The imagination of land and the reality of seizure: Zimbabwe's complex reinventions.

Chan, Stephen ; Primorac, Ranka

In the months before the December 2003 Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in Abuja, Nigeria, Robert Mugabe sustained an intense diplomatic program. Anxious to avoid an extension of his country's suspension from the Commonwealth he assiduously cultivated President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa and other regional leaders. Mbeki in turn reassured Washington that Mugabe was amenable to reason and that the Mbeki brand of patient, if slow, persuasive diplomacy would result in a negotiated compromise between the Zimbabwean government and the opposition. Simultaneously, Mugabe was at pains to indicate to President Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria that the Zimbabwean opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, could not lead a viable alternative government. Obasanjo had not been impressed by Tsvangirai when the two had met, and Mugabe also emphasized the limitations of the MDC party and its lack of Cabinet material. All the while, Zimbabwean "track two," or unofficial, representatives visited London asking what might be the minimum conditions Mugabe had to satisfy in order to retain Zimbabwe's Commonwealth membership. Since the minimum condition was Mugabe's own retirement, the news was not welcome in Harare. As the surface rhetoric to all this, however, Mugabe's lieutenants and ambassadors sustained an international representation of the Zimbabwean situation as solely a black-and-white issue, in which the Commonwealth sought to redress a black victory against the historical reach of white colonialism. (1)

The Zimbabwean exclusion from the Commonwealth was upheld in Abuja, and Mugabe left the organization on 7 December 2003 in response. However, several--not all--African leaders felt aggrieved at the Commonwealth decision. Even if unreasonable and tyrannical in the perception of the West, Mugabe had persuaded much African opinion as to the legitimate nationalism of his policies, particularly over the issue of land. Colonial white denigration of black Africans and the appropriation of land as part of that denigration remained potent and near-contemporary emblems for Mugabe's rhetoric. Mugabe's words had resonance and, to be fair to him, he had signaled his views on land as early as the 1979 Lancaster House talks that had finally provided a formula for independence, and immediately after winning the 1980 independence elections. (2) Not only that, but U.S. efforts to broker an independence and peace deal in the mid-1970s had recognized a need for land distribution. Mugabe had, at the height of the 1992 famine, passed into legislation the Land Acquisition Act and, in 1997, begun the process of gazetting white-owned farms for nationalization. This was never an issue that would disappear--although it was Mugabe's own young government that conferred deeds of title on the white farmers, and it was Mugabe himself who maintained good relations with the white-dominated Commercial Farmers Union for 20 years of independence.

Signs of ambivalence or indecisiveness should not, however, have cloaked a deep-rooted and fundamental issue--which recently became a fundamentalist one. During the post-independence period, was the issue of land posed as a naked black-and-white dichotomy? Was the ownership of land only about economic redress and equity? Was land merely a static commodity, almost a nostalgia, or did it have dynamic values? The aim of this essay is to suggest answers to such questions. We also seek to illustrate the values inherent in land by reference to Zimbabwean creative literature; that is, to transcend questions of economic sociology, and political ideology by looking at the imagination of land that has hitherto escaped academic analysis in the fields of international relations and political science. It is hoped that the insights revealed will be helpful to the establishment of a proper critique of Mugabe's policies of seizure at all costs, and of its consequences.

In a pioneering work, Terence Ranger recounted how, in the early 20th century, peasant society became increasingly differentiated. A class of enterprising peasant agriculturalists emerged. These not only venerated the spirits associated with the land they farmed, but farmed in a patterned response to the commercial efforts of the white settlers. Those white settlers, in turn, saw the economic competition being offered and sought by all means to discourage it. (3) It was not for nothing that, in 1917, the Report of the Reserves Commission recommended strict boundaries for African land tenure. These were formalized in the 1923 constitution, when settler parliamentary government succeeded Cecil Rhodes's British South Africa Company, and in 1930, with the Land Apportionment Act, by which the majority of arable land was given over to private ownership by white settlers. Not all private ownership by black farmers disappeared, but increasingly, to become a black commercial farmer was to enter a small elite. One family that belonged to that elite was the Samkanges, their lives again recorded by Ranger. (4) Educated, Methodist, and nationalist, the family was remarkable by any standards. One of the Samkange sons, Stanlake, became a noted academic, novelist, and politician. Sufficiently "Europeanized" to build himself a (literal) castle for his residence, he was also the author of novels that resonate with the African history he taught at American universities before returning to Rhodesia. One of these, On Trial for My Country, (5) retelling the efforts of the Ndebele king, Lobengula, to resist Rhodes, carries a depiction of land that is imbued with spiritual as well as historical force.

The book is unusual when placed alongside the land debates of the 2000s, since it seeks to narrate both sides of the story--that of Lobengula and that of the white invaders. It begins with an encounter between the narrator and an old man who has returned from death and the afterlife. The encounter occurs in the shadows of the Matopos Hills, an area rich with spiritual significance, (6) and leads to the old man recounting (in parallel) two great councils in heaven--one in which Lobengula is required to explain to the ancestral spirits just how he had lost the land to the white man, and the other in which Cecil Rhodes must convince his ancestors that he has been just and honest in his dealings with Lobengula and his people. Each will be judged according to the moral standards of his own culture: "As a Christian, by this law you will be judged," Rhodes is told. (7) The novel then relates episodes from the history of colonization ("The Moffat Treaty," "The Rudd Concession") from two parallel and contrasting viewpoints--the colonial and the anticolonial--and readers are invited to choose between them. (Rhodes's side of the story is interlinked with the recollections of the very white men who were instrumental in taking the land--men with names like Moffat and Baines which were, until recently, street names in Harare.) In making this choice, readers are, of course, firmly guided: Rhodes is shown to have acted neither justly nor honestly toward the Africans. (8) And yet the novel does not articulate the final verdict. The old man tells the narrator that this verdict must remain "in the bosom of the Spirits." (9) Writing at an early stage of the African nationalist struggle in Zimbabwe, Samkange saw that land had great spiritual value, but that it was also the subject of a great debate, and that no simple answers are generated by struggle alone.

