Read on Twitter
I hate every single thing about the way this story gets reported. https://twitter.com/theeconomist/status/1291831500707684352
Land reform was not done properly, but to be clear, it is absolutely necessary for indigenous people to own the means of their own production. That land did not belong to the white farmers that “owned” it.
They came to possess the land through a colonial transferral of land into regimes of private property. Leaders like Lobungela, for example, signed manipulative and coerced treaties and concessions in an attempt to avoid war with whites he knew he couldn’t win.
The 1st Umvukela/Chimurenga was literally Ndebela and Shona insurrection against the British South Africa Company, ie the economic and political driving force of colonization in the region—the result was the forcible unification of Matabeleland and Mashonaland into S. Rhodesia.
The reason it is solely recognized as white farmland, the reason that land reform isn’t recognized as necessary or legitimate, is that this primitive accumulation assimilated native land — discarding indigenous sociality + claims — into a British structure of private property.
One of the terms of the Lancaster House Agreement was a “willing buyer, willing seller” model for land land reform after independence: a fund was created for the British + US governments to compensate white “owners” to aid reconciliation b/n 1980-90. It didn’t happen obviously.
This unactualized liberation, this “patriotic history,” was exploited by Mugabe as justification for his fast tracked land reform project in the early 2000s. Such a project is only as good as the governance that attempts it.
If you want to write about land reform well, you have to start with the scramble for Africa and British expropriation/settler theft, and only after that can you start talking about the failure of Lancaster House and then Mugabe’s policy. Don’t tell half a story.
Hello!!!!!!
https://twitter.com/seka_hako/status/1292146990537744384?s=21 https://twitter.com/seka_hako/status/1292146990537744384
https://twitter.com/seka_hako/status/1292146990537744384?s=21 https://twitter.com/seka_hako/status/1292146990537744384
