It was obvious that the Lancaster House Constitutional proposals on land were designed more to maintain white settler-holdings on land in Zimbabwe than to transfer a fair amount of land to the landless African majority, writes Dr Felix Muchemwa in his book The Struggle for Land in Zimbabwe (1890-2010) that The Patriot is serialising.

Flashback to 1890.
IN his proposals on land in Zimbabwe, Lord Carrington had almost forgotten that on July 29 1918, a Judicial Committee of the Privy Council had passed a landmark ruling on land stating that:
“The true view seems to be that, if when the Protecting Power of 1891 became the conquering power in 1893, and under the Orders in Council of 1894 and 1898 set up by its own authority, its own appointee as administrator and sanctioned a land system of white settlement and of native reserves, it was intended that the Crown should assume and exercise the right to dispose of the whole of the land not then in private ownership, then it made itself owner of the land to all intents and purposes as completely as any sovereign can be the owner of lands, which are public juris”
Even more importantly, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council of July 29 1918, had ruled that:
“White settlement and the consolidation of the British influence were objects common to both Crown and Company.
Both desired to encourage white settlers generally to select and acquire land, and, on compliance with the prescribed formalities, they were to become absolute owners of their holdings.
In view of the ruling, the British proposals on land at the Lancaster House Conference were therefore aimed at transforming the ‘Right of Conquest on Land’ into ‘Human Rights on Land’ in Zimbabwe.”
Humanising white settler-property rights founded on crimes against African humanity.
On the other hand, the minimum expected by the Patriotic Front was total land restitution for the dispossessed African people in Zimbabwe, with compensation for the 6 000 European settler farmers being reserved only for improvements on the land. (Tongogara Briefings)
It was rather insulting to the Patriotic Front to be informed in Conference Paper No. 19 that in order to resettle landless Africans, the new black government in Zimbabwe would have to negotiate with the European settler-farmers on a ‘willing-buyer, willing-seller’ basis, and only for ‘underutilised land.’ (Conference Paper No. 19, Section V)
Land dispossession had been the bitterest grievance among Zimbabwe’s African people. (Tendi, 2010: p.75)
The ZANLA forces in particular, had actively mobilised the rural people for the armed struggle, more on the basis of the land issue than on any other single issue throughout the whole of Zimbabwe.
It, therefore, meant that Cdes Robert Mugabe and Joshua Nkomo as Commanders-in-Chief of ZANLA and ZIPRA, respectively, would not be able to justify the enormous suffering African people had endured during the whole of the Second Chimurenga, always with the hope that they would get back their land.
It would be impossible to inform the survivors of that struggle that they still had to buy back their land from the European settler-farmers. It was also obvious that the Lancaster House Constitutional Proposals on land were designed more to maintain white settler-holdings on land in Zimbabwe than to transfer a fair amount of land to the landless African majority. There was also no doubt that any land likely to be made available for resettlement on the ‘willing-buyer, willing-seller’ basis would be outside the Zimbabwean Highveld and generally be of the type the white farmers did not want anyway. (Herbst, 1990: pp.53-4)
Worse still, the new Government of Zimbabwe would, more than likely, find it virtually impossible to implement any comprehensive land resettlement programme aimed at decongesting the tribal trust lands.
Commenting on the magnitude of the proposed compensation, even Lord Carrington himself later admitted that: “The cost would be well beyond the capacity of any individual donor country.” (Riddel, 1980: pp.11-12)
This meant that if the US and the UK could not afford to compensate the Rhodesian settler-farmers, the newly independent state of Zimbabwe, ravaged by a protracted war of liberation, could not be expected to meet the compensation specified by the Conference Paper No. 19, Section V(3).
In any case, the requirement of prompt and adequate compensation would in practice place an impossible financial burden on a land redistribution programme as well as force the people of Zimbabwe to pay for land which they had already re-conquered. (Keesings p.30168)
The Patriotic Front proposals that there should be land restitution in Zimbabwe for the African people and that compensation be allowed only for any improvements on land were dismissed out of hand by Lord Carrington and, of course, by the Rhodesian delegation at the Lancaster House Conference. Serious tensions arose during the debates on land and the conference nearly came to a grinding halt. (Tongogara Briefings)
At one stage, Cde Mugabe came out in frustration and said: “If the London Conference reaches no decisions, we will dispatch our military men back to Africa.
This means the intensification of the struggle. We can win without Lancaster House. That is a certainty. Of course we would welcome a settlement. But we can achieve peace and justice for our people through the barrel of the gun.” (Jeffrey Davidow, 1979: p.63)
Cde Mugabe explained this position later and said that the Patriotic Front had already liberated more than 50 percent of the country, adding that 65 percent of the European settler-farms had already been liberated and lay vacant and this land had all to be passed on to the people immediately upon independence. (Keesings p.30168)
The impasse resulted in endless meetings behind the scenes involving the Commonwealth Secretariat, the Frontline Heads of States and the Patriotic Front.
The biggest stumbling block had become the finance for the purchase of land from the European settler-farmers. (Keesings p.30168). Lord Carrington had offered that British money be used to purchase the land from the European settler-farmers on a ‘willing-buyer, willing-seller’ basis and he had also courted the President of the US, Jimmy Carter’s financial support for the purchase of land from the white settler-farmers.
However, the financial assistance pledged by President Carter was couched in very vague and ambiguous terms. (Davidow, 1979: p. 127)
Despite President Carter’s intervention, the Patriotic Front still insisted that the offered British and American money would be borrowed Zimbabwean money which could only be used for compensation on improvements on land. The Patriotic Front stressed to the Conference that it was illogical that hard cash in the form of foreign currency should be used to virtually ‘import Zimbabwean land’ as required under Section V(3) of the Lancaster House Conference Paper No. 19. (Tongogara Briefings)
The Patriotic Front, therefore, welcomed British financial assistance only as compensation on improvements on land and not for the purchase of European settler-farmers’ land. For three days, (October 8 to 11 1979), the conference deliberated on Conference Paper No. 19 on the land issue and then adjourned.