West needs to recognise dispossession of African land

As Zimbabwe returns 67 farms to European nationals, the dispossession that created white land ownership remains unrecognised in law, states an Al Jazeera analysis. The publication’s columnist Tafi Mhaka says on 7 May Zimbabwe’s Agriculture Minister Anxious Masuka announced in Parliament that the government would return 67 farms seized during the country’s land reform programme to European nationals from Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland. ‘The farms, he said, were protected under bilateral investment protection agreements signed between Zimbabwe and the four European states before the land seizures. The measure forms part of President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s effort to restore relations with Western governments and international financial institutions after more than two decades of crisis, sanctions, isolation and debt default linked in part to the fast-track land reform programme of the early 2000s.’ He notes that resolving disputes linked to land reform has become central to that re-engagement process. In July 2020, Zimbabwe signed a $3.5bn compensation agreement with former white commercial farmers for infrastructure and improvements on acquired land. Last year, it began compensating treaty-protected foreign farmers, including claimants from Germany, Switzerland and Belgium.’

But, Mhaka says in the Al Jazeera analysis that this development also exposes a deeper contradiction embedded in the global order governing land and property rights in former settler colonies: European claims arising from postcolonial redistribution are treated as urgent, enforceable and respectable, while African claims arising from colonial dispossession remain largely outside the same legal and moral framework. He points out that from the 1890s onwards, colonial land seizures in Rhodesia were enforced and legitimised through the selective application of British imperial law and Cecil John Rhodes’s British South Africa Company decrees. ‘African ownership of land was never recognised with the same standing granted to settler occupation. That legal order survived the expansion of settler rule through the Land Apportionment Act of 1930 and continued to shape later legal frameworks. That lopsided inheritance still shapes the global response to Zimbabwe’s land question decades after independence.’ He points out that bilateral investment treaties signed between Zimbabwe and foreign states gave protected investors the right to seek compensation when property covered by those agreements was expropriated. ‘Africans dispossessed under colonial rule were never granted comparable access to international reparations or protected claims against empire. Part of this asymmetry is structural: European farmers can invoke treaties their governments signed and a compensation deal Zimbabwe itself agreed, while the dispossessed have no counterparty to sue, no instrument to enforce and, in Rhodesia, no surviving state to hold to account. But that is precisely the point. The legal architecture was built to recognise one kind of loss and not the other.’ The contrast is stark for everyday Zimbabweans, states Mhaka.

‘My maternal grandparents lived in what was the Seke Reserve in Mashonaland, a place where most people were settled on small plots of land with “rather poor sand veldt with a lot of bush'… On the other side of that line, colonial authorities allocated fertile, riverfront and midslope land to white commercial farmers… This was part of a wider colonial regime that, from 1894, also pushed many Ndebele communities into the dry, low-rainfall and tsetse-fly-infested Gwaai and Shangani reserves in Matabeleland North.’ Their subsequent, imposed impoverishment and losses, of land, cattle, livelihoods, political authority and economic autonomy, were absorbed into colonial history rather than treated as enforceable claims demanding compensation from the imperial system that created them, notes Mhaka. ‘They all died landless and economically broken, largely invisible to the global legal order and without meaningful redress, much like countless Indigenous communities around the country. He points out in the Al Jazeera analysis that compensation agreements and investor protections are presented as proof that Zimbabwe is becoming governable, predictable and safe again for international capital. ‘Colonial seizure is treated as inconvenient background history, while postcolonial attempts to restructure ownership are framed as threats to “markets” and “investor confidence”. African efforts to recover land face more obstacles than the colonial systems that stole it.’ He believes that land reform should be lawful, accountable and economically productive. ‘Nonetheless, international law cannot treat property rights created through settler colonialism as morally untouchable while dismissing African compensation as dangerous or illegitimate. The 67 farms are standing remnants of an old and unresolved colonial atrocity. My grandmother’s people also have rights. Zimbabweans are still waiting for justice.’