HomeOld_PostsRevisiting the land question...should robbers be compensated?

Revisiting the land question…should robbers be compensated?

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By Saul Gwakuba-Ndlovu

ZIMBABWE will be celebrating its 40th Independence Anniversary on April 18 2020, four decades in which the nation experienced socio-economic ups and downs.

We can categorically say, however, that the most important economic achievement the ZANU PF Government made in that historic period is the restoration of land to its rightful owners, the indigenous people. 

It was because the people of Zimbabwe wanted back their land from British colonialists who had forcefully seized it during their 90-year-long occupation of the country that they launched an armed revolution. 

The revolutionary slogan, ‘one-person, one-vote’, was for the acquisition of political power by which Zimbabweans could repossess their land and promote their economic, social, cultural and political interests. 

Land ownership and utilisation falls under the economic category, a vital activity in the very existence of every nation. 

Questions have been asked about the legality or otherwise of the Government’s decision to take farms from white settlers without compensation. 

A realistic African look at how Cecil John Rhodes, in league with the British Government, took this country in 1890 and named it Southern Rhodesia in November 1894 shows that there was no legality but only brigandage in the whole process. 

Rhodes was a (British) Cape Colony parliamentarian when he formed the British South Africa Company (BSAC) in 1888 and then sent three of his colleagues led by Charles Rudd to King Lobengula to swindle that Ndebele monarch. 

The messengers succeeded with the help of a London Missionary Society (LMS) clergyman, Rev Charles Helm, whom Rhodes was paying £100 yearly secretly through a Cape Town bank account. 

The reverend interpreted during the Charles Rudd-King Lobengula discussion that led to the Rudd concession on whose strength Britain’s Queen Victoria granted Rhodes’s company (BSAC) a charter the following year, 1889. 

Reverend Helm’s interpretation was biased, considering that he was a secret agent of Rhodes. 

In any case, he had, before then, been speaking well about Rhodes. 

Another friend of Rhodes who visited the Ndebele king a day-or-two before the arrival of the Rudd party was the Bechuanaland Protectorate’s Commissioner, Sir Sydney Shippard, a man who had befriended Rhodes at Oxford University a couple of years earlier. 

King Lobengula regarded Sir Sydney as a very senior and highly respectable representative of Queen Victoria (indlovukazi), the then British monarch. 

Sir Sydney is known to have also spoken very well to King Lobengula about Rhodes and rather disdainfully about Edward Amadeus Maund and a Johannesburg-based trader, Edward Lippert, both of whom were also pestering the king for concessions. 

When Rudd and his two colleagues Rockfort McGuire, a lawyer, and Francis, Thompson a fluent siNdebele speaker, met King Lobengula, he had been fed with a great deal of favourable information about Rhodes who was at that time not only an MP at Cape Town, but also the owner of the De Beers Diamond Mine at Kimberley. 

We should bear in mind that some Ndebele men occasionally worked at the Kimberley mines from where they would periodically return, some with gifts for King Lobengula. 

When King Lobengula realised that he had been duped, he decided to rescind the Concession, and accordingly sent emissaries to the British Commissioner at Cape Town. 

He did that about three times at most and at least twice, but Sir Sydney Shippard would cause them to be delayed in Bechuanaland Protectorate while they were passing through that country where he was Britain’s commissioner. 

The Ndebele King then decided to grant Edward Lippert a concession with a mandate to settle white people in the country. That was an attempt to show that he was not recognising the Rudd document. 

Rhodes, however, later bought Lippert’s concession, and that sealed that attempt. 

A part of the Lippert document read: “I, Lobengula, King of the Amandebele nation, and of the Makalaka, Mashona and surrounding territories, declare that whereas I have granted a concession in respect of rights incidental to mining only, and seeing that white people are coming into my Kingdom and it is desirable that I should assign land to them and appoint someone to act for me in these respects: I hereby grant to Edward Lippert the sole right to lay out farms and townships (in all territories that are now, or may hereafter be occupied by the British South Africa Company.”

Lippert sold the concession to Rhodes, a decision that was certainly legally questionable because of the fact that King Lobengula did not want the BSAC to handle land matters, and had stated so in the document that he later rescinded. 

By buying Lippert’s concession, Rhodes implied that the Rudd document usurped King Lobengula’s power over ownership of his territory. 

If anything, that decision set an example to the people of Zimbabwe, an example that was later compounded by Ian Smith’s November 1965 Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI).  

