First Thoughts on Zimbabwe by Jared Ball, The FunkiNest Journalist

Introduction to the Trip: A choice opportunity.

In his speech, “A Message to the Grassroots,” Malcolm X explained thecentrality of land to any revolution.  Land provides the social, politicaland economic backbone to any community and missing this point prevents actualrevolution from occurring.  My age, 31, and place of birth, the UnitedStates, has meant that the struggle for land has been more of a topic of research and historical study than actual experience.  It is also why I had begun paying attention to the Land Reform Movement in Zimbabwe and why I jumped at the chance to join an African American press delegation headed there led by Akbar Muhammad, International Representative for the Nation of Islam.

I had been following the West’s press coverage which continues to choose hype over substance to characterize Zimbabwe’s president, Robert Mugabe.  He is described by their press as a corrupt supporter of violent thugs seekingto aimlessly and brutally steal land from innocent white farmers.  However, I excitedly followed reports that described Mugabe as a war hero seeking to right historical wrongs.  And after considering the varied perspectives on why Mugabe had seemingly belatedly taken up this issue of land reform or to whom the land was going once confiscated, questions of farming competence and so on,  I was ready to move on to the next issue.

Some Context: Aspects often ignored, understandably, by the West.

Like friend and colleague Dr. Todd Buroughs, also a member of this delegation,  I was finished with the issue of land by the end of our first two days inZimbabwe.  For me it was and is clear: all white farmers should eitherturn over all of their land in Zimbabwe and return to their colonial homenation or at most stay keeping only land proportional to their numbers, i.e. 2% population 2% of the land.  The former European colonial nation,in this case England, should have the responsibility of supplying financialsupport for their returnees since it was the establishment of this Europeandiaspora that helped save England and create its (and Western Europe’s) wealth in the first place.

It is important to remember that Europe has always had the problems of food shortage and overcrowding.  Their favorite remedy for this has been colonies.  Colonies provided resources, labor and places for the resettlement of European people.  More space at home.  Less poverty to deal with.  In the 1700s England would punish “crimes” as small as stealing bread by deportation to their colonies here in America.  In 1884-85 the nations of Western Europe and America sat down at the Berlin Conference and created all of the nations that now exist in Africa for thepurpose of avoiding intra-European violent conflict over who got what Africanterritory.  The very fact that there is even a Zimbabwe to discuss today is that the Berlin Conference had created previously nonexistent borders and called one section Southern Rhodesia after Cecil Rhodes.  Lady Lugard,wife of the man responsible for the development of British colonial administration in Africa, wrote an entire book on the subject titled,  “ A Tropical Dependency.”  She opens by explaining that the British empire, though thought to be white, was actually very Black and Brown due to England’s economic dependence on her colonies in Africa and India.

And the man responsible for most of the problems facing Zimbabwe andSouthernAfrica said it best.  Responding to the poverty and unemploymenthe saw in London Cecil Rhodes said that “to save the 40,000,000 inhabitantsin the United Kingdom from a bloody civil war, we colonial statesmen mustacquire  new lands to settle the surplus population, to provide new markets for the goods produced by them in the factories and mines.  The Empire, as I have always said, is a bread and butter question.  If you want to avoid civil war, you must become imperialists.”  This is the origin of and purpose for a European settler population in Africa and explains how their descendants now rest on the land.

There are those in the West who disagree, as did Alan Graham,  thewhite Zimbabwean farmer we interviewed.  In response to our delegation’s questions relating to this issue Mr. Graham said that these white farmers had been there for generations and had not themselves participated in the actual acquisition of land from the indigenous African population and should, therefore, be spared removal from their farmland.  To them I say, "Sowhat?"  We in America hear this from whites all the time when it comesto correcting the past mistreatment of Africans and Native Americans.  Let this be a lesson to today’s exploiters of people and land. Your sinsmay be visited upon the heads of your descendants and it will be your fault.  Graham took twenty minutes to even acknowledge that his ancestors had not paid for the land (other than a purchase from another white farmer) but had stolen and murdered their way to possession of African land.  And not just “land” in some general vague sense.  The best, most arable land, all of it.

