It’s hard to remember when the fight by a few thousand farmers to keep their land captured so much print and tough talk on a daily basis in the big-business media as have the recent events in Zimbabwe. Usually farmers struggle and protest for years, and lose their land to the banks, without so much as a peep in the daily press. But that is the difference between being a capitalist farmer and a working farmer.

What is the situation?

"Over six million people live in Zimbabwe’s marginal rural lands without fertile soils and reliable rainfall, lacking control of water rights and restricted from access to the bulk of the nation’s natural resources...(and) 4,500 mainly white, large-scale farmers today dominate Zimbabwe’s largely agrarian economy," wrote Sam Moyo in The Land Acquisition Process in Zimbabwe (1997/1998).

Many of these farms are massive. According to 1998 statistics, the largest 233 farms were more than 19,760 acres each. Anglo American Corporation alone owns 25 farms totaling 1.17 million acres.

The colonial conquest of what is now Zimbabwe involved the forced dispossession of Africans from their land, the stealing of cattle and farming implements, and the imposition of a brutal regime to defend the interests of the settlers and their masters in London.

Even with the liberation of the country in 1980 after a hard-fought struggle, the imperialist rulers forced the new government to agree not to touch the land for at least a decade. Going back on their promise to fund land purchases and resettlement, the British imperialists helped keep masses of peasants from gaining even a scrap of land to farm.

The moves by the government of Zimbabwe to end one of the most devastating vestiges of British colonial rule have been roundly condemned from London to Washington and back again. The imperialists try to use the fact that working people are facing growing food shortages in Zimbabwe to justify their demand that the government in Harare end measures to force the capitalist farmers to turn over their land.

While the methods of the government of Robert Mugabe have nothing in common with mobilizing working people to carry out a genuine land reform, his administration seems to be determined one way or another to end the system of land domination remaining from the colonial set up. Washington and London should stay out of Zimbabwe’s affairs. Their sanctimonious hand-wringing over a continent devastated by centuries of colonial and imperialist exploitation need not carry the weight of a single seed of corn with working people. Instead, Washington can start by addressing the claims and discrimination suits by Black farmers it has helped drive off the land across the United States. And London can turn its attention to addressing demands being raised by working farmers in the United Kingdom.  
 
 
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