Whose land is it anyway? Interrogating contesting voices

IN “Whose Land is it Anyway” (2016), Benjamin Sibangani Sibanda evades the novelist’s temptation to pick a side through imposition of ideological vision on the reader, as Nyaradzo Mtizira’s does in “The Chimurenga Protocol” (2008), and Eric Harrison fixates in “Jambanja” (2006).

Such pre-emptive titling presupposes that the reader is blinkered, and has no input in the fictional experiences projected.

Sibanda’s titling allows multiple interpretations to equally multiple claims to the land; be they racial or intra-racial, where judgment on who owns the land becomes evidence-based. Through setting and historical sojourns, the novel reveals how colonialism is central to the contestations of heritage in African societies.

The setting of the story is Zimbabwe, 20 years after independence in 1980. The story begins with Jacques Venter, a white farmer, and a cleric, Pastor Jones, sitting in the veranda of Venter’s imposing mansion in the Macheke commercial farming area, admiring the beautiful environs of the country. It is just before the post-2000 fast-track Land Reform Programme.

Through multiple voices of black and white citizens of the country, the story follows up on land reform. Different individual episodes that make up the tale of contestation play out through liberation war veterans, traditional leaders, the coloured community, Christians, white commercial farmers, farm workers, ordinary citizens and politicians; who all lay claim to the land.

With multiple claims being thrown about, Chief Juru of Hwedza, leads his people on a journey to reclaim their land “owned” by Nicholson, a white man.

The Juru people’s claim is based on the collective memory that it is their ancestral heritage which white settlers had stolen through colonial conquest.

However, the white community, also using history as a basis, disputes the claim. The Juru people’s episode dominates the story from this stage, as it becomes a launchpad for the post2000 Fast Track Land Reform Programme. Following his loss of land to the Juru people, which he feels is unjust, Nicholson is determined to fight back.

As the story unfolds, both parties — whites and blacks — use history to claim ownership, thus laying the basis for the contestation that the novel depicts.

It is this historical link that exposes the void between blacks and whites’ relations.

No matter how much both sides may try to find a common ground; as it appears, they cannot connect. The two parties cannot find each other because of the vast chasm they have created between them, which is as wide as the land itself.

The fictional experience reaches a crescendo when the ZIPA-led government steps in, and from there on reclamation of the stolen heritage becomes a serious business. Thus, the Fast Track Land Reform Programme, whose scope and implementation the novel depicts, is set in motion. With claims and counter claims flung about, liberation war veterans are thrown into the mix through Themba Ndlovu.

Although the novel predominantly gives articulation to black and white voices in their historically-based claims to the land, the coloured minority voice is also amplified through Peter Lawrence; thus complicating the whole issue of land ownership based on both history and race.

Sibanda’s novel conforms to Julien’s (2006) observation that it is not possible for the African novel to avoid the history of colonialism (cited in Mandizvidza, 2018:246). Raftopoulos (2004:1) concurs that it is “analytically impossible to discuss the problems of internal politics, economics and land reforms without an understanding of the colonial inheritance” (cited in Chiumbu and Musemwa, 2012: xi). Kheir (2010) points out that the African “crisis is a crisis of inheritance rather than a crisis of capability”.

The issue of the land, therefore, whose reclamation is roundly blamed on the “crisis” prevailing in Zimbabwe (Raftopoulos and Mlambo, 2009), cannot possibly be explored in the absence of the history of colonialism.

It is such history that is critical in the interpretation of individual and collective biographies provided through the interrogative titling of the novel.

By retracing the roots of ownership contestations to colonialism, Sibanda beams the Fast Track Land Reform Programme onto the bigger screen that history offers. The divergent voices that now lay claim to the land, as the novel attests to, are not new. Thus, the novel, “speaks to, and is a record of, the longer histories of the groups competing for land in the country” (Alexander and McGregor, 2014: 751 cited in Mandizvidza, 2018:247).

While “Whose Land is it Anyway” falls into the category of the historical novel that seeks to remodel the future using memories of the past and the present, it eludes the limitations of the rigid patriotic narrator as in Mtizira’s “The Chimurenga Protocol”, or the participant storyteller in Harrison’s “Jambanja”.

Rather than foreclosing debate on the post-2000 Fast Track Land Reform Programme, through titling, Sibanda opens up avenues for other possibilities.

While history is important in situating the struggle for land, it should not be an end in itself, but a means to an end, where the past is reflected in the present and the future. Ownership of land, or a claim to heritage should go beyond proving whose ancestors did what and to who. Future generations should not continue to be burdened by historical evidence of ownership, or protracted struggles over land, but how that heritage was able to transform livelihoods.

