Communist Web Tuesday 4th April 2000 9.30pm gmt Colonial land question still haunts Zimbabwe By William Pomeroy At the end of February hundreds of landless people in Zimbabwe marched into numerous huge white-owned farms and declared that they had come to stay, reclaiming the land that had been stolen from the people by colonial rulers over a century ago. The action brought to the fore once again the bitterly contested land question that has lain at the heart of Zimbabwe's economy, politics and social problems. Since 1890, when the British imperialist empire-builder Cecil Rhodes invaded the territory with an armed force of white mercenaries to create a colony, promising each 1,200 hectares of land, the land-robbery issue has been a festering one. The British South Africa Company of Rhodes seized 1.5 million acres of the best land from African tribal owners and apportioned it to white settlers. It remains in the form of huge landholdings in the hands of nearly 5,000 white owners, leaving mainly marginal lands in communal or small plots to millions of Africans. Perpetuation of this colonial crime was the aim the Ian Smith white dictatorship in what was then Rhodesia in the 1960s and 1970s. Regaining stolen land was the central aim of the guerrilla liberation war that ended the Smith regime and forced Britain to yield independence in 1980 to the colony (renamed Zimbabwe by the new majority rulers). Keeping the white-owned land intact was the aim of the British negotiators who forced acceptance of an independence constitution, which had provisions barring any expropriation of the land or any redistribution except through purchase at a high price. A land reform based on acquisition and redistribution of the white-owned land to landless Africans was the declared aim from 1980 of the government of... http://www.billkath.demon.co.uk/cw/colonial/colonial.html
