Comment Response: The Troubling Question of Land Reform, by Linda E. Edwards

Sometime ago, I posted a rant about the land reforms in Zimbabwe on this blog. I have had a fair number of responses, both public and private, and at least one accusing me of racism.

One of the more interesting ones was from Linda Edwards, whose article I am posting here. Linda Edwards is from Trinidad and Tobago and the author of two novels: The Sun, The Snow, The Sea and  Coin of Gold,(2001) Xlibris.  She has also written a fair number of thought-provoking articles on various subjects.

The article I am reposting here, with her express permission, was written six years ago. I was not aware of its existence when I wrote mine. While I focussed on the issue of Zimbabwe, Linda Edwards gives a bird’s-eye view of the whole vexed issue of land reform, and raises some very interesting questions.

There are now land reform rumblings in Kenya, as some of you will have heard. I am beginning to think that a time will come when all former colonies will have to decide what to do about the land that the colonisers and the settlers took over.

But I delay. Here is Linda Edwards.

The Troubling Question of Land Reform

                                 By  L.E. Edwards, (victim and student of history}.

The headlines in Europe and Africa as well as in America, are screaming about the seizure of white farms in Africa, in Zimbabwe, seized by Africans, supporters of President Mugabe. I find myself trying to think beyond the screams of those caught in the dilemma of black people streaming over their pristine farmlands, and taking it as squatters. There are bad precedents here for the people of all of southern Africa. What if South Africa under Thabo Mbeke should do likewise, and Botswana?
The BBC spent hours with white people who apparently marched with Mugabe under Ian Smith regretted that he had allowed his people to do this, as if there was some flaw in Mugabe that they missed at the time and are now seeing.

Hold on to your hats and hairpieces for a minute. Let me digress to make a point.

When Diana, Princess of Wales was being buried, the commentators pointed out that she was being laid to rest on ancestral land that had been in the Spenser family for seven hundred years. That’s good. It set me to thinking, which African, in Africa, not those snatched into slavery in the Americas, can proudly stand on a piece of land and say he is standing on land that has been in his family for seven hundred years? And yet, there is no disputing that man as we know him, emerged in Africa, and that the people of Africa are distinctive by virtue of skin color and hair type, that set them apart from Asians, Europeans and the indigenous Americans.

The reason few Africans are still living on their ancestral land is well documented in a recent book by Randall Robinson called The Debt. Many parts of Africa were denuded of their population by slave traders and exploiters from Europe who created wars among peace loving people, in order to snatch slaves and land. One poignant comment in the book was an appeal by the King of the Congo in 1526 to the King of Portugal to stop his people from raiding thousands of Africans. Emissaries sent to the pope to ask his intervention, were arrested in Portugal, and perhaps, this is not documented, sold into slavery.

No European country in the four hundred years prior to the mid-twentieth century recognized African land rights. They invented wars of conquest as means of land acquisition. They regarded land on which Africans lived, as lands on which nobody lived. Particularly true was this in places where the informal ownership of land among nomadic peoples left vast tracts apparently unoccupied. This land seized by Britain, France, Belgium and the Dutch, insignificant countries if one counted land mass and not gunpowder; was carved up into farmlands and assigned to Dutch, French, Belgian and British settlers, in the same way that Israeli settlers still try to establish settlements on Arab land. Because these people were white, their land holdings were protected against protest by law, the white man’s law, and by the jails which the white man constructed to imprison those who opposed the white man’s law. Long jail terms and other harsh and often brutal punishments prevented protest until the situation in South Africa became so bad that even white people were forced to protest, especially when the South African brutality was being practiced by people of Boer origins and who made Africaans the “Mother Tongue “ of former English speaking colonists.

Now the scene shifts to the independence movements of the sixties through eighties. A series of Westminster agreements gave independence first to India/Pakistan, and gave rise to their continuous wars, the British left Israel, and we know how that is working out, then came Ghana, Nigeria, Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago. In none of these places was the question of land reform dealt with by the exiting colonial power. The economic symbols of power were in white hands and the political power in the hands of the “natives.” It was the sort of devilish solution that could only be thought up by people who believed that people of African ancestry were idiots, or were willing to remain beggars forever in the land of their birth.

