Understanding Land, Politics and Change in Southern Africa

Abstract

The crisis in Zimbabwe has transformed a region that was once thought of as Africa’s emerging democratic bastion, where multiparty pluralism had transcended the politics of racial exclusion of the era of colonial settler states and new leaders had firmly committed themselves to market economies and reconciliation as avenues for prosperity and hope. The unexpected slide into state-sponsored anarchy has found echoes in the rise of local militancy on the land issue in neighbouring states, coupled with the apparent chorus of support for Robert Mugabe by fellow Southern Africa leaders. It has threatened to recast the region as a potential repository of instability and, as leaders tilted with their constitutional restrictions on presidential terms, some would even say undemocratic practice.

Let missionaries and schoolmasters, the plough and the spade, go together, and agriculture will flourish; the avenues to legitimate commerce will be opened; confidence between man and man will be inspired; whilst civilization will advance as the natural effect, and Christianity operate as the proximate cause of this happy change.

Thomas Fowell Buxton, 1840.¹

The courts can do whatever they want, but no judicial decision will stand in our way ... This country is our country and this land is our land ... They think because they are white they have a divine right to our resources. Not here. The white man is not indigenous to Africa. Africa is for Africans, Zimbabwe is for Zimbabweans.

Robert Mugabe, 2000.²