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Subject: Land report: The details 


Land report: The details 



This is the second part in a series of the Report of the Presidential Land Review Committee. 

(i) The financial and other resources required to achieve higher levels of production of various crops and other commodities will without doubt amount to massive orders of magnitude. While efforts should be directed to securing and deploying these resources self-reliantly within Government, the collaborative and coordinated participation of the local private sector should be tapped, and the assistance of friendly countries and other development partners sought as a vital complement to national initiatives. 

(ii) The setting up of the Agricultural Development Bank (ADB) out of the present AGRIBANK is long overdue. The new entity, namely, the ADB, should be adequately capitalised. Its sole, or at least pre-eminent, role in financing agriculture should be fully defined in its charter. 

(iii) There can be no alternative to the Programme’s success. It is not possible to move forward without an investment of energy, imagination and material resources into the Programme. Neither stagnation nor regression can be contemplated. Well-targeted and adequate financing of agrarian transformation is therefore a key aspect of the entire Programme. Hence the issues of financing of the land and agrarian reform are taken up as crucial aspects of this Report under Part IV of Volume I and elsewhere under Volume II. 

2. Background to Land Reform in Zimbabwe 

The land question has always been and remains at the core of Zimbabwe’s political, economic and social development. Indeed, now as in the past, it remains the root of the political tension within the country and with the former colonial power, Britain. The advent of European settler occupation of Zimbabwe in September 1890 is the genesis of the dispossession of blacks of their land. The 1893 invasion of the Ndebele Kingdom leading to the creation of the Gwaai and Shangani reserves; the 1896-97 Shona and Ndebele first Chimurenga/Imfazwe (war of liberation); the nationalist struggle in the period before and after the Second World War; the second Chimurenga/Imfazwe which gave birth to the independent Zimbabwe in 1980; the contentious Lancaster House Constitutional negotiations and the Agreement in 1979 and, as already stated, the current internal political developments, all bear testimony to the centrality of the land issue in the country’s history. 

The systematic dispossession realised largely through violence, war and legislative enactments by successive colonial Governments led to the racially skewed land distribution and ownership pattern that until recently was characteristic of Zimbabwe. Having regard to the political and related problems arising from the Boer controlled Witwatersrand gold fields in the Transvaal, Cecil John Rhodes, then Prime Minister of the Cape, and through his British South Africa Company (BASC), became fixated with the idea of developing a second Witwatersrand (Second Rand) to the north of te Limpopo river. The Rudd Concession of 1888, fraudulently obtained from King Lobengula, became the vehicle through which colonialists obtained mineral rights in Mashonaland. This Concession provided Rhodes with the impetus to obtain a Royal Charter in 1889, which, among other things, granted the BASC authority to administer and govern the region that encompasses present day Zimbabwe. The Charter was granted notwithstanding King Lobengula’s protestations that he had been deceived. Lobengula repudiated the Rudd Concession stating that he would "not recognise the paper, as it contains neither my words nor the words of those who got it". The response by Queen Victoria to King Lobengula’s protestation to this development was that it "would be unwise to exclude white men". 

The Rudd Concession was countered by the Lippert Land Concession of April 1889 which reflected competing European interests and German interests and aspirations to acquire territory. This Concession was also deceitfully obtained from Lobengula. With the connivance of the British Government and without Lobengula’s knowledge, the Lippert Concession was soon purchased by the BASC. Even so, by the time the Company bought the Lippert Concession it had already made extensive land awards to the settlers in Mashonaland. 

Disillusioned at the non-existence of the "Second Rand" in Mashonhaland and on the assumption that there existed more gold reserves in Matabeleland, the BASC, on a flimsy pretext, invaded Matabeleland in 1893, destroyed Lobengula’s Kingdom, seized and plundered cattle and other livestock and property and subdued the populace. Indeed the Company set up a "Loot Committee" which determined that settlers who participated in the war would be rewarded with a free farm measuring 3000 morgen (6 350 acres) anywhere in Matabeleland however with no obligation to occupy the land; each man was also guaranteed 15 reef and 5 alluvial gold claims, while the "loot" — Ndebele cattle — was to be shared with half going to the Company, the remaining half being divided equally among the men and officers. The Rhodesia Herald of July 1893, in urging settlers to pursue the land grab now that gold was unavailable, stated that the dispossessed blacks did — 

Not use a large portion of their rich and fertile country and the 

indemnity for expenses incurred could be paid without hard- 

ships to the natives in farms and mining ground. 

Although the existence of the imagined Matabeleland "Second Rand" was to prove yet another illusion, the acquisition of black land had begun in earnest, both for crop and livestock production as well as for speculative purposes. Henceforth the dispersal of the African populace into mostly marginal lands would be embarked upon with a ruthless determination, following the creation of the Gwaai and Shangani Reserves in Matabeleland in 1894. 

