Cedric Steele
YOUR Excellency, President ED Mnangagwa.
We are living in a time when the vestiges of white hegemony and entitlement are, at long last, being challenged almost on a daily basis all over the world. This is as it should be. In the words of Martin Luther King Jr: “The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice”. Black people have been waiting for justice for a long time.
Zimbabwe fought a protracted war against a racist system that was put in place by arch-white supremacist Cecil John Rhodes, paid a heavy price for taking on what was a de facto imperialist power. In 1890, Rhodes dispatched his Pioneer Column to “appropriate”any land as it saw fit. There were no agreements of sale, no willing buyer/willing seller, no compensation paid to the occupiers of the land who inhabited it for countless generations. Africans were systematically driven off the land, often brutally and with many atrocities occurring. This land grab by the settlers continued for the next 90 years right up to independence in 1980.
Your Excellency, the Pioneer Column which consisted of greedy, land hungry mainly white Europeans, was not interested in sharing the abundant good farmland with the Africans whom they saw as inferior beings. On the contrary, the land was part of the spoils of their conquest. This nightmare for Africans is similar to what has taken place on countless occasions all over this continent. Slavery and colonialism have wreaked havoc and wrecked the lives of so many people for more than 500 years and yet no compensation has been paid to Africans or their descendants for the trauma they suffered, lost livelihoods, lost opportunities, loss of inheritance, loss of intellectual pursuits, not to mention the pursuit of happiness.
The invaders that stole the land from the indigenous people did prosper. Many of them managed to grow their farming ventures into huge going concerns generating great wealth for themselves and their offspring, as well as contributing greatly to the Rhodesian fiscus. In turn, these same farmers benefited from government assistance, concessionary banking terms, and very cheap, mainly black labour. The system worked very well if you were a farmer and happened to be white. However, it is universally accepted in any society that is governed by laws, that no one should benefit from the proceeds of a crime and neither should their descendants. Unfortunately, we are waking up to the realisation that due to white privilege and entitlement, the law isn’t applied equally. The reality is, to be a victim one must be white.
Your Excellency, even when a crime is perpetrated against a black person by a white person, the victim is the white person. This is nothing new and it is stubbornly persistent. Jamaica is a prime example of this phenomenon. Slavery lasted for nearly 200 years on the island then In 1833 the Slavery Abolition Act freed all the slaves.
The British government decided to pay compensation, not to the slaves for the 200 or so years of unpaid labour, pain and suffering, not for their toil that made Britain the wealthiest nation on earth at the time, and put the “great” into Great Britain. No, instead of paying the victims of slavery they compensated the slave owners and the ship builders, the lawyers, bankers and even some of the clergy as they were viewed as being prejudiced by the Slavery Abolition Act.
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All these people profited off the blood, sweat and tears caused by slavery, both before emancipation and then cashed in after its abolishment. The total paid out by the British government to these vultures was £20 million, 40% of the national budget, which would be equivalent to £16,5 billion in today’s money. The debt was so huge that it wasn’t liquidated until 2015, a full 182 years later. This means, grotesquely, that a sizeable portion of the debt was paid for by the descendants of the very same slaves who endured the pain and suffering in the first place. Paying the white perpetrators of criminal acts against blacks is the modus operandi of white supremacy and white entitlement as was demonstrated yet again some 30 years later after the end of slavery in America.
Your Excellency, platitudes may occur here and there, together with half-hearted apologies, but never a commitment to pay hard cash in the form of reparations for the evil deeds that have occurred in the past to the descendants of those afflicted by slavery and colonialism. The descendant of the beneficiaries of the huge profits of slavery and then the compensation after emancipation, have gone on to live unimaginably lavish lifestyles including being given lifetime peerages. This is a far cry from what the descendants of the slaves have had to endure.
In Zimbabwe it appears, yet again, that a similar scenario of white privilege and entitlement is being played out. How does a country that fought and “won” a protracted war of independence that lasted 15 years, the main driver of which was the quest to recover land that was stolen from its people by the invader settlers, entertain the idea of paying compensation to the beneficiaries of the original crime? Even those claiming to have bought their farms, who did they buy them from?
At the Lancaster House Conference in 1979 where the terms of an agreement to end the war were being negotiated, Britain and America were on hand to make sure that white privilege was maintained for as long as possible, to give the entitled minority a soft landing despite staring down the barrel of the gun.
They made sure that 20% of the seats in Parliament were to be reserved for whites for seven years after independence.
Furthermore, the country would have to wait for 10 years before any land reform measures could be enacted.
Needless to say, the conference nearly failed primarily over the question of land reform. By all accounts, it was the late former President Robert Mugabe who was most defiant on the land question, pressing home the point that this was the most contentious issue on the table and one of the main reasons why they went to war.
The British and American governments offered to compensate white citizens for any land sold so as to “aid” reconciliation under the willing buyer-willing seller scheme, and a fund was established. Needless to say there was no such fund set up for the land theft and loss of livelihoods for the original occupiers of the land that was stolen by the white invaders.
The present government of Zimbabwe has announced that it will pay white farmers $3,5 billion or 16,4% of its 2020 GDP, in a land compensation deal by issuing long-term bonds via international donors.
The compensation is apparently not for the land itself, but for improvements.
This is a ridiculous distinction intended to pull wool over people’s eyes. These so-called improvements emanate from the proceeds generated by the utilisation of the same stolen land. These are the same proceeds that were denied the original owners of that same land.
Your Excellency, this wretched agreement also takes note of the haste that is required in order to accommodate some of the ageing beneficiaries, presumably before their demise. There is also a clause that benefits the descendants if the named beneficiaries are no longer alive.
It must be clearly stated here that this money, if realised, will be a loan that will have to be paid back by the citizens of Zimbabwe. The same people and their beneficiaries that profited for over 90 years through theft and the exploitation of Africans will be given a handout that will ultimately be paid for by the victims of these crimes. This is white supremacy and entitlement gone bonkers!
I have no doubt that should the government of Zimbabwe proceed with this horrible endeavour, the money will probably be raised because there is nothing the West likes more than giving money to their own and forcing debt upon poor African countries.
These same white farmers with their hands out today and who are playing the victim card should be ashamed of themselves. If they really want justice, they should ask for forgiveness and use whatever leverage they have with potential funders to raise money to compensate the descendants of the people they stole land from in the first place.
Your Excellency, Zimbabwe must never forget the sacrifices made by the gallant fighters that helped to rid the country of its racist oppressors and who paid the ultimate price with their lives. Compensating white farmers will be the ultimate betrayal of their sacrifice. The proposed $3,5 billion would be better spent on revamping the crumbling infrastructure, getting clean piped water to every household, getting hospitals, schools, police stations and public transport to a point where we can all be proud.
If money is going to be raised, let it be used for a just cause rather than to line the pockets of a privileged few who benefited hugely from land theft and the inequalities of a system created by that same theft for over 130 years. If the people of Zimbabwe are to be encumbered with a $3,5 billion burden for the next, God knows, how many years, then it should benefit the over 16 million, black and white citizens of the country and not just 4 500 privileged white farmers so they can deposit in their Western bank accounts.
