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S P E C I A L R
E P O R T S
Not cricket
Robert Mugabe is not so much
against white farmers as his own people – and
a England boycott of the world cup in Zimbabwe
won't help them any.
4 January 2003: A new
controversy has embroiled English cricket,
dampening already dispirited fans following the
thrashing Australia has dealt to the ‘Poms’
in the Ashes series. Several prominent lawmakers
and politicians have come out saying England
should boycott its world cup match against
Zimbabwe to be played in Harare on 13 February,
even if it means England will lose points and
fail to qualify beyond the first round of the
tournament.
The reason is apparently “moral” owing to
the fact that white farmers are being brutalised
by Robert Mugabe’s government in a form of
"reverse racism." Others have come out
saying that the cause for boycott should be the
violence, corruption, rigged elections and
economic collapse Zimbabwe has suffered under
Mugabe. But the central casus belli is the white
farmer land disenfranchisements, and this
concern is completely misplaced and actually a
redux of neo-imperialism in Her Majesty’s
Great Britain.
Zimbabweans (not Mugabe) are victims of the
imperialist line, which is being regurgitated
openly by the media in Britain. There is a
peculiar tendency among former colonial masters
to gloat over the weakness and self-destruction
of their erstwhile colonies. Somewhere in the
collective psyche of a former colonial nation,
it kindles satisfaction when the common people
of Zimbabwe agree that Mugabe is worse that Ian
Smith's racist minority regime. It plays to the
apologist gallery, which claims to have brought
civilisation and virtue to the third world by
means of colonialism. One stellar defender of
this approach is arch-conservative American
analyst, Dinesh D’Souza, who recently wrote a
provocative article titled, Two Cheers for
Colonialism.
To adumbrate, let me quote the ace imperialist
Churchill on this: "I hate India and
Indians. It is a beastly land with a beastly
religion.” He strongly believed that the
moment the British left India, Indians would
fight among themselves “until their skulls are
broken." He had the satisfaction to see the
Partition of India as soon as the British left,
but India and Pakistan survived as entities, and
that is intolerable to the disguised
colonialists.
Today, when Amartya Sen says that independent
India never underwent humungous famines killing
3 million peasants like in British times, it
hurts the psyche of the average British MP by
questioning the rationale of European worldwide
aggression since the 17th century. The ‘White
Man’s Burden’ is under attack and that is
insufferable to many in London.
India is a rising power in the world today, a
far more important country that Britain
economically, and that too a country with stable
democratic institutions. But Zimbabwe is not in
the same league. And so, the Churchillian
mentality of ‘we told you so’ is on display
about decolonised Zimbabwe and the land problem
right now. It is a quality of delighting in the
conviction that Africans cannot ever govern
themselves properly.
Pan-Africanist Horace Campbell has just finished
a new book, Reclaiming Zimbabwe. Exhaustion
of the Patriarchal Model of Liberation
(David Philip Publishers, Cape Town). The
central thesis is that black Zimbabweans, the
overwhelming majority, are the main sufferers of
Mugabe, not white commercial farmers as the
British media is portraying. Economic surveys
have proven that all white farmers who are being
dis-propertied have enough savings and
investments to easily move over to the non-farm
sector and maintain the same, or even better,
standard of living as they enjoyed before losing
land.
The issue here is not loss of livelihood or
pauperisation of the white settlers, but rather
of the black majority. How? Mugabe's crony
capitalism disallows any fair or income-based
redistribution of the seized land. His
relatives, military chiefs and regime supporters
grab the lion’s portion of all requisitioned
land. The so-called 'war veterans' who are
occupying farms forcibly are all in their early
twenties! (Zimbabwe's war of independence,
readers might recall, occurred when these
'veterans' were not even born).
They are a paramilitary gang of hoodlums
unleashed by the Zimbabwe African National Union
Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) on an unsuspecting
countryside. Irregularities in redistribution of
land have also enriched scamsters who helped
Mugabe rig the recent presidential election.
Injustice is being done not so much to white
farmers, many of whom inherited usurped land and
hold British passports, but to the majority
which is being pushed into landlessness,
starvation and en masse crossing of
international borders into Mozambique and South
Africa through state terrorism and
politically-motivated depopulation policies. The
Global IDP Project has reported that the brunt
of displacement is falling squarely on poor
black Zimbabweans who voted for the opposition
Movement for Democratic Change in the last
election, especially those who are unfortunate
enough to live in areas of the country perceived
by Mugabe to be anti-ZANU-PF.
British theories about the mass exodus are again
playing the old imperialist card by claiming
that the snatching of white commercial farmlands
is exacerbating the food crisis. The incredible
racist logic behind this is that only white
farmers are capable of producing surplus grain
for marketing, and that black peasants, if given
land, will consume or store all that they reap
without selling in the open market.
In other words, blacks are labelled
‘subsistence farmers’, while what Zimbabwe
needs right now is commercial farming. If this
were true, how is it that the whole of Southern
Africa, not just Zimbabwe, is in a massive
starvation zone at present, and is falling
deeper and deeper into the quagmire? Surely,
commercial farmers in Malawi, Namibia or
Botswana have not been burgled like in Zimbabwe?
Why are these countries undergoing chronic food
shortages as well?
The partition of Africa in 1885 brought about a
radical restructuring of land relations, whereby
Europe imported the ‘enclosure movement’ and
strengthened the concept of private property.
Pasture lands and agrarian farms, which hitherto
existed in African villages as collective
commons for the enjoyment of the whole tribe or
local community, disappeared inch by inch.
In its place came legal deeds of ownership over
land for government-backed European settlers and
a few chosen ‘enlightened Blacks’ who
collaborated with the colonial rulers. The
shortages that we are seeing today can at one
level be seen as a disjuncture between the
traditional African system of land-sharing and
the imposed coercive proprietorships that have
survived long after the British, French and
Portuguese left the continent.
Mugabe is undoubtedly a pseudo anti-imperialist,
who allowed rich white farmers to remain in
control of their vast properties for two decades
since independence. Of the 15.5 million hectares
in white minority hands on the eve of
independence in 1980, only 3.5 million were
redistributed until 1997. Mugabe is also
notorious for privatising water and renting out
prime land to gigantic multinational
corporations like the Anglo-American Company,
which profit excessively from mine revenues but
share them only with Mugabe’s lackeys, without
reinvesting in local communities.
It needs scarce reminding that Mugabe, by virtue
of these pro-Western policies, was until three
years ago the model African ruler and a darling
of many a Western journalist who projected him
as an enlightened statesman. Curbs on the press
and on political and economic freedoms of black
Zimbabweans, coupled with tribalist
discrimination policies, existed for nearly a
decade in Zimbabwe, but no British outrage was
expressed then. Only when the white settlers, a
legacy of the colonial experience, began to be
threatened did the “moral” dilemmas of
cricket ties surface.
So, should England play the world cup match in
Harare? The British government allowed a
full-length English tour of Zimbabwe in October
2001 and there is no rational reason to scrap
this single game either. Misrule and electoral
fraud are phenomena not unique to Zimbabwe.
Pakistan remains suspended from the Commonwealth
on similar grounds, but there is no ‘moral’
outrage about touring Pakistan (the more logical
fear is of terrorist attacks on players, with
the New Zealand side narrowly missing a bomb
blast in May 2002 in Karachi).
Tony Blair should send Nasser Hussain & Co
to Harare and show that he is capable of
emerging out of the imperial mindset and shallow
sympathy for prosperous white settlers. The poor
in Zimbabwe desperately want regime change and
justice in land redistribution. England
symbolically boycotting a cricket match will do
nothing to improve their living conditions.
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