The imagination of land and the reality of seizure: Zimbabwe's complex reinventions.

• Author: Chan, Stephen

In the months before the December 2003 Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in Abuja, Nigeria, Robert Mugabe sustained an intense diplomatic program. Anxious to avoid an extension of his country's suspension from the Commonwealth he assiduously cultivated President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa and other regional leaders. Mbeki in turn reassured Washington that Mugabe was amenable to reason and that the Mbeki brand of patient, if slow, persuasive diplomacy would result in a negotiated compromise between the Zimbabwean government and the opposition. Simultaneously, Mugabe was at pains to indicate to President Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria that the Zimbabwean opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, could not lead a viable alternative government. Obasanjo had not been impressed by Tsvangirai when the two had met, and Mugabe also emphasized the limitations of the MDC party and its lack of Cabinet material. All the while, Zimbabwean "track two," or unofficial, representatives visited London asking what might be the minimum conditions Mugabe had to satisfy in order to retain Zimbabwe's Commonwealth membership. Since the minimum condition was Mugabe's own retirement, the news was not welcome in Harare. As the surface rhetoric to all this, however, Mugabe's lieutenants and ambassadors sustained an international representation of the Zimbabwean situation as solely a black-and-white issue, in which the Commonwealth sought to redress a black victory against the historical reach of white colonialism. (1)

The Zimbabwean exclusion from the Commonwealth was upheld in Abuja, and Mugabe left the organization on 7 December 2003 in response. However, several--not all--African leaders felt aggrieved at the Commonwealth decision. Even if unreasonable and tyrannical in the perception of the West, Mugabe had persuaded much African opinion as to the legitimate nationalism of his policies, particularly over the issue of land. Colonial white denigration of black Africans and the appropriation of land as part of that denigration remained potent and near-contemporary emblems for Mugabe's rhetoric. Mugabe's words had resonance and, to be fair to him, he had signaled his views on land as early as the 1979 Lancaster House talks that had finally provided a formula for independence, and immediately after winning the 1980 independence elections. (2) Not only that, but U.S. efforts to broker an independence and peace deal in the mid-1970s had recognized a need for land distribution. Mugabe had, at the height of the 1992 famine, passed into legislation the Land Acquisition Act and, in 1997, begun the process of gazetting white-owned farms for nationalization. This was never an issue that would disappear--although it was Mugabe's own young government that conferred deeds of title on the white farmers, and it was Mugabe himself who maintained good relations with the white-dominated Commercial Farmers Union for 20 years of independence.

Signs of ambivalence or indecisiveness should not, however, have cloaked a deep-rooted and fundamental issue--which recently became a fundamentalist one. During the post-independence period, was the issue of land posed as a naked black-and-white dichotomy? Was the ownership of land only about economic redress and equity? Was land merely a static commodity, almost a nostalgia, or did it have dynamic values? The aim of this essay is to suggest answers to such questions. We also seek to illustrate the values inherent in land by reference to Zimbabwean creative literature; that is, to transcend questions of economic sociology, and political ideology by looking at the imagination of land that has hitherto escaped academic analysis in the fields of international relations and political science. It is hoped that the insights revealed will be helpful to the establishment of a proper critique of Mugabe's policies of seizure at all costs, and of its consequences.

In a pioneering work, Terence Ranger recounted how, in the early 20th century, peasant society became increasingly differentiated. A class of enterprising peasant agriculturalists emerged. These not only venerated the spirits associated with the land they farmed, but farmed in a patterned response to the commercial efforts of the white settlers. Those white settlers, in turn, saw the economic competition being offered and sought by all means to discourage it. (3) It was not for nothing that, in 1917, the Report of the Reserves Commission recommended strict boundaries for African land tenure. These were formalized in the 1923 constitution, when settler parliamentary government succeeded Cecil Rhodes's British South Africa Company, and in 1930, with the Land Apportionment Act, by which the majority of arable land was given over to private ownership by white settlers. Not all private ownership by black farmers disappeared, but increasingly, to become a black commercial farmer was to enter a small elite. One family that belonged to that elite was the Samkanges, their lives again recorded by Ranger. (4) Educated, Methodist, and nationalist, the family was remarkable by any standards. One of the Samkange sons, Stanlake, became a noted academic, novelist, and politician. Sufficiently "Europeanized" to build himself a (literal) castle for his residence, he was also the author of novels that resonate with the African history he taught at American universities before returning to Rhodesia. One of these, On Trial for My Country, (5) retelling the efforts of the Ndebele king, Lobengula, to resist Rhodes, carries a depiction of land that is imbued with spiritual as well as historical force.

