‘It was just bush’: Unpacking Eurocentric views of African land
IN his memoir “Jambanja”, Eric Harrison makes a curious observation that in 2000 “the President of Zimbabwe changed the Constitution”, maintaining that it was “at a stroke of a pen”, declaring that “the people of Zimbabwe have been unjustifiably dispossessed of their land”.
He accuses the late revolutionary and former President of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, of “claiming” that the land “had been stolen”, and demonises him for reducing everything the whites had put “into developing the land” to “nothing”.
Harrison seems to forget that it was at the “stroke of a pen” that the indigenous people lost their heritage through the Rudd Concession
of 1888 and the Lippert Concession of 1891, with the British government going against their own constitution and tenets of justice.
He carries the burden of proof that the land had not been stolen (Chigwedere, 2001).
As highlighted in the memoir, he “bought” stolen land, if the borrowed $5 000 he “paid” to get 187 hectares of prime land under Lot One of Mkwasine Estate could translate to buying.
Harry’s gripe is not even against the post2000 Fast Track Land Reform Programme, which he makes the subject of his story; he has always been against the disruption of the status quo.
In Harrison’s view, “farmers were expanding and the economy of the country was going well”. So, to him it was “out of the blue” that in the mid-1990s “talk of Land Reform was first aired”.
He considers it to be “out of the blue”, yet he admits that farmers were expanding, meaning white farmers were prospering, and blacks were wallowing in poverty as “neighbours”.
Persistent questions arise from such assumptions: Did he make an effort at raising his neighbours to the same bar as his? If talk of land reform was “first aired” in the 90s, why then does it become “a stroke of a pen” in 2000?
The historical imbalances in land ownership were bound to be corrected. It was only a matter of time, and he knew it.
Harrison spins the same old and overplayed story thrown about every time the issue of African heritage — the land, stolen and abused over many eons of subjugation and oppression under colonialism, is raised.
It is the story that there was nothing to talk about — it was just an underutilised bush. It is such careless talk that smacks of Hegelian supremacism, and goes against the grain of the African philosophy of human worth and spiritual connectedness as embodied in the land, which complicates land reforms in independent Zimbabwe.
This way of thinking is symbiotic of the Eurocentric individualistic tenets that feed on capitalism; the commodification of everything, land included.
In the African context, land is not a “commodity to be bought owned, sold and used as one pleases” (Lan, 1985) as opposed to the Eurocentric view where land can “be owned by individuals and companies, fenced, and gated as private property” (Bakare, 1993:50).
Colin Saunders projects the rationale of “discovery” of “empty space” and “remote region” (Giddens, 1991), in the foreword to “Jambanja” when he ferrets “unjust eviction” from a heritage fashioned out of “untamed bush”, yet that same bush was a whole people’s source of livelihood.
One then wonders what justice means if it can only be administered by the same people, playing the complainant, witness, prosecutor, judge and God; all at the same time.
The view of land as an empty space whose verdant allure can be claimed by simply shouting “eureka” (I have found it), can be probed using an African lens, and not a European one. Africans could let their land fallow, because they cared for it, not that they had no use for it.
It was their land, communally-owned, and could be passed from generation to generation through families, with each individual having equal claim. The idea of collectivity and oneness, which shaped Africans and permeated their everyday life did not in any way reduce the value of their land, which in the first place was the pivot of their livelihoods.
To Africans loss of spiritual connectedness equates to forfeiture of life, because anything that angers the spirits is detrimental to them.
Land has an intrinsic value to Africans, yet when colonial bigots came, they claimed to have “discovered” “unpossessed land” in uninhabited spaces in “Dark Africa”.
In “The Autobiography of Kingsley Fairbridge” (1927), Fairbridge wonders why there are “no farms” and “no people” on his arrival in Manicaland at the age of 13.
From an early age, the colonial supremacist DNA of pillage and destruction is already visible in Fairbridge, as it is in Harry in “Jambanja”, when he embarks on a historical journey to Bulawayo; where colonial deceit started, and the first war cry of struggle was uttered.
On his excursions in Mazowe, Fairbridge writes: “we fished with dynamite, blasting the big pools and raising many a good meal thereby”.
Blasting and destroying is the colonial way. One who fishes with dynamite neither cares for the fish nor the water that sustains life; human and animal life.
Harrison informs us that when Harry leaves for the “beautiful”, yet “primitive” country of Angola, it is not for its “many natural resources such as oil and diamonds,” but for “the agricultural scene”.
He also tells the reader that “he introduced to them the very latest methods used in his home country”. To him, therefore, Rhodesia is no longer part of “darkest” and “primitive” Africa, because it now “belonged” to whites.
Close reading of the essence of heritage reveals that it was for the land, in its broader sense.
The natural resources “such as oil and diamonds” constitute the land. It is, thus, an individual attempt at colonialism driven on by Hegelian supremacist ideas of grandeur.
Harry fancies himself Cecil John Rhodes’ disciple, on a mission to contribute to the empire, in the same way that Fairbridge does.
Fairbridge writes in “The Autobiography of Kingsley Fairbridge” (1927:40-41): “A lad of 13, dressed in knickers and shirt sleeves, I walked on the outskirts of the Empire, where the shouting of men, the ring of hammers on stone, and the thud of picks in the baked earth were always in my ears . . . The stone faces of sleepy kopjes rent with dynamite that the bridges of the British people might be established in security”.
Through exploitation of Africans, whose “virgin velds”, they stole, colonialists established “bridges of the British people” on “the outskirts of the Empire”; a heritage they seek to protect through chicanery and tyranny disguised as aid and democracy.
Harrison’s quest to project whites as born farmers and animal lovers ignores or rather downplays the fact that Africans have always relied on farming for sustenance, and had systems to protect and live in harmony with their wildlife.
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