THE INDETERMINACY OF LAND

Much has been written about the spiritual qualities and values of land in Zimbabwe. The African belief in a spirit world populated by previously fleshly creatures, capable of autonomous interaction with the human world (in order to requite past wrongs, reward past rights, or act maliciously) and accessible through human mediators or spirit mediums, made land much more than an agricultural commodity, an economic unit, or a site of elite aspiration. Ranger and others have variously written of how spirit mediums were a vitally important validating authority for the guerrillas in the liberation war, conferring spiritual blessings and the blessings of the land upon them. (10) David Lan in particular has written of how the mhondoro, the royal or rain-making ancestral spirits of the Shona peoples, have territorial or spatial attributes; in Guns and Rain, he distinguishes between chieftanships and spirit provinces (areas whose rainfall is governed by individual mhondoro). It was the spiritual (rather than political or economic) authority over land that the guerrillas in Zimbabwe's war of liberation sought to co-opt in seeking the assistance of mediums, and it is this distinction between different kinds of authority that was being evoked in a recent pro-government advertisement in the Zimbabwean press: "Now that the land dour ancestors is in our hands, it's time to use it fully to guarantee food security, create jobs, develop and grow our economy for the good of our country." (11)

It is important, however, not to confer either too much, or too much unarbitrated, importance on the spiritual demeanor of the land. Who accesses the spiritual world, who mediates between flesh and spirit, and why, become significant questions in the politics of spirit mediums and their use. Billy Mukamuri, in a study that should have been more widely published, argues that at the local level individual spirit mediums could trade their insights and access for political leverage or political favors. (12) The spirit world could be used in arbitration and negotiation with the fleshly political world, and each local spirit, each local spirit medium, has a local agenda. In the liberation war novel entitled When the Rainbird Cries, the former Zimbabwean guerrilla Alexander Kanengoni tells a story of the destruction and suffering caused by an incompetent and cowardly guerrilla commander who operates in tandem with a fake spirit medium. (13)

It was in fact the fear of local land activisms of all kinds that created, for most of independence, a determined government and ZANU-PF centralization of policy and decision-making over land--even though that centralization had no clear way forward, particularly when confronted by the increasing phenomenon, from the 1980s onward, of squatting. (14) For one thing, the entire ZANU-PF apparatus had been geared toward operation within the formal economy and had no real sense of the informal sector, either in the cities or the countryside; for another, it knew it had not made great headway with land redistribution and did not want this indicated in stark relief to the self-help of the squatters; and finally, local movements, even perhaps with their local validations, could be seen as marginal within a far greater national picture of agricultural productivity and prosperity. In short, by the close of the 1980s, despite itself having used spirit mediums to validate the liberation struggle and to indicate the sanctity of land that had been wrongly appropriated by the white settlers, the ZANU-PF discourse on land was almost entirely founded on its economic usage. The official discourse on the black-and-white dichotomy and on the reprehensibility of British colonialism was leavened with the concept of "reconciliation": in the war/adventure novel A Fighter For Freedom, published shortly after independence, a gallant freedom fighter flees a white enemy instead of killing him, thus releasing a spark of dormant humanity in the hardened exploiter and criminal. (15) The 1991 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting was held in Harare to commemorate what the outside world saw as 10 successful years of independence. A beaming President Mugabe, with much British cooperation, chaired the agreement on the Harare Declaration on Human Rights, by which all citizens throughout the Commonwealth--black and white--had equal rights under law. Equal access to land was not highlighted at all.

Insofar as the Harare Declaration was a foundation document for today's Commonwealth, Mugabe was in fact a founding father of the Commonwealth he later left and excoriated as a bearer of colonial values. A mere year later, in 1992, the first official signs surfaced of a recognition of uncompleted business over land.

1992 was a year of drought. The Zimbabwean government was caught unprepared and complacent, literally unaware how low food stocks had run. Perhaps it was the personal blow of losing his wife, Sally; perhaps it was the unpalatable prospect of needing to deal with the white South African government to import food relief; (16) but Mugabe made a sudden move to do with land, and this suddenness seemed to the West irrational. Mugabe utilized the period of emergency to launch the Land Acquisition Act of 1992. In that year, 4,500 mostly white commercial farmers owned 11.5 million hectares. This was almost one third of the country. Seven million peasants lived on 16.4 million hectares of "communal farmland." Despite this, the figures of local food production available for relief (tons of maize delivered to the Grain Marketing Board) were as follows: (17) Sector Production To Grain Marketing Board Communal farms 200,400 25,000 Large commercial farms 292,000 32,300 (mostly white) Resettlement farms 21,000 6,000 TOTAL 513,000 63,300

The commercial farmers pleaded that their land was given over mostly to cash crops (for export) or ranching (for elite consumption), and that such maize production as was available had to be kept back in part to feed their black farm workers. Even so, they owned by far the majority of arable land in Zimbabwe and had contributed to the Grain Marketing Board only as much as peasant farmers--and the need to feed black farm workers, while important, was only a minority concern within the greater national need. (Even in 2000, when the farm invasions began, black farm workers amounted to only 350,000 in a population of some 8 million. (18))

Since independence, Britain had contributed some 44 million [pounds sterling] for land settlement, and this had purchased 3.3 million hectares, allowing 70,000 poor families to be resettled, but this had been very much a drop in the ocean against total need and desire. The Land Acquisition Act proposed to nationalize 5.5 million of the 11.5 million largely white-owned hectares. Sensing the potential outcry, famine and the stark figures notwithstanding, Mugabe said, "Let us, you see, carry out this act once and for all. Those who support, support, those who will want to sabotage, let them sabotage. We will go through that path of comforts and discomforts and we will evolve measures ourselves in the process of remedying that." (19) However, there remained an agricultural sensibility: "Only those with the potential to be good farmers should be chosen for resettlement and proper services should be provided to ensure productive communities are established." (20)

