11/21/07

Ian Smith, who presided over a white supremacist government in Rhodesia until 1980, has died in a retirement home in Cape Town. The Financial Times, showing its true colors (or true color) once again, published a kid-gloves article contrasting his rule favorably with Mugabe's.

Some experts trace Zimbabwe’s nine successive years of recession to Mr. Mugabe’s populist policy of expropriating white farms and businesses left over from the Smith era. Zimbabwe was a large exporter of crops such as tobacco and has the world’s second-largest reserves of platinum. After Zimbabwe passed to black government in 1979, Mr Smith remained a member of Zimbabwe’s parliament until 1987 and continued to live on his farm. He was born in 1919 in Rhodesia and had a distinguished career as a fighter pilot during the second world war. In retirement in Cape Town, he claimed in his last years that the crisis in Zimbabwe vindicated his policies of white rule. He said Mr Mugabe was a ”mentally unstable gangster running a one-party Communist dictatorship." One of Mr Smith’s stepsons, Robert, said: “It is finally over for him. His was a life of service to Africa. Whatever came by him, he at least tried.”The causes of Mr Smith’s death were unconfirmed, but news agencies reported that he suffered a stroke recently.

The notion that someone who did not respect Africans led "a life of service to Africa" is truly Orwellian. It's like saying Ariel Sharon led "a life of service to Palestine." Over at Race and History back in 2002, Ayinde cut through the bullshit very nicely with a list of essential facts about Zimbabwe.

To paraphrase Ayinde's useful summary:

-When the colonization of Zimbabwe began in 1889, the territory between the Zambezi and Limpopo rivers was inhabited by the Shona peoples (thought to have been there some 1,000 years) and the Ndebele (who migrated there from Natal in the 1830s). In 1889, arch-imperialist entrepreneur Cecil B. Rhodes (who had made a fortune in diamond mining in South Africa) set up the British South Africa company to explore north of the Limpopo. Rhodes managed to obtain exclusive mining rights to the territory from the Ndebele king, Lobengula, in return for 1,000 rifles, 10,000 rounds of ammunition and a monthly payment.

-The company sought to attract white settlers by promising each one a 3,000 acre farm and gold claims in the heart of Mashonaland. The Shona were politically fragmented and unable to mount a unified resistance. The British claimed the territory as a colony in 1890, and within three years the white settlers and had conquered King Lobengula and Matabeleland. White volunteers in the war of were each granted 6,000 acres of conquered territory. The Ndebele people who tried to return to their land found their cattle confiscated, and were forced to work on white-owned farms as laborers or sharecroppers. The settlers imposed a "hut tax" of 10 shillings in Mashonaland, which was meant to coerce the Shona to work for them to obtain tax money.

-In 1895 the colonists named the territory Rhodesia, after Cecil B. Rhodes.

-In 1896, the Shona and the Ndebele rebelled, but they were crushed and ther leaders hanged.

-All the best land was claimed by white settlers; "native reserves" for blacks were allotted on the most arid and marginal lands.

-In 1923, the territory came under official British control, and was renamed Southern Rhodesia.

-In 1930, under the Land Apportionment Act, African land ownership outside the native reserves was officially banned.

-In 1965, the far-right Ian Smith government declared independence from Britain, which had refused to allow Rhodesia to "decolonize" as a white supremacist state. Smith won the support of white hard-liners by declaring that he would not support black majority rule "in a thousand years."

-Two major liberation organizations emerged: the Zanu under the leadership of Robert Mugabe, and the Zapu under Joshua Nkomo.

-International economic sanctions were imposed on the Smith regime.

-A violent guerilla war was fought through the 1970s. The white regime employed mercenaries, and recieved help from the kindred white regime in South Africa.

-In 1979, negotiations in London led to the Lancaster House Agreement, which led to the first free elections in 1980. Mugabe won by a landslide with promises of land reform.

-The Lancaster House Agreement had many strings attached. Land reform was only authorized in the case of "willing sellers for willing buyers," meaning blacks were expected to pay whites for the land that had whites had conquered from blacks less than a century before. This stipulation was set to expire after 10 years, however.

But there have been few transfers in the last decade, with the government failing to budget for serious reform. In 1997 ago Mugabe announced a hit list of 1,500 farms set for compulsory acquisition. He said Britain should foot the bill for compensating the white farmers because Rhodesian colonists had stolen the land from blacks in the first place.

The Situation Today
Since March 2000, groups of government supporters led by war veterans have occupied many white-owned farms. In the ensuing violence, several white farmers and their black workers have been killed. Agricultural production has plummeted. Donors say this is one reason why up to six million people could face starvation unless food aid arrives quickly. Almost all of Zimbabwe's 4,000 white farmers have had their farms listed for acquisition. Under a new law, they must leave their land and homes before receiving compensation. Courts have ruled several times that the bureaucratic process of acquiring land has been breached but the government is determined to press ahead. About 500 white farmers have decided not to lodge legal appeals and some of these have been paid by the state, albeit in devalued Zimbabwe dollars. Lists of those who will be allocated land have been widely publicised in the state media ?but many have not taken up the offer. Many rural Zimbabweans desperately want more land but they also need aid to buy seeds and fertiliser, which the state does not have the money to provide. Some farms have been allocated to ministers and senior officials in the ruling Zanu-PF party and the army. In urban areas, most people want jobs, rather than land.

As late as 2000, white settlers still owned 70% of the best arable land in Zimbabwe. The land reforms in effect since 1998, as Tiyambe Zeleza points out, are rife their own contradictions, including the evictions of tens of thousands of migrant workers from neighboring countries like Malawi and Mozambique. As Zeleza observes,

This underscores what is at the heart of the Zimbabwean conundrum: how to restructure, develop, and democratize a former settler colony that relied on migrant labor from within and without, which necessitated massive land alienation and left behind legacies of high structural unemployment, racial disenfranchisement and dispossession, and militarism and the use of political violence as weapons of both control and liberation. In short: how to construct an inclusive citizenship and subject state power and the political class to democratic accountability.