reform. But he had no choice. Any successful politician has to respond to the reality on the ground.

TG: Even if that means going along with such violence, such thuggery? Rightly or wrongly, Mugabe’s image in Britain right now is the image of a totally remote man who released a bunch of hooligans onto productive white farmers and ruined his country in the process.

JH: I think there was less violence in 2000 than there was 30 years before. What’s interesting is to compare Zimbabwe with South Africa. Hundreds of white farmers have been killed in South Africa mainly in KwaZulu/Natal. The number of deaths and injuries in Zimbabwe has been rather small. Okay, even a small number is too many and yes, it shouldn’t have been so violent but I think the campaigners against the land reforms have used that violence without ever having realized it has a history and that history comes from the liberation war. We should remember that many of those white farmers fought against war veterans. A number of the white farmers were veterans of the Rhodesian Army and the most vicious attacks were on those who had been soldiers in the Rhodesian Army – they were targeted.

TS: Mugabe used appalling violence against ordinary people in Matabeleland (Gukuruhundi) and they weren’t former members of the Rhodesian Army.

JH: A lot of Gukuruhundi was set up by South African agents who were still in Mugabe’s secret service (after 1980) who a year or so later were seen in Johannesburg working for the South African secret services.

TS: Because there was violence in some of the farm takeovers it’s as if now the audience throughout the whole world doesn’t want to know what has happened since. It’s as if because of the reported violence, nothing good came out of all of this. We spent months sitting on farms talking to people who occupied farms, particularly women who previously had hardly any land in the communal areas. But today there are farms full of hard working people who haven’t got a sense of violence, who are creating and doing well. Their kids are well dressed, well fed, going to school.

You now have a community that is so excited, so pleased they have land. They just had to take the land and most of them had nothing to do with violence.

Maybe none of them can remember the violence. The violence they want to talk about now is the violence when the rain doesn’t come or the problems caused when the sun’s too hot, or the difficulties encountered when they can’t get fertilisers. And those are the problems they all talk about now. Four thousand farms were taken over. There was trouble. There was violence in a small number of cases. There were large numbers of farms taken over and no-one noticed for a while. What we want to talk about is what’s happening on the land right now.