By Dr Douglas Munzvengi

THE contemporary socio-economic challenges experienced in Zimbabwe, other developing economies in Africa, Latin America and elsewhere are largely rooted in the historical imbalances, market imperfections and monopolistic tendencies by the US and its Western allies. 

The strategy of Euro-Western powers is to expropriate the economic surpluses of the developing economies and appropriate the economic surpluses for their own development, thereby causing developing economies to remain underdeveloped and continuously riding on a slow developmental wave largely retarded by lack of access to their own surpluses.

The hegemonic and egoistic factors characterised by self-centredness, the appetite for control and dominance among the European controlling powers, intensified during the 30-to-80-year wars in Europe that ended with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. 

The peace settlement of Westphalia was the terminal point of the protracted struggle for dominance, power and religious boundaries in Europe. 

The outcome of the peace settlement in Europe was that the religion of the ruler became the religion of the subjects under the ruler’s territorial control. 

The subjects were made to pay taxes to sustain the ruler and his religion, a principle defined as ‘cujus region ejus religio’. The Treaty became the hallmark of international law principles of equity between nation states, whether large or small, espousing non-interference. Each state should have sovereignty over its territory and domestic affairs, thereby having the right to decide its own fate, thus enshrining the co-existence of states and individual state sovereignty, inter-state diplomacy and the balance of power between nation states.

The principle of ‘cujus regio ejus religio’ was imported into Africa in 1884, at the partitioning of Africa, and manifested in a negative way at a time when Christianity and Islam were being propagated by missionaries among the indigenous Africans. 

The indigenous Africans freely observed oneness, family unity, equity and worship to the one Supreme Being, the High God (Mwari, Nyadenga or Musikavanhu). 

The Western Christian missionaries-cum-explorers, funded by the British Government, such as David Livingstone and motivated by what has gotten to be termed the ‘4Cs’ of ‘Commerce’, ‘Christianity’, ‘Civilisation’ and ‘Conquest’ were instrumental to the African fact finding missions, geographical mapping, colonisation and domination of African countries by European powers. 

Honed by the historical background of manipulative skewed trade as well as capitalist tendencies driven by appetite for labour and raw materials to feed the Industrial Revolution, Europeans partitioned Africa at the Berlin Conference in 1884. 

The 1884-85 Conference regulated the socio-economy and colonisation of Africa, thereby defining its political boundaries, religious persuasions and trade relations. 

Despite the elements of the principle of ‘cujus regio ejus religio’ in the portioning of Africa, it later formed the roots of the principle of self-determination, as adopted by the UN Charter, espousing that nationalities have the right to create their own state organisations representing their own interests. 

The recognition of the need for self-determination later created impetus for socio-economic and political liberation struggles in many African countries and other colonies.

African colonies or peripheral satellites had become the subjects of the colonising powers and were made to engage in skewed trade, providing raw materials and labour through slave trade for the development of the metropolitan centres such as Liverpool, Portsmouth, Lisbon and Barcelona, among others. 

The metropolitan centres, in turn, provided extractive systems such as banks, finance and insurance houses including the manufacture of metropolitan-branded finished products, among them, cloth and clothes, machinery and equipment that were sold back to the satellites or colonies at very high premium for the development of the metropolitan and its corporates, while underdeveloping the satellites or colonies.

The manipulative character of the Westerners is evident in the US foreign policy, for instance, the adoption of the Monroe Doctrine in 1823 which formed the cornerstone of the US policy. 

The Monroe Declaration proclaims that: “The US would not interfere within European wars and activities of European countries in their colonies, in turn the European countries would not as well interfere with the North and South Americas and its black neighbourhood within the Western Hemisphere.” 

The Monroe Declaration, therefore, gave the US and Europe the sweeping powers of supreme central authorities to superintend the affairs of other nation states as international police force, including the overthrowing and changing of presidents and governments that did not support their interests. 

Bernie Sanders, an American Senator, admittedly explains how the US Government manipulated other governments for the benefit of the American Government and its corporates. Sanders points out how the Chilean President Salvador Allende won the election in 1973 for being pro-poor and protective of the natural resources for the Chilean people, but was undermined and overthrown by the American Government and how a later iron-fisted killer, the Chilean President General Pinochet, was supported by the American Government and corporate sector for promoting American interests. 

The Americans also engage in quiet diplomacy such as the ‘dollar diplomacy’, a foreign policy adopted in the early 1900s describing the US stance of ‘substituting dollars for bullets’ to respectively create stability and instability in countries the US had commercial and corporate interests.

In their physical and mental cohesion intended for resource manipulation, slavery and control of Africa, the Westerners formulated bad attitudes towards Africans and continue to do so by denigrating their persons, identity, language, philosophy, culture, beliefs, religious institutions, traditions and way of life. 