As it happened, 1992 was also the prelude to the International Monetary Fund's programs of structural adjustment embroiling Zimbabwe. The white farmers lobbied the international community hard--in retrospect, perhaps too hard and too successfully--and donors never came forward to finance land nationalization; nor did structural adjustment regard land nationalization and redistribution at that time as anything but economically undesirable. In the face of fiscal stringency, the last thing the IMF wanted was the disruption of the nation's key economic sector. The Land Acquisition Act was never implemented--although the British government of John Major did signal it would remain ready to help, albeit modestly, with land reform at the opportune moment. So, for most of the 1990s, the question of land remained unsettled and the discourse surrounding it did not go beyond questions of equity. Although white farmers owned the bulk of commercially arable land, official discourse did not emphasize the black/white divide. The racial constituent of ownership was politely, even assiduously, sidestepped. Thus relationships on the white-owned land remained fixed in time--although, as Blair Rutherford points out, there could be considerable variation in how well white farmers could appreciate the needs of their workers and be appreciated by them in turn. (21)

The image painted in Chenjerai Hove's Noma Award-winning novel, Bones, is of a demanding, often unreasonable, and overbearing white farmer--harsh on his workers, who are in turn dependent on him. After independence, the farmer flaunts his unassailable status with regard to land: "There is nothing the government in the city can do. I rule here. If your government wants to run this farm, let them bloody take over. Then we will see if they can run a farm." (22) The heroine of the book, a female farm worker called Marita, has lost her son to the liberation war. After independence, she goes to the city in hope of finding him or learning his fate. She dies there; it is as if the city--the seat of the newly independent government--has swallowed her. But Marita knew the old ways of rural society, and she also represents a rejection of the idea of simple retribution. During the liberation war, she refuses to denounce the cruel farmer to guerrillas, which would send him to his death: "Child, what do you think his mother will say when she hears that another woman sent her son to his death?" (23) It is this attitude that the city also swallows.

There is in this book a sudden intervention, a chapter where the human protagonists fall silent and the spirits of the land, who have inspired the liberation struggle, speak. At the outset of this chapter is a most startling paragraph: Disease comes like a swarm of white locusts covering the trees, breaking the branches with their weight, a weight never seen by any eyes alive today. The locusts of disease will eat into the fields of our harvest until we remain like orphans in the land we inherited of our children. We did not inherit this land for ourselves but for the children we have inside us. Look at the cloud of locusts. Eat them if your mouth waters for them, but this cannot be eaten since it is a bad omen. The locust that our ancestor says we can eat comes alone and runs away when we run after it. But this swarm cannot be on its own. It has its own messages which I tell you are not good. Have you ever seen a swarm of locusts so large and with such a mouth as to eat even the fireplace? Locusts that nibble and claw at everything? No, this is not a swarm to appease the eye of any ancestor. Look what has happened to the fields and forests. They are a mountain of white locusts. (24)

The spirits go on to warn of newcomers--the "men without knees"--who wreak havoc upon heritage, custom and memory. They call upon the bones of the land to rise and wage war against the invaders, but what happens is a war of cosmic proportion, and of desolation, which does not, by itself, bring about change.

It is tempting to think of Bones as a novel of both spiritual hunger resident in the land, and of the need for social redress of the inequities caused by white ownership of the land. However, Marita's younger confidante, Janifa, undergoes a traumatic and complex transformation, in which--even with the return of Marita's son from the war, crippled but victorious and seeking her hand in marriage--she must free herself from others and not find new ties in the young veteran, but find freedom within herself. She rejects the veteran. The novel ends on a hopeful, but tragic, note. (25) Can Janifa free herself, when even victory in war is insufficient? The novel's end echoes its introductory dedication and epigram: "To the making of a new conscience." It is this that is harder than spirits or war could contemplate. In what way could this new conscience come? In what way could the new citizen be born? In Bones, the emphasis is not only on land, but also on the difficulties of movement to and from the land, or the difficulties of crossing space in a society where past relationships remain fixed, as if frozen. Hove's other novels also address this issue.

LAND AND SEIZURE

At the 1997 Edinburgh Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting, Mugabe and the recently elected Tony Blair first met--and took an instant dislike to each other. Blair apparently indicated to Mugabe that he had no intention of honoring John Major's undertaking to fund land redistribution. The new British government was committed to a fresh start in all things, and the letters of the Overseas Development Secretary, Clare Short, to the Zimbabwean Minister of Agriculture in 1997 declared that Britain no longer felt it had residual responsibilities for the effects of a bygone colonialism. (26) Mugabe stormed home from Edinburgh and gazetted 1,732 farms for nationalization. Whether this was pique, bluff, or indicated real intent, the hectarage involved would have been little different from that announced in 1992. However, events within Zimbabwe soon began to force Mugabe's hand.

By the late 1990s the incidence of squatting had increased. This affected mostly white commercial farmers but also state, church, and private black-owned properties. The Mugabe government floated resettlement models and plans before donor conferences as late as 1999, (27) suggesting that beneath its rhetoric of preemptory nationalization it was still seeking a way forward that would command international support. However, by 1999 it was also clear that "war veterans" were involved in what had become a squatting movement.

