ANOTHER LOOK AT ZIMBABWE

The tragedy of Zimbabwe lies not merely in its Government’s limiting of freedom nor its breaking down of tens of thousands of homes of citizens, and each is horrific, but the fact that both the developed and the developing world appear to have ignored the psychological damage of colonialism which gave rise to today’s excesses.

I do not seek to execuse the negative actions of the Robert Mugabe Government, but rather to stimulate readers to seek to appreciate what may have led to them. Yet even as I do this I urge the Zimbabwean Government not to continue to follow in the footsteps of British and German Imperialists in East Africa.

Zimbabwe, not unlike Tangan-yika, Uganda, Egypt and even India, China and the Caribbean and other formerly colonised lands had its development and initiative deliberately suppressed by the European Imperialists. This, in addition to the dehumanising treatment of its people by the invading and occupying European forces.

Jeffrey Herbst tells us in his State Politics in Zimbabwe, published in 1990, that British settler farmers, aided by Land Ordinances which "guaranteed white economic domination and black poverty during the 90-year colonial period," commandeered the country’s best agricultural land. This argument of the economic and social rape of Zimbabwe receives support from K Eicher in his Zimbabwe’s Maize-based Green Revolution: Preconditions for Replication, World Development Volume 23 No 5 published in May, 1995. Eicher has stated, and I have quoted for the record that when Zimbabwe achieved political independence in 1980, half of the country’s best arable land was controlled by approximately 5000 white settler-owned commercial farms, and the other half occupied by 700,000 indigenous farmers!

The clearly discriminating and cruelly, cynical situation was further aggravated when successive colonial administrations in East Africa, with specific reference to Zimbabwe, allocated large portions of rich agricultural land, for which the white settler farmers did not have immediate need, for the establishment of "wild game reserves." In the process, indigenous people were uprooted to make way for game parks and to prevent them from competing with settler farmers.

There was total disregard for East Africans and East African initiative and concerns. In the end, hundreds of thousands of indigenous people, who had their land arbitrarily seized from them and, in the process, denied a needed chance at upward mobility slipped into a dark age of poverty and seeming hopelessness.

"It is important to emphasise," E A Brett stresses in Colonialism and Underdevelopment in East Africa, the Politics of Economic Change 1919-1939 (Pages 294-295), "that the failure of Africans to move upwards did not stem in any way from any of the attributes supposedly associated with ‘traditional values,’ indeed the full power of the colonial state had to be brought in to eliminate small Asian and African middlemen who were competing only too effectively on the market where the opportunities existed. Their failure stemmed directly from the limits imposed on the free operation of the market system by the state....The nature of the colonial presence had precluded the development of an authentic capitalist revolution in the rural sector and, by so doing, created a situation which inhibited long-term structural change in social and economic relationships."

It must have been disturbing to Zimbabweans who for generations had been excluded from land their families once owned tilled and harvested but which had been expropriated at the barrel of a gun, to have other Zimbabweans defend the right of white settler farmers to the land.

In nearby Tanganyika, when Germany sought to create a colony there, resistance was met with a scorched earth policy. I wish to make it clear that I do not support the curtailing of freedom in Zimbabwe today nor at any time in the country’s history. Additionally, neither do I support the arbitrary demolition of citizens’ homes.

Nonetheless, I ask, and not rhetorically, where were the goody two shoes of Europe, who, today, hold up their hypocritical hands in much horror as the Zimbabwean Government breaks down homes, when the Germans were doing that and worse in say Tanganyka.

Let me quote Helge Kjekshus’ Ecology Control and Economic Development in East African History: The Case of Tanganyika 1850 (P 150) :—

"The systematic destruction (by the Germans) of houses, crops and storages as well as the capture of available stock...The military command found that famine was its most useful weapon. The guerilla tactics of the tribes made it impossible to inflict significant losses in battle and the theatre of operation was too vast to permit a concerted military response. Instead, the attention was trained on the civilian population....(troops) were stationed in strategic food producing locations to prevent any form of activity during the main seeding periods. The local people were faced with the cruel choice of surrendering or facing death by starvation."