Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight_ An African Childhood - Alexandra Fuller [55]
The Rudd Concession of 1888 tricked King Lobengula of the Matabeles into surrendering mineral rights to the British South African Company.
In 1889, the Lippert Concession allowed white settlers to appropriate land for farms and townships in Lobengula’s name—concessions that were supposed to be valid only in Lobengula’s lifetime.
In 1894 a British Land Commission declared itself unable to remove white settlers from native land.
In 1898 the British government set up “sufficient” areas for the exclusive occupation of the African people.
In 1915 the boundaries of the “Native Reserves” were set up.
In 1920 a Southern Rhodesia Order-in-Council assigned 21.5 million acres (out of a possible 96 million acres) for the sole use of Africans.
The 1925 Morris Carter Commission recommended division of land among the races.
The Land Apportionment Act of 1930 divided the country: 21.5 million acres for “Native Reserves”; 48 million acres for occupation and purchase only by Europeans; and 7.5 million acres for occupation and purchase only by Africans. Seventeen and a half million acres were unassigned.
The Land Apportionment Act was amended in 1941, 1946, and several times in the 1950s and 1960s, and the Native Reserves were renamed Tribal Trust Lands.
The Rhodesian government built its policy of racial segregation on the Land Tenure Act of 1969 (repealed in 1979 under growing international and internal pressure).
The Tribal Trust Lands Act is replaced by the Communal Land Act in 1982.
“To us the time has now come for those who have fought each other as enemies to accept the reality of a new situation by accepting each other as allies who, in spite of their ideological, racial, ethnic, or religious differences are now being called upon to express loyalty to Zimbabwe.” That’s what the new “ZANU (PF)” government announces at the end of the war.
“I’ll show them peace and re-bloody-conciliation,” says Mum.
Piss and reconciliation, we call it.
Our farm is designated one of those that, under the new government, may be auctioned (but not to whites) by the government for the purpose of “land redistribution.”
This is how land redistribution goes.
First, the nice farms, near the city, are given to Prime Minister Robert Mugabe’s political allies.
Then, the nice farms far from the city are given to those politicians whom Mugabe must appease, but who are not best-beloved.
After that, the productive, tucked-away farms are given to worthy war veterans—to the men, and a few women, who showed themselves to be brave liberation strugglers.
Then farms like ours—dangerously close to existing minefields, without the hope of television reception and with sporadic rains, unreliable soil, a history of bad luck—are given to Mugabe’s enemies, whom he is pretending to appease.
Our farm is a gift of badlands, eel-worm-in-the-bananas, rats-in-the-ceiling.
Our farm is a gift of the Dead Mazungu Baby.
Our farm is gone, whether we like it or not.
Dad shrugs. He lights a cigarette. He says, “Well, we had a good run of it, hey?”
But already, landless squatters from Mozambique have set themselves up on our farm. Before our farm has been officially auctioned, and the old crop has been pulled in, before the new owners can set foot on the road that leads, ribby and washed away, up to the squat barracks house (which Mum painted peach, years ago, to try and cheer us up), before our footsteps are cold on the shiny cement floors of the veranda, the squatters come.
No one invited the squatters to come and take over the farm and other farms close to the border. The squatters are mostly illiterate, unlikely to have been war heroes, but hungry. They are belly-hungry, home-hungry, land-hungry.
They have made themselves a camp up in the hills above the house, they have chopped down virgin forest and planted maize. Their cattle drink straight from hillside springs, crushing creek banks into red erosion, which comes out, in the end, like blood in our tap water.
Mum