The denigration implanted low esteem, self-hate and inferiority complexes among the African indigenous people. 

Chinua Achebe (2009) accordingly summarises the colonial intent and position when he writes that:

“Colonisation may indeed be a complex affair, but one thing is certain, you do not walk in, seize the land, the person, the history of another, and then sit back and compose hymns of praise in his honour. 

To do that would amount to calling yourself a bandit; and nobody wants to do that. 

So what do you do? 

You construct elaborate excuses for your action. 

You say, for instance, that the man you dispossessed is worthless and quite unfit to manage himself or his affairs. 

If there are valuable things like gold or diamonds, which you are carting away from his territory, you prove that he does not own them in real sense of the word – that, he and they just happened to be lying around the same place when you arrived. 

Finally, should the worse come to the worst, you may even be prepared to question whether he can be, like you, fully human. 

It is only a few steps from denying the presence of a man standing there before you to questioning his very humanity. Therefore, the agenda of the colonist did not make provision for the celebration of the world of the colonised…”

Towards the end of 1800, Cecil John Rhodes and his Pioneer Column captured the land between the Limpopo and Zambezi rivers and called it Rhodesia. 

This excursion was carried out under the mandate of the British Royal Charter. 

The aftermath of this capture was characterised by white settlers seizing the land, minerals, livestock, the local men and women for their own development. 

The indigenous languages, cultures, customs, religious and other institutions were denigrated as the imported spiritual, social and economic ways were forced onto and into the local people.

After the defeat of the indigenous people in the First Chimurenga of the 1890s, various land legislation that included the Reserves Commission of 1914, the Land Commission of 1925, the Land Apportionment Act of 1930 and its further amendments, the Land Husbandry Act of 1951 and the Land Tenure Act of 1969, among others, were promulgated to protect land ownership by the white settlers while marginalising indigenous people. 

By 1914, about 23 700 white settlers, who were 3,15 percent of the 752 000 Africans, owned 19,5 million acres covering 20 percent of the country’s land, while the 752 000 Africans held 21,4 million acres, being 23 percent of the country’s land. 

The unassigned land covered the remaining 57 percent of the country’s land.

A Shona adage holds that: “Rwakafa rukasiya rumwe” (the act of leaving a legacy) and another that: “Mhembwe rudzi inozvara mwana ano ruzhumwi,” (the philosophy of a people abounds generations), Mbuya Nehanda consolidated the Shona idioms before her death by saying: “Mapfupa angu achamuka (My bones shall rise).” 

The Second Chimurenga indeed erupted and the white settler-regime was brought to a demise by a war hatched by the indigenous people and in 1980, political independence was celebrated. 

Notwithstanding the advent of political independence in 1980, the economy and land remained under the control of the defeated white settlers.

To empower the indigenous people, the Government of Zimbabwe promulgated the Land Acquisition Act of 1992. Following this enactment, land was acquired from white settler-farmers with little compensation and limited rights to appeal to the courts. 

The European and Westerners, in particular the British Government, in reaction, declined to support the land redistribution exercise and labelled it an ‘illegal, corrupted and violent exercise’. 

To the chagrin of the Westerners and their backers, the Government of Zimbabwe further empowered the indigenous people by enacting the National Indigenous Economic Empowerment Act of 2008, largely focusing on indigenising the economy.

The adoption of the land redistribution policy, the indigenisation policy, coupled with the look east political, socio-economic co-operation with Asia and the SADC regional integration thrust profiled Zimbabwe to become a global player challenging the West.

As the emancipatory and empowerment thrust unfold in Zimbabwe, we hear the echoes of voices of Mbuya Nehanda for self-determination, Chinua Achebe for economic freedom while experiencing the ills of the effects of the Treaty of Westphalia and the dictates of the 1884 Berlin Conference, Monroe Doctrine and the dollar diplomacy, among many others, including the ZDERA spectre!

To punish patriotic Zimbabweans for their actions of defeating the white settler-regime and the subsequent land redistribution exercise, economic sanctions were imposed in 1998. 

In 1999 the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank confirmed their stance by suspending lending to Zimbabwe and all donor development funding apart from humanitarian aid. 

The US Government exposed its hidden sinister hand by the enactment of ZDERA in 2001 and its further amendment in 2018, imposing sanctions on Zimbabwe and issuing travel bans on Zimbabwe’s ruling elite, while in the process freezing their assets. 

The actions by the US Government, its backers and supporting institutions are a prescription for the Zimbabwe Government and its leaders to play to the tune of the US Government and its allies and a punishment for land redistribution to the indigenous people from the white settler-farmers. 

The question lingers: Are US economic sanctions for human development or underdevelopment of Zimbabwe, the SADC region and Africa or is it a calculated hegemonic strategy to pose lessons for other African and developing countries that may opt to follow the same emancipatory and empowerment trajectory?