African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [46]
Comrade Mugabe learned from all this, and only two years after Liberation there was a careful, cautious, thoughtful policy of buying up white farms as they became available, settling selected people on them, but only when elementary services had been guaranteed. The rhetoric that accompanied this policy was as senseless and torrential as in any communist country, but luckily there was (and is) little connection between what was happening and the words used to describe it.
Inflamed and justified by the years of rhetoric, black people rushed on to the new farms, not waiting to be properly settled, but were removed again, if unsuitable. Who was suitable and who not? Well, that’s it, the promises of the Bush War did not mention suitability.
‘The whites stole our land, and now we want it back.’
‘Yes but slowly does it. Do you want Zimbabwe to be a mess, like Mozambique, like Zambia, like Tanzania?’
‘We don’t care about all these big thoughts, long-term perspectives. Just give us the land you promised us.’
‘But there isn’t enough land to go around.’
‘Then throw the whites off their farms and give us their land.’
‘There still wouldn’t be enough land.’
‘That isn’t what you were saying when you were the Boys in the Bush.’
‘Yes, but the exigencies of that period of time prohibited in-depth analysis, and now we have examined the situation from all angles and taken into consideration the parameters of the parastatial infrastructure and relevant co-ordinates, it is evident that…’
‘Give us our land.’
The new farms are an extension of the already existing settlement areas and Native Purchase Areas set up under the whites, just as the Master Farmer Certificates given to good farmers are a continuation of policies begun under the whites. It was not possible to give credit to the whites for anything in 1982, so the new policies were presented as if born out of the head of the new regime.
On the white verandahs, the most important article of The Monologue was the Squatters. When I was not sitting on verandahs, I sat in cars, being driven through areas crowded with every kind of shack, hut, shanty, each surrounded by straggling mealies and a few pumpkins. The earth was eroding into gullies, the trees were being cut for fuel. Who drove me? Explosive, splenetic whites.
‘Just look at that, look at it, there won’t be any soil left…’
‘For God’s sake, calm down!’
‘It’s not as if they are even living there…the men have jobs in town, they bring their wives and kids to the land they’ve squatted, they can’t live on what they grow, they can’t even grow more than a few meals of sadza.’
‘You are going to have a stroke if you aren’t careful.’
‘And the Minister won’t do anything…when he addresses meetings of the Faithful he just promises them land…he’s scared not to. When he speaks to us, the white farmers, he says, “Yes, yes, yes, you’re right, no of course we don’t want soil erosion.” But he doesn’t do anything.’
The soil was washing away. The gullies deepened. Bad enough on mealie-growing land, but on the steep hillsides of the Vumba perched and huddled the shanties with a few thin maize stalks about them, and some chickens. But this shallow forest soil could never grow maize, and whole hillsides were sliding into gullies. ‘Just look at that!’ shouted the white farmers, who these days are all conservationists to a man, woman and child.
Half an hour’s drive from this high valley in the mountains that grows coffee, kiwi fruit, soft fruit, passion fruit, you have dropped a couple of thousand feet and there you are in the tropics: pineapples, bananas, mangoes, any tropical fruit, but what united these different landscapes was the Squatters. On to every farm crept the people from the towns hoping to be farmers, real farmers, with title deeds.