The people of Mugabe’s party are taking a lesson from the ancient Romans. Land was given for fighting in war. They are taking a lesson from the USA where Indian land was given to white settlers with no regard whatsoever for who was already living on it for twenty thousand years. Now the drastic land reform policy practiced in present day Zimbabwe is upsetting to the European farmers who have worked the land for perhaps five generations. Now, where exactly are they expecting the landless black people to get land from? The problem is the same in the Mexican state of Chiapas.

Of all the former British colonies who have tackled this problem, the solution I find most pleasing is that of Antigua and Barbuda under the late trade unionist turned Prime Minister, Vere C. Bird. When I lived in Antigua in the late eighties, I heard the story from the Antiguans themselves.

The white planters in Antigua had bitterly opposed independence from Britain, but Bird, encouraged by other Caribbean leaders, Manley, Bustamante, Grantley Adams persisted. When he finally worked out an agreement with Westminster, his next stop was Barclay’s Bank. On his return to Antigua and Barbuda, he bought out every white planter on the island, and distributed their land among the cane farmers, former slaves, whose sweat had helped make Britain rich off its colonies. He invited his former opponents to go farm elsewhere. Some went to East Africa, quite probably to Zimbabwe also, some to Barbados and some to Australia and New Zealand. There are no former white colonial farmers farming land in Antigua.

The Trinidad/Tobago solution was slightly different. White planters held thousands of acres of land, that the population of imported African slaves and indentured Indians had no access to. There were two large former American bases that were just lying there, thousands of acres of unused land. The government decreed that if unused land was not under cultivation, growing food for the nation, not sugar and cocoa to export, but real food, by a certain date, the land reverted to the government to redistribute to the people.

The plantocracy’s screams were vociferous, “Communist!”. The local media, controlled by the planter class and their chamber of commerce friends was loud in condemnation, but land reform was under way.

Trinidad and Tobago and Antigua differ from Zimbabwe and South Africa in that they are relatively small islands. They are hot, humid, and were primarily sugar growing colonies. Zimbabwe is different. The climate is pleasanter for Europeans. There is African wildlife in the backyard and diamonds, gold and copper in the hinterland. There are also millions of landless people, disinherited by the stroke of a pen in some colonial office hundreds of years ago, whose expectations of improved conditions under independence cannot be realized because those who had a stranglehold on the economic throat of the indigenous population have never let go.

Whatever the outcome of the Zimbabwe situation is, it will have repercussions throughout the world where subject peoples, now supposedly free, find that freedom is a debt too big for their country to pay, a burden too heavy to carry, in the manner in which they have tried to carry it, in the post-colonial era. While Caribbean countries struggle under the burden of their one crop economies, the educated people of Africa will look to other solutions to change the situation they live under. South Africa too, would need to tackle the problem of land reform. Under aparthied, we all heard that 3% of the population owned 90% of the land. Has anything changed in that area since 1994? How long will southern Africans wait to own a piece of the land on which their people have lived for three million years? They are not asking for a country estate the size of that owned by the family of Lady Diana Spencer, whose brother, you may recall, moved to South Africa to escape the consequences of living in England.

I recently heard on the BBC of an Israeli who was going to open a farm in Africa, because the labour was cheap there. I couldn’t help asking myself whose land he was planning to acquire, and by what means. He was not going to grow food for feeding Africans, 100% of his produce was for export.  Eventually, when the land was poisoned under monoculture, which is not the method of farming most supportive of the land in the tropics, he, like past colonial masters, would move on somewhere else, possible leaving some bastard children in his wake. Of course this could only happen if Africans allow it to happen. I do not think his plans would currently include Zimbabwe.

Linda E. Edwards
Houston, Texas

15 April, 2000

Comments

[African]

This Zimbabwe story cannot be appreciated fully without a word about Cecil Rhodes. He actually named the country Rhodesia, now called Zimbabwe after himself. He was a mass murderer and enslaver, concentration camp operator. He also displaced a lot of Africans from their ancestral lands to make room for his tribespeople. The crimes of Cecil Rhodes have a direct continuity wth what is happening now. Africans are expected to forget.