Historical records of the period leading to the 1896-97 First Chimurenga/Imfazwe, depict a sorry picture of a systematic violation of the rights and dignity of the indigenous people under white domination. Confirming the official sanctioning of this policy, the Rhodesia Herald of 19th April 1895 reported thus: 

For the Rhodesian it was absurd to take the untutored savage, 

accustomed as he is from time immemorial to superstitious 

and primitive ideas of law and justice, and suddenly try to 

govern him by the same code of laws that govern a people with 

many centuries of experience and enlightenment. 

The 1896-97 war was therefore fundamentally a struggle for the recovery of lost land and dignity. 

On account of the settlers’ superior firepower, the African resistance fighters of the Chimurenga/Imfazwe were subdued. The rapidity of the establishment of additional "Native Reserves" throughout the country was given impetus with the codification — in the British Government’s Southern Rhodesia Order in Council of 1898 — of the policy of racial segregation. By the same instrument it was provided that: 

The Company shall from time to time assign to Natives inhab- 

iting Southern Rhodesia, land sufficient for their occupation 

and suitable for their agricultural or pastoral requirements. 

Invariably, this land was located in marginal and low potential areas. 

Land acquisition for speculative purposes was the precursor to land acquisition for agricultural production as an economic activity, its euphemism being "white agricultural policy", which commenced in 1908. However, its successful realisation was predicated on the continued dispossession of the African of his best land and the destruction of his property in the years 1908-14. By 1914, white settlers, numbering 23 730 owned 19 032 320 acres of land while an estimated 752 000 Africans occupied a total of 21 390 080 acres of land. (R. Palmer: Land and Racial Domination in Rhodesia: Heinemann 1977) The end of the First World War saw the BSAC embarking on a Land Settlement Policy through the launch of elaborate and extensive campaign of wooing immigrants to Southern Rhodesia. (British South Africa Company Leaflets of 1st January 1919). The British Government under pressure to accommodate veterans of the war as well as mitigate the demands on it arising from the post war economic depression, lent support to the campaign. An inl From Page 8 

crease in the settler population necessarily had to be matched with the availability of additional land for the new immigrants. 

Prior to the granting of responsible Government to Rhodesia in 1923, the Rhodesian Legislature had been preoccupied with the question of demarcating land for exclusive use by Africans and Europeans. By 1925, fourteen blacks, half of them of South African origin, had purchased farms in different parts of the country. Nine of the farms were subsequently placed under European area jurisdiction. 

This concept of segregation informed the provisions of the Terms of Reference of the Morris Carter Land Commission of 1925 and its findings reaffirmed the need for such a policy. The Land Apportionment Act, embodying the greater part of the Commission’s recommendations, was enacted in 1930 and brought into effect the following year. It provided for restricted rights of the African to land ownership, to designated Native Purchase Areas. 

The apportionment of land stood thus: 

Land Apportionment In Southern Rhodesia In 1930 

CATEGORY ACRES % OF COUNTRY 

European Area 49,149,174 51 

Native Reserves 21,127,040 22 

Unassigned Area 17,793,300 18.5 

Native Purchase Area 7464,566 7.8 

Forest Area 590,500 0.6 

Undetermined Area 88,540 0.1 

Total 96,213,120 100 

The land available for African use was now 28 591 606 acres or 29.8 percent for a population estimated at 1 081 000 in 1930. At the same time a European settler population of about 50,000 was allocated 51 percent of the best land. The agricultural economy of the Shona and Ndebele had been reduced to subsistence levels by the late 1930’s. A significant reduction in the variety of crops grown was witnessed, accompanied by very low volumes in trade involving the black people. This is in contrast to historical accounts of the pre-colonial and early postcolonial Zimbabwe, which portray a prosperous region with agriculture as its mainstay. 

A further wave of new European settlers escaping from post Second World War economic hardships in Europe resulted in the phenomenal rise in the white population from 80 500 in 1945 to 219 000 by 1960. Although some of the new settlers took up white-collar jobs in the cities, many took up farming. As a result, the numbers of Europeans working or owning farms almost doubled from 4 673 in 1945 to 8 632 in 1960. To make way for these new immigrants, recourse was had to the now entrenched policy of wholesale evictions and forced removals of black communities. In the decade 1945-55 at least 100 000 people were forcibly moved into the Reserves, some of which were located in the inhospitable and tsetse-ridden areas such as Gokwe and Muzarabani. 

Blaming this state of affairs on alleged African malpractices, the colonial Government enacted the Native Land Husbandry Act in 1951. The provisions were primarily aimed at enforcing de-stocking and conservation practices on black held land. The policy of segregation had led to severe overcrowding and land degradation in the Reserves, a situation confirmed by, in 1959, a former Land Development Officer in the Native Agriculture Department, one Ken Brown, in "Land in Southern Rhodesia’’, that: 

The majority of arable areas in reserves are al- 

ready so eroded and so exhausted of fertility that 

nothing short of 12 to 15 year rest to grass will re- 

store them to a state of structure and fertility 

which would enable economic crop production to 

commence. 

