They Are Not White Farmers
by T. Tut Tsanga, 31st December 2008
Two years ago, I ran into a new black farmer who had acquired a farm famous for producing huge groundnuts, mazambani. I wanted to know if this new farmer was still growing the famous groundnuts.
"No," he said. "I don't. We now grow flowers that we export to Europe. Eeh, how did you know that farm?"
“I did not know you are now growing flowers on that farm,” I said without bothering to answer his question. It was startling. “Why flowers?”
“My friend, they can’t eat flowers. The labourers are thieves. If I grow groundnuts and other edible crops like maize, the labourers will steal the crops to feed their families. Listen,” he said as he realized that I had been stunned speechless, “I am running a business not a charity.”
I knew the farm. The black farmer bought the farm from the commercial farmer with assistance from a government minister. One of my great grandmothers, an immigrant from Malawi, and my great grandfather, a Shona from Murehwa, met while working on a farm adjacent to the farm Mugabe’s black farmer now owned. Inevitably we had a lot of relatives who worked as farm labourers and my grandmother used to take me along whenever she visited our relatives. The visits were memorable. We had beans, salted and dried bakayawo fish, cultured milk, sugar, you name it. The “white” farmer was not an angel but he was kind enough to give his labourers food.
Contrast that with his “black” successor who now grows flowers while his labourers starve. Since the labourers’ children cannot eat flowers, the poor kids have to hunt for crickets and wild fruits to survive. That is Mugabe’s land policy right there. It is a failure and people, the inordinate majority of them black, are going to starve. Just like the heartless flower grower put it, they can’t eat flowers. Children digging up crickets and gathering wild fruits is what passes for black empowerment in ZANU-PF. It is this revolution that has to be guarded, says Robert Mugabe.
Inevitably, I wanted to know if most of the farm workers were still under the employment of the new farmer.
“Manyasarande aye takaatandanisa! – We got rid of all the Nyasalanders!” he chortled as he congratulated himself for dismissing the labourers he had inherited from the white farmer. Mugabe’s black farmer had deeply seated contempt for the black workers. To him, they were Malawian interlopers hence the use of the profoundly derogatory Manyasarande colonial-era epithet. Munyasarande is a loaded noun. It captures a terrible stereotype of someone who is a permanent alien, a person incapable of assimilation into a new cultural environment and, therefore, irredeemably and hopelessly uncultured. The original immigrants are all dead and all their descendants are Zimbabwean, any which way you look at it. However, to this ignoramus Mugabe farmer, the "Nyasarande" traits are heritable like Adam’s sin.
I was furious. I have relatives of Malawian extraction who are some of the most patriotic, honest, God-loving and ethically enterprising Zimbabweans. They have never been to Malawi and yet Mugabe’s goofball was dismissing them as gypsies. For all of Mugabe’s endless incantations about African Solutions for African Problems, the attitude of this beneficiary of the ZANU-PF’s catastrophic land program had no iota of sympathy for a fellow black African. Some will say I should have known that Mugabe’s cronies are as insincere as the man himself. You will have to excuse my French, folks, I was pissed off big time!
The black farmer’s supremacist attitude encapsulates the mentality of the circle of lunatics that surrounds Mugabe. They are shameless bearers of false witness and will blatantly lie if it gives them political and material mileage. The ZANU-PF farmer's xenophobic characterization of the farm labourers fits the ZANU-PF modus operandi.
Like Munyaradzi Wasosa put it, when a leopard wants to eat its children it starts by accusing them of smelling like goats. If anyone stands in the way of the Mugabe crime syndicate, nothing will keep the supposed offender from a torrent of invective and, increasingly, abductions, torture and gruesome death. That is how the Stalinist-Maoists in ZANU-PF operate. It comes straight from the playbook of Joe Stalin whereby you dehumanize and demonize your victims first and then rob them of their property and lives thereafter.
When ZANU-PF wants to give commercial farms as gifts or bribes to placate disgruntled party followers, Zimbabwean commercial farmers are attacked as white farmers, a charge which is equivalent to calling the farmers unrepentant racists. How can all the farmers who used to produce enough food to feed the entire region be racists? Incredibly, the same land is now owned by Mugabe’s cronies, most of whom had never even cultivated a backyard garden of vegetables before receiving the farms as payment for loyalty to Mugabe’s revolution. It is widely believed that some of these new farmers keep the farms so they can get subsidized fuel, seeds and fertilizer that are then sold on the black market. Farming requires constant and monomaniacal attention. I have to wonder where someone like Samuel Mumbengegwi gets the time to be both a viable commercial farmer and a minister, even in a completely dysfunctional government.
The truth of the matter is that it is not just the commercial farmers that have been demonized by the ZANU-PF Mafia.
Comrade Mugabe may profess to hate the British but he seems to like aping them at every opportunity. He tries to speak English like a Britisher. When it comes to dividing and conquering, the man learnt a lot from his colonial masters.
Criminals in ZANU-PF may have arrogated to themselves the right to determine who is and who is not Zimbabwean but we do not have to ape them. We need to renounce ZANU-PF’s xenophobic lexicon once and for all. There are no white farmers, there are no Manyasarande, there are no Mandevere and there are no Maindiya. Their forebears might have come to present-day Zimbabwe from different parts of the world and at different times but that must not be the defining character to their citizenship. These are Zimbabweans, pure and simple. Anyone who insists otherwise must be considered a criminal.
