Africans vs. rich farmers in cutting issue: whose
land?
By Monica
Moorehead
As a struggle over land rights intensifies in Zimbabwe,
that crisis has spilled over into other countries in southern
Africa, including Mozambique.
Zimbabwe used to be the racist, white-ruled entity called
Rhodesia, after the British financier Cecil Rhodes. His
British South Africa Company robbed the land from the
Matabele and Mashona people in the 1890s. The British
soldiers who fought for the BSAC were each rewarded with nine
square miles of land and 20 gold claims--estimated to be
worth about $50,000 at that time.
Besides seizing the land, the British looted 100,000
cattle from the native people, leaving the survivors of the
war destitute. The area became a formal colony of Britain,
called Southern Rhodesia, in 1923. Later the name was changed
to Rhodesia.
In 1980, after two decades of struggle by national
liberation groups, the racist, white minority government led
by Ian Smith had to turn over the reins of government to the
Patriotic Front, an alliance of the ZANU and ZAPU parties.
Robert Mugabe of ZANU became prime minister of Zimbabwe.
The super-oppressed Zimbabwean masses had carried out a
heroic armed struggle, but it ended in a compromise, with the
racists still controlling the rich agricultural land that
dominated the economy.
The Zimbabwean people had won formal independence but were
not free from the remnants of colonialism and imperialism,
which had shamefully plundered and enslaved the entire
African continent for centuries. As a result, a handful of
super-rich white farmers--many of them descendants of those
invading soldiers who stole the land from the native people
in the 1890s--still control 60 percent of the most arable
lands in Zimbabwe.
Black veterans seek land
Thousands of Black African war veterans who fought against
colonial rule are now telling the world that they are the
rightful owners of this land because of the struggle for
independence. For the past two decades, the war veterans have
appealed to the white farmers to leave Zimbabwe and turn over
the land. But this appeal was ignored.
This struggle is not unlike the one that took place after
the U.S. Civil War. During Reconstruction the freed slaves
fought against the former plantation owners for the land that
they had tilled from sunup to sundown under the whip and the
lash. The former slaves were demanding the 40 acres and a
mule that had been promised to them by the Abraham Lincoln
administration. However, Andrew Johnson, a Confederate
sympathizer who became president after Lincoln was
assassinated, rejected this demand.
What is going on in Zimbabwe is another form of
Reconstruction, except that many of the war veterans are
armed, along with the farmers.
The war veterans are now fighting a war on two fronts. One
is an armed confrontation against the farmers. The other is a
propaganda war against the worldwide big business press,
especially in the U.S. and Britain. The farmers are portrayed
as the innocent victims of physical attacks, while the war
veterans are portrayed as wild marauders on a violent
rampage. It is one of the most vile, racist smear campaigns
concocted by the media against the African people.
Because the Zimbabwean government has come out with some
measure of support for the war veterans taking back the land,
the U.S. and British imperialists have threatened economic
sanctions. Some have called for the outright overthrow of
Mugabe.
White farmers buying land in Mozambique
Some white farmers have decided to leave Zimbabwe. They
are not planning to go back to Britain but are opting to go
to neighboring Mozambique and have applied to purchase land
there. On July 11, the Integrated Regional Information
Network of the United Nations reported that 63 white farmers
from Zimbabwe had made a formal request to the Mozambican
government to buy 400,000 hectares of the most arable land,
right near the Mozambican/Zimbabwean border. A hectare equals
about 2.5 acres.
Only 4 million hectares of land is cultivated in all
Mozambique. So if these farmers get their way, they will
privately control 10 percent of this land and an even larger
slice of the Mozambican agricultural economy. This will
undoubtedly lead to the displacement of great masses of
people, whose local economy has already been devastated by
the policies of the IMF and World Bank
Some bourgeois analysts have dubbed Mozambique an
"economic success story." And it is--for the bankers who take
out the wealth. But life expectancy is 47 years for men and
50 years for women. The average yearly income is $220.
Under the IMF and World Bank's structural adjustment
programs, more than 900 state enterprises have been
privatized. This former Portuguese colony of 18 million
people has a foreign debt of close to $6 billion.
Since its formal independence in 1975, Mozambique has been
devastated by many years of civil war. The mercenary army
Renamo, with roots in apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia and
collusion from the U.S., created a nation of orphans and
amputees. Droughts and floods also contributed to its
downward spiral.
All this, after being a Portuguese "possession" for
centuries, has lead to this country's gross
underdevelopment.
Eighty percent of Mozambique's work force is rooted in
subsistence farming. These farmers have only archaic hand
tools to eke out a living. They cultivate between two to four
hectares of land. They have no access to technologically
advanced equipment.
When the Mozambican government made a request to some of
these peasant farmers to produce more fruits and vegetables
for export, not local consumption, the farmers stated they
were having difficulties buying agricultural parts, paying
their energy and water bills, and buying machinery, due to a
lack of credit.
This is not true for the white farmers, who can easily
attract huge bank loans, investments and the best
earth-moving machinery. Once the white farmers buy the land,
they can hire Mozambicans to work the land, who will then
become just a few steps above being slaves in their own
country.
These white farmers are reminiscent of the big landlords
during the height of feudalism. They are on the side of the
big imperialist banks and private investors who seek to
recolonize Africa by financial means in order to secure even
greater profits. Zimbabwe was once self-sufficient in food
production, but now has been reduced to importing staples
since the restructuring by the U.S.-dominated IMF and World
Bank.
What is going on in Zimbabwe and Mozambique shows why
there is a growing worldwide movement against globalization
or global capital. Countries that once could protect their
independence and their indigenous economies have been reduced
to pauperism under the brutal restructuring and privatizing
plans forced on them by the imperialist bankers.
Both the richness of the exploiters and the poverty of the
exploited are the legacy of the slave trade and
colonialism--something that the imperialist governments
refuse to admit. The U.S. in particular has demanded that the
UN conference on racism, to take place in Durban, South
Africa, at the end of this month, leave out any mention of
reparations.
All the more reason why the demand for reparations for the
African people, including massive land redistribution, has to
be raised prominently on every possible occasion.
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
Subscribe wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net
Support independent news http://www.workers.org/orders/donate.php)
HOME
:: U.S. NEWS ::
WORLD NEWS ::
EDITORIALS
:: SUBSCRIBE ::
DONATE
Email
this article
Printable
page