The state of the degradation in the so called native Reserves was further confirmed when the then Catholic Bishop of Umtali, Donal Lamont, asked in June 1959 that: 

Can you in conscience blame the African, if eking 

out a tenuous existence from the poor soil in an 

over-crowded Reserve, he is swayed by subver- 

sive propaganda, while close besides him there lie 

hundreds of thousands of hectares of fertile soil 

which he may not cultivate, not occupy, not grace, 

because although it lies unused and unattended, it 

belongs to some individual or group of individuals 

who perhaps do not use the land in the hope of 

profit from speculation. 

With the coming into power of the Rhodesian Front in 1962, any pretence at accommodating blacks was abandoned. Segregation would henceforth be pursued with increasing vigour. This process culminated in the 1969 Land Tenure Act, which, while repealing the Land Apportionment Act, re-enacted and strengthened its provisions by dividing the land in half with 44.9 million acres allocated to each race. The policy was entrenched in a new constitution. These measures led to further overstocking, very high population densities, serious environmental damage, reduced agricultural productivity and poverty in the communal areas. Overcrowding led many people to settle in riverbanks, steep slopes, grazing areas and fragile land, posing great environmental risks. 

It is therefore against this background that land ranked highest among the grievances that motivated the indigenous black majority to launch the Second Chimurenga/Imfazwe to free the country from colonial oppression. It is worthy of note that in the period preceding the liberation war, "mwana wevhu/umntwana womhlabati’’ (child of the soil) became the nationalists’ rallying call. Herbert Chitepo, Chairman of the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) party, put it succinctly when he said: 

I could go into the whole theories of discrimina- 

tion, in legislation, in residency, in economic op- 

portunities, in education. I could go into that, but I 

will restrict myself to the question of land because 

I think this is very basic. To us the essence of ex- 

ploitation, the essence of white domination, is 

domination over land. That is the real issue. 

(Herbert Chitepo: Speech on a trip to Australia in 1973) 

The land issue was inevitably central to any initiatives aimed at resolving the crisis in Rhodesia. It was a major stumbling block in all pre-independence negotiations initiatives, including those held in Geneva (1976), and Malta (1978). In 1977 Lord Owen and Andrew Young, then British Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary and US Ambassador to the United Nations respectively, proposed the "Anglo-American proposals,’’ under which their Governments pledged to contribute towards a fund for land reform, including paying compensation to white farmers whose land holdings would be redistributed to landless blacks. 

The near collapse of the Lancaster House Conference in 1979 revolved around the land question. The Patriotic Front’s position at the Lancaster House negotiations was that the raison d’etre of the liberation struggle in Zimbabwe was the recovery of land of which the people had been dispossessed. It was put to those involved in the talks, that the dispossession without compensation was not a thing of the distant past, but rather an occurrence still within the memories of living people. Further arguing its case, the PF objected to British provisions in the draft Bill of Rights which sought to convert the freedom from deprivation of property into a right to retain privilege and perpetuate injustice whilst upholding the status quo. 

(Partial record of the Lancaster House negotiations). 

The pledge by the British Government, supported by the US Government, to support the new political dispensation by agreeing to the setting up of a fund to finance land reform in a new Zimbabwe broke the impasse at the constitutional talks. Former Commonwealth Secretary General, Sir Shridath Ramphal, in 2002 in an interview on the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) "Hard Talk’’ programme highlights this fact. In that interview Sir Shridath states that he had "intervened through the American Government.’’ That intervention secured assurances for the PF to resume talks and accept the British constitutional proposals. He added, "the American Ambassador, Mr K Brewster, with the support of Cyrus Vance, the Secretary of State, persuaded the President who was Jimmy Carter to make an offer of US assistance in conjunction with other countries including Britain’’. In its announcement of the agreement that was finally reached, the PF said: 

We have now obtained assurances that . . . Britain, 

the United States of America and other countries 

will participate in a multinational donor effort to 

assist inland, agricultural and economic develop- 

ment programmes. These assurances go a long 

way in allaying the great concern we have over the 

whole land question arising from the great need 

our people have for land and our commitment to 

satisfy that need when in Government. 

(Partial record of the Lancaster House negotiations) 

Chairman of the Lancaster House Conference, Lord Carrington, acknowledged the centrality of the land issue and the enormity of the resources needed to redress the colonial legacy, in a statement issued on 11th October 1979: 

We recognise that the future of Zimbabwe, what- 

ever its political complexion, will wish to extend 

land ownership. The costs would be very substan- 

tial indeed, well beyond the capacity, in our judge- 

ment, of any individual donor country, and the 

British Government cannot commit itself at this 

stage to a specific share in them. We should how- 

ever be ready to support the efforts of the 

Government of Independent Zimbabwe to obtain 

international assistance for these purposes. 

(Partial record of the Lancaster House negotiations) 

Yet the final agreement did not address the land problem adequately; the PF accepted it on the understanding that the UK, the USA and other donor nations would pay for land needed for resettlement 

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