About 6 million of Zimbabwe's 12.5 million people are landless peasants eking out a living on poor agricultural land, while about 4,000 white commercial farmers control 27 million acres of the most arable, fertile soils--and much of the nation's wealth.

The land question has been at the center of the class struggle in this country for more than a century, including in the 20 years since Zimbabweans ended white-minority rule in what was then Rhodesia.

In 1980, the British government--the colonial power--in concert with the capitalist landholders, forced the parties that led the armed liberation struggle to agree to key concessions in what became known as the Lancaster House agreement.

Chiefly, the new government of Zimbabwe was prohibited from nationalizing commercial farms. London and Harare have since been in a tug of war over funds from the United Kingdom pledged to the Zimbabwean government to purchase such farms. London has withheld much of the money to pressure Harare to do its bidding. While some of the most onerous provisions of the Lancaster House deal fell away in 1990, the government has failed to carry out a radical land reform.

"Less than 15 percent of Zimbabwe's land held by large-scale commercial farmers had been redistributed by 1990 to about six percent of the rural population (65,000 families)," according to the 1998 booklet The Land Acquisition Process in Zimbabwe. "The concrete result of the 1990s policy has been less than 50,000 hectares (123,500 acres) acquired and 2,000 families settled each year so far."

This situation highlights the extent to which Zimbabwe is still trapped within the web of financial and capitalist market relations through which the system of imperialism transfers massive wealth from the vast majority of oppressed countries into the coffers of the super-wealthy minorities in a handful of great powers.

In typically cryptic language, a World Bank report on Zimbabwe says the country, "has been experiencing an economic and social crisis induced by dropping prices for its key export products, uncertainty about domestic policies, high inflation and jittery markets." Low economic growth is a "result of poor performance in agriculture and mining." It notes the Zimbabwean dollar has depreciated by 90 percent since the end of 1997 and inflation hit 64 percent last year.

Imperialist powers and capitalist concerns in South Africa stepped up their pressure on the Mugabe government this past week, demanding he put an end to the farm occupations organized by government supporters.

The Financial Times reported that at the end of a visit to Zimbabwe, Kevin Wakeford, chief executive of the South African Chamber of Business (SACOB), condemned the government for its actions. "The moment you prostitute the rule of law and allow property rights to be ignored is the moment normal business instruments are withdrawn," Wakeford said. "It really makes it very, very difficult for us to conduct normal business." Zimbabwe is South Africa's largest trading partner in Africa. SACOB backed the racist white minority regime in South Africa, which, like its partner in Rhodesia, stripped blacks of their land and rights over the course of decades.

The Times reports that the crisis in Zimbabwe has "prompted the withdrawal of credit lines and export credit guarantees for trade with Zimbabwe. Insurers are also refusing to provide further cover for goods in transit inside the country."

In an article titled, "Besieged Mugabe Turns From Reconciliation to Rage," Washington Post journalist Jon Jeter writes Mugabe "has done nothing but rage as mobs of landless peasants and black veterans from the war against white-minority rule have set fire to the country's cash crops and murdered farmers and farm workers, political dissidents and even a police officer, pushing what was once southern Africa's most promising democracy to the edge of chaos."

The rapidity with which Zimbabwe has gone from "Southern Africa's most promising democracy to the edge of chaos" does worry the imperialists, and they are working to stabilize the situation in their own interests.

Working farmers in this rural area outside of the capital here present a more complex picture on the ways in which workers, peasants, and small farmers are organizing to confront the economic and social crisis.  
 
Black farmers face monopolies
Johannes Chikarate, 30, is chairperson of the Musengezi District Cooperative Union, which groups six farms run as cooperatives by small-scale black farmers. Nationwide, there are about 25,000 cooperative farmers. "Our cooperatives are on state land," he said. "We are pushing to have title deeds, or even a 99-year lease, which we still do not have. Most cooperatives cannot borrow without these. We just have a piece of paper that says we can occupy the land."

The 667 Musengezi farmers grow maize, baby corn, cotton, beans, and groundnuts, and also raise cattle.

Four of the farms have surpassed subsistence level and are making annual surpluses. The one farm for which accurate accounting has been done for 1999 posted a surplus of Z$170,000--about US$4,475. With the surplus, "they have started developing housing for the members," said Chikarate. "They were staying in dugouts and huts. Now they are building brick houses."

Chikarate said the farmers received no aid from the government, including for seed and fertilizer, but by pooling their resources, farmers could do better. For example, the cooperative union will pay 60 percent of the outlay for tillage, seed and other inputs, and farmers pay the balance at the end of the season.

Like working farmers in North America and Europe, the Musengezi farmers are subject to the ups and downs of the capitalist market. "The maize price last year was Z$4,200 (US$110) per ton. The return on the dollar invested was good. But we had a lot of problems with cotton, which is very labor intensive. Inputs, most of which are imported, have risen 40 percent but the price paid of Z$14,50 a kilogram (about 18 cents a pound) has stayed the same."

