MARTIN FLETCHER’s story on Zimbabwe’s Land Reform Programme makes very interesting reading that deserves a few comments.
Some of us will not sit back and be abused by some journalist in our backyard.
We will protect our space on the media landscape.
On the face of it, the text looks balanced, neutral and innocent.
However, my little knowledge of discourse analysis suggests no text is neutral or innocent.
Every text has its ideological leanings, power relations and its prejudices.
I will not dwell on the wisdom of Norman Fairclough, Michel Focault and other authorities in the critical discourse analysis, ideology and power.
To say the least, this narrative is condescending, imperial, patronising, written from some pedestal looking at some savages tearing away innocent white people.
Fletcher volunteers to be the voice of Rhodesians who lost their war years ago.
What does an English journalist look for in a purely Zimbabwean problem?
Who is he writing for, for what purpose?
Who is his audience?
Tsitsi dzei tsvimborume kupukuta madzihwa mwana wemvana?
There are so many points of contention in this narrative, but I will just pick out a phrase which recurs throughout the narrative – ‘war vet’.
He reduces the phrase ‘war vet’ to a swear word.
The phrase and its variations is used more than 10 times.
Its repeated use is not a mistake, but a deliberate build-up of images of pillage, terror and anarchy.
The phrase ‘war vet’ is carefully stitched together with words of violence by the crafty journalist to present gory images of ogres, marauders dripping with the blood of innocent victims.
When the war vets arrive, they ‘ratchet up’ and ‘sow terror’, they are arsonists who set fire to houses, they are thieves who steal tractors and by inference they are ‘thugs’.
They are poachers who hunt game, they are terrorists who ‘harass and intimidate’; they beat up people.
Only one war vet is mentioned by name and even in 2017, Ben Freeth is still scared of the war vets.
Readers in the Diaspora engaging such a text will see gorgons, not humans, from the depths of hell coming to persecute snow white farmers who are sitting on land that has no history.
Fletcher paints a picture of a Zimbabwe full of chaos and violence.
He refuses to give the war vets a human face.
They are thugs, mobsters, drunkards, who spread virulent strains of malaria wherever they go.
Can he kindly show us the medical evidence for this ridiculous assertion that smacks of racism.
He is the kind of racist who will suggest HIV and AIDS started in Africa.
Fletcher refuses to give them the label ‘war veterans’, probably because it would legitimise them.
He knows that every nation has its war veterans and they are always given a place of honour in a nation.
Zimbabwe has its own war veterans, but Fletcher decides to deny them this honour.
He refuses to accept the truth that the Land Reform Programme was a mass movement, not some political gimmick by ZANU PF.
It was largely driven by simple rural folk, the same people who bore the brunt of Chimurenga.
I will not dwell on the causes of land reform here; we have and will always talk about them.
In any unit that moved onto the farms, war veterans were in the minority.
By 2000, many of these veterans of the Second Chimurenga were too old to have the energy normally found in a 25-year-old person.
Moreover, many more were busy trying to earn a living far from the farms.
I invite Fletcher to come and do more research on land reform on a wider cross-section of the Zimbabwean population.
He should not write a Zimbabwean story based on one British-born person who married the daughter of a Rhodesian farmer.
Fletcher’s piece is journalistic mischief of the highest order as he seeks to nullify, denigrate, invert and subvert the image of the war veteran and the Second Chimurenga, reducing a peoples’ struggle to a meaningless rebellion.
This a white voice lamenting lost lands.
Fletcher should go back to the history of his forefathers who stole the same land from our forefathers in the name of the British crown.
It is sad a few lives were lost during land reform, but Zimbabweans will never apologise for recovering the land.
Never!
Incidentally, as Fletcher savages the war veterans, stripping them of all humanity, he must know this writer is a proud war veteran, not a war vet.
I invite him to continue this debate.