The BSAC’s Pioneer Column arrived in Mashonaland on September 12 1890 and immediately raised the Union Jack (the British Flag), as it had done at what they named Fort Victoria (Masvingo), to indicate that it had occupied the territory on Britain’s behalf, an act which was Rhodes’ life passion. 

What and whose law did those reckless people use to hoist their national flag in King Lobengula’s kingdom? 

That action was as unlawful as colonialism together with its dispossessive and displacing practices. 

It was utterly an unlawful act and, in any case, a dispossessed or displaced indigenous people do not require more than natural law to take back their country and freedom. 

After hoisting the Union Jack, each Pioneer Column member then started pegging mines and farms, 15 mine claims and a       3 000-acre farm per person. 

Since the Pioneer Column had 600 members, that meant that at least 3 000 acres x 600 = 1 800 000 acres of our country was literally grabbed by those people. 

Much more was taken by the BSAC as it established urban centres. 

That company began to sell large tracts of land at nine pennies an acre. 

The money realised thereby was not given to the chiefs or King Lobengula on behalf of the people of this country. 

It went into the BSAC coffers.  

Since King Lobengula had rescinded the Rudd Concession and the fact that it did not give that company the right to seize, let alone sell King Lobengula’s land, what the BSAC did was patently unlawful to the indigenous people. 

White farmers whose land was taken without compensation since 2000 had been living as inheritors of the BSAC land looting, in effect, and were legal responsibilities of the British Government in fact. 

That means they must be compensated by the government whose subjects there were (or are) – the British Government – and not by a Government representing people they and their predecessors violently dispossessed and displaced. 

An important Bantu cultural practice we should bear in mind when discussing this is that land was held in trust for the nation (the people) by the chiefs or kings who granted it to each family for occupation and use, but certainly not for sale. 

That extremely considerate communal (nation) ownership of land was based on the fact that future generations would continue occupying and using the land without let or hindrance, whereas private land ownership makes financially stronger people eventually ‘own’, not only the land but even the people living on it as either tenants or as workers (or as both tenants and workers). 

It is a most unBantu development that, after a brutal armed liberation struggle, the Zimbabwean Government adopted the Western European land ownership culture whereby land is a saleable commodity.

We did not sacrifice for that type of land ownership that could benefit a minority, as selling and buying land does, but for land ownership that can benefit the majority of the nation.

Individual subjective aspirations should be subservient to collective interests. 

That should have been the case on land ownership and usage, a Bantu traditional type of socialism in which the interests of the community precede those of the individual, unlike the European and American practice where the interests of the individual suppress those of the public; a remnant of feudalism, in fact. 

We should not forget that the Southern Rhodesia white settler-regime passed the notorious Land Apportionment Act in 1930, dividing the country’s land between the European minority and the African majority. 

That law assigned 49 149 174 acres to the Europeans,                21 600 000 acres to the Africans and 7 464 566 acres for sale to what were called ‘Native master-farmers’. 

That land was known as Native Purchase Areas (NPA). 

The country’s 88 former native reserves, later known as communal lands, were created out of the 21 600 000 acres assigned to the African people. 

Other land categories under the Land Apportionment Act were Forest Area which had 590 500 acres; then there was what was called Unassigned Land whose area was 17 793 300 acres and, lastly, there were some 88 540 acres of what the administration called Undetermined Land. 

The European part of the land was on the high veld where the soil was much better and health conditions very good. 

The African part was on the low veld; a very unhealthy, hot, infertile region. 

The administration actually forcibly removed the Africans from the high veld and dumped them on the low veld to make room for the white settlers.     

The Land Apportionment Act was amended many times, ending up as the Land Tenure Act of 1969. 

In addition to the Land Apportionment Act (1930), the white setter-regime, in 1950, passed another piece of disgusting legislation named the Land Husbandry Act. 

It was implemented in 1951 and compelled black people to till only eight acres and drastically reduced their livestock per family. 

It would have been, therefore, ill-advised for the Zimbabwe Government to either tax the people or to borrow money to buy back farms from descendants of people who, to start with, swindled this country’s former king in order to enter into his territory and later attacked him and then seized his country, and thereafter brutally displaced the people in order to occupy their land. 

Compensations can be considered, certainly, for such improvements as houses, wells, dams and for crops on fields and gardens as well as for equipment, but not for the land. 

Why should descendants of people who were given land for taking part in a colonial invasion be compensated for that land? Robbers are not compensated after they have been caught with stolen property. 

Saul Gwakuba-Ndlovu is a retired, Bulawayo-based journalist. He can be contacted on cell 0734 328 136 or through email: sgwakuba@gmail.com

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