This is not to say that the squatting was monopolized by veterans, nor that the veterans were more than a minority of those involved in the massive land invasions that began in 2000. Nor is it to marginalize the experience of true veterans searching for redress only in land. In Alexander Kanengoni's third, unjustly critically neglected novel, Echoing Silences, the war-veteran hero, Munashe, seeks above all a moral redemption for the atrocity he was forced to commit in the liberation struggle, and it is because of this atrocity that ancestral spirits intervene in the narrative. (28) Nevertheless, the large-scale entry of veterans into Zimbabwean politics in the late 1990s was not over land or moral redemption, but over the issue of pensions. In 1997, led by Chenierai "Hitler" Hunzvi, a Polish-trained doctor who was married to a Polish woman and himself no veteran, the Zimbabwe Liberation War Veterans Association scored a stunning victory over Mugabe's initial reluctance to award them their pension demands. As a force, they had arrived, and Hunzvi found himself a national figure whom even the president treated warily, Despite this, neither Mugabe nor the Zimbabwean political pundits saw the veterans as the future explosive ingredient in the land issue. Intellectual analysis was still predominantly biased toward an urban politics, with writers on rural issues like Sam Moyo a rare exception. What was far more common were analyses of dysfunction within both the international political economy and the elite, urban and capitalist Zimbabwean political economy, which was seen as its tributary. The author who was hailed as the novelist and poet of post-colonial malfunction and despair was Dambudzo Marechera. His novella, The House of Hunger, struck a chord by depicting urban degeneration and desperation, and nationalist literary critics such as Musaemura Zimunya (who was also a noted poet of Zimbabwean rural landscape) accused Marechera of being decadent and un-African. (29) As early as 1991, the eminent Zimbabwean political analyst Brian Raftopoulos utilized Marechera's image of the entire country as a "house of hunger" in his own work. (30) In early 2000, however, the sense of slow degeneration suddenly erupted into chaos, new forces emerged, and the central issue was land.

On 12-13 February 2000 Mugabe held a constitutional referendum. Among other provisions the new draft constitution would have extended his own powers, and also allowed him to nationalize land. In a landmark vote, Mugabe's constitution was defeated, 697,754 to 578,210. Although only 26 percent of the electorate voted, it was a stunning defeat for Mugabe, who had never previously lost at the polls. Since 1990, Mugabe and ZANU-PF had comfortably won all elections--and would probably have won even without their use of targeted violence and intimidation. This time, and for the first time, a viable opposition party--the MDC--had emerged, and it seemed that the future of Zimbabwean politics would involve new forces. It would also involve a more direct and pointed rhetoric than before. The ZANU-PF spokesman, Jonathan Moyo, heralded the new racism of the rhetoric: Preliminary figures show there were 100,000 white people voting. We have never had anything like that in this country. They were all over town. Everybody who observed will tell you there were long queues of whites. The difference between the "yes" and "no" votes would not have been what it was had it not been for this vote. (31)

In the last week of February 2000 the farm invasions by "war veterans" began. It was clear that, at first, this was an extemporized project. Senior government ministers had no idea what was going on, nor did the police. All the original invasions were within commuting distance of Harare; and, although the actual veterans were clearly reinforced by ZANU-PF hired hands (a great many far too young to have fought in the liberation war) and were aided and abetted, transported and provisioned by ZANU-PF, no one knew who within ZANU-PF was at the heart of the new movement. Even Mugabe's early statements seemed to indicate that the "war veterans" were there for spectacular demonstration effect, and their invasions could be moderated as soon as the white farmers and Britain began cooperating with land redistribution. (32) But, if ZANU-PF figures variously appeared to endorse and to be amazed by the farm invasions, the leader of the war veterans, Chenjerai Hunzvi, soon assumed center stage with a completely unambivalent message. With his veterans and his articulation of their grievances over land, the MDC as a new force in politics had been met by a countervailing new force whose core was trained in violence, and whose leader was demagogic and racist.

There has long been debate as to whether Mugabe or Hunzvi was most involved in the escalation of the land invasions until they covered all Zimbabwe. One of the present authors has written elsewhere that in his opinion, it was Hunzvi who made the early running. (33) Distinguished journalists such as Chris McGreal and Andrew Meldrum at the time asked which of the two was in charge. (34) Whatever was the case, it was Hunzvi who led the way in the rhetorical stakes. He declared the white farmers as "foreigners, they are British! They should go back to Britain. We don't need them here. They can all go." He insisted that the farm invaders were not squatters. "They are Zimbabweans on Zimbabwean land. That is the land we went to war for and we are going to stay on that land." On the matter of Western reaction, he said that it was a new war, "an economic war" and "a bitter war." (35) As for those Zimbabweans who opposed the land invasions, Hunzvi asserted that "we are here to ensure that ZANU-PF's reign shall never be interrupted by sell-outs." (36) It seemed that Mugabe had to race to keep up. Only in May, with parliamentary elections in sight (which ZANU-PF narrowly, and probably with rigging, won), did Mugabe reach the peak of Hunzvi's rhetoric--but still attacking Britain as a neo-colonial power as much as attacking the white Zimbabwean farmers (although he called the latter "diehard Rhodesian settlers"). (37)

In a way the political rhetoric that asserted latter-day nationalist credentials by being more black than black or more anti-white than any other reflected an undercurrent in both Rhodesian and Zimbabwean popular literature. The early colonial novels of Peter Armstrong, Daniel Carney, and others featured heroic, lantern-jawed white heroes locked in struggle with savage, greedy, and corrupt black villains. (38) There were no black heroes in this literature. By contrast, some of the thrillers and adventure stories that appeared after independence portrayed superheroic black characters, James Bond-like in their gadgeteering and resourcefulness, invulnerable, impermeable by white bullets, and unable to be deflected or deluded by white strategy. (39) In R. M. Machingauta's thriller, Detective Ridgmore Riva, a black secret agent bemoans the necessity of obeying the law, which prevents him from torturing white suspects at will: "Why then do we defend the country when its laws are at times against us and in support of the very people who want to destroy it? ... I wonder whether some of our laws were not imposed on us to please certain organizations or outside countries." (40) The British government's response to the events of 2000--lamenting the seizure of white farms and the deaths of white farmers as a first-order objection; lamenting the death of legal rights for all, and the deaths of black opposition activists secondarily--played right into the hands of the Zimbabwean supremacists. (41)

