The farm on their land

In the winter of 1998, before the first short that declared the Third Chimurenga was fired, the rural communities of Svosve had increasingly become restless demanding rapid and equitable land redistribution. Confrontation between the villagers and the land owning white farmers was certain and inevitable, a socioeconomic triumph of unparalleled scope was imminent for the villagers of Svosve. That early wintry June morning, the dusty bleak village of Zenda in Svosve was host to a series of village meetings called to map the way forward in the process of reclaiming the land long stolen by the white colonial settlers. The occasion was momentous and the decisions that were to be taken would decide the future of the land question in Zimbabwe. Overnight, Zimbabwe’s destiny would be changed as the ownership and the land distribution pattern was destined for a drastic transformation. Country wide, the people wanted the land question addressed without further delay. The people of Svosve stood poised, ready to invade and reclaim their land upon which the white man had forcibly put his farm. Although the people of Svosve would later be advised to return to their villages and desist from resettling themselves outside the government’s land redistribution exercise, the villagers ignored the advice and the government would later be compelled to support them. “We were ready for war,” Sekuru Zenda repeated emphatically punching the air more vigorously as if to suggest that even at his advanced age that I estimated to be in the eighties, if provoked, though he could no longer punch like an eighteen year old, he was still able to put up a formidable fight. “There was no going back. After all the white man brought the farm but he did not bring the land,” asserted Sekuru Zenda. Sekuru Zenda had said it all. His was a statement pregnant with symbolic meaning, and it could not be naively interpreted. The statement put the land question into its historical context, and also placed the whole land issue and property rights into perspective. What Sekuru Zenda said was a fact that anyone looking on the land question in Zimbabwe should understand and appreciate in its entirety. Said in other words, Sekuru Zenda simply said the land was their birthright and it belonged to the villagers and no-one else under the sun. Once again, I was convinced that the people of Svosve knew what they were about and it was no wonder their determination spearheaded the third Chimurenga that reclaimed the land from the hands of the white farmers and returned it to its rightful owners. Theirs was a revolution that saw people of all ages, the young and the old, men and women, fathers and mothers with their babies on their backs, taking part. It was the land-hungry villagers of Svosve who fired the first warning shots of their own, expressing growing impatience with the perceived government’s failure to fulfil promises to redistribute land when independence was achieved in 1980. For them, and the entire rural population, the market-driven land reform was an abysmal failure from every standpoint, except that of protecting wealth, property rights and privileges of the white commercial farmers. In reality, the pace of market-based land redistribution approach was markedly slow. The number of resettled farmers during the first phase of land redistribution never approached the numbers necessary for the nation to advance economically and alleviate widespread rural poverty while land degradation and its negative effects intensified unabated further compelling the rural population to demand for land. The gross imbalance imposed by colonial theft where the indigenous population lacked any claim to the land was no longer acceptable as the natural order in Zimbabwe. Therefore, the demand for land reform was not only a matter of socio-economic imperative. It was a matter of justice. The population could no longer tolerate the grossly unjust distribution of land created by colonial expropriation. Following the footsteps of the villagers of Svosve, in 1998 rural communities in various parts of the country started spontaneous commercial farm invasions that were intricately linked to violent confrontation in some parts of the country particularly since March 2000 when groups of rural population seized and occupied many prime commercial land, most of it owned by whites, to resettle themselves. The villagers vowed not to move out of the properties, accusing the government of not being serious about addressing the land question. The people of Svosve were leading the entire population in claiming their space in a sovereign, invaluable and unitary member nation of the international community. They believed that Zimbabwe could only be a nation that is democratic and characterized by good governance as reflected in all its structures, institutions and operations at all levels if they were able to reclaim what was genuinely and rightfully theirs. They were aspiring for a country that was united in diversity, free, tolerant peaceful and prosperous as would be expressed by the regaining of the ownership and control of their land. The people of Svosve resolutely believed that they could only be assured that theirs was a country that respected the rights of all its citizens regardless of creed, gender, age, race, ethnicity as defined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and, with a leadership that puts the interest of the people of Zimbabwe above personal gain, if they were able to reclaim their birth right. As a people they were aspiring for a nation where all citizens enjoyed equal access to the land resources, protection of the law and with equal opportunity to compete and prosper. After all it was on that basis they had supported the Second Chimurenga without wavering.