The book is unusual when placed alongside the land debates of the 2000s, since it seeks to narrate both sides of the story--that of Lobengula and that of the white invaders. It begins with an encounter between the narrator and an old man who has returned from death and the afterlife. The encounter occurs in the shadows of the Matopos Hills, an area rich with spiritual significance, (6) and leads to the old man recounting (in parallel) two great councils in heaven--one in which Lobengula is required to explain to the ancestral spirits just how he had lost the land to the white man, and the other in which Cecil Rhodes must convince his ancestors that he has been just and honest in his dealings with Lobengula and his people. Each will be judged according to the moral standards of his own culture: "As a Christian, by this law you will be judged," Rhodes is told. (7) The novel then relates episodes from the history of colonization ("The Moffat Treaty," "The Rudd Concession") from two parallel and contrasting viewpoints--the colonial and the anticolonial--and readers are invited to choose between them. (Rhodes's side of the story is interlinked with the recollections of the very white men who were instrumental in taking the land--men with names like Moffat and Baines which were, until recently, street names in Harare.) In making this choice, readers are, of course, firmly guided: Rhodes is shown to have acted neither justly nor honestly toward the Africans. (8) And yet the novel does not articulate the final verdict. The old man tells the narrator that this verdict must remain "in the bosom of the Spirits." (9) Writing at an early stage of the African nationalist struggle in Zimbabwe, Samkange saw that land had great spiritual value, but that it was also the subject of a great debate, and that no simple answers are generated by struggle alone.

THE INDETERMINACY OF LAND

Much has been written about the spiritual qualities and values of land in Zimbabwe. The African belief in a spirit world populated by previously fleshly creatures, capable of autonomous interaction with the human world (in order to requite past wrongs, reward past rights, or act maliciously) and accessible through human mediators or spirit mediums, made land much more than an agricultural commodity, an economic unit, or a site of elite aspiration. Ranger and others have variously written of how spirit mediums were a vitally important validating authority for the guerrillas in the liberation war, conferring spiritual blessings and the blessings of the land upon them. (10) David Lan in particular has written of how the mhondoro, the royal or rain-making ancestral spirits of the Shona peoples, have territorial or spatial attributes; in Guns and Rain, he distinguishes between chieftanships and spirit provinces (areas whose rainfall is governed by individual mhondoro). It was the spiritual (rather than political or economic) authority over land that the guerrillas in Zimbabwe's war of liberation sought to co-opt in seeking the assistance of mediums, and it is this distinction between different kinds of authority that was being evoked in a recent pro-government advertisement in the Zimbabwean press: "Now that the land dour ancestors is in our hands, it's time to use it fully to guarantee food security, create jobs, develop and grow our economy for the good of our country." (11)

It is important, however, not to confer either too much, or too much unarbitrated, importance on the spiritual demeanor of the land. Who accesses the spiritual world, who mediates between flesh and spirit, and why, become significant questions in the politics of spirit mediums and their use. Billy Mukamuri, in a study that should have been more widely published, argues that at the local level individual spirit mediums could trade their insights and access for political leverage or political favors. (12) The spirit world could be used in arbitration and negotiation with the fleshly political world, and each local spirit, each local spirit medium, has a local agenda. In the liberation war novel entitled When the Rainbird Cries, the former Zimbabwean guerrilla Alexander Kanengoni tells a story of the destruction and suffering caused by an incompetent and cowardly guerrilla commander who operates in tandem with a fake spirit medium. (13)

It was in fact...