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Sleights of hand at Lancaster House
Shridath 'Sonny' Ramphal speaks with Gugulethu Moyo and Mark Ashurst
From The Day After Mugabe, Africa Research Institute
November 01, 2007

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I think Zimbabwe today comes out of Zimbabwe of yesterday. Yes I do, because I think there is no one factor that can explain what is going on in Zimbabwe. I think you have to go back to the beginning to a statistic that never left my mind from the moment I heard it and that is that in Rhodesia 80% of the arable land was owned and occupied by less than 5% of the population. That statistic colours everything that happened in the process that led to Lancaster House.

It was about land in the beginning; it was about land during the struggle; it has remained about land today. The land issue in Rhodesia / Zimbabwe is not ancient history. It is modern history. Black Zimbabweans were dispossessed of the land that was theirs within the lifetime memory of some, and certainly in the lifetime of the generation before. Now, if you forget that, then you can't answer rationally any of the pertinent questions about Zimbabwe. And I think it is the forgetting of that that ultimately has led us to where we are.

Who has done the forgetting?

Well, many people - including, I fear, the government of Zimbabwe, postindependence. But that fault, that forgetting, has to be set in a context which explains how it came to happen. My own feeling is that we came very close to getting Zimbabwe right at the Lancaster House Conference.

Is "forgetting" the right word? Has there been perhaps a wilful amnesia or was there some other kind of agreement to put this, the redistribution issue, the land issue, to one side?

Well, yes. I think the first ten years, what was in effect a moratorium on land redistribution in which the government seem to have concurred, was part of the forgetting.

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