THE NEW OWNERSHIP OF LAND

The newly invaded and acquired land was meant to pass into the hands of hitherto landless peasants and benefit the poor of the nation. It was meant to complete the liberation struggle, with economic rights in 2000 finally following upon the political rights gained with independence in 1980. In actuality, three things happened. Firstly, poor and landless peasants did indeed gain land, but not huge numbers of them and, generally, they did not receive the best land or large segments of land. (There is still confusion over the final outcomes, but the evidence thus far strongly suggests that this is the case.) Secondly, much of the best arable and commercially viable land passed, in large, economically viable segments, to members of the Zimbabwean elite. Government ministers and other politically influential persons acquired titles to land and, in some cases, titles to more than one farm. (42) A species of looting by the rich was visible alongside some redistribution to the poor. Thirdly, neither rich nor poor could farm their new acquisitions properly. In the midst of drought, the poor had insufficient inputs and equipment to make use of their land, and the rich had insufficient agricultural knowledge. Agricultural production crashed catastrophically. Mugabe toyed with bringing white farmers back; with bringing new Chinese farmers into the country; and finally; at the end of 2003, in order to facilitate some meaningful agriculture, has set about seizing farming equipment as well as the farms themselves. (43)

Although the land issue was very old in Zimbabwe, and the rhetoric of black and white was always present as an undercurrent, it was not officially introduced to independent Zimbabwe in a significant, sustained, and public way until 2000. This new rhetoric was about black ownership of what had been white, and was traditionally black. If Zimbabwe is to become agriculturally prosperous again--and economic prosperity involves the complex production of export crops--it can now only be this elite that can seek to replicate the commercially productive methodologies used by the whites. A bitter irony now resonates with the words of the racist farmer from Hove's Bones: it remains to be seen whether government-related elites can run farms.

This much is clear. Three other things need to be said however. Firstly, insofar as elite ZANU-PF members now own large farms, we see the advent of a new ZANU-PF rural sociology, and rural domination. Secondly, insofar as elite ZANU-PF members now assume control of farming, the phenomenon has nothing to do with farm ownership as an elite aspiration among peasants, but with the established elite from the cities also becoming the elite in the countryside. It is the city coming to the countryside. Thirdly, despite these fundamental changes, the discourse involved is extremely backward-looking. It harks back to rhetoric from the liberation struggle. It is as if more than 20 years of independence have provided a completely static discourse. It debases the possibility of any new discourse, and it seeks not at all to develop Chenjerai Hove's "new conscience." In fact it can only compromise any existing notion of conscience; any "new citizen" from this ransack and appropriation can only be a citizen by virtue of having deprived other citizens of livelihood, rights, and farms. All of this took place amidst what was admittedly a revolution over land, but one in which no agricultural planning whatsoever was involved--so that land, having neither spiritual nor agricultural value, was reduced to a symbol for seizure and appropriation but not for productive use or veneration. It is, in this retrospect, an appallingly sorry story in which equity had fictional properties.

In Echoing Silences, Alexander Kanengoni's extraordinarily moving novel about the psychological consequences of war, the veteran Munashe finally achieves relief from his tortured conscience through death in a part of the countryside rich in spiritual history It allows him his gateway to a heaven, in which he attends a great political rally, reminiscent of Stanlake Samkange's heaven, with its great councils, sitting in judgment. Both council and rally are judgmental. The ancestral councils are there to judge Lobengula and Rhodes. Kanengoni's rally, however, does not mention white settlers, but judges the post-independence political history in Zimbabwe. All the deceased heroes of the liberation war are there--the ultimate veterans, those whose names are now the new street names in Harare, such as Parirenyatwa and Takawira. But there are also black soldiers who fought with the Rhodesians. This is a heaven of forgiveness for the past--even though it judges the present. Herbert Chitepo and Jason Moyo address the rally, and they speak of corruption and of historical betrayals. There are two paragraphs of Herbert Chitepo's speech that are worth quoting in full. They follow a denunciation of the fact that "the wealth and the economy of the entire country [is] slowly becoming synonymous with the names of less than a dozen people." It is shocking to see the reluctance that we have to tell even the smallest truth. Ours shall soon become a nation of liars. We lie to our wives. We lie to our husbands. We lie at work. We lie in parliament. We lie in cabinet. We lie to each other. And what is worse is that we have begun to believe our lies. What I fear most is that we will not leave anything to our children except lies and silence. It all began with silence. We deliberately kept silent about some truths, no matter how small, because some of us felt that we would compromise our power. This was how lies began because when we came to tell the history of the country and the history of the struggle, our silences distorted the story and made it defective. Then the silence spilled into the everyday lives of our people and translated itself into fear which they believe is the only protection they have against imaginary enemies whom we have taught them to see standing behind their shoulders. They are no longer able to say what they want. Neither are they able to say what they think because we have become a nation of silent performers, miming their monotonous roles before an empty theatre. And behind the stage, we, their leaders, expend our energy, coining high-sounding words--indigenization, empowerment, smart-partnerships, affirmative action--with which we will silence them forever.

Chitepo echoes the Alan Paton title. He laments, "Cry Zimbabwe. Cry beloved country." (44) Perhaps there is no greater indictment than to infer Zimbabwe had become like racist South Africa.

NEW CONCEPTS OF LAND?

