Chapter 7: Zimbabwe (15,300 words)
Land Occupations and Land Reform in Zimbabwe:
Towards the National Democratic Revolution
Sam Moyo and Paris Yeros
COPYEDITED
February 2004
I. Introduction
II. The Political Economy of Neo-colonialism
The white-settler colonial state
From liberation to liberalisation
Civilising society
III. Land Occupations and Land Reform
The interaction of land reform models, 1980-1997
Nationalism and land reform re-radicalised, 1997-2002
The structure of the land occupation movement
IV. The National Democratic Revolution at a Crossroads
The new agrarian structure
The new challenges
Bibliography
Chapter for Reclaiming the Land: The Resurgence of Rural Movements in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, ed. by Sam Moyo and Paris Yeros, London: Zed Books, forthcoming.
Sam Moyo is Director of the African Institute of Agrarian Studies, Harare, Zimbabwe; Paris Yeros is Visiting Professor, Department of Economics, Federal University of Paraná, Curitiba, Brazil.
I. Introduction[1]
The land occupation movement in Zimbabwe has obtained the first major land reform since the end of the Cold War. It has also been the most important challenge to the neo-colonial state in Africa under structural adjustment, and if judged by its effectiveness in acquiring land, it has also been the most notable of rural movements in the world today.
Yet it has proved an intellectual challenge and a matter of political ambivalence. On the one hand, the land reform process has presented genuine intellectual challenges, raising fundamental analytical questions regarding peripheral capitalism, the state, and nationalism. On the other hand, neither academia nor ‘progressive’ political forces have risen to the task. Most have readily denounced the land reform process as ‘destructive’ of the state, its nationalism as ‘authoritarian’ or ‘exhausted’ (i.e., belonging to a previous era); others have gone the other way, celebrating the land reform as the culmination of ‘black empowerment’ or ‘economic indigenisation’.
The polarisation of the debate has less to do with the peculiarities of Zimbabwe and more to do with the state of academia in the 1990s. This has been marked by a diversion into rarefied debates over ‘identity politics’, nationally and internationally, and a generalized embourgeoisement of nationalist intellectuals. Certainly, twenty years ago, radical land reform in Zimbabwe would have received a different response. While the event would have presented considerable analytical difficulties even then, progressive intellectuals would have proceeded to debate the relevant issues rigorously, and these would have concerned the nature of the neo-colonial state, inter-capitalist conflict, peasant-worker relations, the class struggles within the land occupation movement, and the direction of the national democratic revolution.
Why such a change in just twenty years? Is it that neo-colonialism is no longer relevant? Did structural adjustment deliver national democracy? Or is it that the national form of sovereignty itself has been superceded by neoliberal globalisation? Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth. The answer lies precisely in the cooptation of both academia and ‘oppositional’ politics, to the point where imperialism has become mystified, national self-determination demoted, the state obscured, and the agrarian question abandoned.[2] Such intellectual reversals have had real political effects, perhaps most clearly in relation to Zimbabwe, whose radical nationalism and land reform have proved unpalatable to the ‘civic’ and ‘post’ nationalisms of domestic and international social forces.
II. The Political Economy of Neo-colonialism
The political economy of Zimbabwe is comparable to that of other African, Latin American, and Asian states that have remained in a disarticulated pattern of accumulation with unresolved agrarian questions. This persisting underdevelopment is part and parcel of the neo-colonial situation, that is, the failure of juridically independent states to complete the national democratic revolution. This remains the case despite complete transitions to capitalism in the twentieth century.
The case of Zimbabwe, and Southern Africa more generally, consists in a ‘sub-type’ of neo-colonialism, deriving from the white-settler colonial experience. One crucial aspect of white-settler colonial capitalism was that, periodically, it manifested strong contradictions between introverted and extroverted capitalist accumulation strategies. This was especially the case in Zimbabwe upon the emergence of an industrial bourgeoisie in the course of the two world wars. In this sense, the historical experience of Zimbabwe (together with South Africa) can be understood as comparable to ‘semi-peripheral’ Latin American countries. A second aspect of white-settler capitalism, however, was that, in the organisation of the labour process, white capital exercised both ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’ power over the indigenous black population. This contrasts with recent interpretations regarding the primacy of ‘indirect’ rule in Africa (Mamdani 1996), and it also contrasts with Latin American experiences, where the post-slavery latifundio-minifundio system did not institutionalise racial segregation. These two aspects of white-settler capitalism have given a particular shape to neo-colonialism in Zimbabwe, notably in its dynamics of class, race, and nation.
