Debating the Land Question in Africa

In February 2000, twenty years after their victories brought Rhodesia's ruling white regime to the conference table, veterans of Zimbabwe's war of liberation began to occupy some of the large privately owned commercial farms that controlled Zimbabwe's most valuable land. During the next few weeks, thousands of people followed suit: by May, nearly a third of the country's large-scale commercial farms had been seized ( New York Times, 27 May 2000; Moyo 1998). Armed with a court order, landowners demanded that the “squatters” be evicted, but the police demurred, and President Mugabe refused to order them to carry out the court's instructions. A few weeks earlier, voters had rejected a proposed constitutional amendment that would have strengthened the President's powers to seize white-owned land, without compensation, for redistribution to land-hungry blacks. Angry over the deteriorating economy, rising levels of corruption, and Zimbabwe's costly involvement in Congo's civil war, a majority of those who voted were unwilling to increase the President's powers, even if they supported the cause of land reform. When the veterans took matters into their own hands, Mugabe lost no time in associating with their cause. He, in turn, was accused by Western governments, the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, and the international press, of sacrificing the rule of law in order to save his own political skin.