It is only now that tides, and in some cases gun barrels, have turned that we hear calls for “discussion,” “compensation,” “peaceful transfers” and “patience.”  I could not help but smile to myself when thinking of Graham’s ancestors watching him surrounded by Black reporters asking him about his feelings of being unsafe on land he may lose in a country now led by a Black African descendant of the very people Graham’s ancestors murdered and stole from with pleasure.  If you want to protect your future generationsyou had better consider your own contemporary behavior.

The Question: How can any leader function properly under the constraints of a European/American dominated global economy?

The trip itself did present areas of concern for me not so easily reconciled.  For many of the last years of his life, which ended in 1998, Dr. John Henrik Clarke often said there “was no African leader of any African nation leading that nation for the benefit of African people. None.  Every Africanleader must be willing to state that ‘I will not drive a Mercedes until my people make them!’”   This statement ran through my head constantlyas our delegation moved about the country meeting members of Mugabe’s cabinet, including Mugabe himself, and as we were openly asked by the leaders of our delegation to write favorably about Zimbabwe’s leadership as support for an African nation being mercilessly attacked by a portion of the ideological wing of Western imperialism: the media.

Though in total agreement that this media assault was and is in high gearmy own subjectivity has to be dealt with.  And while not in total agreementwith our hosts (both the Zimbabwean government or Nation of Islam) I applaudtheir honesty in openly stating their position.  Unlike the West maskingits agenda with claims of objectivity our hosts and myself are, if not alwayscorrect, honest about which position we defend.  In my own case subjectivityincludes a belief in moving beyond supporting complexion to supporting theequitable distribution of goods and services, making the basics of human necessity, healthy food, water, health care, education and political access, available to all equally.  This subjectivity blended with Clarke’s voice caused me to ask myself several questions, none of which have, at this point, been answered to my satisfaction.

Of these several questions (all subjects of forthcoming commentaries) one easily sits at the top of the list.  How can we expect any nation so needed by the world for its natural resources to ever be truly independent in a world dominated by international capital? So of the questions I have that pertain to the freedom of the press and political party inclusion, the treatment of Zimbabwe’s Colored population, HIV/AIDS, the equitable distribution of land and ethnic chauvinism this one comes first. It is this system of  an international political economy that sets the stage on which all actions are played out.  It is this system that produced Cecil Rhodes, that produced “Rhodesia,” produced the need for an armed liberation struggle, land reform, eventual ethnic conflict and so on.  And it is this system that poses the greatest threat to any African country. In this case Zimbabwe.  Consequently, of course, it is the least discussed issue of them all.

I had spent the week in Zimbabwe quietly thinking about this and at varioustimes attempting to inject this issue into conversations with limited success. In part this difficulty comes from the fact that it is an uncomfortable question to raise.  It challenges everyone’s views on more specific issues on one hand and how much we understand this system of economics that is rarely discussed much less taught on the other.  It also challenges those involved in the discussion to perhaps question their own actions or plans for change.  But in Zimbabwe there still reside on tremendous tracks of land Ian Smith the self-proclaimed “Rhodesian,” descendant of English colonists and violently racist thief and murderer.  Along with him is the international conglomerate family of Oppenheimer.  The latter lives on land the size of Belgium and is involved in a wide variety of natural resource business ventures. I asked Zimbabwe’s Minister of Foreign Affairs why Anthony Oppenheimer (descendant of Ernest and Harry) has not been removed and his land reallocated.  He told me that due to the Oppenheimer power in a wide range of resources from oil to sugar to copper to wheat they could, by either flooding or withholding from the market any or all of these goods, “alone whisper the demise of our economy.”