In that context, Hegelian supremacist settler gods as well as black gods that use history to keep ordinary citizens down, claiming to inherit the means of production on their behalf, should be censured. Entitlement to land, Sibanda suggests, should be linked to one’s relationship with it so that it produces more (Warren, 1997), and how one relates to those with counter claims.

Though there are multiple voices in the African nation with blacks tussling against each other for control of the means of production; the land, an ancestral heritage, the need arises to locate the contestation in the larger historical frame that created two contrasting nationalisms; Black Nationalism and White Nationalism.

Colonialism created a paradise for whites, which paradise they want to hang on to, and which paradise the elite in the African nation wants to inherit and push the majority out of.

The attitudes that characters from across the colour bar exhibit in relation to both history and land ownership point to a kind of arrogance that is likely to keep the European nation and the African nation in the country apart. These two nations in one country have been in existence since the “Pioneer Column” hoisted the Union Jack at Harare Hill on September 12, 1890 (Chigwedere, 2001).

In the novel, the European nation hangs onto past exploits where the settler remains a supremacist hero, and his junior black brother a perpetual servant.

The African nation on the other hand clings onto history to justify ownership, and uses the agency to struggle epitomised in the Chimurengas of the 1890s and 1970s, as its default mode. The “nation-less” coloured component, represented by Peter Lawrence, justifies claim through legality and by virtue of having bloodlines traceable to both the European nation and the African nation. While the European nation is united by its “self- centred ‘ Rhodesian- ness’ ( Godwin and Hancock, 1993:18), with white nationals, who see themselves as “British imperials imbued with the sense of the South African frontier; the South African mission; and the South African cultural idea” (Schutz cited in Godwin and Hancock, 1993:18), the African nation is united by the same ethos that divides it; reclamation of its heritage.

The South African cultural idea relates to apartheid, and its tenets of segregation. The history of the liberation struggle and what precipitated it, unites the African nation, but it is split into multifarious voices placing separate entitlements on their collective heritage. Thus, the same liberating and unifying ethos divide Africans. The composition of the characters in the novel attests to the multiplicity of voices claiming rightful ownership based on history. Both the “British imperials” and the “South African frontier” (ibid) ideas are reflected in the novel through characters like Jacques Venter, Jack Van Breda, Pete Van Zyl (the Afrikaner connection), Dudley White and George Nicholson (the British connection). The European nation and the African nation operate in a Manichaean world, where you are either with “us” or you are the “other” with no space for the in-between, a situation that Pepetela is contemptuous of in “Mayombe” (1980).

On the other hand due to colonial association, the African nation functions in a Manichaean world as well.

As is depicted in the text through past memory, Rhodesia is a country for whites in which the European nation flourishes and the African nation is tolerated.

The African nation is riddled with poverty and fights for every morsel of crumbs dropped from the tables of the settler nation — the European nation.

The settler constitution is conspicuous in its insistence that white Rhodesians are Europeans, blacks are Africans; coloureds and Asiatics (not Asians) are “nation-less”. They simply do not belong, therefore, their claim to either European, or African heritage becomes frivolous. It hinges on nothing.

The term Asiatics is a denigrating reconstruction that debars claim to Asia, meant to subdue, rob of historical link and simply declare one unfit to claim the heritage of the two nations outlined. Since the Rhodesian constitution is clear on race in relation to land ownership, as is depicted through Peter Lawrence, it recognises two races; blacks and whites.

The reading of the historical fact is that one is either black or white, with no room for other shades, which according to the settler constitution do not exist.

Therefore, coloured is obscure, for no such shade exists. It is in itself a derogatory term. On the issue of Asiatics and coloured people, the African nation has leant its lessons well; they do not exist.

It is a historical burden that the post-colonial nation state carries, and which also needs to be addressed.

George Nicholson’s farm of 40 years is called New Bristol Farm because “he had originally come from Bristol in England”.

His claim is based on title deeds and the fact that he remodelled the farm along the British tradition; a heritage that should be bestowed to future generations.

To Jacques Venter, Ventersburg Farm, is his own personal creation emblazoned on the empty African landscape and modelled on the European tradition, which is neither hostile nor alien to him.

In his mind as in the reality of the reconstructed landscape, Africa no longer exists in the precinct of Ventersburg.

Africa exists, as it has always done, in the adjacent Nhowe Communal Lands and its environs; the white man’s source of labour and women.

It is this status quo that the African nation seeks to change through the Fast Track Land Reform Programme.

However, in its determination to reconstruct history and map its own way forward, leveraging on its heritage, the land, the African nation creates more problems on itself, some linked to the Empire that refuses to let go, and some of its own creation.