The ZANU-PF discourse on land has been deliberately retrogressive to the rhetorical discourses of the second Chimurenga, Zimbabwe's struggle for independence. Government propaganda calls the process of "fast-track land resettlement" the third Chimurenga, implying a continuity that has culminated in a final act of decolonization. But even before 1980, it would have been wrong to ascribe all motivation for struggle only to the land. Fundamental human rights were involved. The goals of dignity and political freedom were involved. (45) The wish to be nationally independent and part of an internationalism of independent states was involved. That is why, at the 1991 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Harare, Mugabe was so obviously pleased to announce the Harare Declaration on Human Rights--seated alongside a Nigerian Commonwealth Secretary-General, host to almost 50 heads of government from all parts of the world, and host also to South African liberation leaders at last able to begin an emergence from hiding or prisons. The fetishization of land thus not only provides for a static discourse but also an exclusive one that forgets principles to do with human and political rights, that forgets the principles of modern agriculture, and that retreats from internationalism.

This segmentation of discourse is a ZANU-PF accomplishment; and it is one into which the opposition MDC has fallen. The MDC is an urban party. Its policy on land is not one of restitution of land to dispossessed white farmers, but of compensation. It effectively accepts the land seizures as a fait accompli. It has, beyond this, no agricultural policy of any greater complexity or forward-lookingness than ZANU-PF's. This is due in part to the urban foundation and sociology of the MDC; in part also to the realization that, however atrociously, ZANU-PF has done something overdue; and in part to the MDC's need to conserve and propagate its urban strength. It can only carry the fight to ZANU-PF from the cities. Outside the eastern provinces of Matabeleland North and South--which have their own quarrels with Mugabe from the repression of both the real and imagined dissidents in the mid-1980s (46)--the MDC has no significant rural strength, and none of its strength is based on its rural and agricultural policies.

Who then is to say, or has said, something resonant and meaningful about land outside ZANU-PF and the MDC? Since well before independence, creative writers have produced complex reinventions of Zimbabwe's multi-dimensional struggles. Their imagination of land is itself multi-dimensional. In this section we want to highlight in particular the experimental strand of Zimbabwean fiction, which started in the 1970s with Marechera and has continued after independence with Kanengoni's Echoing Silences and the lyrical prose of Chenjerai Hove and Yvonne Vera. (47) These writers have cultivated literary styles built around prominent and evocative imagery and syntax, as well as the non-realist approach to narrative composition; in their texts, the causal and temporal links between episodes are often not explicitly stated, nor are the episodes themselves ordered chronologically. The poetic and imaginative worlds they have created have brought them international critical praise--and their experimental form has probably been instrumental in keeping the Zimbabwean censor at bay. (48) The theme of land is particularly prominent in the writings of Hove and Vera. Together with other Zimbabwean texts, these writings suggest that land is not something that is static, nor should it be viewed statically In addition to having a political, economic, and spiritual dimension, land is also a part of both national and narrative space-time, and as such it is something to be traversed. This traversal, the fictional narratives suggest, is bound up with certain rights. Without these rights, the possession of land has little meaning.

Not that the possession, in itself, is unimportant. The two novels Hove wrote after Bones, entitled Shadows and Ancestors, each feature a male African character who desperately longs to become a matenganyika, "the buyer of land." (49) Since both stories are set before independence, their heroes' only option is to gain Master Farmer certificates and acquire poor-quality, tsetse fly-infested plots in designated Native Purchase Areas. This, however, involves a displacement: the new farmers and their families must leave the overcrowded Tribal Trust Lands and make the journeys to their new farms--from which, in turn, the previous occupants have been forcibly displaced.

Both novels stress that the journeys are difficult. They require leaving behind the graves and rituals of one's ancestors, and taking the slow and expensive trip by bus or train. When, later, characters want to leave their farms, and, in some cases, come back, their movement is again represented as slow, torturous and sometimes dangerous. ("You walk home from the bus stop where the dusty bus has abandoned you to the night full of horrors.") (50) Hove is not the only Zimbabwean writer to insist on this; overcrowded buses and trains and difficult journeys on foot feature in the majority of Zimbabwean novels in English (see, for example, Shimmer Chinodya's Harvest of Thorns). (51) When Marita leaves the white-owned farm in Bones, part of the risk she is taking is the danger of the journey. From a bus window, she sees large farmlands which nobody farms. The owners are frenzied or vicious when they see someone walking through these unspoiled forests that are their farms. But there is no bus or car to take the walker away from the roads through the farms. So, one does not know how to leave the farmlands and reach the bus stop. (52)

Marita reaches the city, but cannot return. The master farmer in Shadows also goes to the city, and returns from there only with the greatest difficulty. The longed-for status of being a matenganyika is thus reduced to a passive and static existence, in which all spatial movement is directed and enforced from the outside. In an essay entitled "Freedom and Knowledge," Hove makes the connection between land and the right to movement explicitly, and in the post-independence context: I am the son of a farmer who grew cotton, maize and sunflowers.... I discovered, through hard experience, that the joy which bloomed on my father's face when the crops were ready for harvest soon dried up when he knew that the destination of his harvest was not for him to know.... Buses carry people. People carry ideas. The best way to keep the nation ignorant is to deprive them of roads so that new ideas do not cross certain boundaries. That is why the ruling party's strategy has often included beating up those who were able to move from the city to country with ease. (53)

In today's Zimbabwe plagued by chronic shortages of petrol, the same government elites who are taking possession of agricultural land are also monopolizing the right to traverse it.