The white-settler colonial state
The political economy of colonial Zimbabwe began to exhibit its peculiar tendencies early in the twentieth century, as the initial speculative incursion by mining capital gave way to the establishment of a white agrarian bourgeoisie with a partial interest in the home market. The ensuing years were marked by an intensifying inter-capitalist conflict between white agrarian capital, on the one hand, and mining capital and London-based finance, on the other (Arrighi 1973). This culminated in 1923 in the establishment of white ‘self government’ in the colony of ‘Southern Rhodesia’, by which the white agrarian bourgeoisie both established its political leadership and struck a compromise with extroverted capitals.
Also established under the leadership of white agrarian capital, however, was the institutionalization of racial segregation. In itself, this was a profound contradiction to whatever designs white agrarian capital may have had for the development of the home market. For the vision of the ‘home market’ held by white agrarian capital would thereafter be confined to the white settler element, and would only partly be challenged in due course by the emergence of a white industrial bourgeoisie. This white supremacist framework was to leave an indelible mark on the development of capitalism in the white-settler colonial state. From an early stage, white agrarian capital demonstrated that, while it was ‘more than comprador’, it was ‘less than national’ (Phimister 1988: 180); and over time, while inter-capitalist conflict would challenge the foundations of racial segregation, it would never do so to the point of becoming properly ‘national’, that is, of producing an alliance between white industrial capital and popular nationalist forces for the concerted development of the home market.
The seeds of black capitalism were also sown from the early days of the white-settler colonial state. In the interwar years, the state allowed for the creation of a small black agrarian capitalist class outside the communal areas – in the ‘Native Purchase Areas’ – as a means of cultivating a bourgeois alliance across the racial divide. But this project remained insignificant, as the white-settler colonial state refused to support black capital for its expansion and, indeed, competition with white agrarian capital. Beyond Purchase Area farmers, a small black bourgeoisie also developed within the communal areas, together with the development of commodity production, but this too was to be prohibited from dynamic development.
The labour process in colonial Zimbabwe came to be characterised by an enduring contradiction between proletarianisation and a politically-engineered functional dualism, by which petty-commodity production in the communal areas, and especially unwaged female labour, would subsidise the social reproduction of male labour-power on mines and farms. This contradiction would produce neither a settled industrial proletariat nor a viable peasantry, but a workforce in motion, straddling communal lands, white farms, mines, and industrial workplaces. This was the ‘semi-proletariat’, the aggregate of peasant-worker households, differentiated by gender, and torn between ethno-linguistic particularities and a developing sense of nationhood (Yeros 2002b). Under such conditions, trade union organisation was an onerous struggle. The obstacles inherent in semi-proletarianisation - migration, rural-urban duality, poverty, ethnic and gender cleavages - were compounded by state repression and, in the postwar period, by the onset of divisive tactics by international trade unionism (Raftopoulos 1996). Nonetheless, early after World War II, trade unionism in the white-settler colonial state did make advances, even to the point of mobilizing successful country-wide strikes in 1945 and 1947.
The mode of rule in colonial Zimbabwe combined direct and indirect forms, for indirect rule in itself was far from self-contained or sufficient to organize the labour process. The segregationist project of white agrarian capital proceeded actively after 1923, in the combined form of territorial segregation, notably by the Land Apportionment Act (1930), and even more crucially, legal segregation. As the institutional lynchpin of African-style functional dualism, this consisted in the transfer of judicial authority within communal areas to chiefs, under the Native Affairs Act (1927) and the Native Law and Courts Act (1937), while its social lynchpin was the binding of women to the land by kinship relations, adjudicated by chiefs (Schmidt 1990). Beyond this ‘indirect rule’, white agrarian capital continued to exercise direct power over the vast tracts of ‘European’ land that it appropriated; and there it reproduced relations of personal dependence vis-à-vis black tenants and labour (Palmer 1977). For its own part, mining capital would perfect the ‘compound system’, by which labour would be bound to the mining compounds by means of a variety of economic and extra-economic instruments (Van Onselen 1976). The power of the central state would also be used to undermine African agriculture systematically, taxing it and manipulating it, most notably by the Maize Control Acts (1931, 1934), for the purpose of subsidizing white agrarian capital and reinforcing its economic-structural supremacy; while agrarian, mining, and later industrial capitals as a whole would resort systematically to the deployment of the security forces of the state to suppress trade union organization – notably by the Industrial Conciliation Act (1937, 1937) and the Sedition Act (1936) – as well as, in due course, nationalist mobilisation.
World War II and its aftermath brought about a restructuring of the economy, in two important ways. First, industrial capital embarked on a spectacular growth path, expanding output five-fold between 1939 and 1948 - in such industries as food-processing, construction, textiles, and clothing (Phimister 2000b: 32-33) - and maturing politically to pose a new challenge to functional dualism. Second, agrarian capital redirected its accumulation strategy resolutely to the external market, by the conversion of its farmland from maize to tobacco (Arrighi 1973: 350-58). Thereafter, inter-capitalist competition would produce a closer alliance between mining and agrarian capital against the industrial bourgeoisie.
