Zimbabwe
Chenjerai Hove: In search of an identity

misanet.com / The Standard, 29 October - Cecil John Rhodes, whose company invaded Zimbabwe in 1890, used the slogan: "Come with me, I will make you a millionaire." At that time, he was busy recruiting adventurers from South Africa where he was prime minister of the Cape province. Thus, when he eventually managed to get the commitment of about one thousand 'pioneers', he had the audacity to give his name to the country now called Zimbabwe.

He had it named Rhodesia. And his company was the British South Africa Company. Eventually, he established a security company to protect his company property.

In short, Zimbabwe was colonised by a private company and it was the private property of an individual. Cecil John Rhodes did not cross the Limpopo without a map of what he wanted. He alleged that across that vast river, all the hills and mountains were filled with gold and diamond. It was only later that he discovered that his dream was only a dream.

The maps he carried were drawn by many hunters and adventurers who had crossed the Limpopo in search of ivory and gold. After the hunters, there were also the missionaries who came in search of the souls of the 'natives'.

The tradition of the 'whites' who came after these events was that they wanted to make money. They were fortune seekers. Then they had children, and their children had their own children who also had their own children.

It went on and on until 1980.

For the whites of Rhodesia, it was also clear why they were in this country. They tried to dig for gold and other minerals, but it did not work. They went on for endless years.
Then they discovered that the real gold of the land was the soil and they went on to try one crop after another until it eventually emerged that the real gold was tobacco. That is why Zimbabwean tobacco is called 'the golden leaf'.

The colonial experience was, for blacks, nasty and bitter.

The class structure of the citizens was clear-at the top, were the whites, then came Asians and coloureds. Everybody knew where they stood.

The whole map had to do with who earned what money and even where they could drink. It was a small apartheid in a small country.

Come 1980, and we had the flower of independence. Freedom had come. That was the time to celebrate. Poets celebrated with poetry. A poetry anthology titled And Now the Poets Speak was published, edited by Musae-mura Zimunya and Mudereri Kadhani. In that anthology, everyone is a poet. Trade unionists, priests, preachers, prophets, teachers, politicians and all. It was the voice which signalled the arrival of our dignity. At least we could now write our history in our own words, even if it meant writing that history with fingers dipped in our own blood.

Why not? Prime Minister Robert Gabriel Mugabe had said it was our country, all of us, whites, blacks, colou-reds, Asians. After all, we had all arrived from some place in search of living space where we could plough the land and dream our dreams in peace.

The people agreed and said it was no longer necessary to grow new trees of hatred. Most whites accepted it as a kind gesture in shaping our own complex destiny. But then, they still owned their farms and decided that the hand of reconciliation was simply a hand which said we should go on the way we had done before.

I remember one farmer asking me if I had been a freedom fighter during the war. When I said "No", he relaxed. He was quick to assure me that I had to know that there had been a lot of pain among white farmers because of the war.

I asked him how many relatives he had lost in the war of liberation. He replied that he had lost a son and a few friends. He did not feel anything when I told him that I had lost dozens and dozens of relatives and brothers and sisters to the war.

With vast farms in their hands, they decided to withdraw from all general aspects of social life which included involvement in the life of the country at all levels. They opened new private schools which their children attended at exorbitant fees. They opened their own private sports clubs after withdrawing from their long established clubs on the grounds that blacks had 'invaded' them.

What it all meant was that they cancelled all possibilities of new cultural and political encounters with blacks. They had their own world and blacks had theirs. For many years, I talked with those whites who were accessible, about issues such as the land, the economy, tourism. I told them to stop being tourists in their own country. It was good for them to realise that the land which they feel so strongly about once belonged to some black person's ancestor and that blacks felt as strongly about it each election time in the past twenty years. The land issue always came up, and died a natural death soon after.

We can talk about what the white farmers are like at the moment. That is not an issue. The issue is that they are citizens of this land. Among them are people of great hearts as well as people of ugly hearts.

There are bad and good citizens who still think they are in this country to make money and would not care a hoot what social and economic conditions their fellow citizens (blacks) are in.

But there are some who have realised that this is their country and they have worked to make it beautiful, especially since they have the economic means to assist their black brothers to improve life.

Much as there are bad black citizens, there are also bad white citizens. That the white citizens isolated themselves is not typical of them alone. There are people of Asian origin who have also isolated themselves in this country. You see them in their shops and bid them farewell at night. They go to their own residential areas and forget about the rest of the country.

Zimbabwe, like every southern African country, is unique. Europe is also unique. No country is excluded from this uniqueness. Whites are not the only people in this country who arrived from some place in search of economic prosperity.

Chenjerai Hove's ancestors arrived from far away places in search of economic fortune. The Ndebele are the same. All the ethnic groups of our country arrived from some place. It is a matter of who arrived from where and when.

So, the question of why whites are here is not relevant. Everybody deserves to be asked the same question. While the whites thought they were in this country to civilise blacks, some of them also realised that they had much to learn from this country.

Others enclosed themselves in their social and economic cocoons. Jeannie M Boggie, MBE, received her honours from the Queen of England for writing, among other books, First Steps in Civilising Rhodesia. In that book she openly admits that while she and others were trying to teach blacks about life, they were also learning a lot. Boggie was the wife of one of the first whites to 'invade' our country. But their history of invasion ends with the invaders.

It will not be transferred to the great great grandchildren. You may have parents, but you may not be the one to choose who you want your parents to be. 

The sad thing about the presence of whites in Zimbabwe is that they stood up to vote for the first time only when they realised that the recent referendum had serious implications on the land issue. That they own most of the prime farming land in Zimbabwe is well known. But their reappearance on the political scene was interpreted as an attempt to keep the land privileges they had inherited from their ancestors.

Their appearance also happened at the same time that President Mugabe is facing the most serious challenge to his rule from a formidable opposition. So, at the moment, Zimbabweans are seeing a political situation in which a desperate Mugabe regime is searching for the weakest community among Zimbabweans in order to portray that community as the sole evil of our country.

It is a well known fact that President Mugabe always invents a suitable enemy at the time of elections. Farm invasions are not a spontaneous occurrence. They are well planned by the ruling party and are usually stopped only after elections because they will be used to intimidate farm workers not to vote in the same manner as their employers. Nothing else.

The white population in Zimbabwe has been shouting out its awareness of the land imbalances as they exist and it has been urging government to deal with it in a manner not disruptive to farming. But the Mugabe government has not been forthcoming. It is important for the world to realise that the dialogue Mugabe should have initiated many years ago with the white population did not happen because of him, not because of the white population.

Zimbabwean political leaders have allowed corruption to mushroom. Nothing has been done about it. There is hardly a minister of government who does not have a farm.

The people of Zimbabwe cannot be taught a new form of racism. White-hate is as unviable an alternative as black-hate. The viable alternative is to ensure that there is good governance in our African countries.

Our African leaders must know that government does not belong to an individual. Will this crisis change the relations between blacks and whites in Africa - and how does it do so?

Chenjerai Hove is an award winning Zimbabwean writer.

 

© Chenjerai Hove/The Zimbabwe Standard    You can contact afrol.com at mail@afrol.com