The Zimbabwean government is going to compensate former white commercial farmers for the land, and the big question is why?
When the colonial settlers landed in Zimbabwe in the late 1800s under the guise of missionary work, with the Cecil John Rhodes’s British South Africa Company (BSAC) in tow they chased, hanged, shot and did anything else you can imagine, to the owners of the land for the sake of argument namely the Shona’s and Ndebele amongst other African tribes.
What followed was a systematic enslavement of the owners of the land and an illegal takeover of the indigenous land. White colonialists segregated Africans to the worst part of the land they could find called the reserves (maruzevha) whilst the prime land was shared amongst themselves, we don’t want to sanitise this robbery with the word paid because they pretty much, bought the land for next to nothing, this is the point that many of them argue that it was constitutional, I don’t want to engage in that daft argument at the moment.
For close to 100 years Europeans were enjoying themselves on ‘their’ farms, actually they became very wealthy as a result of this, whilst black people wallowed in poverty on their motherland, the best they could become was a farm worker, or a policeman in Rhodesia, essentially for a century black people did not benefit at all from their land.
During the Lancaster agreement it was agreed that the then British government of Margret Thatcher would compensate the Zimbabwe for the land, but years later the Tony Blair government reneged on that agreement, to cut a long story short it led to the Land Reform programme, which in my opinion could have been handled better.
Which brings us to the current situation, why are African’s who were deprived from accessing their land for close to a century, now responsible for paying compensation for land which was benefitting colonialists, their argument is that it’s for developments made to their land, well my questions is when are Africans going to be compensated for being excluded from utilising their land for close to a century?