Between the late 1940s and the late 1950s, a new compromise was struck among white capitals to further broaden the home market, by two means: first, by the Native Land Husbandry Act (1951), whose intention was to re-organise the communal areas along capitalist lines and to create a settled urban proletariat; and second, by the enlarging of the sphere of influence of white-settler capital beyond Southern Rhodesia to colonial Malawi and Zambia (Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia) by means of the establishment of the Central African Federation. This process was accompanied by limited reforms in labour relations, as well as in the electoral system, the latter intending to coopt a black petty-bourgeoisie within the framework and ideology of racial ‘partnership’.
The reforms and the partnership did not succeed or survive. By the late 1950s, the perennial constraints of disarticulated accumulation were imposing themselves on the Federation, and thrusting its balance of payments into crisis; by 1958, class balances and capitalist alliances were entering a new period of reconfiguration. On the one hand, black trade union organisation was continuing to advance, now resonating with the popular anti-colonial nationalism spreading across the continent. On the other hand, a black bourgeoisie had not emerged in time under the wing of white capital to defend a neo-colonial solution. Instead, the white-settler colonial state became polarised between a cross-class African nationalism, led by the black petty-bourgeoisie, and a cross-class white supremacism, led by white agrarian capital (Arrighi 1973). In the following years, nationalist organisation was suppressed and driven underground, de-colonisation was aborted, unilateral independence declared (UDI) in 1965, and, ultimately, the transition to neo-colonialism postponed. With the collapse of the Federation in 1963, Zambia and Malawi would make their neo-colonial transitions on their own.
Under UDI, the white-settler colonial state went from boom to bust. It experienced rapid industrial development, as all capitals, including industrial capital, closed ranks under a highly interventionist capitalist state, to be steered into an introverted white-supremacist survival project. This would be facilitated by UN-sponsored international sanctions that were permeable by design, de facto allowing for the financing of Rhodesia by Western banks, the importation of oil, military aid, and direct investment by transnational capital - the latter expanding its capital stock by 37 percent in 1966-76 (Clarke 1980). Until 1974, ‘sanctions’ and state dirigisme would drive an annual average industrial growth rate of 9 percent. However, by the mid-1970s, the white-settler economy was once again overheating, as its unresolved internal and external constraints were re-imposing themselves. For the state never broadened the home market beyond the settler element, even as it turned inwards; instead, it reinforced functional dualism in its segregationist form and relied on the super-exploitation of black labour for rapid capital accumulation. The crisis would be compounded politically and economically by the re-organisation of the nationalist movement in two parties, ZANU and ZAPU, and the launch of armed struggle in the countryside, with the support of China and Soviet Union, respectively.
The remaining years of colonial occupation were riveted by guerilla warfare in a Cold War context. By the late 1970s, British and American foreign policies were becoming intensely preoccupied with the possibility of radical outcomes in Southern Africa, henceforth focusing their energies on a negotiated transition to neo-colonialism. In 1979, after years of guerilla warfare, and under a Patriotic Front (PF) coalition, the liberation movement would sign up to the neo-colonial transition at Lancaster House in London.
From liberation to liberalisation
The independence of Zimbabwe was celebrated on 18 April 1980, and, at long last, Zimbabwe would embark on a nation-building project of its own. But in the new state, the national democratic revolution would remain a matter of social struggle. The ‘post-white-settler colonial state’ was a particular variety of the neo-colonial state, for formal power had not been ceded to a black petty-bourgeoisie alone; instead, the aspiring black bourgeoisie would share power with the established white-settler capital (Mandaza 1986a, 1986b). Ideologically, this political dispensation was cast in the form of ‘reconciliation’, an echo of postwar ‘partnership’, consisting effectively in a reconciliation not ‘between the races’ but ‘with capital’ (Sibanda 1988). Economically, industrial and mining interests remained wholly-owned by local white and foreign capital, under monopoly conditions. For its own part, the white agrarian bourgeoisie, some 6000 farmers at independence, retained 39 percent of the land, amounting to 15.5 million hectares of prime agro-ecological farmland, while one million black households remained consigned to 41.4 percent of the land, or 16.4 million hectares of marginal land (Moyo 1995). In all, the white minority, at below 3 percent of the population, commanded nearly two-thirds of national income; while the black majority, at 97 percent, took the remaining one-third. Constitutionally, the Lancaster House agreement established the ‘willing-buyer, willing-seller’ principle as the basis of land transfers, with an expiration date of 1990; and it reserved 20 percent of parliamentary seats for the white community of 3 percent, with an expiration date of 1987.