[Patrick Gathara]

Why not turn Linda Edwards question on its tail? In Britain, how many of its 55 million citizens can proudly stand on a piece of land and say they are standing on land that has been in their family for seven hundred years? Not too many I suspect.

Take the Scottish example. During the violent and brutal land 'clearances' in the Highlands during the 18th and 19th centuries, it is estimated that 85-90% of the population were forcibly cleared from the land. Today, just 1250 or so landowners (mainly the aristocracy and wealthy individuals) out of a population of 5 million own two thirds of Scotland.

In spite of this, Scotland has a GDP per capita of $23,622 compared to Zimbabwe's $1,900 which gives the lie to Edwards contention that African's "expectations of improved conditions under independence cannot be realized because those who had a stranglehold on the economic throat of the indigenous population [read land] have never let go."

The fact is the "issue" of land ownership is a convenient excuse for failed leadership.

[Vito]

Mr.Gathara,where's scotland supposed to be?East,West Central,North or South AFRICA?And then there's this thing about refeerring to England,Britain or the UK as fits the situation or suits the writer.Rather cheap!

[Patrick Gathara]

Vito,
So I guess land issues are only land issues when it involves the dispossession of Africans eh? We are not the only ones who have suffered it. Learning from other peoples' experiences is nothing to be ashamed of. It is the very definition of education.

[Vito]

True,but then education to what end?if its to give a dispossessed poeple the illusion that the injustice perpetrated on them will have long term benefits like imaginary increases in GDP per capita,then i beg to disagree with you;we really dont need it because it's more of Psycho-mental slavery than education.Thanks

[Patrick Gathara]

Vito,
The imaginary increases in GDP are not the result of the dispossession of land. That is why I cited the Scottish example. They suffered the loss of their land in much the same way our ancestors did. But that has not prevented them from becoming a wealthy people. The difference between them and us is simply leadership. Theirs served the people, ours served themselves.

[vito]

Thanks Patrick,and that's exactly why it took the scots a century to get to where they are.If they reacted like us they'd have gotten there earlier;so i firmly beleive our approach is better.Every other oppressed poeples should be learning from us and not condemning.There can never be meaningful and sustainable developement without JUSTICE.

[Patrick Gathara]

Well more than 40 years after most African countries got independence, we are on the road to nowhere. Approaches such as Zimbabwe's seem to be a step in the wrong direction. I would gladly support them if you could point out examples where such have worked in a shorter time period than it took the Scots.

And what exactly should oppressed peoples be learning from us? How to be corrupt? How to sacrifice their nation's welfare to the short term interests of the political classes? Those are lessons they could do without.

[Vito]

To stop being puns on the global chess board for one;or at least stop regarding ourselves as such.
Our welfare indeed.True we're not alowed to beg or borrow anymore;we are'nt qualified for membership into exclusive clubs like HIPC etc.
If our "welfare" is so perceived as having been "sacrificed"on the altar of JUSTICE,so be it.
And then its humanity that's on the fast track to nowhere with the prevailing greed, hypocrisy,injustice and double standards;not just us.
"Saul"Mugabe,by a singular act became "Paul" Mugabe and there's no turning back.Checkmate!

[Misty]

If the whites had not made trouble in the Zimbabwe land reform then the voilence that marked it would never have happened.....
Why can't the whites realize that the land was never theirs to take in the first place....

[Patrick Gathara]

Misty,
So now it's the whites who are to blame for the violence, eh? Next you'll be blaming them for all the shortages, the collapsing economy, the slum demolitions. Nothing whatsoever to do with the very people who are perpetrating them. Blame the victims.

Vito,
Mugabe serves neither your welfare nor justice. It is surely no coincidence that he discovered the "land issue" just as elections were around the corner and he was facing a credible challenge to his position. And where is the justice in consigning millions to a short and miserable existence for the sake of an election? Anyways, the fact that the whites took the land from your forefathers (who probably stole it from someone else themselves) doesn't justify or excuse Mugabe's actions.Two wrongs don't make a right.

You want to live in the past, be my guest. But don't drag your countrymen down with you. The past cannot be undone. The future however beckons and can be moulded for the benefit of all Zimbabweans (yes, including the "white devils"- they're just as Zimbabwean as Mugabe).