The right to traverse space, Zimbabwean fiction further points out, is bound with the right to leave the land and not return to it. This is especially obvious in the works of Yvonne Vera, in which young Zimbabwean women move with as much difficulty as Hove's characters, but the movement is often away from the countryside, and in search of mobility as an aspect and precondition of the modernity that development in Zimbabwe must point to. (54) In Vera's novel Butterfly Burning, a young woman seeks to keep moving within the city, in a futile attempt to escape being constrained either by the colonial system of boundaries, or by a relationship with a man. (55) In her most recent novel, The Stone Virgins, it is a measure of progress brought about by independence that the heroine is able to leave a rural area and go (using an arrow-straight road with no obstacles) to the city of Bulawayo, never to return. (56) In the novel entitled Without a Name, another young woman wishes to escape the trauma she has undergone in the war-torn rural areas, and find both work and freedom in the city On a large commercial farm that she passes through, a caring lover pleads with her to stay, and remain close to the land because he does not want to leave. What he is afraid of is the difficulty in returning to the land not unlike that experienced by Hove's characters: "He was afraid of returning and not knowing the land, of the land not knowing him. He feared untried absences. He preferred the histories of his people." The novel, however, argues precisely for the right to leave history behind, and traverse the land in untried directions: "The woman rose above the land and scorned its slow promises, its intermittent loyalties. She had such a will, and he knew that he could not equal her passion for beginnings." (57)

In today's Zimbabwe, dominated by official discourses that insist on confronting the future by looking into the past, "a passion for beginnings" may be precisely what is needed. There can be no doubt that the struggle for land in Zimbabwe has involved, and continues to involve, much suffering. Some of this suffering has yet to be admitted to the official discourses, and has been described in novels like Shadows and The Stone Virgins. But this suffering cannot be requited by the mechanical, statically conceived act of taking possession of land, nor by a demagogic and narrowly based rhetoric. "Corruption begins with the corruption of language," writes Chenjerai Hove, condemning the Zimbabwean government's discrimination against "people without totems" which, while it may have been aimed primarily at white farmers, affected also people of Malawian and Zambian origins on the invaded farms. (58) In that sense, what has become corrupt after independence is of the same order as that which was corrupt and discriminating before independence. What is required, now more than ever, is the imagination of the new consciousness that Hove referred to in the dedication of Bones, and the obverse side of which he described recently in an essay entitled "Violence Without Conscience." (59) In the forging of this conscience, creative literature is pointing the way, and creative literature says that land is something complex; it is about not only arrivals but departures; it is thus about freedoms--and freedoms are those things of conscience and consciousness which today's Zimbabwean government seeks to deny.

Acronyms in this essay have been kept to a minimum. The two used are MDC, the Movement for Democratic Change, the contemporary opposition party in Zimbabwe; and ZANU-PF, Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front, the government party.

(1) Stephen Chan was consulted by one of the "track two" emissaries; during this period, he also took part in debates with the Zimbabwean High Commissioner (Ambassador) to the United Kingdom, Simbarashe Mumbengegwi, at the London School of Economics, 12 Nov 2003, and the ZANU-PF Secretary for Foreign Affairs, Didymus Mutasa, on BBC World Service "Talking Point," 7 December 2003. Despite extensive educational backgrounds in the white West, both attacked both the West and its colonial and contemporary racism as a first response to any criticism of the Mugabe regime. For the importance of the Commonwealth to Zimbabwe, see Stephen Chan's The Commonwealth in World Polities: A Study of International Action 1965-1985 (London: Lester Crook, 1988) and "Commonwealth Residualism and Machinations of Power in a Turbulent Zimbabwe," CW & Comparative Politics 39, no. 3 (2001).

(2) "We cannot deprive those who have large farms, arbitrarily, of those farms. We are going to acquire land. We must abide by legality, but also by the requirement of fair play." Robert Mugabe in a 1980 BBC interview, excerpted in Michael Charlton's The Last Colony in Africa." Diplomacy and the Independence of Rhodesia (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 152.

(3) Terence Ranger, Peasant Consciousness and Guerrilla War in Zimbabwe (London: James Currey, 1985), Chapter 1.

(4) Terence Ranger, Are We Not Also Men? The Samkange Family & African Politics in Zimbabwe 1920-64 (London: James Currey, 1995).

(5) Stanlake Samkange, On Trial for My Country (Oxford: Heinemann, 1967).

(6) On this see Terence Ranger, Voices from the Rocks: Nature, Culture and History in the Matopos Hills of Zimbabwe (Oxford: James Currey, 1999), and Jocelyn Alexander, JoAnn McGregor, and Terence Ranger, Violence and Memory: One Hundred Years in the 'Dark Forests' of Matabelel and (Oxford: James Currey, 2000).

(7) Samkange, 27.

(8) For an analysis of a similarly "dual" narrative technique and its implications in Samkange's novel The Mourned One, see Ranka Primorac, "The Novel in a House of Stone: Re-Categorising Zimbabwean Fiction," Journal of Southern African Studies" 29, no. 1 (2003).

(9) Samkange, 156.

(10) See the debate between Terence Ranger (1985), David Lan, Guns and Rain (London: James Currey, 1985), and Norma Kriger, Zimbabwe's Guerilla War: Peasant Voices (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

(11) Cited in W. Moyo, "On the Breadline," News Africa 1, no. 32 (2003): 21 (emphasis added).

(12) Billy Mukamuri, Making Sense of Social Forestry: A Political and Contextual Study of Forestry Practices in South Central Zimbabwe (Tampere, Finland: University of Tampere, 1995).

(13) Alexander Kanengoni, When the Rainbird Cries (Harare, Zimbabwe: Longman Zimbabwe, 1996).

(14) The squatter issue was noted by Jeffrey Herbst, State Politics in Zimbabwe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), Chapter 4. See also Jocelyn Alexander, "State, Peasantry and Resettlement in Zimbabwe," Review of African Political Economy 61 (1994): 325-45.

(15) E. Chipamaunga, A Fighter for Freedom (Gweru, Zimbabwe: Mambo Press, 1983).

(16) Stephen Chan witnessed the release of the Harare Declaration on Human Rights, and the 1992 recognition of how close "stock-out day," the end of food stocks, actually was. There was a range of calculations, one being as little as nine days until "stock-out." For differing views as to how contact with the South Africans was finally established, see Stephen Chan, "The Diplomatic Styles of Zambia and Zimbabwe," in Paul B. Rich, ed., The Dynamics of Change in Southern Africa (London: Macmillan, 1994); and Ulf Engel, The Foreign Policy of Zimbabwe (Hamburg, Germany: Institut fur Afrika Kunde, 1994).