The chief buyer of cotton--and the entity which sets the price the farmers are paid--is Cargill, the giant U.S. agricultural merchant.

The imperialist powers' demands for economic "reform," expressed through agencies such as the International Monetary Fund, also have an impact on farmers' livelihoods.

"In the first 10 years of independence we did not pay a cent for primary school education," said Chikarate. However, when the Zimbabwean government began implementing an IMF-dictated belt-tightening program in 1990, peasants felt the pinch. "Parents are now required to pay school fees of Z$300, which is very difficult. We have a school here for grades 1-7 attended by about 560 children, but the nearest secondary school is 10 kilometers (about 6 miles) from here on a dirt road. Most of the kids run there and back."  
 
Fighting off an occupation
Kumuka Kwavatema is one of the six farms in the Musengezi cooperative union. In the Shona language, it means "the rising of the black people." The 407-acre farm was started by seven veterans of the liberation war along with some peasants and young people in the early 1980s. Today it has 47 farmer members, nine of whom are women.

Kumuka Kwavatema was occupied twice by area villagers just prior to the nationwide occupations of white-owned commercial farms that began with the support of the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) government at the end of February.

Chikarate put the blame on one faction of the ZANU-PF leadership in Mashonaland West province. "The people who were pushing for the invasion were looking at the infrastructure to add to their own farms," he said, identifying the driving force behind the move as the provincial governor.

"It was the ZANU-PF headman who took the initiative for the invasion," said Jameson Zizi, 34, farmer and vice-chairperson of the Kumuka Kwavatema cooperative. "They came first in December, about 200-300 people from a nearby village. They were not ex-combatants. They said some of us should leave this area because we were not from here. It was almost a tribalist thing." After consultation with other elements of the government, he said, the villagers were pushed off the land by officials.

"But they came again in February, 200-300 people again. They said we must leave. We fired two shots into the air with our .303 rifle and about 75 percent of them left. In the morning all 47 of us gathered for a meeting along with some of our neighbors who came to help. That's when they attacked us."

"We had to fight to defend our land," said farmer Vivian Mazorodze, who described how she wielded an ax and a knobkerrie in the battle. "They did not want talks, so fighting was the only solution. We fought like hungry lions."

"We managed to drive them out," said Zizi.

While not directly part of the current land occupations led by the official war veterans association, the battle they described gives an indication of how ZANU-PF officials play on massive land hunger to advance their own interests.

Said Zizi of the current occupations: "It's not the right process of getting land 20 years after independence. The government has to get the land and resettle the people. Invasions by hungry peasants wouldn't come to this."

He did not see the opposition Movement for Democratic Change as offering an alternative to the policies of the government. "MDC is a party with no future," he said. "I have not heard anything that could see black people progressing through them."  
 
'Land is power'
Albert Vingwe, chairperson of the Organization of Collective Cooperatives in Zimbabwe, said that a real land reform and redistribution are vital to boosting the national economy by allowing the peasantry to draw the wealth from the land. "Land is power," he said. "If you give title to a person they can be free."

In the mid-1970s, at age 15, Vingwe, the son of peasants in eastern Zimbabwe, crossed the Mozambican border and joined the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA), the military wing of what was then ZANU. After training, he was assigned to a combat unit within Zimbabwe assigned to ferret out the Rhodesian regime's "Selous Scouts"--army units that were dressed up to look like guerrilla units. At independence in 1980, he became a lieutenant in the Zimbabwean army.

In the early 1980s, longstanding factional struggles escalated between President Robert Mugabe's ZANU and the Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU), then led by Joshua Nkomo. Saying that ZAPU was planning a coup, Mugabe sent troops into southwestern Zimbabwe, known as Matabeleland, ZAPU's support base and home to most of the country's Ndebele speakers. Most Zimbabweans speak Shona. Vingwe's unit was among those sent.

"A big fight took place. The army started shelling the city of Bulawayo with mortars, shelling defenseless people. I didn't like it. I immediately resigned. The army ended up slaughtering Ndebeles," he said, putting the figures in the thousands.

He and 21 other liberation war veterans pooled their demobilization allowances and bought the 300 acres on which they now farm south of Harare. The number of agricultural cooperatives nationwide eventually grew to 110, but 55 were repossessed by the government for being unproductive.

Describing the challenges faced by small farmers, Vingwe said that "commercial farms apply professional production and planning methods. Many of the cooperatives are on former commercial farms but are doing subsistence farming. Farmers had no access to credit and finance. Training was not adequate and co-ops are the last to receive inputs. Exports are done through middlemen."

The national cooperatives association helps peasants cut across these conditions by pooling resources and making expertise available.

"On state-owned land the government was supposed to provide grants for machinery and infrastructure. That didn't happen. Now they are levying a tax on us." Moreover, he said, "nobody wants to invest in land that is not titled."

Vingwe said that of the land reform that has taken place in the past decade, a number of government officials have benefited while the vast majority have not. He called this "naked robbery."

"For our farmers to feed the nation they need a real resettlement program," he said.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home