For my part this one statement was the entire trip.  Included in this discussion should be the IMF and World Bank considering what havoc the attendant loan restrictions and potential for “capital flight” (white people stalling or removing investment funds) have on nations around the world.  Desmond Tutu even admitted to us while visiting Cornell University a year ago (and has written) that his push for reconciliation was born out of a realization that South Africa had not won its struggle for liberation but rather had fought to a stand still and that South Africa depends on foreign investment in order to survive.  I had asked the Minister how much we could expect from any government or any leader given the kind of economic power these small corporate-family factions (and international lending institutions)have on Zimbabwe’s economy?  His response was that time will bring change and that even Oppenheimer is making plans to leave the country stating that he “sees the writing on the wall.”  After seeing the disbelief on my face the Minister offered a grandfatherly smile and said, “slowly, slowly is how you catch a monkey.”  I thanked him for his time and for the best, albeit shortest, conversation I had had on the trip.

I hope he is right.  My concern though remains for one primary reason.Imperialists are notorious for planning well into the future.  CecilRhodes created the Rhodes Scholarship for the express purpose of continuinga white supremacist ideology that he hoped would eventually unite the entirewhite world for the purpose of organized worldwide white dominance.  The De Beers corporation that he founded was the unification under his controlof all Southern Africa’s diamond mines.  Ernest Oppenheimer made De Beers, itself the world’s most dominant diamond trader, but one of many pieces of the larger Anglo American Corporation Limited which at one point meant (and may still mean) it was one of more than 70 companies controlled by the Oppenheimer family.  De Beers alone has struck deals affecting the economies of entire nations.  Consider Russia as one example.  De Beers has a deal with the Russian government to buy a certain amount of Russian diamondseach year in exchange for Russia not flooding the market with its vast diamondresources thus crashing the value of the diamond.  If Russia cannot refuse such an arrangement could a Zimbabwe with its weaker global economic standing?

With African nations like Zimbabwe shackled to a European/American-dominated economic system what can any of us fairly expect of any African leader?  We have already mentioned the first division of Africa, the 1884-85 Berlin Conference, but we have yet to properly deal with what Kwame’ Nkrumah called the “New Division” of Africa, the post World War II neocolonial arrangement of granting flags and Black leaders while maintaining European/American economic dominance from afar.  We tend to ask a lot of people struggling against these odds.  We want them to be “democratic” (despite the fact that no nation on earth has ever been less concerned with democracy than the United States or the nations of Western Europe).  We want them to be mindful of human rights, homophobia, ethnic difference and so on.  But we rarely call into question the enormous forces that work against just such moves and that rest outside of these countries.

So before this writer can feel comfortable discussing the behavior of a Robert Mugabe the machinations of those with the most power must firstbe called into question.  It would be easier to be critical of any leader were it not for the more powerful neocolonial relationships that tend to dominate that leader’s ability to behave in certain ways.  Every move of a leader in Africa or Latin America that leaned towards nationalism (using the wealth produced by a nation for that nation itself as opposed to profits flowing straight to Western powers), pan-Africanism or socialism has been met with the utmost restraint from Western powers.  Hence Dr. Clarke’s comment on African leadership.  He did not make it out of context.  No African leader leads Africa in the manner Clarke thought best (that ever so Western-hated blend of nationalism, pan-Africanism and socialism) because those who tried were removed by either assassination, exile, imprisonment or tremendous political/economic support of the opposition by the West.

If we in the West want to comment on the behavior of those in power aroundthe world we had better first address the world’s economic arrangement whichforces a dependence of the West on the so-called “Third World” forresources,cheap labor and markets.  It is this arrangement of dependencethat demands the West play a key role in how these countries are run in order to assure that Western economic, political and cultural supremacy is maintained. In terms of Zimbabwe, if Ian Smith and Anthony Oppenheimer have the abilityto single-handedly sink Zimbabwe’s economy why then do we start with Mugabewhen it comes to issues of land reform, distribution of wealth and services,etc.?

Contact and dialogue with this writer is highly encouraged as this is but the first of several installments on this trip.  Please send constructive responses and thoughts to tables@mac.com.

-- Jared Ball, aka The Funkinest Journalist, is a writer for and founding member of Organized Community Of United People (COUP) www.voxunion.com , an independent journalist and founder of Chaos Or Community! a Washington, DC based funk-filled community radio program.  He is currently a Ph.D. student of Journalism at the University of Maryland, he received a Masters degree in Africana Studies from the Africana Studies and Research Centerat Cornell University and a BS in History from Frostburg State University.