(17) Figures from Economist (15 February 1992).

(18) Economist (22 April 2000).

(19) Financial Gazette (Harare), 12 March 1992.

(20) Herald (Harare), 28 March 1992.

(21) Blair Rutherford, Working on the Margins: Black Workers, White Farmers' in Postcolonial Zimbabwe (London: Zed, 2001).

(22) Chenjerai Hove, Bones (Harare: Baobab Books, 1990 [1988]), 99-100.

(23) Hove, 64. For a denunciation of Hove's inability to direct undiluted hatred at white settlers, see the article by the Zimbabwean nationalist critic Rino Zhuwarara "Men and Women in a Colonial Context: A Discourse on Gender and Liberation in Chenjerai Hove's 1989 NOMA Award-Winning Novel--Bones," Zambezia 21, no. 1 (1994).

(24) Hove, 47-8.

(25) For a discussion of the complexities of this ending, see Caroline Rooney, "Re-Possessions: Inheritance and Independence in Chenjerai Hove's Bones and Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions," in Abdulrazak Gurnah, ed., Essays on African Writing 2: Contemporary Literature (Oxford: Heinemann, 1995).

(26) Blair Rutherford, Degrees in Violence: Robert Mugabe and the Struggle for Power in Zimbabwe (London: Continuum, 2002), 133.

(27) Sam Moyo, "The Land Occupation Movement and Democratisation in Zimbabwe: Contradictions of Neoliberalism," Millennium 30, no. 2 (2001).

(28) Alexander Kanengoni, Echoing Silences (Harare: Baobab, 1997).

(29) See Musaemura Zimunya, Those Years of Drought and Hunger: The Birth of African Fiction in English (Gweru: Mambo Press, 1982).

(30) Dambudzo Marechera, The House of Hunger (Oxford: Heinemann, 1978); Brian Raftopoulos, Beyond the House of Hunger: The Struggle for Democratic Development in Zimbabwe (Harare: Zimbabwe Institute of Development Studies Working Paper 17, 1991).

(31) Times (London), 16 February 2000.

(32) The war veterans "should not disturb the farmers. They should not touch the property at all. They should be as peaceful as possible and not disturb the day-to-day activities and operations of the farm." Mugabe quoted in the Guardian (London), 13 May 2000.

(33) Stephen Chan, Robert Mugabe." A Life of Power and Violence (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 149-151.

(34) Guardian (London), 20 April 2000.

(35) Ibid.

(36) Independent on Sunday (London), 30 April 2000.

(37) Guardian (London), 4 May 2000.

(38) On this, see Anthony Chennells, "Rhodesian Discourse, Rhodesian Novels and the Zimbabwe Liberation War," in Ngwabi Bhebe and Terence Ranger, eds., Society in Zimbabwe "s Liberation War, Vol. 2 (Harare: University of Zimbabwe Publications, 1995), and Ranka Primorac, (2003).

(39) Chipamaunga (1983) and the novels of Garikai Mutasa.

(40) R. M. Machingauta, Detective Ridgemore Riva (Harare: ZPH, 1996 [1994]), 159.

(41) Foreign Office Minister Peter Hain's attacks on Mugabe are a case in point. When it came to popular British media, even the glossy gossip magazine Hello devoted a five-page photographic tribute to the widow of a murdered white farmer, with no coverage at all of black deaths (23 May 2000).

(42) See "Addendum to the Land Reform and Resettlement Programme National Audit Interim Report," released in March 2003.

(43) Independent (London), 18 December 2003.

(44) Kanengoni, 87-8.

(45) During the truce and interregnum between Rhodesia and Zimbabwe, Stephen Chan's conversations with military officers from the liberation forces, although not pretending to be representative, were revealing in that the impression gained was certainly not of having gone to war in the first instance because of land. In fact, one officer was ignorant that the land situation was any different in the independent states of Africa: Stephen Chan, The Commonwealth Observer Group in Zimbabwe." A Personal Memoir (Gweru: Mambo Press, 1985), 77-8.

(46) On this, see Richard Werbner, Tears of the Dead (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991), and Jocelyn Alexander, "Dissident Perspectives on Zimbabwe's Post-Independence War," Africa 68, no. 2 (1998).

(47) On this, see Ranka Primorac (2003) and Preben Kaarsholm, "Coming to Terms with Violence: Literature and the Development of a Public Sphere in Zimbabwe," in Robert Muponde and Ranka Primorac, eds., Versions of Zimbabwe." Literature, History and Politics (Harare: Weaver Press, forthcoming).

(48) Despite the social and political criticism expressed in his novels and poetry, Chenjerai Hove ran into problems with the Zimbabwean authorities only after he became a political columnist. He now lives in exile in France; the columns he wrote for The Zimbabwe Standard are collected in Palaver Finish (Harare: Weaver Press, 2002). Yvonne Vera and Alexander Kanengoni are based in Zimbabwe.

(49) See Chenjerai Hove, Shadows (Harare: Baobab Books, 1991) and Ancestors (Harare: College Press, 1996).

(50) Hove (1996), 50.

(51) Shimmer Chinodya, Harvest of Thorns (Harare: Baobab Books, 1989).

(52) Hove (1990), 69.

(53) Hove, "Freedom and Knowledge," in Palaver Finish (2002), 14.

(54) For a spatial analysis of Vera's novels, see Ranka Primorac, "Crossing into the Space-Time of Memory: Borderline Identities in Novels by Yvonne Vera," Journal of Commonwealth Literature 36, no. 2 (2001).

(55) Vera, Butterfly Burning (Harare: Baobab Books, 1998).

(56) Vera, The Stone Virgins (Harare: Weaver Press, 2002).

(57) Vera, Without A Name (Harare: Baobab Books, 1996 [1994]).

(58) Hove, "Violence Without Conscience" (2001), 6.

(59) Ibid., 79-81.